Tuesday, January 29, 2019

I think I've heard both. One story is: a long time ago caricaturists use to draw crazy. Now everybody just draws fast and “cute.” The other story is the opposite. There’s your traditional caricatures and then there’s your new school crazy ones. It’s strange how the word traditional gets used for caricature. The tradition caricatures actually comes from is a tradition where a drawing is done for the newspaper in order to smear some politician or public figure. Of course there are also live caricature traditions too. But live caricatures haven’t been around all that long. When I think of live caricature traditions I think of the best of Dino and Tom Richmond, but that’s just me. Me and growing up in a small town in Ohio and going to Cedar Point. Live caricatures may have been around for a while, but everybody seeing everybody else’s live caricatures is only as old as the internet. Or the widespread use thereof. The early 2000s. Now that’s young. Twenty years. Editorial or newspaper caricatures has built into it an element of mass exposure. Mass exposure is new for live caricatures because the artform doesn’t work that way. The more public any given live caricature of some person becomes the more it wades into a different role. The role of the editorial caricature—also, the more of a public figure the subject is. Editorial caricature is a public drawing of a public figure.