The Army Defines Recap And Reset

Monsanto Westinghouse's 2007 NY Times/LA Times Recap

Cartooning is always subjective, so when you look at political comics, it’s useful to think about where their arguments can lie — not just in their words but in the implications of their visual style. If you were to read only Andrew Helfer’s text for RONALD REAGAN: A Graphic Biography (Hill & Wang, $16.95), for instance, it would seem to be a straightforward chronological trot through Reagan’s life story, with particular attention paid to the showmanship of his public persona and his weakness for self-serving fabrications. Most of the book’s spin, though, is actually in its artwork, by Steve Buccellato and Joe Staton. After an opening montage of notable moments from Reagan’s public life, which might as well have been sketched from publicity photos, “Ronald Reagan” becomes a catalog of the sorts of visual rhetoric cartoonists can pull off: nearly every panel incorporates some kind of broad caricature or symbolic distortion, usually at Reagan’s expense. On a single page, we see a smiling Reagan hobnobbing with three other Screen Actors Guild board members while Jane Wyman checks her watch; then Reagan and Wyman sweating, smiling and pushing away enormous tough guys with shirts labeled “Union”; then a quizzical Reagan (with a question mark over his head) watching a man with a fez and a hammer-and-sickle jacket whispering in someone’s ear; and finally the editorial-cartoon shorthand of an eagle and a bear standing on a broken swastika and scowling at each other. That sort of visual ricocheting among multiple varieties of exaggeration and abstraction, combined with the time leaps required to squeeze Reagan’s career into 100 pages of comics, makes for disjointed storytelling, and there’s scarcely a panel here that leads directly to the next.

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