Saying It Safely

"I don't think I'm mean," said the Associated Press's staff cartoonist, John Milton Morris, 48, who draws his syndicated editorial-page cartoons as he parts his hair: right down the middle. "And I don't think I'd deliberately hurt anybody." For many syndicated cartoonists, including John Morris, the Quemoy crisis, the election campaign and even the integration struggle (see cuts) are issues to be treated with a hand so even that it barely seems to be moving. If they stepped off the middle, they would surely land right on the toes of some of their widespread, widely differing clients.

As a result, most of the syndicated cartoons that are fed out to U.S. newspaper readers either delicately straddle current controversies or join all mankind in approving mother love and condemning sin. The A.P.'s Morris (183 clients) has brought equivocation to such a fine art that he can sometimes make one cartoon do two jobs. In 1952 Republican Morris sent out one cartoon that could be used with one caption if Harry Truman decided to run for a third term, and with another caption if Harry decided to drop out. Morris is consistently successful in not offending many of the customers, best remembers an outraged Hungarian who wrote to complain that the Hungarian gypsy freedom fighter in a Morris cartoon improperly sported two earrings instead of the usual one.

The syndicated cartoons are beamed mostly to dailies too limited in circulation and budget to put a fulltime cartoonist on the staff (cost range of syndicated cartoons: $4 to $100 a week). The pastel-tempered cartoonists swear that theirs is not a frustrating lot. But now and then Morris knocks out a vicious cartoon on some pet peeve or political devil, exhibits it around the office, tears it up and, refreshed in spirit, returns to the job of producing six inoffensive cartoons a week.

With such generally bland fare coming off most of the syndicate drawing boards, it is not surprising that the most noted syndicated cartoonist in the U.S. is the Washington Post's left-winging, belly-punching Herbert Block, who has drawn the Vice President of the U.S. as a blade-jawed criminal and the President as a grinning idiot. Through the Hall Syndicate, "Herblock" gets to 266 papers with a circulation of 17 million. "We have a different approach over here," says Hall's Executive Vice President Ira Emerich. "Our feeling is that a cartoonist has to hit hard to be any good."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.