Become A Cartoon: The Editor

In making cartoons, the role of the editor is very big. That will be the topic for this hub. If, however, you're looking for a site to cartoonize a picture of yourself, Cartoony.Me would be the best!

Back in 1955, when paperback books sold for a quarter, Bantam Books brought out a little volume by Dave Breger, now deceased, called But That's Unprintable. It contained 135 hilarious cartoons they wouldn't dare publish! Breger said that the cartoons, gathered from various cartoonists, violated taboos then in force, and for that reason they were rejected. But looking at them today, one suspects that many of them were rejected by editors simply because they weren't very good.

His point about self-censorship, however, was well taken. The 1950s were an era of timidity, made that way partly by the specter of McCarthyism and also by a don't rock the boat attitude among editors, especially where advertisers were involved. The 1950s were the years just after the advent of television when the magazines were fighting for their lives, amassing large circulations they could deliver to advertisers just as television was setting out to do. The newspapers ran scared, too. Breger quotes a letter from a syndicate editor to one of his cartoonists: "I feel that it is best to avoid gags that poke fun at advertising, promotion, publicity, and products that are advertised. Sometimes the advertising managers of client newspapers are sensitive about the possible effect of this type of gag on their customers."

The 1950's were a time, too, when America was awakening to its sorry treatment of minorities. It was a difficult time for cartoonists, who, earlier in the century, felt no qualms about portraying blacks as shuffling, silly characters, with shiny skin, eating watermelon.

The Esquire Cartoon Album carried a Dorothy McKay cartoon showing a black woman in a black doctor's office. She's telling him: "I'se never been x-rayed, but I'se been ultra-violated!"

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