Editorials are Dated

While the editorial style struck me emotionally, I felt that it didn't lend itself to being considered art. By their nature, editorial cartoons confront contemporary issues. Authors set up comics in order to create discussion about the perceived wrongs of an era. If they are successful, the public becomes more educated about these wrongs and put pressure on their governments to enact change. This in turn should fix the problems that the author identified and attacked in the comic.

We often celebrate a this triumph of the editorial cartoon. With the triumph comes some sort of end to the prime lifetime of the comic. While relevant to the problems of the time, the comic had purpose, it had power. Now that the problem it set against has been solved, it occupies another space. It is a record, a more passive object than it once was. Most people see editorial comics in school before they ever see them in paper. History classes teach interpretation of these comics more than English classes.

This distinction in subject allows for a distinction in classification. Editorials are less art objects and more records and artifacts, indicating to us how people lived lives in bygone ages. Perhaps other forms of comics can enter into art museums, but the editorials we looked at today seem to me to fit better in historical archives and historical museums than their aesthetically focused counterparts.