Sutton Impact: The Political Cartoons of Ward Sutton

Ward Sutton’s new anthology confirms his eminence as a confidently roaring young lion of political cartooning. Sutton’s commentary can be described as biting—and tearing and gnashing and gnawing and swallowing and violently regurgitating. His strips are full of schadenfreude; sour grapes; unmitigated rage; fervidly reductive reasoning; and dead-aimed, if sometimes cheap, shots at easy targets. In other words, great stuff for political cartoons. With many hapless muses in the current administration, Sutton suffers no shortage of material. But he’s also, admittedly, furious at us, for turning blind eyes to what he sees as so much state-sanctioned atrocity. At its pithy best, Sutton’s work is inimitably, button-pushingly hilarious. Young, dyed-in-the-wool liberals may defiantly make a gift of his book to their conservative parents, and prepare to be disowned.