Category: News
Cartoonists Honor Fallen Libyan Artist
Last week, I heard from my a cartoonist friend of mine from Corsica, Manfruelli Batti, that a Libyan street artist/cartoonist named Kais al-Hilali had been killed by Quaddafi supporters after drawing a caricature of the leader on a Benghazi street wall. I put out a call to my international cartoonist friends, and gathered a number of poignant cartoons on this tragedy. The New Yorker created a slide show of the cartoons, I wrote some copy and it was posted on their News Desk Blog. Here it is. There is nothing like the power of cartoons to speak to an issue.
cartoon by Riber Hansson of Sweden
Those of us born before 1990 work hard to keep up with technology, we weren’t born into it. I love twitter, tumblr, email, FB, and I was born well before then. But it will be interesting to see how the upcoming generations will be different because of the Internet. Will they physically be different from bending over phones? Will their brains work in new, as-yet- to-be-understood ways? Will their handling of cyber-etiquette be so ingrained as to further distance us from them? Just when we were able to trash the music divide that existed with parents when I was young–my children and I share music tastes– along comes the Internet. I text with my daughters frequently, but I am not able to email my computer-less father. The Internet is not only changing us in both good in bad ways, it is changing how the generations co-exist.
I guess there’s always something.
Stone Age Print
The future of print media is, to put it mildly, uncertain. I don’t read any magazines any more (except for, ahem, The New Yorker. I have to say that), and still hang on to reading the paper version of the New York Times, as well as online. It’s not exactly becoming obsolete, but is a different form of news gathering. I read the paper edition of the Times to see what they consider worthy of being in the print edition. The online version is for me up-to-date news.
But my first love for immediate news is, of course, Twitter.
How?
The devastation in Japan, continuing turmoil in Libya, Bahrain and Egypt– these events have the world riveted and heartbroken. How is this affecting our consciousness and our way of life? How do we respond to natural disasters? What are the safety issues surrounding nuclear power? What does freedom mean, and what are we willing to do for it?
How do we allocate and how much do we allocate of ourselves for these things? There is a need to express ourselves and give to the world, but then what do we have left for our own loved ones? Plenty.
International Cartoons, CNN and World Ink
Being connected to cartoonists around the world is a great pleasure for me. I feel it is a way for people to talk about issues without needing to use words and it is a way to be connected with other cultures and their concerns through art. And, I am fascinated at how we can see different artists approach one issue. I was fortunate to be invited to write about this for CNN.com, and I curated a cartoon slide show for the article. You can view it here, and it is titled “How International Cartoonists See Gadhafi.” I put out a call to all the cartoonists I know around the globe, and within a few hours had a selection that we went with. The editors at CNN and I felt we had to move fast in case the situation changed in Libya. Over the next few days, more cartoons arrived in my inbox that I could not use for the CNN feature, but were equally poignant. I will run these in the next day or so on the site I edit called World Ink.