Editorial Cartoonists—An Endangered Species?

With feminist inroads giving the green light to female aggression, editorial cartooning—like stand-up comedy—opened up to women in the '80s. Young women cartoonists M. G. Lord at Newsday and Signe Wilkinson at the Philadelphia Daily News began to make their mark, although Etta Hulme of the Fort Worth Star Telegram had been plugging away unheralded for years. Editorial cartooning in the '90s, the Clinton era, has been special so far in that nothing special has emerged. If Clinton is squishy and amorphous, so are the cartoons that mirror him. Editorial cartoonists are an endangered species. Editors think like publishers, cartoonists think like editors, and they all think like marketing directors. They find the messy emotions that good cartoons raise threatening, untidy, unseemly—and worse, unquantifiable. Young cartoonists seem to be struggling to find themselves, but instead of breaking new ground, creative energies are spent in rival bashing and crass self-promotion, achieving new levels of smarminess.