On January 7, two gunmen burst into the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, killing eight journalists and bringing into focus the risks cartoonists face. But with the ability of their work to transcend borders and languages, and to simplify complex political situations, the threats faced by cartoonists around…

Source: cpj.org

Pictures are worth more than 1,000 words: they are worth at least 14 lives, in the case of the killings over the publication of a cartoon in the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

 

Daumier's Gargantua

Daumier’s caricature of the king as Gargantua led to imprisonment for six months at Ste Pelagie in 1832.

Cartoons have been used to share political messages at least as far back as the French Revolution; the grotesque images from Goya in his series, Los desastres de la guerra from the early 1800’s, and carried as editorial features in major newspapers throughout the world throughout the 20th century.

 

The article linked here is from the Committee to Protect Journalists an independent, nonprofit organization that promotes press freedom worldwide.

 

This article exposes how political cartoonists, now using social media to share their images, are facing not only violence from religious and political extremists but arrests and prison sentences in their own countries when their governments feel under attack or made vulnerable by a cartoonist’s pictorial excoriation or exposure of wrongdoing.

 

In an age when memes are easy to create to poke fun at what may be obvious truths by quickly marrying a picture to a snappy line of text, it’s easy to take for granted both how powerful the old-fashioned cartoon can be. Behind the simplicity and association with comic strips and superhero stories is the power of the cartoonist’s singular voice, whether in pen and ink or drawn on a digital tablet, daring to speak openly.

 

Whether you agree or not with the content, and even if you don’t like the aesthetic of a simple drawing of a stick figure with uneven, handwritten text, cartoonists, and most particularly cartoonists who choose to tell stories with political, social or even religious stories, make targets of themselves as soon as they share their images.

 

The committee to Protect Journalists recognizes that because of the great power of the image, cartoonists who choose political journalism as their field of work are now facing persecution, restrictions and prison from their own governments. Even their publishers are  under attack.

 

Worth a 1,000 word? Far more than that.