Anatomy of a Cartoon

Cartoon critics Phil Witte and Rex Hesner look behind gags to debate what makes a cartoon tick. This week our intrepid critics take a look at introverts. Lockdown … social distance … shelter-in-place. These terms cause the extroverts among us to quail, “Will this ever end?” For another group, however, those concepts are gifts from…
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Cartoon critics Phil Witte and Rex Hesner look behind gags to debate what makes a cartoon tick. This week our intrepid critics take a look at THE NEWS. The news these days is grim, but here’s a truism: bad news is often good news for cartoonists. An effective cartoon in bad times captures the dismal…
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Cartoon critics Phil Witte and Rex Hesner look behind gags to debate what makes a cartoon tick. This week our intrepid critics take a look at the changing landscape of handshakes. The coronavirus has ushered in a new era of human interaction. The easy familiarities with friends and strangers are memories now, replaced with masks…
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Cartoon critics Phil Witte and Rex Hesner look behind gags to debate what makes a cartoon tick. This week our intrepid critics take a look at exercise. Exercise: for many people it’s torture, while other folks enjoy it, if only because it makes them feel superior to the rest of us. With gyms now closed…
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Cartoon critics Phil Witte and Rex Hesner look behind gags to debate what makes a cartoon tick. This week our intrepid critics take a look at the art of cartoons. Cartoonists are artists, so cartoons about art and artists come naturally to them. By making serious art the subject of humor, the cartoonist serves as…
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Cartoon critics Phil Witte and Rex Hesner look behind gags to debate what makes a cartoon tick. This week our intrepid critics take a look at captionless cartoons. The vast majority of single-panel cartoons offer two elements: a graphic illustrating the situation and a caption that delivers the punchline. Occasionally, in lieu of a caption,…
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