Customer Reviews

The Best Political Cartoons of the Year, 2006 Edition

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Always great to see another Cagle book of political cartoons. Very informative to see the entire portfolio of 20 cartoons that won the Pulitzer Prize for Nick Anderson in 2005.

Satire is the name of the game.Great book with the best editorial cartoons from all over the world on many topics. They are biting, witty and more. If you can't stand jabs at your favorite politicians, TV, movie stars and more then don't try this book. I think it is just great. If you like this book you can get ones that will come around the corner next year or for years past. Hilarious historical journals.

What can I say? Cagle is unquestionably the best. I read his website every day religiously. So what's not to like about his year-in-review books? They're spectacular.

Br. Randall Horton

I love Cagle's website, and this book is a gathering up of the best cartoons from there. If you're into political or editorial cartoons you'll love it. It's almost like an almanac of what happened in 2005.

They just keep getting better. This third book by Cagle should't be missed. The cartoons are such a great way to review the year!

Cagle's book has a wide variety of cartoons in various styles, but the book is badly hampered by Cagle's insistence that political cartoonists are primarily left-leaning (10 to 1 was the claim, which he ironically justifies by suggesting that liberals think that people are mostly "stupid" and so since that's where humor lies, there are naturally more liberals in cartooning. He also refers to conservatives as humorless - as a stereotype, to be fair - but one that makes you wonder if the man has ever read P.J. O' Rourke, Jonah Goldberg, Rob Long, Mark Steyn, or listened to Rush Limbaugh, just to name a few.) Cagle then goes on to pander to that assumption my placing an overwhelming number of liberal cartoonists in the pages, mildly broken up by the odd conservative cartoon.

The intros to the chapters are full of misinformation (One example is the matter of fact state ment that there's a civil war going on in Iraq...not yet, though sadly I'm sure that's wishful thinking on some leftists' part - but a country whose factions are all working towards a single government is not in civil war - there's a difference between that and a country wracked by terror. Another: In the intro to cartoons on Hurricane Katrina, there wasn't a single mention of Governor Blanco or Mayor Nagin, an appaling omission.)

Even the chapter selections, including a section on Pat Robertson, but leaving out Howard Dean and the DNC which got a fair amount of attention from political cartoonists (and writers) this past year demonstrates a kind of calculated bias on Cagle's part.

The main problem though is that the intellectual quality of political cartooning has diminshed considerably in the past two decades. This was already apparent when Berke Breathhead won a well-deserved award for Bloom County some years back, an award richly deserved over the polemical and often plainly didactic work of the majority of political cartoonists then and unfortunately now.

Cagle's collection is full of works that rely on the most biased, unfair, and extreme take on events, a take which will leave many readers on both left and right scratching or even shaking their heads.

However, to be fair to Cagle, this sort of simplistic bias is well rewarded by the media and the same establishment that liberals always seem to rail against, forgetting that they form a large part of it. Anderson's Pulitzer portfolio was embarrassingly didactic and ham-fisted, and example of an award that seems to have been given out because it was one cartoonist's time.

The art of the cartoons vary and it is still nice to see some artists using brushwork and detail, even in the face of the increasingly small spaces newspapers give their artists to work with.

Ultimately though, Cagle's book is a sad reminder of the fact that the polemics of the overrated Post cartoonist Herblock have trumped the more balanced and thoughful approach of a cartoonist like Mauldin. That probably shouldn't be such a surprise in an age where partisan rancor is extremely high and unbearably dishonest. To see it celebrated though is a kick in the gut to those of us who have followed and admired political cartooning for decades. One hopes this the a deep valley from which this valuable craft shall emerge. Right now though, that's seems a day too far off.