Being connected to cartoonists around the world is a great pleasure for me. I feel it is a way for people to talk about issues without needing to use words and it is a way to be connected with other cultures and their concerns through art. And, I am fascinated at how we can see different artists approach one issue.  Just this week, I was fortunate to be invited to write about this for CNN.com, and I curated a cartoon slide show for the article.  You can view it here, and it is titled “How International Cartoonists See Gadhafi.”  I put out a call to all the cartoonists I know around the globe, and within a few hours had a selection that we went with. The editors at CNN and I felt we had to move fast in case the situation changed in Libya.  Over the next few days, more cartoons arrived in my inbox  that I could not use for the CNN feature, but were equally poignant.  I will run these in the next day or so on the site I edit called World Ink (a section of dscriber.com), where we routinely publish cartoonists’ work from around the world on a variety of issues.

Among the cartoonists that I did not hear from were my colleagues in Iran. I did get nice emails back from two woman cartoonist I know in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, but no drawings. I don’t know whether to attribute that to politics or simply to the individual artists way of working. Some cartoonists work very fast, and draw on world events immediately. Others don’t.  But I heard from Morocco, Turkey, New Zealand, Lebanon, France, Canada, Belgium, Sweden, Kenya, among many others. Some use color, others not, words, no words, silly humor, powerful emotive images…it is such a variety, it’s wonderful.

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