Sometime in high school I become obsessed with scrap booking political cartoons. I would read the paper every day, and cut the satirical clippings out. I did this for nearly two years and created a little personal political history book of my own that I still have and look back on for amusement. Although I have less time, and don't have regular access to a free printer, political cartoons are still an almost daily ritual with me.
If you were too look in my scrap book, you would notice that Tom Toles is a dominant cartoonist in my collection. If you look next to my scrap book on the shelf, you would see that I have purchased a book of his best editorial cartoons for the past several years. He is an American Political Cartoonist from Buffalo who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1990.
There is something really important in making people laugh in art. Art can often be a depressing and too serious. Tole takes our culture and instead of highlighting the atrocities of the modern world, he makes fun of it. He is able to make people laugh while critiquing the human condition. He uses dry humor, sarcasm, and wit to create images that people quickly develop a relationship to. His subject matter is completely serious, but in illustrating that seriousness in a simplistic manner he helps people understand the hilarity of politics. I read the editorial cartoons in the New York Times everyday and I consistently find Tole's work to be the most tasteful and humorous. His cartoons are very simplified and usually there is a doodle in the bottom right that is a self portrait of himself commenting on the panel. He successfully imparts an opinion on the viewer, and somehow manages to do it in a simple and understandable way.
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