Are Political Cartoons Over The Hill?

Farhad Manjoo attacks the genre:

Editorial cartoons are solo efforts in an era when political art has become a collaborative, crowdsourced affair. Many of today’s most powerful political images were put together by anonymous people on Reddit, where Photoshoppers find them and create ever-more-inspired versions. This collaboration is critical—while a single cartoon might get lost in the media din, an ongoing game of image-based one-upmanship is impossible to miss. Consider, for instance, the Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop meme. [The image of Lt. Pike pasted into the 1819 painting Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull] —which started it all—makes a profound point about police brutality by itself.

Another example is the above illustration, which any regular Dish reader should recognize by now. The image, like those described by Manjoo, went through several layers of collaborative revision. It began as a photo by the AP freelancer Mannie Garcia, then stylized by Shepard Fairey into his famous poster, then remixed by University of Illinois grad student Mike Rosulek to honor Charles Darwin for his 200th birthday. A final layer of meaning was our placement of Rosulek's image into blog posts alluding to the theme of Obama's long-game strategy: very gradual change we can believe in.