The least innovating profession in the world (and that's a good thing)
Editorial by Tjeerd Royaards
When I talk about political cartoons in lectures or workshops, I often start by saying that what we, as political cartoonists, do hasn’t changed all that much for the roughly two centuries that political cartoons have been around. OK, we might draw on tablet screens these days, and some of us are even dabbling with AI (although at Cartoon Movement we try to stay AI free for now), but the basics of the profession are fundamentally unchanged.
A cartoon published as editor’s choice this week on Cartoon Movement proved this point once again quite eloquently.
The cartoon, by Tunisian cartoonist Z, depicts a map of the Middle East, filled with characters that define the current geopolitics of the region. It’s well worth spending some time looking at the image to take in all the details. Details you might miss at first glance include Putin, keeping Zelensky in a knee hold, Ursula von der Leyen performing Edvard Munch’s The Scream, and Yemen joining the Middle Eastern fray with a catapult.
Using the map as a way to visualize the balance of power has a long tradition. Check out this anthropomorphic map, made by German-Jewish artist Walter Trier in 1914. The cartoon shows the state of the world at the outbreak of World War I:
And the map as a visual reference isn’t the only symbol we have continued to use in cartoons. Although cartoons often use popular and time-sensitive references (like making a cartoon about Putin based on the 2022 Oscar slap by Will Smith), most visual language in cartoons is surprisingly timeless and universal. Take this famous political cartoon from 1805 by James Gillray:
In the image, we see UK Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger and Napoleon carving up the world. It’s and image has been repurposed many times by modern cartoonists to make a similar point, but with current world leaders. This is great example, by UK cartoonist Andy Bunday:
And here are some more examples:
There’s a reason we continue to employ the same visual language as our predecessors: it’s effective. Our job is to create visuals that can be understood in matter of seconds; using symbols and imagery that is immediately clear is vital to what we do.
Also, our main adversary, has not changed in the last 200 (or even 2000) years. Although it might come in different guises and make use of modern tools, power hasn’t changed. Those in power are still trying to carve up the world, and the ones craving absolute power are still using violence, oppression, intimidation, lies and fear to achieve their goal. The strategy of most cartoonists is exactly the same as their counterparts from the 18th and 19th century: to keep a check on power by lampooning the powerful, and in doing so exposing corruption, injustice and untruths.
A sad testament to the effectiveness of this unaltered strategy is Under Pressure, the latest report by Cartoonists Rights and Cartooning for Peace, documenting all the cartoonists taken to court or put in prison because autocrats were fearful of their work.
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What makes this piece interesting isn’t just its argument—it’s what it reveals about the profession it’s describing. Cartooning has always been treated as the “easy” art form, the one people assume is instinct rather than labor. But that assumption misses the point entirely.
Cartoonists are some of the most disciplined thinkers in media. They compress politics, culture, and power into a single frame because they have to—there’s no space for excess, no room for wandering. That constraint is not a limitation; it’s a form of precision.
So when someone calls it “the least innovating profession,” what they’re really bumping into is a misunderstanding of how innovation actually works. It’s not always technological or loud. Sometimes it’s the ability to distill complexity into something immediately legible—something that lands faster than a headline and lingers longer than an op-ed.
The irony is that cartooning may look static from the outside, but it survives precisely because it adapts constantly—to politics, to platforms, to censorship, to shrinking newsrooms, and now to AI. If that’s “un-innovative,” then the word has lost all meaning.
abc