The Art Of Sketching The Issues

By Jeff White

A picture’s worth a thousand words, the adage goes, and Andrew Beck, Paul Dozal, and Dave Strong hope there is some truth to it.

Since the end of January, these three Newtown High School juniors have endeavored to approach a community service requirement for their American literature class a little differently. Whereas their classmates busied themselves delivering flowers, cleaning the high school’s bleachers, and collecting trash alongside roads, Andrew, Paul, and Dave sought a way to give something back to the community while also making it think.

They settled on political cartoons.

“What made our project different was that this project is something that can stay, whereas if you clean up a track it is kind of a one-time thing,” Andrew says. Not to impugn the efforts of other groups, he went on, but his group wanted to develop a way of opening up a dialogue between Newtown residents concerning the issues that are at currently at the town’s fore: Fairfield Hills, elderly tax relief, the new police contract. All three students say that they settled on political cartoons because such drawings almost force people to look at well-known issues in a slightly different way, and when people start to see things differently, discussion ensues.

Deciding to take on town issues visually was not something completely unrelated to their course work, Andrew explains, especially since in the weeks leading up to the end of school their American literature class focused on the volatile 1960s and the different forms of expression people exercised during that time.

To Andrew, Paul, and David, cartooning is simply another form of expression.

The three pored over past issues of The Newtown Bee to determine the different issues people were talking about. “That actually took the longest time,” says Andrew, “because you were trying to find an ideal that everyone can identify with and have in common.”

But once the issue was chosen – be it a Legislative Council stalemate or the threat of encephalitis-carrying mosquitoes – the act of sitting down to draw the particular cartoon proved easy, the three say. And it was a total team effort. Dave might propose the best way to get a point across in a picture, Andrew might then draw the cartoon, and Paul might tighten up the finished product.

“We wanted a new issue every day, we just didn’t want Fairfield Hills every day,” Paul explains. “We found ourselves looking to find new topics.”

By churning out cartoons, the three say they were acutely aware of the purpose of the traditional editorial cartoon: it had to comment on an issue clear to the public. Thus, oftentimes they searched for issues that would lend themselves best to a cartoon, not necessarily issues that were on the mind of the average high schooler.

“We were hoping that this would create a new forum for a free expression of ideas,” Andrew recalls. “It also fit in to what we were studying in class.”

Using Web page design skills he developed during a prior high school computer class, Paul has the group’s political cartoon Web site up and running at http://lorddweeb.tripod.com/cartoon1.htm.

On it, links take visitors to a stash of several of the group’s recent cartoons, as well as another link where interested readers can look through the history of political and editorial cartooning.

Having a Web site people can go to is just another way to encourage dialogue and participation, they say. Andrew, David, and Paul want to encourage anyone interested to submit their own political and editorial cartoons to their Web site, as well as search out different forums to publish them.

They have students especially on their minds. High schoolers and middle schoolers are not typically filling newspapers with letters to the editor. Yet, if they were challenged to come at issues that concern them in a different fashion, say artistically, Andrew, David, and Paul believe that they might become more interested in what was happening in their community.

For now, the end of the school year has not squelched these three students’ desire to find other issues as grist for cartoons. A few topics they say they would like to address in the future are the possibility of more kid-oriented diversions in town, like a skate boarding park or mini-golf course; the lack of sports fields in town; and the prevalence of hazing in high school sports.

Future sketches notwithstanding, Andrew, David, and Paul all say they are happy that they made the effort to learn what was going on in Newtown, and the challenge of approaching issues visually only made their efforts more rewarding.

“On a broader scale, just taking issues and boiling them down into something you can work with and to make a cartoon was difficult,” says David. “It was difficult to make it so that everyone can understand. In the end we took broad issues that everyone should understand because [the topics] have relevance.”