Cartoon pencils close to disposal

Press, 14 September 1988, Page 21

Cartoon pencils close to disposal

By

DAVID ZIMMERMAN,

of Reuters, in New York City

Michael Dukakis is so boring and George Bush so “wimpish” that they risk falling off the drawing boards of some of America’s leading political cartoonists. Cartoonists spoke to Reuters days before the Democrats formally named Dukakis their presidential candidate and weeks before the Republicans crowned Vice-President Bush to lead them in the November election. The artists say that Ronald Reagan is still an easy target for their humour. "Dukakis is so controlled and he plays his cards so close to his chest that he’s hard to get a fix on for voters, not to mention cartoonists,” says Doug Marlette, the 1988 Pulitzer Prize winner for cartooning. “He’s so dull that cartoonists tend to caricature that dullness. I just did one on sheep counting Dukakises. “Bush is less of a control freak. I (once) had him fighting his own shadow. He lends himself to the wimp factor,” says Marlette, who draws for the “Atlanta Constitution.” “Reagan, he’s terrific,” he says. “His entire administration is a cartoon. There’s a kind of cheerful obliviousness about him.” Berke Breathed, the 1987 Pulitzer Prize winner who draws the strip “Bloom County,” said that he finds Bush and Dukakis “really boring.” Garry Trudeau, the creator of “Doonesbury,” who in 1975 became the first cartoonist to win a Pulitzer for his column, draws Bush as an invisible man, with only words appearing. Herblock of the “Washington Post,” the doyen of American editorial cartoonists, recently depicted Bush as a petulant preppie (one who has attended a privileged preparatory school) in a blazer waving a pennant emblazoned “Beat Russia.* Paul Conrad, of the “Los

Angeles Times,” another Pulitzer Prize winner, puts it bluntly: “Have you ever drawn a wimp? With Bush, you just draw a wimp. I’ve only done Dukakis three or four times. There’s really no need, as far as I’m concerned. There’s nothing there, other than the fact that he’s never said anything.” Dwane Powell, of the “Raleigh News and Observer,” in North Carolina, says Dukakis is easy to draw because he has a “large nose, heavy eyebrows and his head is a little bit too big, like if it rolls around too many times it will roll off his shoulders.”

“Bush is very, very bland to do. I keep reading about how popular he was in'school, about his war record, and I don’t see any of this in the man. I get the impression of a guy who doesn’t have an original thought in his head. “One real cheap shot I took was when he kept denying know-

ledge of the Iran-Contra affair. I drew him with his handlers saying ‘no-one can question you any more,’ and he had stitches in his head showing his brain had been removed .... “Reagan is easy to do, but he’s so loved by the public that they’re always objecting to what you draw. I usually wind up

doing • him as a bumbling oaf.” Paul Rigby of New York’s “Daily News,” America’s biggestcirculation general interest newspaper, agrees that Reagan provides steady comedy relief. “The bumbling oaf is always good for a laugh,” he says. He also predicts that the. 1.7metre Dukakis, overshadowed on TV by drought-withered lowa corn, “eventually will come to be a very tiny figure among cartoonists.”

“Bush,” he says “has this exaggerated great dome and little chin. He’ll become blander and blander. Maybe a wimpier smile will be left, something like the Cheshire cat. “They (Bush and Dukakis) really have to do something. They’re in danger of falling off the drawing board because they’re so boring.” But dullness is not necessarily a political liability, says James Beniger, of the Annenburg School of Communications at the University of Southern California. “Politicians have to talk to everyone, and as political parties decline in importance, they have to appeal to people straddling lines, so to be bland is to be successful,” says the professor, who is doing a major study on humour in politics. “Judging from the cartoons, Dukakis comes across as the technocrat, not terribly . emotional. The humorous thing about him is probably his shortness, with the eyebrows second. “The greatest single impression you get of Bush (from the cartoons) is that he’s riding the President’s coat-tails. The second strongest image is 0f... a country club guy using Ivy League words when he has a beer in a neighbourhood saloon.” Hardly the stuff to make you roll in the aisles. But then again, this is thdj" 1980 s, and bland is beautiful.