Frontiers of the thin black line

Then why this months-long unanimity and consistency against a war on Iraq? More so when their writing colleagues are shaping far more nuanced editorial opinions. Rarely has one seen the inky squiggles in print and the Net at such variance with the carefully chosen words. An estimate puts the lives lost in 20th Century’s declared and undeclared wars on nations and races at no less than 167,000,000. War is an ugly business and there is a lot more moral comfort in opposing it than in defending it. But the cartoonist today isn’t exactly going to bed hugging a soft moral teddy bear. He is taking on the public mood which post 9/11 is more prone than ever to patriotic escalation. And in these tough times, the last thing a media professional can afford is to antagonise the readership.

It isn’t as though pacifism has been an article of faith in the cartooning world either. Cartoons and cartoonists have come to the aid of war efforts. British warplanes airdropped David Low’s cartoons in German- and Italian-occupied territories to tease the Nazis and Fascists and to pep up the underground resistance movements. Major cartoonists who were young or old enough to enlist did so in World War II.

If anything, the legendary Herblock was an early opponent of US isolationism during the war and ironically this nearly cost him his job but for a remarkable coincidence. As he sat waiting for the pink slip in the New York office of his publisher who hated the cartoonist’s ‘‘interventionism’’, the news of his first Pulitzer arrived. Next year he was drafted into the Army where for two years he drew, wrote and edited a clipsheet. Ketcham who went on to sire Dennis the Menace had a stint in the Navy where he did cartoon posters and felt a bit guilty about ‘‘fighting the enemy with nothing more lethal than pen and ink.’’

What has changed since then? The Vietnam simile doesn’t hold either. Saddam is no Ho Chi Minh. He isn’t a much more desirable human specimen than Hitler or Mussolini and is an equally caricaturable target. The cartoonist does attack him but he spares the enemy’s enemy no less. More than war itself it is the collateral damage to a free society that comes with it that bothers the cartoonist.

The very values for which a political cartoonist like Herblock and a comic artist like Ketcham took sides with the state are at stake here. The urge to look for the enemy is a particularly addictive one and can easily get out of hand. As Herblock himself realised soon enough after the war when McCarthy was running the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The senator complained that he had to shave twice a day “because of that guy and his cartoons”. Herblock would caricature the man as an unshaven bully.

Cartoonists have an uncanny memory for the unpleasant and can’t be faulted for forewarning us about bullies clean-shaven or unshaven who may not stop at complaining. Irreverence is central to all good things American including what they claim as their National Art — the comics. Without a fair degree of dissent even a business strip cartoon like Dilbert can’t work.

Surely it is not just the cartoonists who are bothered about the values that go with their craft. As practitioners of an essentially unambiguous medium, they are merely being more vocal about apprehensions more widely shared. Otherwise why would these unfashionable cartoons get printed or uploaded?

No one is quite sure how a war will go. No one can be until some extraordinary guy comes up with a bomb smart enough to target tyrants and tyrants alone in a swift push-button act. And that has to happen before the mad men who cling to power can get themselves cloned. Till then cartoons will speak louder and clearer than words.