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Editorial Cartoon Hints

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Essentials of a Good Editorial Cartoon

  • Good editorial cartoons express the cartoonist's opinion on a topic and provoke readers to think and clarify their own opinions.
  • Thinking skills are much more important than drawing skills in creating a good cartoon.
  • A good cartoon is always simple and limited. It never tries to tell everything the cartoonist knows about a topic.
  • Drawings should be uncluttered. Heavy, cleaner lines are better for the newspaper than many light lines.
  • Any words used (captions, dialogue balloons or words that are part of the drawing itself) should be large, clear and easily recognized.
  • Don't be too much of a perfectionist. If your cartoon is clever and gets across your opinion, you've done a good job!
Here are brief descriptions of some of the "tools" cartoonists use to communicate:

Symbols
Symbols are simple pictures that are commonly understood by people in our society to stand for ideas or groups. For example, a donkey is the symbol for the Democratic Party, Uncle Sam or an eagle symbolizes America and a dove symbolizes peace.

Caricatures
Caricatures are drawings of well-known people which exaggerate certain features to make the cartoon picture of the famous person quickly and easily recognizable. Caricatures also serve sometimes to poke fun at the person they picture.

Stereotypes
Stereotypes are styles of picturing a person or a group of people which call to the reader’s mind commonly held ideas or prejudices about the type of person pictured. Stereotypes often found in editorial cartoons include the lazy, rich Congressman; the old fashioned, bespectacled teacher; the sneaky, fast-talking lawyer; the rumpled, disorganized scientist and many others.

Analogies
Analogies are comparisons. In simplest terms, they tell us that this thing is like that other thing, at least in one respect. They often use symbols and compare a current situation to a well-known historical event, story, book, movie, fairy tale or nursery rhyme.