- Courtesy Joe Fournier
- Joe Fournier’s cartoons for the Tribune challenge readers to go beyond the surface. “It confuses the hell out of people when I don’t choose a side,” he says.
Joe Fournier is one of two cartoonists who appear regularly on the editorial pages of the Tribune, a newspaper that for a long time had no editorial cartoonist at all. But one reason he’s there is that he works cheap. The other is that he’s good. I like what Fournier does, but it’s hard for me to put my finger on what that is.
MacNelly was an indulgence—an indulgence the lean, mean Trib of the 2000s had no interest in repeating. I’d write occasional columns on the Tribune’s empty chair, which the cartoonists of America denounced as a disgrace and lamented as the ultimate evidence that no one gave a damn about their profession any longer.
Op-Art, which is what his space is called, is drawn as a series of panels, and it registers in a minor key. Fournier doesn’t kick ass, and he doesn’t mind confounding readers who can’t figure out how to respond. A lot of readers, he believes, don’t even try to understand what a cartoon says as long as they can tell whether it leans left or leans right. All they need to know is whether to applaud or dismiss it.
“Ferguson, Mo., coming unglued. And air strikes in Iraq to stop genocide!”
“I don’t like those hard landings,” says Fournier, meaning cartoons whose points you’d have to be dead to miss. He likes to “sidle up” to his characters and catch them thinking out loud. “If I do them right the characters kind of exist in people’s minds,” he says. “I kind of like the idea of a piece that only exists in the mind like that. It’s kind of cool.”
There’s nothing unusual about an op-ed page taking aim at a foreign policy that isn’t working. But we usually find the commentator sneering at its architect as an incompetent boob. Fournier offered a note of compassion. How strange is that?
