Cartoonists’ Halloween season

The perennial coincidence of election season and fright night is an overflowing sack of grist-candy for editorial cartoonists. Cartoons and Halloween go together like … profusely bleeding eyeballs and dagger-pierced jugulars! I mean, when you think masked pretense, unabashed misrepresentation, craven solicitation, scare tactics, dirty tricks and the indiscriminate distribution of decay-causing spoils, that just screams “democracy”! That’s the stuff that makes evildoers hate freedom! The ghoulish imagery is amusing to draw too: leering jack-o’-lanterns, sinister apparitions, haunted mansions, monsters, death, blood and gore. Just look at Ed Stein’s ominous cemetery plot or Nick Anderson’s ghastly carnage scene. OK, so some of the fun is lost when the horror shows are all too real.