Tooning in

The reliably brilliant political cartoonist Tom Tomorrow has packed up and left Salon for the big orange circus tent at Daily Kos. That’s news in itself, but even more intriguing is the fact that Kos, while running Tom Tomorrow’s cartoons, has also taken on the job of building a political cartoon section for Kos.

I love that idea. One of the many ingenious things the newspaper industry has done to destroy itself is to dumb down op-ed pages, shrink comics down to postage-stamp size, and shy away from political cartoonists. There was a time when Pat Oliphant, Herblock and Paul Conrad were as well known as columnists like Art Buchwald and David Broder. I’d love to see the Internet foster a resurgence of political cartooning, above and beyond what exists now.