BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And I’m Brooke Gladstone. The pen of the editorial cartoonist often is the sharpest in the newsroom, and it’s generally aimed at the jugular of all manner of politicians and institutions. But if a pictorial barb gores the wrong ox, it’s likely to be spiked. David Wallis has collected some of the best of what was deemed not fit to print in his new book, Killed Cartoons.

He says that offending people is part of the job of the cartoonist, but it’s a job that’s getting harder to do.

DAVID WALLIS:
Unquestionably, there are ebbs and flows. During the McCarthy years, newspapers got really nervous and certainly put a clampdown on their editorial artists. I think post-9/11 we’ve seen a rebirth of not necessarily McCarthyism, but McCarthyism Light, and I can think of an example recently.

During the Iraq War, in 2003, Mike Luckovich did an important cartoon that was killed by the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and it was spelling out the words “W Lied” using little military coffins, and that image was spiked.

And then two years later he was given more of a green light when the war became less popular. He meticulously handwrote each name of all the soldiers who had died at that point, to mark the two thousandth death in Iraq, spelling out the word “why” with a question mark. And that cartoon ran and he won a Pulitzer Prize for his body of work last year.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Politics is a big reason why editorial cartoons get spiked, but as you note in your book, there are a number of other reasons, reasons that basically amount to taste. That cartoon about the naked Uncle Sam –
DAVID WALLIS:
Yes.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
- was done by Mike Keefe. It was spiked, and it was called Electile Dysfunction.
DAVID WALLIS:
And his penis was – I hope I can say the word “penis” – it was shaped like the map of Florida. It was a cartoon that Mike Keefe knew – of the Denver Post – knew was not going to run, and I understand the reasons why you don’t necessarily want that cartoon in your morning paper.

What was interesting about that cartoon was Mike Keefe learning to test the limits, and to find out how far he could push his editor in order to then, you know, maybe pull back and do a drawing that would pass muster.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Obviously, a major job of the cartoonist is to offend the powerful, but you argue that American culture is turning non-offensive?
DAVID WALLIS:
We used to have a lot of two-paper towns; now we have nothing but pretty much one-paper towns, except for a few cities. Rather than allowing their cartoonists to have more freedom, newspapers are now more worried about trying to be all things to all people; I think that’s what’s gone on.

You know, they’ve shown an incredible abdication of their duties, newspapers, in the last ten years or so, certainly since the “Republican Revolution,” quote, unquote, in 1994, to skewer the powerful.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
I was surprised to see that in 1968 Look magazine killed an editorial cartoon by, of all people, Norman Rockwell.

DAVID WALLIS:
You know, there’s a lot of illustrators who think Rockwell is a sentimental and not really a cutting edge artist, but after the civil rights movement, he was a very important voice working for Look magazine, and I think he really was doing brave work, in my opinion.

And his cartoon – his illustration, really – it’s an illustration of a dead black soldier next to a white soldier, and they’re bleeding together in Vietnam. And he originally had created the same image, but they were a dead white youth and a dead black youth in a ghetto, and somehow this scared Look magazine and they, they wouldn’t run either, in the end.

They asked him to put it in Vietnam, probably a safer context, Vietnam, than the ghetto, in the Sixties, and they ended up not running it, and I think it’s a pretty profound image.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
When you talk about sure-fire subjects that will get your cartoon killed –
DAVID WALLIS:
Religion!
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Religion every time?
DAVID WALLIS:
Often. Abortion, religion, corporate power, cartoons about the newspaper industry - [LAUGHTER]- that’ll get ya, that’ll get killed. But religion and race are probably the big two.

In my book, I have a cartoon by Graeme MacKay of the Hamilton Spectator in Canada, of Pope John Paul II going towards heaven through the skies in a golden pope mobile, sun-kissed clouds, and it’s just really a reverent cartoon. But apparently it didn’t genuflect enough for his editor, because they killed it as too whimsical an image after the Pope’s death.

I mean, I couldn’t think of a more innocuous praiseworthy cartoon than that one.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:
You note in the book that newspapers have thinned the ranks of editorial cartoonists. You know, they don’t investigate political crimes, they didn’t uncover the truth about Enron. They just opine, like myriad newspaper columnists, one voice among many. Why should we care whether editorial cartoonists are losing their jobs?
DAVID WALLIS:
These opiners have actually been very important in our society. In the Vietnam era, for instance, we watched people like Paul Szep and David Levine do a very famous illustration of LBJ pulling up his shirt and showing a scar in the shape of Vietnam. And that was considered a very, very important image that was burned in people’s minds.

And that’s what it is about cartoonists. They are burned in people’s minds. They affect us. They in some ways poke us in the eyes from the static pages of newspapers and magazines, so I would argue that they’re pretty important.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:
David, thank you very much.
DAVID WALLIS:
Thank you very much, Brooke.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
David Wallis is the author of Killed Cartoons: Casualties From the War On Free Expression.
[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]