The Editorial Cartoons of Pat Oliphant (1964 to present)
REVIEW BY R.C. HARVEY:
(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)
Pat Oliphant may be the most influential editorial cartoonist since Thomas Nast, who is, for all practical purposes, the father of American political cartooning. Arriving on these shores from his native Australia in 1964, he proceeded to revise utterly the appearance and approach of American editorial cartooning.
Deploying his pictures in horizontal manner of the British (as did John Fischetti, a little earlier but without quite the same impact), Oliphant drew with a juicy, raggedy brushline (reminiscent at first of Ronald Searle's) - not a grease crayon, then the petard of choice among American editorial cartoonists; and he sharpened his points with a pungent sense of humour.
At the time of his arrival on these shores, he said (with typical irreverent outspokenness), "American cartooning was a laughingstock among other cartoonists in the world. All we ever saw was the Peace Dove with the scroll in its mouth. Hope coming over the hill, and the Rocky Road to prosperity. There was a stagnation one could see. Here was an audience that was really ready for a variety of new approaches."
Oliphant was quickly aped by nearly an entire generation of American cartoonists, who drew like him and tried to provoke their readers with comedy as well as a visual metaphor. An unanticipated by-product of this development is that more and more editorial cartoonists in the Oliphant era resort to being simply funny instead of aiming their humour at a target. Oliphant, however, never lets up: his humour hits targets with terrifying accuracy.
FURTHER READING:
