Red Lines

This is the companion website to a book project by Cherian George & Sonny Liew. Red Lines, to be published by The MIT Press in 2020, will study the motives and methods of the political censorship of cartoons around the world. It will be rendered entirely as a documentary comic book.

Highlights

New York Times: political cartoons are not fit to print

NYT’s surrender to the outrage industry is part of a larger trend—the erosion of that special, symbiotic, centuries-old relationship between cartooning and journalism. – Read the article.

What cartoonists say about the NYT move

Cartoonists as the guerrillas of the news media

What makes satirical cartooning such a potentially radical and powerful medium is that you don’t need much to do it. You don’t need a lot of capital or an organization behind you. That makes cartoonists the guerrillas of the media — but it also makes them more vulnerable. – Read the interview.

Interviews

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Events

Red Lines: Cartooning at Risk

University of Pennsylvania, Dec. 7, 2018 – Cartoons are among the most basic forms of political commentary, but their evocative power also renders them and their creators vulnerable to attack. Today’s threats range from direct attacks by governments to self-censorship by publishers and the crossfire of the culture wars. This symposium brought together leading artists and experts to discuss the power and precarity of cartoons in America and around the world.

Cartoon Censorship: Rights, Dignity and the Endangered Art of Ridicule

Madrid, Spain, Jul. 10, 2019 – Presentation by Cherian George at the Annual Conference of the International Association for Media and Communication Research.

The Precarity of the Pencil: The Future of Political Cartooning 

University of Cardiff, Sep. 12, 2019 – Presentation by Cherian George at the Future of Journalism Conference.