BOOK REVIEWS
A Child in Palestine: The Cartoons of Naji al-Ali, with an introduction by Joe Sacco.
London and New York, Verso.
March 2009, 119 pages, $19.95. ISBN: 13: 978-1-84467-365-0.
 The “child” in this title is the ragged, barefoot 10-year-old Palestinian refugee who stands with his back to the viewer in virtually all of Naji al-Ali’s cartoons. His name, variously transliterated Hanzala (in the cartoonist’s website najialali.com and in al-Ali’s 1988 WittyWorld obituary), Handala (in Wikipedia and the websites handala.org and resistanceart.com), and Hanthala (in palestineaidssociety.com and in the introduction and text of this book), has become a byword for the Palestine cause, and his image its logo. Al-Ali’s signature image made his first appearance in a Kuwaiti journal in 1969 and has borne silent witness to his country’s suffering, and the cartoonist’s outrage, in some 40,000 published drawings since.
This elegantly designed and produced volume contains 104 of them.
Described as “the most famous and feared political cartoonist in the Middle East,” Naji al-Ali
spent most of his tragically brief life in exile from his native Palestine, much of it shuttled
between refugee camps in Kuwait and Lebanon. His work appeared daily throughout the Arab world,
in periodicals in Cairo, Beirut, Kuwait, Tunis, and Abu Dhabi, as well as in London and Paris.
In 1987, at about the age of fifty, he was assassinated in London, where he had settled with his
family two years before. He was posthumously honored with the Golden Pen of Freedom award by the
International Federation of Newspaper Publishers in 1988, and Hanthala, the iconic “child in Palestine”
of this book’s title, became the official symbol of the Commission for Freedom and Justice Through Humor, an affiliate of UNESCO.
Like all political cartoonists, al-Ali is put to a severe test when an entire volume is devoted to his work; both the currency of his material and the diversity of his treatment of it are challenged by collecting years of topical drawings in one place. In the newspapers and magazines for which these cartoons were drawn they were powerful and urgent statements of al-Ali’s position and valuable contributions to the public discourse on their subject, but something more is expected of both the art and the content when a cartoonist’s drawings are bound in a volume. It may be said that Naji al-Ali passes this test impressively. Although he harps more or less on a single string, he never fails to play upon it inventively, with wit, ingenuity, and poignancy.
The introduction places al-Ali clearly as both a cartoonist and a political commentator. Its author, the well-known alternative-press graphic novelist Joe Sacco, was an ideal choice for the job; Sacco’s own book Palestine (2005) shows him to be a shrewd observer of the subject, and his personal experience of Middle Eastern politics has prepared him for a sympathetic and astute evaluation of the work he introduces. And if some of the imagery is obscure to the Western reader, Abdul Hadi Ayyad’s lucid and concise captions and chapter introductions provide all the contextual information the reader needs. In fact, however, not much is needed; one of the most impressive features of al-Ali’s genius is the universality and timelessness of his visual metaphors. Unlike the typical editorial cartoonist who may comment on war or crime today and the scandal surrounding his home-town’s police chief tomorrow, al-Ali seldom descends to the personal or the local; his cartoons almost never specify time or place or the events of the day. With the rare exception of Henry Kissinger, Anwar Sadat or Yasir Arafat, the only human characters in most of these cartoons are the ubiquitous Hanthala, the generic figure of the wretched, emaciated Palestinian Everyman, and what Ayyad identifies as “the affluent, irresponsible fat cats of the Arab world” and “the incompetent obese Arab leadership,” whose sycophantic submissiveness outrages the artist as much as the abuse of his country by Israel and the U.S. does.
But if al-Ali rarely targets specific villains, there is no difficulty in identifying the focus of his ire. The five sections of A Child in Palestine all deal with the country and its woes, its exploitation, and what Ayyad calls “the Palestinian refugees and their inalienable right to return to the land from which they were displaced.” Divided rather arbitrarily into “Palestine,” “Human Rights,” “US Dominance, Oil, and Arab Collusion,” “The Peace Process,” and “Resistance,” the chapters all deal essentially with the same thing, and no one, except possibly the touching waif Hanthala and his fellow Palestinian victims, comes out looking good. The artist was not linked with any political party and supported no one in his art; his message is entirely one of opposition—opposition to terrorism, to oppression, to violence, and to the expropriation of his country. He may be truculent, but no one can deny that al-Ali is even-handed in his condemnation; he’s as tough on Arafat and the PLO, on the Arab sheik and oil merchant, on Christian, Moslem, and Jew, as he is on John Bull, Uncle Sam, the Russian bear, and the state of Israel.
Naji al-Ali offers no simple solution for the problems of his people and his region in A Child in Palestine. He does not represent any group and takes no partisan stance. He saw himself as speaking for the whole Arab world, but this book shows that his work was more than an expression of that community’s suffering; it speaks to us all, East and West, as an eloquent voice for humanity.
Dennis Wepman
- Mad Art: A Visual Celebration of the Art
of Mad Magazine and the Idiots Who Create It,
by Mark Evanier. Illustrated. New York, Watson-Guptill Publications,
January 2003, 304 pages, $24.95. ISBN: 0-8230-3080-6.
-
- This is a comprehensive history of Mad Magazine.
Well, practically every book about Mad is so well-written
that it is a comprehensive history of the magazine. That is certainly
true in this case. It is also a comprehensive collection of mini-biographies
of 75 artists who have become closely-enough identified with Mad
to be included in the ranks of Mad's famous "usual
gang of idiots."
"A visual celebration of the art of Mad
Magazine" could have been little more than a random hodgepodge
of sample panels by some of the different artists who have drawn
for Mad during its fifty-year history. Instead, all of
Mad's artists (with a very few minor, acknowledged exceptions)
are represented here. Each drawing is identified by artist, title,
writer (when the writer was not also the artist), and issue in which
it appeared. Cartoon-historian Evanier begins with a succinct yet
complete overview that describes the conditions under which Mad
came to be created in 1952; the creative and commercial goals of
its publisher and founding editor; and its evolution since then.
There are also separate articles, placed roughly as chapter headings
to divide the generations of artists by the decade, on how Mad's
editors select their artists; how a visual "article" in
Mad comes to be created and how the artist works; and how
Mad's art editors fulfill their duties.
The bulk of the book is its "About the Artist
Dept." profiles of Mad's artists. The arrangement
is roughly chronological, from 1952 to the present. Mad's
most important artists, who helped to define its personality and
were truly among "the usual gang of idiots" during its
first three decades, get from five to nine pages apiece: Harvey
Kurtzman, Jack Davis, Will Elder, Wallace Wood, George Woodbridge,
Sergio Aragones, Paul Coker Jr., Don Martin, Al Jaffee, Dave Berg,
and so on. The newer artists, who have been with Mad for
only the past ten or twenty years, get usually from two to four
pages apiece: Richard Williams, Gerry Gerstein, Tom Hachtman,
Hermann Mejia, Roberto Parada, Drew Friedman, and more.
Some have joined Mad so recently -- or drew for Mad
so seldom instead of becoming regular contributors -- that they
get only a page or less apiece.
The lengthier profiles usually include the artist's
self-caricature portrait, date of birth, artistic background, how
he (very rarely she) discovered Mad, his artistic specialties
and distinctive traits, how he works, and what happened to him if
he is no longer working for Mad (which usually is a brief
statement of the artist's death, as in "Cancer got to him [Jack
Rickard] in 1983"). The artwork ranges from enlargements
of single panels to reductions of doublepages spreads to covers
to preliminary sketches next to finished art. The selection usually
covers the artist's whole career with Mad; for example,
the profile of Mort Drucker contains selections
from 14 features (mostly movie and TV parodies) from 1963 to 2002.
Most of the art is printed in black-&-white but there are two
color sections of 16 pages each.
If you are interested in a history of Mad Magazine,
this is the book for you. If you want a gallery of all the popular
artists who defined Mad, with biographical notes, this
is the book for you.
-- Fred Patten |
