Know Your Subject

A letter from Ted Rall in today's New York Times Book Review criticizes the editors for assigning a review of cartoonist's Jules Feiffer's complete Village Voice strips to David Kamp "a contributing editor for Vanity Fair" and "the author of 'The United States of Arugula'".

Rall criticizes Kamp for not knowing much about cartooning, but he doesn't home in on what I thought was the biggest gaffe in the piece. Right on the front page of the Book Review we read:

So the new anthology "Explainers," which gathers all of Feiffer's Village Voice strips from 1956 to 1966, is a welcome reintroduction—or introduction for the unititiated—to a great cartoonist who boldly bent his medium to adult purposes long before it was commonplace to do so.

But cartooning didn't start out as a medium for children, unless you think kids in the 1840's were the intended audience for the drawings published in the satirical Punch, from which we get the term "cartoon".