This morning the Star Tribune op-ed page greeted me with a cartoon I didn't understand:
I thought it was probably supposed to be sympathetic to queer youth, but I honestly wasn't sure. Obviously, that's a rainbow, and a young-looking person is sitting at the foot of it. There's a storm happening. Some papers are wafting away. Did they come from the kid's closed backpack? How did that happen?
I figured it was suffering from being printed in black and white on newsprint, so I looked up the cartoonist, Jeff Koterba and found this:
Which is better, I guess. The monochrome kid stands out better against the multicolored rainbow, and the dark storm looks more threatening. But it's still not clever or even particularly evocative, given the clichés involved. And the idea of symbolizing queer youth as sitting, as if they're hiding at the foot of a rainbow, seems kind of weird to me. And what is with those pieces of paper that came from nowhere?
I can see that Koterba is trying to be sympathetic, based on his other cartoons, but this is a miss for me.
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Meanwhile, the Star Tribune announced its new political cartoonist recently. I can't remember what his name is, even though I looked him up. I remember he's currently got a daily gig elsewhere, has been nominated for noteworthy awards, and is originally from Minnesota. And I guess it goes without saying that he's a he, and I'll add that he appears to be white. The tradition continues. But at least he isn't Lisa Benson.
2 comments:
Close up, it looks like looseleaf paper, which would signify “student.” But that’s pretty difficult to figure out at a smaller scale. Not a good cartoon.
Maybe there could have been a group of people under the rainbow? And a storm overheard? But it makes sense that the storm is coming from the right.
I could see that it was loose-leaf paper, even in the black-and-white version, but it was the source of it that confounded me, since the backpack is shut and it doesn't look as though the kid was writing... just sitting there. It was distracting, essentially.
It makes me think of Renaissance paintings that had a fully worked-out set of visual signifiers that viewers generally understood. But we are the modern audience, living at the same time as the cartoonist, and either these are not the signifiers or there is no such set.
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