In his article "That's Not Funny: Rage, Laughter and Political Cartooning After 9/11" from TCJ #250, Tim Kreider makes his case for a three-pronged standard by which to judge political cartoons -- humor, artistry and political/social relevance. The formula seems as good as any I can think of, and Kreider, a political cartoonist himself, is far more qualified than I am to make such a proposal. Thus I borrow Kreider's scale for the purpose of weighing Tom Lechner's The Morning After Consumption.

It could be argued that Lechner's offerings in Consumption are not political cartoons in the strictest sense. One of the most appealing qualities of his work is the way in which it differs visually from the sterile, tragically hip alternative-weekly comics Kreider focuses on. Lechner's attention to detail and style has more in common with Pat Oliphant or Jeff MacNelly than it does with Tom Tomorrow or Ted Rall, but there is a lack of caricature in his work that makes it more closely resemble book or magazine illustration than political cartooning. Lechner's characters, even when participating in visually absurd actions, are depicted in a staunchly realistic style. Consider this with the fact that Lechner publishes his cartoons in minicomics rather than weekly or daily newspapers, and one is tempted to call them something other than political cartoons.

But political cartoons they are. Rather than forcing it into a less appropriate category or failing to categorize it at all, let us classify Lechner's work as political cartooning, albeit an entirely different breed than the venom and bile alternatives or the gag-first dailies -- art-first political cartooning. Doing so affords us the opportunity to study Consumption through the lense supplied by Kreider, which in turn allows us to view the unique strengths and weaknesses in Lechner's work more clearly than any other approach would.

In "That's Not Funny" Kreider points out the advantage to an art-first approach: "The only thing that entitles you to anyone's attention as a cartoonist is being funny or entertaining or drawing a good story." As mentioned previously, Lechner is a stylist, and a talented one at that. His drawings are attention grabbers. The elaborate linework varies from solid to stunning, depending on which selection you view. Even more impressive, Lechner is a first-rate conceptualist with a knack for taking the peculiar image and rendering it so that it seems not absurd, but organic. This is due in large part to Lechner's commitment to detail and realism. One of his best cartoons features George W. Bush standing over a broken skeleton, saying, "We had to bomb your country deeper into hell to retaliate! It was the only option! Don't you understand?" The play off of the old "We had to destroy the village in order to save it," quote is executed perfectly, as it erases the soldier's horrifically misguided belief in a greater cause and replaces it with the craven, unapologetic lust for vengeance that lies of at the heart of the current war on terror. An extraordinarily gifted caricaturist may be able to take that statement, pair it with the image of Bush and the skeleton, and make it funny. More than likely it would appear juvenile or crass. In Lechner's hands it is harrowing. The lack of regard for human life apparent in the Bush administration, just as it is apparent in the ideology of the terrorists, is presented earnestly, without being cheapened by a silly drawing of Bush as Alfred E Newman or a hook-nosed imp. If the presentation is discomforting, it is no more so than it would be to stand in the presence of the body of an accidentally bombed Afghan or Iraqi. The cartoon makes no attempt to mask the reality behind the guise of cuteness.

If we believe Kreider, Lechner can get away with this humorlessness where Rall and Tomorrow cannot because he is a superior draftsman. While Kreider focuses on his colleagues in the alternative papers' inability to temper their vitriol with a joke, he also chastises them for not being able to draw: "Their drawings are only decoration for their agendas; almost all of their cartoons would be just as effective without any illustrations at all." Kreider asks only that the artist engage the reader in some way, if not with humor, then with artistry. It does not matter if Lechner fails to be funnier than Rall or Tomorrow, so long as he keeps drawing so beautifully.

Kreider begrudgingly admits that, "Tom Tomorrow and Ted Rall, the two best-known alternative political cartoonists, to the shame of the mainstream press, have become some of the best sources of alternative news and analysis in print." But he dismisses the importance of Rall's and Tomorrow's just-the-facts approach, claiming that they will not win any converts this way. "Pointing out logical inconsistencies, scoring points and winning debates, as anyone who has ever been on an internet message board or in a relationship should know, tends to make your opponents defensive and hostile, and entrenches them deeper in their own position." While Kreider is troubled by the take-your-medicine approach of his colleagues, he also warns against the all sugar, no substance method common to cartoonists in daily newspapers: "The risk of opting for laughs over politics is that you'll produce work that's just irrelevant and pointless -- the USA Today school of cartooning." Just as Lechner's best work achieves a balance between the strengths of these two approaches (so long as you substitutes "pretty pictures" for "laughs"), his lesser work is a hybrid of their weaknesses.

The skeleton cartoon is a high point among Lechner's work in terms of provoking thought. At the opposite end of the spectrum are his charming but vague bicycle cartoons. Here, Lechner's visual trickery is at its best. One example features a giant spider plucking SUVs from an interstate off-ramp and lashing them to its web, a gigantic bicycle wheel. It is a striking image. Lechner toys with perspective so that both the spider and the SUVs are believable even though both defy their normal physical properties (the spider by lifting the SUVs, the SUVs by hanging from the bicycle wheel). The wheel itself is a marvel, and the extent to which Lechner succeeds in manipulating perspective flirts with the Escher-esque. The problem is that this is not a spatial illusion destined to hang as a poster on countless dorm room walls. Because this drawing is presented in a collection of liberal-thinking political cartoons, one can assume that the SUVs are meant to be negative and the bicycle positive. But what if this page was torn out from the book and placed by itself on a table? Would it be anything more than interesting visual trickery? There is nothing about the drawing that explicitly states that the bicycle is somehow superior to the SUV, much less how or why.

Lechner's politics are in line with Rall's and Tomorrow's (he cites both of their websites in an index of recommended material). Like their comics, Lechner's comics occasionally fail to complete delivery of their message. In the case of Rall and Tomorrow, the failure is due to a lack of proper packaging, while the easy gag dailies Kreider bemoans are brightly wrapped and ribboned cardboard boxes with nothing inside. With the less impressive Consumption cartoon, there is something hidden inside, it is just impossible to find, like a temporary tattoo hidden in a five-pound box of Cracker Jacks.

The bicycle strip represents an extreme lack of clearly defined politics that is not uniformly typical of Lechner's work, but rather representative of a trend that troubles it semi-regularly. A few times Lechner takes a rhetoric-heavy, cartooning-light approach more like of Rall or Tomorrow to address a specific issue. But just as the beautifully drawn, rhetorically muddled comics represent one weak extreme, the wordy, artless counterbalancing comics represent the other. Lechner is at his best when he finds a median, such as in the skeleton cartoon. There he is able to take his greatest strength, and undeniable gift for drawing, direct it at an issue (in this case military action in Afghanistan) and deliver a powerful message without having to indulge in the editorializing of Rall or Tomorrow. Here he is a cartoonist whose work meets all desirable criteria, those belonging to Kreider as well as others.

A character does not have to be sympathetic for a story to work, but if a story is to revolve around an unsympathetic character, there must be a readily identifiable bit of truth, an aspect that the reader will recognize in the character as strikingly human. To do this, the author must open her unsympathetic character up and reveal its inner mechanics. Jenny Gonzalez makes no such effort with Devil Dhalia in 2-Too Negative. All the reader sees of Dhalia is the manifestations of her neuroses. The neuroses themselves are in no way explored. More importantly, nothing else about her is, either.

Dhalia is a tortured soul who fantasizes about vengeance, but little else is revealed about her. When she is not musing on her mental well being, she serves only as a prop for other neurotics such as Aaron or Killbaby to talk at about their own issues. Neither of her two roles -- insular nutcase or lifeless sounding board -- do much to make her worth reading about. In fact, they make her the opposite. When the voices in Dhalia's head dare her to turn her arm over and cut open her wrist, the reader wishes that she would, and that one of the other characters would then step in and cart her body out of sight.

Because Gonzalez provides no insight into Dhalia's character, one must assume that she wants the reader to react emotionally to the acts that the neurosis spawns. We must sympathize with the character's plight, if not with the character. The problem is that the reader can't feel for her based on hardships endured, because the reader sees only the after-effects of those hardships. All Dhalia does is complain about how fucked up she is and spew venom at the people who were once mean to her. At one point, Gonzalez conjures images of Carrie to drive home just how much Dhalia hates jocks but the reader does not see what these people did to deserve a prom-night massacre. Without knowing her motivation, the reader can't understand Dhalia's desires. (Depression may be good enough in real life, but fiction calls for something less clinical.) Gonzalez counts on the reader to already be of the mind that clinically depressed goths are good and that jocks and cheerleaders are bad and deserve to die. In Carrie, it is understood that a series of events beyond Carrie's control led her to the point where she would burn down the gym. While her actions may be disturbing, the motivation behind them is clear. Even as she murders her tormentors and a gym full of innocent bystanders, Carrie is worthy of sympathy. Dhalia is not. She has not earned the right to lash out in murderous rage. This lack of development makes her not just a vapid shell, but a loathsome vapid shell.

What Gonzalez appears to rely on in lieu of a multi-faceted character, or even a pitiable one-dimensional character, is the presumption of familiarity. The characters in 2-Too Negative address each other in an annoying tone that implies that whatever it is that a character may be doing at a given moment is something they have done a thousand times before, a catch-phrase mentality applied to all action. Dhalia's depression and Killbaby's repressed homosexuality are handled with as much delicacy as, "Where's the beef?" or "Cowabunga!"

Whether this is or is not how these characters always act is irrelevant. The reader should be allowed to recognize a behavioral pattern in a character without the author having to throw it into his or her face like a cream pie (or, in this case, a baseball). But that would require careful thought to character development, and who has time for that when there are gyms full of bullies to burn down?