Happy 4th of July.
The 4th of July is just the right day to contemplate and celebrate freedom. That’s what I’ve been doing today.
We might as well kick off the celebration with this little clip by that freedom loving Republican president, Abraham Lincoln:
One moment to celebrate is that Turkish cartoonist Zehra Ömeroğlu, after five years of court hearings, doesn’t have to go to prison for drawing a cartoon. The Istanbul courts ruled that her cartoons were protected under the Intellectual and Artistic Works Act.
Good news for her, not so good news four other Turkish cartoonists and staff members of the Turkish satirical magazine, LeMan, who were just arrested this week and charged with “inciting public hatred”.
If anything, making cartoons has become an increasingly perilous activity.
In recent years, around the world, ink slingers have been censored, fired, arrested, imprisoned, and in some cases, tortured and killed.
Some make the news globally like the horrendous Charlie Hebdo magazine attack of a decade ago. But most travel under the mass media radar.
The struggles of Ali Ferzat, Atena Farghadani, Pedro Xavier Molina and many others are rarely known beyond the borders of their own countries.
But beyond outright repression, more and more cartoons of edgy social and political content are disappearing simply because print media editors are backing away, fearful of upsetting one of their few precious remaining subscribers.
In the US, the subtle threat is the incremental censorship and outright abandonment of cartoons.
And publishers aren’t just jettisoning cartoons but the staff cartoonists as well.
Editorial cartoonists are losing their jobs right and left (actually, I guess we could say more left than right).
Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonists like Ann Telnaes and Rob Rogers have left positions after conflicts over content with their home papers.
Of course it’s not just editorial cartoonists taking the heat. Graphic novels/ Graphic Memoirs continually make the banned book lists around the country.
Books such as Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer --and amazingly Art Spiegelman’s Maus experienced a resurgence in repressive interest.
(If you’re wondering why cartoons get more heat, raise a greater ruckus, than the written word, I recommend reading The Art of Controversy by Victor S. Navasky).
If you’re interested in the plight of cartoonists and cartooning as an art form, here are a couple of sites you can check out:
Freedom cartoonists Foundation
Happy 4th of July.
I leave you with this: China has banned the use of puns. The government is concerned that punning leads to “Cultural and linguistic chaos”.
Cartoons copyright by their respective holders
