Immodest Proposal- Political Cartoon

By: Jade Robbins

From the time I was five years old, I would curl up on the couch with my dad and read
the funnys. Most of the time I didn’t understand the punchline, but the pictures were
entertaining, and I liked hearing my dad laugh. In the morning after a sleepover in middle
school, when my friends and I were all sick of each other, we would eat cheerios and crack
jokes at the comics. My favorite kind of humor was always rough around the edges, and usually
talked about something taboo. To this day, I am not the kind of person who puts on the news on
my drive to school, I am much more inclined to want to digest media in artistic forms. Politically
driven music, artistic podcasts, and cartoons always catch my attention. I think that through the
visual means of cartoon, I can convey my message to the most people. The audience for
cartoons ranges from young children to grown human beings. Although the actual bias and
opinion of the cartoon will stir more people than others, the age doesn’t matter much when it
comes to cartoons. I think the people who will most connect with my art will be people who are
not affiliated with pharmaceutical companies, or the politics behind it, I think that my message is
meant more for the average joe who has heard a few times about “BIG PHARMA”.
I want to write and create a political cartoon comparing the Crack Epidemic to the Opioid
Crisis. I want it to speak on the racist lenses we examined each tragedy through, but I don’t
want it to be hard to understand immediately. People like to understand what a cartoon means
immediately. The ultimate goal would be to sell prints of my art at noel night, but that will take
some hard work.
The visual aspect of my piece will be a person holding glasses and through the lenses of
the glass, you see the different views of these epidemics. On one side, there will be a black man
cracked out maybe with police men holding him down. On the other side, there will be a white
woman with pill bottles being shoved in her face.
The written aspect of the cartoon will be two bubbles. On one side there will be a bubble
that says, “Lock up the criminals, they are poisoning our streets.” On the other side there will be
a bubble that says, “Sue Big Pharma, they’re poisoning our children.”
I hope that this project catches the public's eye, and creates a conversation for the
reason why we view the world as we do.