Cartoons

Draw your own conclusion about political cartoons. Neighbors Bob Scheibel and Daryl Cagle certainly have. Scheibel contends that editorial cartoonists no longer have the free hand -- or the public clout -- that they enjoyed for more than 200 free-wheeling years. Cagle counters that today's political cartoonists are doing the most significant work in the history of their barbed pen-and-ink profession.

I had already been talking to some of America's best editorial cartoonists about the enduring power of a single well-drawn image when the New Yorker delivered the proof with megaton force -- this week's cover depicting that closet jihadist, Barack Obama. Put a turban on the senator from Illinois, dress his wife up in camo and an assault rifle, and you get the whole country talking.

Two plumbers working on a sink with an alligator coming out of the faucet? Yes. Two drunks brainstorming about starting the Drinking Network? No. A guy with his hand chopped off pointing the way to the Islamic court? Ahhhhhh ... maybe. It's Wednesday afternoon and David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, is picking cartoons. A few minutes ago, Bob Mankoff, the magazine's cartoon editor, entered Remnick's office carrying three wire baskets and 81 cartoons.

"WHOSE funeral was it?" asked Freddie Roman, talking to his longtime friend Mickey Freeman. Freeman shrugged, "Buddy Hackett's?" "No, Buddy was there. Sinatra's?" said Roman, who gave up on the story to sign a copy of "Old Jewish Comedians," a new collection of caricatures of elderly comedians by illustrator Drew Friedman. When the New York City Friars Club members gathered in their headquarters' George Burns Room to celebrate a book with that title, any number of conversations started this way.

The professor gazed at 18 students seated at long, glass-topped drawing tables, then projected a frame from the comic "Fritz the Cat" onto a pull-down screen. "I was a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin when I fell in love with R. Crumb," James Sturm said of the cartoonist with the signature big-footed characters, an icon of the counterculture. "I can honestly say that this comic that you are looking at caused me to drop out of school."

Square and loud, SpongeBob wasn't supposed to have much chance for success in Japan, a nation known for its love of more cuddly characters such as Hello Kitty and Pikachu. But the perky, bucktoothed American cartoon character is proving the skeptics wrong. SpongeBob SquarePants attracts nearly 1.9 million Japanese households to his TV show daily and is raking in a growing share of the $5 billion in annual retail sales for Nickelodeon, the Viacom Inc. unit behind the show.

Exports to Muslim countries fell by more than 11% last year after a boycott of Danish goods to protest the publication of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, the government said. Dairy products, dominated by the Scandinavian Arla Foods group, were worst hit, with exports dropping 39%, to $196 million, Statistics Denmark said. The boycott started in Saudi Arabia and spread to other Arab countries.

A psychiatrist instructs a patient on his couch: "I'll say a normal word, then you say the first sick thing that pops into your head." Another phones his wife to say: "I'm going to be late, dear. It's total craziness here."

This is the tale of "El Tigre," a new animated TV series \o7about \f7Latinos that was actually created \o7by \f7Latinos. It's a story, like so many in Los Angeles, of immigration, ambition, defeat, triumph and, of course, romance. It starts at the border town of Tijuana, where the show's creators, Jorge R. Gutierrez and Sandra Equihua, met in high school 13 years ago and fell in love, initially against the wishes of her family, who are all doctors.

Animation historian Jerry Beck says there are some cartoons that are so bad they're embarrassing -- so naturally he wants everyone to see them. For the last five years, Beck has hosted a nighttime program at San Diego's Comic-Con International titled "The Worst Cartoons Ever."