81: Stanley Franklin

Stanley Franklin in "The Sun" 4 July 1984


Stanley Franklin in "The Sun" 28 September 1984


Stanley Franklin in "The Sun" 25 February 1986


Stanley Franklin in "The Sun" 24 November 1987

Since I think I’ve mentioned him quite a few times, here are some editorial cartoons by Stanley Franklin. They’re not spectacularly hateful, but I am offended by their being so simplistically and thickwittedly stereotypical. It’s that, in a national newspaper, they are still are no better than the sort of graffiti someone might scrawl in junior high. It’s just ridicule, without even much thought, every nasty cliché garbled into an ugly mess. Weird and unabashed limpwristed transvestites with clone moustaches. Fairly badly drawn, they’re just designed to elicit guttural chuckling from the “Sun”-reading slopebrows who know poofs are just wrong. Since “The Sun” is a coarse blokey celebration of conventional appetites, anything outside its world is unblokish and weird. So weird, effeminate poofs are delineated in that same coarse blokish manner. We get the street jibes of the bored construction worker, with not a new hint of wit or thought since they were first learnt as children, drawn with exactly the same lack of skill as that same bored construction might achieve.