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Happily, such pictures are beginning to find less favor with readers—and with cartoonists. Says Bill Mauldin, at 53 a. 35-year veteran of the editorial page: "Cartoons are getting better, more and more away from labels. Readers are more savvy. It is less and less necessary to put names on things. The trend is more interesting drawing, less complicated captions." To sharpen his point, Mauldin spent last semester teaching a course in his profession at Yale. "I deliberately started with a nondrawing bunch," recalls the most technically proficient cartoonist of his generation. "What counts is the thinking. A drawing with authority helps give authority to an idea, but there's no way a weak idea can make a good cartoon." Don Wright, Pulitzer-prizewinning cartoonist of the Miami News, agrees. "The editorial cartoon has become a welcome relief from some of the ponderous, elitist, overwritten poopery that typifies so many editorial pages today."
Wright's judgment has been accepted by many editors who know that, of all features, the editorial cartoon is the least imitable by TV. Cartoonists have been encouraged to explore new forms: Jules Feiffer's psychiatric monologues have spawned a generation of imitators; Garry Trudeau's campus favorite, Doonesbury, is bringing politics back to the comic strip. Moreover, because cartoons are a major journalistic attraction, editors are often tolerant of artistic statements that would not be welcome in a prose piece. Says Herblock: "A lot of newspapers run my stuff even though they don't agree with me. They feel it's a signed piece of work, an example of personal opinion." This liberty has brought U.S. editorial cartooning to something of a rebirth. It is a renaissance with too few galleries; the great epoch of newspapers is gone and with it, many of the journals that carried the art of the great cartoonists. Yet the work somehow finds space in the surviving dailies, in magazines and in student publications. At its frequent best, contemporary cartooning in the U.S. steadily outshines work anywhere else in the world. No country now produces corrosive lampoons equal to Patrick Oliphant's vaudeville sketches or Paul Conrad's acidulous critiques. The competition for attention may have reduced the impact of graphic art everywhere. Yet the cartoon seems to be gaining influence. No photograph damaged Lyndon Johnson so much as David Levine's waspish drawing of L.B. J. lifting his shirt to reveal a gall bladder scar—in the shape of Viet Nam. Richard Nixon once admitted, "I wouldn't start the morning by looking at Herblock." Even President Ford, gazing forlornly at a gallery of U.S. political cartoons, recently conceded, "The pen is mightier than the politician."
It is likely to remain so. The mood of the nation is skepticism, not credulity. The appetite for the cartoon is whetted. International and local tensions call for caricature, not portrait. Today, more than a score of editorial cartoonists answer that demand—and answer it with astonishing quality. These artists fulfill the difficult prerequisites that Historian Allan Nevins lays down for their work: "Wit and humor; truth, at least one side of the truth; and moral purpose." After 100 years, the nation that nurtured Nast can be proud of his successors.