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AN APPRECIATION
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Cartoonist Tony Auth:
Best of the Very Best?
of TheColumnists.com
There are some 80 newspaper cartoonists in the country. Here are some of the cartoons by Tony Auth of the Philadelphia Inquirer that make me think he may be the best cartoonist of all:
There is a picture of a cemetery with the heading “Smoking Deaths.” On the left is a large group of tombstones with the caption, “Smoking Section.” On the right is another large group of tombstones with the caption, “Non-smoking section.”
On the left of a split cartoon is a U.S. Marine carrying a huge backpack. On the right is a fifth grader with the same-sized huge backpack.
This cartoon shows one kid with a big body and no head. It shows another kid with a large head and a slim body. The kid with the big body asks the kid with the big head, “Where do you work out?” The kid with the large head answers, “At the library.”
The cartoon shows American troops in tanks
in Iraq being assaulted by people and missiles. The caption reads,
“Where have all the flowers gone?”
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Tony Auth has been drawing editorial cartoons for the Inquirer since 1971. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976, the Thomas Nast prize, named for the father of American cartooning, in 2002.
Auth, whose ancestors came over from Germany in 1870, was born in Akron, grew up in California, and was graduated from UCLA in 1965. Later, working as a medical illustrator, he drew cartoons for the UCLA student paper, the Bruin, for free. “Though I wasn’t getting paid, I was being shown in 30 or 40 other papers, college and otherwise, around the country and it led to my job at the Inquirer.”
One cartoon underscored the high-handed tactics of the UCLA administration at a time of unrest on the campus. It shows a ladder-like chart. The government is on the top, the college administration under that, below it on the same line are the police, highway patrol and national guard. At the bottom are the faculty and then the students. The caption has a U. of California board member saying, “It’s just a matter of getting rid of the two troublesome elements at the bottom.”
Charley (not the musician) Parker, a longtime admirer of Auth, said, “When he started he was a brash, headstrong, angry young maverick, hot to expose injustice, fraud, idiocy, corruption of government…Delightfully, the subsequent years don’t seem to have changed him that much.”
Jules Feiffer, another icon of cartooning, said, “Tony Auth’s perspective is that of a bemused and often angry comic historian. Irony, never a favorite form among Americans, is his meat and potatoes. He is not smug and though he can be mean, he is never mean-spirited. Auth is a moralist and an optimist.”
He is a minimalist. There is an appealing, uncluttered lightness about his drawing even though one of his heroes, Herblock, was celebrated for heavy-lined drawings, like the bearded look of Senator Joe McCarthy, or Richard Nixon emerging mud-splattered out of a sewer. His style, a critic said, “leans toward the pared down ink line and subtle wash drawings of a magazine like the New Yorker.”
Auth says, “Cartooning is a form of shorthand. The trick is to do a drawing that conveys a kind of reality immediately. If the cartoon required drawing a jungle, I would argue there not be an extra line of jungle in the cartoon.”
Auth is 58, a cheerful, low-keyed man. He delights audiences when he speaks about his work and shows cartoons with a talk he labels, “Sacred Cows Make the Best Hamburger.” He is self-deprecatory. “When you do this for a living” he said, “you get two things: awards and hate mail.”
His work day starts by reading the Inquirer, New York Times and Washington Post. He attends the daily news meetings at 9AM. “I listen to them argue and thrash out the news. I have a great respect for the writers and editors,” he said. “If I am lucky, I know immediately what I am going to draw. Otherwise, it usually takes an hour or two to come up with an idea. The deadline is 9PM but I always get it in by 3 o’clock.”
The fastest cartoon he ever drew took 26 seconds. “Pretty good,” he said. “When there was an energy shortage, I drew Uncle Sam on a bed of nails; the nails were oil wells.”
He seems to get most of his criticism from Jews and Arabs, each faction seeing prejudice against them in his work. “People think there is an overriding intelligence at the paper about certain issues. It isn’t so, but you can’t tell that to those who complain on the phone, or, more lately, with e-mails.”
The genius of Auth’s work was personified to me by the cartoon he did at the time John Kerry made a notorious gaffe about kids winding up in Iraq if they didn’t study in school. His cartoon showed Kerry on the left with a twisted tongue coming out of his mouth. On the right was a taunting George Bush riding a tank in which the gun turrets were twisted in the same manner.
This countered the gleeful taunting by the Republicans of Kerry by underscoring that Bush’s actions were much worse. “I wanted to grant that Kerry had not chosen wisely in his words,” Auth said, “but that Bush had not chosen wisely in his war.”
Auth has been merciless in ridiculing George Bush since a little after the beginning of our involvement in the Iraq quagmire. He has evolved from his early ambivalence about the war. “I felt that the world needed to get rid of homicidal maniacs. I felt that Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction, so I did cartoons of him as a tyrant and that we needed to confront such threats.”
Though a piercing critic of Bush now, he says “I am still not convinced we have a moral right to leave Iraq as soon as possible. We need to salvage something for those poor people.”
Auth’s three-times a week cartoons can be accessed from the websites of the Philadelphia Inquirer, New York Times (cartoons) and Washington Post (comics). The Times would be enhanced by hiring Auth as its first ever political cartoonist.
©2007 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The cartoons are used with permission of Tony Auth and are the exclusive property of Auth and The Philadelphia Inquirer. This column first posted Feb. 26, 2007.
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