Drawing History / Martin Kozlowski: How does a cartoonist bring Obama and Qaddafi together?

As I was about to watch President Obama’s much-anticipated speech on the US response to the upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa, a call arrived from the very region. It was this Website’s fearless (and tireless) editor-in-chief phoning from relatively placid Dubai, (not so) gently suggesting that I whip up an installment of my strip “Simply Bazaar,” depicting the cartoon characters responding to Mr. Obama’s words.

Foolish enough to ask when he would like the finished product, I soon realized he would have been happiest if its posting might coincide with the president’s last spoken syllable. As it was, I wangled a few hours for a deadline, and set about listening and imagining how His Qaddafiness and his cohorts might respond.

The scripting and sketching in pencil are done concurrently, and can go pretty fast or be waylaid by stalled inspiration. Tight deadlines tend to unstop those particular clogged pipes—desperation is the real mother of invention. The inking of the word balloons and artwork can be just as time-consuming, but it’s mindless activity in the best sense, where you’re acting instinctively, rhythmically, with little conscious thought (except for the nagging awareness of the imagined ticking of the digital clock on the wall.) Once the artwork is scanned into the computer, there is some tidying up of the line work in Photoshop and the addition of color. And then, via email, the almost instantaneous delivery of the finished product more than half a world away. It’s a process of several hours that can be condensed as necessity or an (relentless) editor dictates.

As a professional political cartoonist who has done work for The New York Times Op-Ed page and is a regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal, I am always setting my sights on the big story that will spark heated debate. The extraordinary news pouring out of the Middle East over the last few months has made an already sizzling region white hot. Thus, I was delighted to be offered the opportunity to contribute a regular comic strip set against those seismic events to the rejuvenated Al Arabiya Website.

The strip is meant to be a satirical look at the ignorance and misperceptions of non-Arabs towards Arabs as it depicts the misadventures of a relatively unsophisticated character, Ali Bazaar, who is inadvertently thrust into the world of geopolitics. Satire calls for a sense of irony on behalf of the artist and the reader. It can be a tricky balancing act to portray characters espousing bigotry without seeming to endorse their benighted attitudes. I hope I can tread that line by holding these biases up to ridicule while providing some humor at the expense of the ignorant and the corrupt who so thoroughly deserve our uncharitable judgment.

And now back to His Qaddafiness, who—I can report authoritatively—has been rattled by Mr. Obama’s rhetoric. Stay tuned.

(Martin Kozlowski can be reached at: [email protected])