“Maybe I was too clever, turning it around like this for the caption.”

Because that was such a HILARIOUSLY CLEVER cartoon, but obviously over the heads of all us liberals who don’t know nuffin bout nuffin.

What a refreshing change from being called intellectually elite.

Power Stupid Power Up!

Problem is, she still thinks she is clever, and now she thinks she is a lawyer, too?

Priceless.

Well, seeing both of the cartoons linked here, she’s just not funny or clever.  Double fail.

This is like the comedian at open mike night who starts berating the crowd for not laughing.  Why is it so difficult to explain to people that, yes, we understand the joke, we just don’t think it’s funny.

Thanks for the link!

She’s now written my ISP about the posts on “Alas.”

As a political cartoonist, I find this behavior embarrassing. Political cartoonists should be glad of controversy and criticism, not seeking to shut it down.

Well, me, my EFF membership, my ACLU membership, and my silly little law license are all giggling.

I had no idea who she was before this.  I do now, and for all the wrong reasons.

It is an awfully cute whale, though.  Maybe she should focus her efforts on making more comics about cute little whales happily playing in the sea.

Holy shit, this is funny. First the “you didn’t get the State Farm joke,” then the “this is illegal and “stealing”“? Dear Ms. Barstow, stealing is when you take someone’s work and pass it off as your own. Hotlinking an image which you posted ON THE INTERNET, saying where and who it came from, and criticizing it, is not stealing. Not even close. This is so far from a fair use violation that her assertion that it is is actually amusing. Not to mention the allegations of slander and libel.

She should be glad. Like other people said, I had no idea who she was before yesterday, and now I suspect there will be some nutjobs running to her defense and/or linking to her work approvingly.

It’s a political cartoon (at least the Mexico one is, no idea what point the Chia pet one is trying to make). Is her objection really that no one can comment on it, or that if they do, they can’t put the image in the blog post but have to instead just link to her blog?

God, this is silly. Jesse, she called you on the phone?!

*Yawn.* Did I miss something? I was napping.

Yep - threatened suit and all.  And then lectured me on how two sentences of commentary was insufficient to constitute legitimate commentary, and how the cartoon can’t be reproduced because it’s use of the whole thing, even though there’s no other way to reproduce it.

This is awesome. I would to see her find a lawyer to bring that suit. In the future, you should just place random black squares over the non-essential parts of the cartoon, that way it would only be a reproduction in part. Duh.

So how many sentences do you need for legitimate commentary? I count 8 in Barry’s post at Alas. Is that enough? Oh wait, that’s because of a personal vendetta, not commentary. I see the stuff about personal vendettas being exempt from fair use in section..let’s see…1….2…oh here it is! Right in my butt!

Maybe she should focus her efforts on making more comics about cute little whales happily playing in the sea.

Better yet, maybe she should just go back to painting little whales on nicknacks to be sold at seaside shoppes from Downeast Maine to Cape Cod to Bethany Beach.

Naw, on second thought we can get some Mexican artisans do that cuter and cheaper.

I like the commenter who says State Farm might want to sue her.

OMG! She totally parodied the State Farm commercial. That is so awesome and timely.

Anyway, proves how much of a sexist I am. I thought this talentless hack was a dude, like that Muir guy.

Y’know, if it were true satire, she might have wanted to keep “Like a good neighbor” if she was going to list all of the bad things about Mexico. Then there would be irony. Or something.

What I don’t get it why she’s so riled up about this. I mean, she seems to get a decent amount of work (among then the New Yorker, Harper’s, Slate, etc.). And those New Yorker cartoons get commentary all the time. It makes it quite obvious that she’s just busting out this “fair use” nonsense because she’s probably never had the occasion to be seriously criticized before, and can’t handle it.

But it seems like her work is doing just fine. Or was, anyway.

Right, Seebach, if she’d said “Like a good neighbor, Mexico is there,” that would have at least been better (although still racist).

On the other hand, there’s only so much we can expect from the person who wrote the book “What do women want? Chocolate!” Which is apparently not a Sarah Haskins-style takedown of the ridiculous narrative surrounding women and chocolate, as I had hoped, but a book of cartoons…making fun of women by saying they go crazy for chocolate.

Gag.

I love cartoons and the whole art of cartooning.  It’s always a little dangerous when one draws (ahem) a conclusion from just one or two examples of a work.

I spent some time looking for her cartoons.  Everything else aside she writes within a very narrow frame, which we can call a New Yorker style: that sort of restrained, repressed striving-at-wit-so-dry-that-it-renders-the-joke-arid feel.  Fine, so far as it goes.  The New Yorker style is very narrow and inhibiting, creating an almost cramped, confined feel, visually and joke-wise.  She’s not the only NYer cartoonist to have that problem because the fault likes with the magazine which badly needs a revamp of the shockingly narrow type of cartoon that it permits.

The chia head and mexico cartoons are, truth be told, at odds with the rest of her work, which is conventional and predictable to the point of dull.  There’s an argument that the Mexico cartoon isn’t racist but merely the bog-standard view that many Americans have of Those Other, Lesser Countries.  Her chia-pet-head cartoon can be read (and she presents it as) being a parody of the fact that chia pets only seem to be advertised at Christmas on the one hand with everybody going Obamalicious in the runup to the inaugural on the other.  I don’t much give a damn either way, truth be told; I’ll leave it to others to debate as to whether they are Really racist.

Sadly, she just ain’t funny.  I went through dozens upon dozens of her cartoons, and didn’t crack a smile even though cartoons are the easiest possible way to get me to laugh.  Me sitting stone faced through a long supply of cartoons is the comic equivalent of producing a slate of drinks that can’t convince a parched alcoholic to tipple.

Okay, I finally found a word for feeling that the New Yorker cartoon style produces in me: claustrophobic

First the “you didn’t get the State Farm joke,”

I’ve noticed another odd quirk of conservative “humor”—they have this idea that if you reuse/paraphrase a slogan or saying for another purpose, that it is funny in and of itself, and if you didn’t find it funny, it must have been because you didn’t recognize the origin of the original saying.

Please note that the following is posted in accordance with fair use law.

You have a great future in IP law—or comedy.

As for the cartoonist herself, she deserves to wear <a >this caption</a> (a New Yorker cartoon fair-use mash-up) on a sign around her neck.

I’ve noticed another odd quirk of conservative “humor”—they have this idea that if you reuse/paraphrase a slogan or saying for another purpose, that it is funny in and of itself, and if you didn’t find it funny, it must have been because you didn’t recognize the origin of the original saying.

Woah, woah, quit with the ad hominem attacks. Didn’t mean to hit a nerve there. /sarcasm

I love cartoons and the whole art of cartooning.  It’s always a little dangerous when one draws (ahem) a conclusion from just one or two examples of a work.

Note that the original post, brief as it may have been, drew exactly zero conclusions about the cartoonist responsible. Plenty of people whose canons are generally blameless are capable of producing work which is undeniably racist*. And the Mexico cartoon is, in fact, an undeniably racist piece of work, in about 17** different ways.

* cf. Burqagate, if I’m not being too self-absorbed…
** Satiric hyperbole.

I’ll give Barstow a little credit.  Her stomping around the internet threatening lawsuits has provided me with much more mirth than most New Yorker style cartoonists can manage.

Damn. That whale just called you out, DB.

It will be hard for me to feel sympathy when she’s unemployed following the collapse of the newspaper industry.

Political cartoons are the lowest form of art.

I go to Mexico. Ok, but I think Azerbaijan more fun place. Food more to my taste.

Ben D., are you serious?  You can probably learn more about Tammany through the cartoons of Nast than you can through dozens of turgid tomes.

Auguste, I’m not convinced on the Mexico cartoon, if for no other reason that it is (if I may say this kindly) not at all unusual for Americans to look down their noses at any other country that isn’t America and think it a whackadoodle, crime-ridden shithole without them having any negative race feelings about its people.

And I disagree that “negative race feelings” are required to be present for racism to exist.

Also, is there a country that we think of as “a whackadoodle, crime-ridden shithole” (rather than simply disliking) that doesn’t feature a populace with a higher melanin count than the perceived whitness of the USA? I can believe there is, maybe, but I’m not thinking of any.

Also, is there a country that we think of as “a whackadoodle, crime-ridden shithole” (rather than simply disliking) that doesn’t feature a populace with a higher melanin count than the perceived whitness of the USA? I can believe there is, maybe, but I’m not thinking of any.

Russia. That’s the one country that comes to mind. Nothing else, though.

Ben D., are you serious?  You can probably learn more about Tammany through the cartoons of Nast than you can through dozens of turgid tomes.

Alright, good point. <I>Modern day mainstream<i> political cartoons.  About eighty percent of the time they’re unfunny, and twenty percent offensive.

I don’t think that’s true, seeker, in this case.  The prevalence of immigration means that most Americans have a specific opinion about the people, not just the place.  Her opinion appears to be racist.

Ah, American cartoonists and their labels.

Eh.

Hack cartoonist whose widely published body of bland and soulless work reveals a knack for salesmanship (which she undoubtedly mistakes for talent).

Russia. That’s the one country that comes to mind. Nothing else, though.

That’s true. But I will bet you that not one critic in 50 will mention Russia’s drugs, gangs, unemployment without mentioning the fall of communism and other bad stewardship. No such mitigating factors apply to most criticisms of Mexico, this cartoon included.

The common thread, as I see it, in criticisms like the ones I’m talking about (and in the cartoon) is the ascribing of what I might call “atypical motivation.” Russia gets ex-communism. Everyone else gets the brown horde theory.

I think that smug, even nasty, feelings of superiority can exist outside of race, but I do see your points.  There’s an awful lot of Americans, though, who divide the world into Us and Assholes and are awfully race-neutral in who they look down at from upon their self-perceived Olympus.

Ben D., I see what you mean.  Most political cartoonists of the right, for example, make their points and then try desperately to shoehorn a joke in around it; the result is painfully tin-eared propaganda rather than anything funny or lasting; McCoy and Muir spring to mind.  (It’s interesting to note that Nast’s worst cartoons are when he did exactly that.) 

But I simply don’t despair over a country’s cartoonists when they can produce the likes of MacNelly, Brethed, Sargaent, Trudeau and the like. 

Still, very few cartoonists hold a candle to the late, great Duncan Macpherson of the Toronto Star.  Examples of his work:
http://seeker6079.blogspot.com/2007/11/nobody-did-diefenbaker-as-well-as.html
http://seeker6079.blogspot.com/2007/10/nobody-did-trudeau-as-well-as-duncan.html
http://seeker6079.blogspot.com/2007/10/this-one-is-for-real-interrobang.html

That’s true. But I will bet you that not one critic in 50 will mention Russia’s drugs, gangs, unemployment without mentioning the fall of communism and other bad stewardship. No such mitigating factors apply to most criticisms of Mexico, this cartoon included.

True. And 99% of Americans would still rank Russia ahead of Brazil or Mexico as a place to live, even though Russia is equal to them in economic development and way fucking behind in democracy/political freedom. To say nothing of climate!

Ben D, about “art,” in the most pretentious sense anyway, I am an ignoramus—at best, “self-educated.”

But I feel I’m on firmer ground in discourse and semiotics in general and like seeker I loves me some cartoons—especially political ones. Dunno if what Bill Mauldin did in Up Front or GB Trudeau does or the early Life in Hell of Matt Groening or Nicole Hollander’s Sylvia should be placed in museums alongside Picassos or Rembrandts. I do think they hold their own, and then some, as narrative.

Or not, when the cartoonist is an idiot. Or shall we be more charitable (I’m inclined not to be, given this particular idiot’s tantrums) and say narrow, shallow, shockingly naive—and with all this blissful ignorance, rudely mean-spirited as well.

Some cartoonists have elevated rude meanness to an art indeed. Failing at that too seems par for the course of a third-rate hack.

The problem, Mark, is about 99 out of 100 cartoonists in daily mainstream newspapers are boring and/or idiots. You have to go to alt. weeklies or the internet to find good ones.

Dunno if what Bill Mauldin did in Up Front or GB Trudeau does or the early Life in Hell of Matt Groening or Nicole Hollander’s Sylvia should be placed in museums alongside Picassos or Rembrandts.

Liar!  Li-AH! We both know damn well that they do.

Sylvia’s a hard one to ease up to, largely because of the art.  Rodriguez’ “Charlie” was like that; for me my perception of the “feel” of the cartoon got in the way of the considerable wit for many years.

I take it from your comments that you looked through her blog, Mark.  She is rather bland and self-absorbed.  One gets the impression that being stuck listening to her at a party would be a 13th circle of hell.

The problem, Mark, is about 99 out of 100 cartoonists in daily mainstream newspapers are boring and/or idiots. You have to go to alt. weeklies or the internet to find good ones.

This.  I open up a Firefox folder with over a dozen cartoon tabs in it, every morning.  Only one or two of them are mainstream syndicated work and could likely be found in a paper.  The rest are webcomics.

http://www.agreeablecomics.com/therack/archives/

Apropos of nothing, “The Rack” is funny web comic about a comic book store I’ve been reading. You don’t have to know much about superheroes to enjoy it, or anything.

Wow…I’d LOVE to see the cartoonist do the USA!

see the cartoonist do the USA!

Howbout the Carribean region?  Or Africa?

Apologies to Ben D.—-sort of. You clarified you were talking about the 99 percent which is crap, which appeared while I was writing and I didn’t see it until too late.

Sturgeon’s Law applies everywhere of course.

Which is why I assumed you were taking that into account and damning even the best cartoonists. Of course the bad ones are bad! And there are a lot of them. But I pretty much ignore them and look at the good stuff, and that’s my standard.

No, seeker, I didn’t go to Barstow’s site. I don’t see the point. Other than as some kind of ordeal by tedium.

It turns out that Mexico is also the world’s number one exporter of hungover UC system students.

Jesse: You are rapidly becoming One Of My Favorite People Who I Don’t Actually Know.

Mark—

With political cartoons, it’s Sturgeon’s Law Plus Nine.

Hmmm…if she keeps this up, might have to get all Streisand on her.

“ordeal by tedium”

Got it in one.

(cross-posted at amptoons)

Ms. Barstow is probably feeling the pressure of print sources folding, and her income going away. I can sympathize with that, having myself made a hard transition of my comics to the web, and being on my own self-imposed extended hiatus.  The solution isn’t suing critics and fans, though—that’s been proven to fail as a strategy and can only lose you sympathy.

I’d like to share an idea with Ms. Barstow. Webcomics have largely financed themselves over the past 10 or 12 years by selling items based on their strips, rather than trying to “protect” copying of the comics themselves. The most popular item—something that has kept some of the top-ranked webcomics going—is the humble t-shirt.

You could put your Mexico cartoon on a t-shirt, and sell it! Then you could enjoy looking at the kinds of people who would wear this work, and acknowledge them as your dearest fans.

Just think. Barstow work televised live, nationwide at teabagging parties and libertarian rallies, just for starters!

Exciting, isn’t it? You’ve entered a whole new phase of your career.

There’s an argument that the Mexico cartoon isn’t racist but merely the bog-standard view that many Americans have of Those Other, Lesser Countries.

That’s called a distinction without a difference.

That Barstow appropriates Roz Chast’s drawing style isn’t without irony.

Howbout the Carribean region?  Or Africa?

Too predictable 0 LOL!

My, my, my.  Stupid, racist, and thin skinned.  Now that is a winning combination, especially when combined with no talent or ability at humor.

Someday somebody will chance upon the cartoons I did for the college newspaper back when I was a College Republican in Utah. God, are those a dung heap of sound-bite right-wing politics. Sadly, nobody ever wrote in and took me to task either. (Or if they did, the letters never made it past the editor.) But yes, once I was a right-wing political cartoonist. And yeah, I think the comment about making the point and then trying to shoehorn an awkward joke is pretty apt.

I’m pretty certain Jesse’s use of the cartoon still counts as fair use, as does Ampersand’s. It’s not as if you are trying to reproduce her entire body of work. Critique, even if the critique doesn’t meet the original author’s standards, is still fair game, AFAIK. Anyway, she’s a sad sheltered flower if she thinks that the right wing bloggers hasn’t been similarly linking and critiquing the likes of Ted Rall. (I mention Ted Rall in particular since I first came across his work when a blogger I was reading at the time, but who ended up veering sharply into right-wing territory after 9-11, critiqued some of his cartoons.)

Everything else aside she writes within a very narrow frame, which we can call a New Yorker style: that sort of restrained, repressed striving-at-wit-so-dry-that-it-renders-the-joke-arid feel.  Fine, so far as it goes.

Jules Feiffer’s body of work is as far as I’m fine with the style.

This scared me for half a second, I thought I’d read Donna Barr did this comic and was wondering if she’d suffered severe head trauma or something. Barstow. Thank Kibo.

For those who despair of the state of political cartooning, two words:  Tom Tomorrow.

He’s everything Barstow isn’t—especially smart and funny. 

Of course, he’s not exactly mainstream.

Well this is interesting.

Ms. Barstow seems to be hosting images of Scott Adams’ Dilbert characters on her site, and has since July 2008.

http://thecartoons.net/2008/07/10/dilbert-isnt-funny-anymore/

http://www.thecartoons.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/dilbert.jpg

I wonder if her praise for his work constitutes his permission.

OMG I assumed that cartoon was from Muir too. I guess sometimes my yonni gets in the way of me remembering that women can be douche bags too.  Oh I know this is awful but part of me kind of hopes she keeps putting up these racists ass cartoons then whining and threatening people when they point how racist they are. It’s so entertaining to watch her freak out while she’s bitching that people are freaking out. Wait..does that make me racist?

From Barstow’s post:

The Drawing I don’t know if anyone remembers the State Farm jingle that goes, “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.” Apparently not. Maybe I was too clever, turning it around like this for the caption.

Yes. That’s the problem exactly. You are too clever.

Well, you know, she “blocked and stopped a major internet”.  Definitely an excess of - cleverness.

It’s interesting that she “steals” and insurance company jingle, but then gets mad at people for “stealing” her comic.

I thought I’d read Donna Barr did this comic

I really liked Stinz.

Donna Barstow has a canary named Breyers because he looks like Breyer’s orange sherbet.  She has a book out, “What Do Women REALLY Want? Chocolate!”

What I appreciate the most about Jesse and Ampersand’s critiques is that it is part of the everlasting process of changing the sphere of what’s socially acceptable. If we don’t have voices like theirs weighing in, explaining or mocking or just pointing out the wrongness, then the other folks get all of the airtime by default, and the zone of acceptability continues to overlap with and be defined by the white-frat-boy-bigot demographic.

I don’t know what was in the cartoonist’s mind when she drew the picture, and I don’t particularly care. I’m comfortable saying that as an American living in the 21st century, she is obligated to have understood that the cartoon would come off as horrendously racist. (I assume she’s American, as in U.S., not N.A. If I’m wrong, apologies.)

Just this week I was confronted with teenagers circulating a photo purporting to show a “true” horrific ethnic stereotype regarding cannibalism, and I was reminded all over again of how valuable it is to keep calling this kind of thing out, and more to the point, picking it up and firmly moving it out of the sphere of socially acceptable.

Just to make it clear, the critiques of her cartoons printed on “Alas” weren’t written by me, as a couple of people on this thread have suggested. The first one was written by Jeff Fecke, the second one (linked to in Jesse’s post here) was written by Mandolin.

I just wish I wrote them. But I didn’t.