I’ve got to admit I love the toons. And I love even more how, even though they appear in the Onion, a lot of folks can’t seem to understand that it’s satire.
Summary: The cartoonist represents himself as an old school social conservative (while allowing loopholes for his own behavior) reactionary complainer. Here are a few samples for those of you who are not familiar with his work:
Too cluttered. He’s got too many concepts and memes and references and allusions, all battling for space and attention. He fails the ideal of simplicity and directness.
(He makes me think of bad 1950s cartoonists, where Lady Liberty and U-No-Who and Uncle Sam and Uncle Moneybags are all shown with daggers into The Working Poor while Uncle Joe circles in a bomber with a big nuke… Cluttered and ugly.
Also…he’s not a very good artist. (Yeah, he’s better than I’ll ever be…) His lines are too simple, without any subtlety. He’s drawing “coloring book” shapes. He’s no Jeff MacNelly or Pat Oliphant or Bill Mauldin or Herbert Blockwood. He’s a tyro, with an outdated style and limited skill.
(Also, he’s a goddamn fucking bigot. His anti-same-sex-marriage cartoon was a vicious slur.)
If anything, I always thought they were a little too on the nose. But Poe’s Law strikes again in this very thread, so apparently not. I get a chuckle out of the less obvious ones, and groan a little at the puns.
“Jesus and Gun Control” is kind of perfect. I just wish he’d worked the Statue of Liberty into it somehow. “Kelly” seems a very, “We speak American like Jesus in the Bible,” kind of Christian, so that explicit tie between religiosity and nationalism would have been the cherry on it.
Kelly rocks, and I love how some people don’t get it. He’s a perfect representation of those who feel any discussion of stratified privilege is nothing more than political correctness gone amok.
Doesn’t do it for me. Mixes up stuff that is (IMHO) unfunny, obvious, or just not quite right (like in the “new hippies” one – um, Earth Day was created only three years after the Summer of Love…).
Any random MAD Magazine toon from any random year is likely to show more wit and insight, and ring truer.
That’s because the MAD cartoonists were on the outside looking in and satirizing what they saw, while the Kelly persona is on the inside, stating his ‘truth’.
I love those cartoons. My favorite things are the previously mentioned weeping Liberty, and how everything is clearly labeled so that the dull-witted reader/follower can grasp the cartoon.
I love Kelly’s “Behind the Pen” videos where he explains in detail what’s going on in some of his cartoons. Here’s one where he graciously includes some tips for today’s young artists.
He’s one of my three Onion favs. The other two are Teasdale (I used to work at a newspaper with her doppelganger, in looks, lifestyle and writing style) and Jackie Harvey.
“Kelly” perfectly nails that certain style and sentiment. I can picture these types of cartoons cut out and hanging on grandmas’ fridges all across the Midwest. Heck, seeing how effectively these have fooled people, I could see these *actual *cartoons hanging on grandmas’ fridges.
