Drawing A Blank

Let's be completely honest, Bill Clinton is damn hard to draw. Please do get me wrong, I'm thrilled to have a Democrat back in the White House for the first time since I was nine. Absolutely delirious. No more going to bed at night in fear of waking up the next morning to discover that, Harry Blackmun's feeble pulse having winked out at some obscure hour of the a.m., Pat Buchanan is our newest Supreme Court Justice.

Sure, we can all breathe a little easier now, but it's little consolation to those of us who have to spend a fair part of our week trying to capture our president-elect on paper and shoehorn him into some snappy piece of graphic satire. Especially those of us who hope to making a living doing this in about half a year's time.

Caricature is a tricky business, you see, and unfortunately not my strong suit, as it makes great demands of a cartoonist's life drawing skills, skills with which I am somewhat unencumbered.

Caricaturists must be able to discern to what extent physical features individually contribute to a likeness so that they can gauge just how much these features can be exaggerated or diminished to humorous effect without losing the resemblance.

It's well nigh impossible, however, to completely capture a likeness in one fell swoop. The best caricaturists spend hours chained to their drawing boards, slogging away at their intended targets, trying to push and pull a satisfactory caricature into shape.

Immediately after the election, Jeff Danziger, editorial cartoonist for The Christian Science Monitor, did a wonderful cartoon illustrating this process. A proported page from Danziger's "cartoon notebook," designed to demonstrate his attempt to work up a Clinton caricature, is a montage of a dozen different, dogged attempts to draw the president-elect. I have a copy of this cartoon (which was reprinted in The Boston Globe) taped to the wall next to my drawing board in the vain hope that it will provide me with a little help, a bit of direction for the next time I have to burn the midnight oil and draw Bill.

Unfortunately, thus far it hasn't. Bill Clinton is just plain hard to draw. There's just so much to him. All of these wonderful features compete for attention against one another--with no one or two taking precedence over the others. There are those squinty little eyes, all baggy from the rigors of the campaign and too many nights up late jamming on "Arsenio." There's that Leno-esque chin, those pinched Bubba cheeks, the little snubbed nose and that tousled mass of gray hair that just seems to cry out for Grecian formula. Just where do you start with Bill Clinton?

Despite his resistance to caricature, Clinton does represent an exciting change on the American political scene.

Out go all the old, tired trappings of the Bush years: the daft yet terrifyingly archconservative vice president, Millie the acclaimed canine auteur, the Kennebunkport/Houston hometown ambiguity, the Machiavellian figure of James baker ever hovering in the background, horseshoes and deep-sea fishing, Iraq, etc. etc.

And with the new president, riding his coattails into the White House and the public eye, are all the new and exciting features of a Clinton administration.

There's Hillary, of course, the United State's first ever First Woman. There's Chelsea, too--how's she going to turn out in four, eight years' time?

Is she going to grow up as well as Allysa Milano did on "Who's the Boss?," or will she do as poorly as Tina Yothers on "Family Ties?"

Also associated with a Clinton administration: marijuana, hog-calling and jogging to McDonald's. And let us not forget "Socks"--first cat in the White House since Amy Carter's "Snookles," or whatever it was called.

And we're going to hear everything we could ever want to know about the state of Arkansas and the Baby Boom generation. Perhaps Elvis is even lurking out there somewhere...

So, as a young, aspiring cartoonist this is an exciting time. This is virgin ground, as new to all my crusty cartoonist idols--the Danzigers, MacNellys, Oliphants, et al--as it is to me.

By the time I took up a pen, Bush, Reagan and Carter had been done to death. Now, I'm free to form my own original take on politics. As I teeter on the brink of graduation, the real world a yawning chasm before me, I have a chance to make my mark.

If only I could draw Clinton.

Adam J. B. Lane '93 draws Drawn and Quartered three times a week for The Crimson. He occasionally draws for another campus publication as well, and it's not the Indy.