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Donald Rooum
The Use of Cartoons in Anarchist Propaganda
Raven 12
This article will consist of a series of dogmatic assertions with little if any
attempt to justify them. If you disagree, fine; I am not arguing.
There are three ways in which cartoons can be useful in anarchist propaganda.
They can make simple assertions, they can express opinions in an entertaining
form, and they can act as an appetiser for written material.
Cartoons as simple statements
Political cartoons are usually metaphors, and the people in them, are symbols
for political ideas or attitudes. A Prime Minister, depicted in a cartoon, is a
symbol for the politics of the Prime Minister, or the politics of the
government, or the government as an international power. When a new person
attains power in a country where cartoons are permitted, the various cartoonists
produce different caricatures. But as rapidly as possible they copy from each
other the features they will exaggerate, and arrive at a consensus which readers
will instantly recognise. A cartoonist who draws a politician every day may fail
to recognise the politician in the flesh, and this does not matter at all if the
cartoon ideas are good and the symbol can be read. You cannot argue with a
cartoon, because a cartoon cannot argue back.
Cartoons can make assertions in the form of metaphors, and tell stories
effectively and attractively, but they cannot present arguments. (Of course it
is possible to put a written argument in a series of speech balloons, but
surrounding an argument with cartoons is not presenting the argument in cartoon
form.)
This inability of cartoons to put arguments is no disadvantage in propaganda; on
the contrary, it is an asset. If you make a contentious statement using words,
your audience can say or think
'But. . .,
which interrupts the flow of communication. This is not the case if you make
your statement in a medium where argument is impossible.Then, your assertion can
be obscured only by incomprehensible metaphors, intrusive jokes, and other
events which you are able to control.
One reviewer flattered me with the compliment that my Wildcat cartoonsin Freedom
'hit the nail on the head'. Lovely. But if anyone said my cartoons made a
pertinent analysis of something, that would be nonsense. Trying to use a cartoon
for analysis would be as daft as trying to use a hammer as a microscope
Cartoons as popular art
It is about a century since anarchism has been formulated in its current form.
During that time there have been big changes in the techniques of mass
communication, and these have produced cultural changes. One change is that a
hundred years ago, books were the most common media of popular entertainment,
and this is no longer so.There is no need for me to detail the other media now
available. Since reading a lot of words is no longer a common custom,
expansiveness in print is less effective than it used to be, as a means of
propaganda. Indeed, it is difficult in 1990 to imagine any reader preferring
verbosity to conciseness. The anarchist classics continue to be useful, and new
works of genuine scholarship also have a place in anarchist propaganda. New
tub-thumping polemics, however, must be short and concise to meet the modern
cultural environment. Yet leaflets and short pamphlets are still seen as
lightweight, throwaway material. The problem is to present concisely-worded
propaganda in a form which looks fairly substantial. And a useful, pleasant,
culturally acceptable solution is to produce books of strip cartoons.
Another important cultural change has taken place in the art galleries. The most
respected gallery artists today think their job is to stimulate imagination by
doing something unexpected, on a large scale ('a child of three with a
heavy-duty crane . . ).
Modern art appeals to a sophisticated audience, and tends to leave
unsophisticated viewers bewildered. Popular art has always needed pictures which
tell stories, and since this need is no longer satisfied by gallery art, people
turn to strip illustrators and cartoonists.
A snobbish superstition developed, among those sophisticated enough to
understand modern art, that what may be understood without effort may be
produced without effort. The composer Scott Joplin, the cinema director Charles
Chaplin, and the writer P.G. Wodehouse are all artists now recognised as
important innovators, whose work was belittled because it was instantly
enjoyable. Lately, art snobbery seems to be somewhat on the decline.
Young people who try to improve their skill as cartoonists and strip
illustrators are still subject to opposition from their art teachers, but this
is because art teachers are a conservative lot, as stuck with modernism as an
earlier generation was stuck with academism. They are not the only ones. In this
country, good cartoons are never subsidised at the expense of tax-payers,
because the grant-giving bodies are dominated by art snobs.
The Liverpool Tate Gallery recently circulated a call for cartoons to go in an
exhibition about Modern Art,offering no fee to the exhibitors except what they
evidently saw as the honour of appearing alongside proper Art. And whereas the
French Ministry of Culture funds an annual comics gathering, the Arts Council
does not even reply to letters from the organisers of the UK Comic Arts
Convention. Modernist (ie not instantly comprehensible) comic books are
produced, and I believe some of them have been publicly subsidised. But they are
not by noticeably talented artists; those I have seen look as if their authors
use modernism as a disguise for their inability to draw. If it is not obvious in
a cartoon who is saying what to whom, or whether a running character is running
terrified or running to catch a bus, then the cartoonist is lacking in skill.
Many cartooning skills can be learned by anyone with a bit of visual ability,
but as with all art, there are also skills of expression which depend on the
personality of the artist. I admire those strip cartoonists who can convey
elegance and heroism, though I have no ambition to draw elegance and heroism
myself. I was flattered to be told by an editor of Peace News that my work had
the quality of hatred. But the cartoonists I would most like to emulate are the
visual humourists, whose drawings make you laugh even where there is no specific
joke.
There is no way to draw anarchism. But if you put an anarchist statement in an
amusing cartoon, you not only induce people to read the statement, but also show
that anarchism is not a miserable doctrine.
Cartoons as an appetiser for words
In publications consisting mostly of text, the most important function of
cartoons is to enliven their appearance. An experiment, often repeated by
trainee librarians, is to take the 'dust jackets' off half the copies of a book,
leave them on the remaining copies, and observe how often each copy is borrowed.
People wish to read the book, not the jacket, and they can see that all copies
are of exactly the same book. Nevertheless, they prefer the books with jackets.
It is as if a visually attractive exterior acts as the equivalent of an
appetiser, providing some of the energy for digesting the words.
Most magazines these days, even specialist magazines sold on subscription only,
devote the front cover to a single picture, which may have little relevance to
the content, and whose function is to make the magazine look readable. There is
a conventional wisdom that any page of text, bigger than an ordinary book page,
needs an illustration or two to stop it from looking grey and boring. Even the
most serious-minded of daily and Sunday newspapers take some trouble to be
visually attractive. Seen as mere decoration, photographs relieve the grey of
the typesetting by varying the texture of the grey, while line drawings provide
solid areas of black and white. The size, shape, and distribution of black and
white in a cartoon are important design elements of the publication in which it
appears. As recently as twenty years ago, nearly all printing was done by
letterpress, and using an illustration meant going to the expense of a
letterpress block. Now that nearly all printing is done by lithography,
illustrations are actually cheaper to use than text, because they do not involve
typesetting costs. This means that even anarchist publications can be as lavish
with cartoons as they like.
Most anarchist periodicals, these days, follow the commercial press in including
some pictorial interest at each opening of the paper or magazine. Some
illustrations are original, some lifted from other anarchist publications in an
unobtrusive spirit of international anarchist co-operation. Some anarchist
publications are not so much enlivened, as overwhelmed, by illustrations. Some
other anarchist publications, by contrast, embrace the prejudice that liveliness
of appearance is incompatible with seriousness of purpose. The late Jack
Robinson, when he was an editor of Freedom, would veto illustrations proposed by
his fellow editors on the ground that 'Freedom is not a comic'. Freedom under
its current editorship does not lift cartoons from otherpapers, and consequently
has a higher proportion of words-to pictures than most of its contemporaries. At
first there were grumbles from readers about the unfamiliar greyness, but nobody
seems to have stopped buying the paper because of it. The conventional wisdom
that readers need visual stimulation seems to be mistaken, at least in the case
of Freedom readers. If so, it is not the only case of conventional wisdom being
wrong, and Freedom editors being right.