Plucky Pair's
Punchy Picks
For years, 150 or so other art directors, editors, and I have looked
forward to opening our monthly packets of class-conscious cartoons from Gary Huck and Mike
Konopacki. We choose a couple of bitingly funny comments on the issues facing our lives
and society to run in the publications we work for.
Thanks to the UE, which last published an anthology of cartoons by their
famous cartoonist staffer, Fred Wright, 17 years ago, you too can laugh, shake your head,
or maybe take a cue from their cartoon characters and run outside to organize a neighbor
into the Labor Party. Maybe you’ll snicker at Mike’s comment on national
healthcare in which a crazed, skeletal Uncle Sam preaches, "You don’t have the
right to health insurance ... but you do have the right to physician assisted
suicide!" Or maybe you’ll just laugh at our world of organizational
abbreviations in Huck’s cartoon of a worker wearing a button saying
"AFL-CIO" next to a farmer whose button reads "e i-eio." As a Labor
Party Press reader, you’ll recognize some of this art, like the NAFTA blackmail
cartoon we commissioned for a cover.
These jokers always have a twist. It could be the stifled amusement in the
faces of a pair of bosses as they look at an injured worker. Or maybe it’s how the
boss-pair deliver their boss-speak: "Oh look, J.P. It’s a happy little worker
freed from the shackles of burdensome health & safety regulations."
In the book’s introduction, Gary Huck’s co-worker/editor, Peter
Gilmore aptly describes the work of this "plucky pair from Wisconsin": "If
cartoons could kill...well, let’s say Mercedes sales would be down substantially,
unions would be growing by leaps and bounds, Microsoft would be a workers’
cooperative, and Bill Clinton would have kept himself busy by delivering on real
healthcare reform."
— Michael Kaufman
Working Class
Hero
Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons IV
published by the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), 1998, One
Gateway Center, Suite 1400, Pittsburgh, PA 15222-1416. $15 plus $2 shipping and handling. |
