The yellow press

“I have wanted to be a cartoonist ever since I stopped wanting to be an actor,” Guardian doodler Andrew Marlton told an interviewer in 2010, and no doubt he would still like to be a cartoonist. You know, someone who melds wit and art like the late Bill Leak, John Spooner and the Herald Sun’s Mark Knight, lately copping it from the sorts who look to the Guardian for staying abreast of the latest trends in offense-taking.

In addition to those skills there is that other required quality: the bravery not to buckle and grovel when the lampooned and their allies strike back. Leak had that courage in spades. As Spooner puts it, Bill never backed down despite having his life “ruined by a combination of murderous Islamist threat and insidious defamation by the Australian Human Rights Commission.”

Marlton has pursued a different course. Bravery? Atop this post there is an example of how he has most recently demonstrated an invertebrate’s notion of standing tall. A genuine cartoonist, Mark Knight, dared to depict a large, misbehaving black woman as a large, misbehaving black woman, so he must be a racist. Worse, as Mark works for Murdoch666, it’s all a conspiracy or something. As with his draftsmanship, Marlton’s command of words leaves much to be desired, although he certainly understands how Guardian readers and colleagues think. The word “think” used advisedly.

Not that we should be surprised, as Marlton’s cravenness is a matter of his own admission. In 2015 he explained to his Guardian readers (emphasis added)

I don’t depict Muhammad because it’s probably racist and also I don’t get to put my family and my coworkers at risk of being firebombed.

But easy targets, the ones whose followers do not believe in two-fisted devotions – one to grip your hair, the second to slice your head off — well they’re ripe and worthy for a yellow dog’s scorn. Thus, while Muhammad goes undrawn, the Virgin Mary is held up to ridicule, as per the cover art (another word used advisedly) on his 2010 Christmas book.

Instead, when the topic is Islam, it’s kind words for the burqa. How a man who endorsed Julia Gillard’s hysterics about blue ties and misogyny could defend a symbol of oppression even most Muslims disdain is laid out in this video of Marlton courting his muse.

Last year there came another opportunity for Marlton to demonstrate, if not courage, at least collegial solidarity with a bona fide cartoonist, Bill Leak, tormented into an early grave by the odious likes of Gillian Triggs and Tim Soutphommasane. Let Tim Blair detail Marlton’s disgrace:

“Oh Bill. This is very sad,” Marlton posted on Twitter about his fellow Walkley award-winning cartoonist. “We didn’t agree on much, but he was a lovely bloke in person.”

Indeed he was, as Bill’s huge number of friends will attest. But that brief yet heartfelt farewell was too much for Marlton’s lefty followers, who slammed his kind tribute. Leak was a terrible racist and a homophobe and a misogynist who deserves no respect even in death, they raged. “F**k right off,” seethed one respondent to Marlton’s post, damning Leak as “a racist c**t.”

So what did Marlton do? Did he stand by his words? Did he argue with the hostile Twitter legions? Did he defend himself? Did he insist that in his personal experience Bill Leak was in fact a lovely bloke?

No, he did not. In a spectacular act of absolute cowardice, Marlton caved. He wimped it. He melted like the fragile little snowflake that he is.

He deleted the post.

Worse still, he then indicated his agreement with the piece of garbage who smeared Bill as a racist c**t.

“Yeah fair point,” Marlton wrote, of a man he’d just minutes earlier described as “lovely”.

Mark Knight should feel honoured to find himself in the same camp as Bill Leak. The fact that Andrew Marlton, coward, disapproves of his Serena cartoon is a priceless endorsement of its worth.

Marlton’s latest attempt at cartooning can be viewed via this link or the one below. He’ll probably win another Walkley for it. Yes, another.

— roger franklin

 

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