I mentioned about a month ago that the Star Tribune had hired its new full-time political cartoonist. His name is Mike Thompson. Looking briefly at his previous work, he seemed moderate or at least not right-wing. His drawings seemed okay: nothing that stood out as terrible, though not initially great either.
Well, he started this week, and so far there have been four examples of his work…and he is a disaster.
The one from today is the only one that's not offensive. It is, however, completely incomprehensible:
The thread on Twitter where the Strib posted this cartoon (in color!) contains a raft of people commenting that they don't understand it, so I'm not the only one. Even people who say they are sports fans don't get it. I realize it's making sports references; I do know who/what Griddy and Aaron Rogers are. But I still don't get it, or why it's supposed to be funny, or how it makes any kind of point that's relevant in Minnesota.
The first of Mike's cartoons, which ran on Sunday, was essentially a two-panel that managed to offend Muslims, U.S.-born Black people (by implying they are violent criminals), and anyone who thinks the over-hyping of crime is being used intentionally to undermine cities. (The last of which fits pretty squarely with the Star Tribune's op-ed page.) I will not repeat its content here.
The second cartoon tried too hard to be topical and didn't make sense, if you know anything about Minnesota. It was about marijuana legalization, which was being debated in our state House at the time, and has since passed there. It will likely pass in the state Senate this Friday.
The third one was this:
The third cartoon, while topical in this area — yes, we have potholes — tried too hard, this time to draw together that issue with the fact that legislators are thinking of naming a highway after Prince. The highway that might be named for him is pothole-free, I hear... It's city streets that have the potholes because of lack of funding, and anyone who lives here would know that. The same legislators who might name the highway after Prince tend to be against funding for those streets. That might be a subject for a cartoon!
Plus, this drawing is very bad. Mike never met a glowing white outline he couldn't commandeer to compensate for the lack of contrast in his busy drawings. And it looks like he grabbed a bunch of items from Google Images to make a collage: There are 3D-rendered traffic bollards, which look computer-generated, in the same image with a completely flat black boingy-boingy line behind the car. And then there's the car itself, whose wheel and axle parts would make a mechanic weep.
In reference to today's Griddy cartoon, this thread from Minneapolis activist D.A. Bullock and his respondents contained more political astuteness than Mike Thompson could ever marshal. Bullock wrote:
I think the main issue with Mike is that he is just kinda simple. One wants some rigor around political satire to elevate it to some form of humor or provocation or dissent or biting truth to power or something other than bland, else what is the need for political cartoons?
To which one wag, named @TomCruise_69, replied, "I simply want political cartoons to blandly echo the daily complaints I read on the NextDoor app."
And that's what Mike Thompson's deal seems to be. I'm not sure he's moved to Minnesota yet, and so far I think he actually may be reading a NextDoor board from one of the suburbs, or another website called Uptown Crime. He clearly doesn't have any depth of knowledge about the Twin Cities enough to cover local issues with any astuteness, so he should probably shift to national topics for a while until he's been here long enough to understand things himself.
If he ever does move here before he loses this job.
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The day after I posted this, the Star Tribune's publisher ran an apology for Mike Thompson's first cartoon at the top of the editorial page, saying it should not have been printed. Way to start off in a new city!
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