Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

– Sources report that a suspected plotter of the recent U.K. terror threat, Kafeel Ahmed, owned a hard disk which included an animated video showing how a syringe can be used in a bomb. The technology was used to trigger the bombs found in London but British investigators said they failed because the syringes malfunctioned.

The disk also contained a speech by Ahmed.

I can only suspect that the animation was done in Flash.

This information brings me to Political cartoons, and to that end I thought it’d be a good idea to look at this form.

– Let’s look at a couple of sites that feature Political Cartoons. For the moment I’m not talking about animated cartoons, just the printed kind. You can view a lot of this material on line, and I thought I’d point to a couple of sites that feature this form.

Today they call it Editorial cartoons, but until recently the monicker Political Cartoon was more appropriate. So pardon me if I switch back and forth using the two terms.

- Jim Zwick has a good site called History Illustrated which puts up a lot of political cartoons and has some fine articles about the cartoons and cartoonists. There’s a wealth of information here about the likes of Hogarth and Tenniel as well as many cartoonists I should know. A Daumier I own & love. (Click to enlarge.)
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There’s an alphabetical listing of cartoonists
and a lot of cartoons to view. I recommend you
take a quick look at the pages featuring Daumier and Tenniel cartoons.

If you want to read about it, there’s a “brief” History of Political Cartoons featuring a longish article about it with smallish illustrations.

A Dr. Seuss political cartoon.

- Dr. Seuss (Ted Geisel) was a political cartoonist during WWII, and a number of these cartoons can be viewed on the Mandeville Library Site, Dr. Seuss Went To War.
You can view them by year (1941-1943) or by categories.

– Then there’s the Political Cartoon Society, a British site that gives a lot of information about featured cartoonists. The site displays examples of cartoons that are currently on exhibit.

If you want to find out some information about Ronald Searle’s bio, it’s there. You just don’t see any of his cartoons. For that you’d have to go to Ronald Searle‘s own site.
(Searle’s Icarus is pictured to the left.)

As a matter of fact most cartoonists these days have their own sites.
There’s a good Herblock site which displays the Library of Congress exhibition on his work.
Tom Toles has his cartoons on display at the Washington Post. As a matter of fact, they post all of their cartoons daily. (More than can be found in the print version of the newspaper.)

Most papers have a link to their daily cartoons, and it’s a feature you should check out and support if you read your newspapers on-line.

- A lot of syndicates and news media also post their contingent of cartoonists on line. However there are others that put together a nice sampler of work out there.

Daryl Cagle has a site on MSNBC which indexes a number of current editorial cartoonists and allows you to click on their daily cartoons. It’s a good way to get an overview of what a lot of these cartoonists have on their minds.

Another similar site is the Comics.com editorial section. There they have a list of cartoonists, and you can just click from cartoonist to cartoonist.

- As for animated political cartoons, that’s a whole ‘nother research project. I’ll write about it when I’ve put enough material together. For the moment, I have to say that most of the animated pieces I’ve seen have been rather lame. They try too hard to cover all sides of the political spectrum. The JibJab effect, I guess. They want to sell rather than make a political point.

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