Iconography

Cartoonists will hijack anything visual, including, but not limited to classic art (one more Munch and I’ll scream), photographic standards (stick a flag in the Iwo Jima toons -- they’re done), pop-culture tube boobs (next one to do Trump should be fired), even the grandest-scale sculptures (Mt. Rushmore. Now there’s a cartoon cliche carved in stone.).

We’ll appropriate the molehills too, when appropriate. No graphic icon is too petty for our larceny: Tom Toles buries tortuous administration torture talk in a blizzard of punctuation.* Leilah Rampa deftly stretches the tiny AIDS ribbon into its sad and overwhelming reality. And I twisted the knife with the umpteen-zillionth adaptation of the ubiquitous smiley-face. OK, so I could use an originality transplant, but don’t expect us to knock off the knockoffs anytime soon.

*I think Toles is brilliant**

**depending on the definition of “brilliant”

-- Joel Pett