Are Cartoonists Writers?

Brian Fies said, "The Combination of words and images is more powerful than either one standing alone". Some recent essays have explored the long-standing question: Are cartoonists writers?

April 26, 2024
New York, NY

“Why is it so hard to say I’m a writer when it’s not even that big a deal and I should just get over it —Being a cartoonist makes you a writer, artist, and illustrator at minimum.”

In a recent post on Substack (& Shout in the New Yorker),

Zoe Si

dove into the conflicted idea of calling oneself a “writer.” —The idea of wearing that label and feeling like an impostor. A charlatan. A dilettante. (Strunk & White tells me I should use the rule-of-threes.)

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I have always struggled with this notion —the cartoonist as a writer— especially when I’m surrounded by friends who are journalists and novelists. All they do have in their toolkit are words, which is hard. Very hard. ”A picture is worth a thousand of those things”, they insist. So it always felt like a kind of unfair advantage to be able to wield both at once, like some double-edged weapon. But it also made me feel like I wasn’t as good at either individually, since I didn’t ‘specialise’.

Read Zoe’s post here.

There are “artists who write”.
There are “writers who draw”.

James Thurber and Beatrix Potter are examples. But are they just the same thing? Are Tolkien and Lewis Carroll just the same? (From my understanding, Thurber would probably call himself a ‘cartoonist’.) Peter Steiner is a successful novelist, but he’s also a prolific cartoonist. Does one label dilute the other?

My conflict lies in writing an idea out in words, and then being able to show it entirely as an image.

That is the power of cartooning: Without a single letter, you can draw a good cartoon and still get the idea across. I still consider this ‘good writing’ even though it is drawing. Sergio Aragonés and Sempé would be the most talented examples I know of these pantomime cartoons.

But I digress.

Chaz Hutton

posted this week about the notion that this powerful skill of “cartooning” goes back to our most primal of communication skills; predating language itself. Cartooning is possibly older than the ‘world’s oldest profession.’ But it’s still often considered a kind of childish pursuit.

Read the full post here.

“The combination of words and images is more powerful than either one standing alone.”

So said Brian Fies in his masterful graphic novel, Mom’s Cancer. Sometimes this combination can be more helpful to people who process information differently. Graphic Medicine is a good example.

When I contracted COVID-19 in March/April of 2020, and very little was known about the onset of symptoms, I drew/wrote a comic about it. It wasn’t intended to be some kind of official guide, but it did go *cringe* viral. And it helped a lot of people who didn’t want to read an endless slew of long, dryly-written medical articles, as it turns out.

There aren’t many big art galleries or libraries dedicated to the art form in the US. It isn’t culturally celebrated like it is in Belgium or France. (Note: The Billy Ireland is a treasure, and I wish there were one in every city, like with Andrew Farago’s cartoon museum in SF, and the Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa.)

Whittling an idea into a few carefully chosen words in a caption or speech balloon is very hard. Whittling it down to no words at all is even harder. I would argue that it’s just as hard as writing the idea out succinctly in 1000 words and still landing the idea with the same punch. Yet, professional cartoonists routinely get paid less than writers in magazines and online publications. Is their work easier to do well? No.
But perhaps that’s for another post.

I’ve heard people in the cartooning world put it in such black & white terms: “You’re either a writer or an illustrator. If you do both, you’re a cartoonist.” (or Comic Artist.) But in adopting this title, you somehow forfeit the singular title of either?

I call bullshit.

I think cartoonists are writers. They’re illustrators. They’re Authors, Graphic Novelists, Novelists, Artists, Comic Artists, Scribbley-dibbleys— they’re whatever their work tells you they are, or whatever they prefer to be called. Labels limit creative people, but people who don’t work in creative fields prefer them, so when you answer the question “So, what do you do?” you have a word to say that they can easily identify. (For the record, when people ask, I say “Taxidermist”.)

I know this isn’t a new topic, but I’m always curious about what people think. I’m removing the paywall for this post: Read Zoe’s and Chaz’s posts above and sound off in the comments. 👇