"Man of Peace": Danziger cartoon about Jenin vs. Tasteless Mideast Cartoons Pt. 3

You might remember Jeff Danziger as one of the first cartoonists to get beyond drawing crying Statues of Liberty last fall. With his cartoon of a man on a stretcher making a cell phone call ("Harry? I'm running late...") under the caption "The New York Spirit," he somehow managed to find a shred of irony in a World Gone Mad without seeming tacky or sacriligeous. I think his new cartoon about Jenin has a similar combination of respect, horror, and irony distilled into a single panel and caption.

In other news, many cartoonists continued their "Ha-ha-ha-aren't-all-those-Palestinians-psychotic-freaks-who-want-to-blow-up-their-kids" suicide bombing cliche campaign (examples by Bob Gorrell, Wayne Stayskal). Apparently they have yet to realize that suicide bombing is tragedy, not comedy. For my previous thoughts on the subject see "Tasteless Mideast Cartoons" Part 1 and Part 2, and "The New Racist Cartooning". As a final note, Tom Tomorrow is right--you really need to read Joe Sacco's masterpiece of comics journalism, Palestine. In Palestine, Sacco spends 285 exquisitely rendered pen + ink pages in Israel and the West Bank, observing general goings-on, providing some good historical and political background on the conflict, and most importantly, drinking sweet tea with families in the refugee camps and rendering their experiences of life and death under occupation in anthropological detail. The book is some years old now, but it's still far more relevant and meaningful and complex and right-on than most any cartoons being produced on the subject at the moment, primarily because, get this: he actually views Palestinians (and Israelis) as real live human beings.

P.S. if you live in the Cambridge area, please don't buy the book from the Coop (aka Barnes and Noble)--head over to one of the best comic book stores in the country, the Million Year Picnic--they might even have some autographed copies left.