The New York Times' War on Cartooning

What is going on at The Times? Readers ask me all the time, as if I know because they used to run my work, but hell if I know. The Week-in-Review section has become a clone of Newsweek's famously dismal gags-about-the news (yes, gag me) Perspectives section. To read either would be to miss the fact that editorial cartooning is currently in its golden age. Sadly you have to read the alternative weeklies, and the ATTITUDE compilations, to know. And the Web, of course. You sure as hell won't find anything but donkeys, elephants, labels and all manner of stupidity in the Times.

As if that wasn't bad enough, the Times' Sunday Magazine has introduced a section called "The Funny Pages" which includes a one-page serialized graphic novel by, incredibly--the dead worst graphic novelist in America, Chris Ware.

Ware, best known for his Jimmy Corrigan GN of a few years ago, is a fine draughtsman who works wonders as illustration's answer to Death Cab for Cutie. Sadly, he also fancies himself a cartoonist, i.e. an artist who works with words and ideas as well as pictures. That's tough to do when you're fairly stupid (read his interviews to see what I mean), aggressively out of touch with the world (no crime, unless you're trying to be a cartoonist) and have had nothing of interest happen to you. His artwork has managed to seduce enough fans and editors (at the Times magazine, for instance) that they've managed to ignore Ware's FEMA-like incompetence as a cartoonist, some to the extent that they call him one of the (cough) best cartoonists working today.

Of course, many of the same folks think George W. Bush is the best president we've ever had, so there you go.