Always in Our Hearts

Speaking for cartoonists, I’m thankful that former President Clinton’s surgery was a success -- because now we can still draw him! When it comes to Clinton, we wear our hearts on our sleeves. In our cartoons, he wore his on his underwear. But is that still an apropos postoperative approach?

Since deadlines don’t allow for artist’s block over blocked arteries, the operation with the highest success rate was the old bait and switch: use one highly visible topic to comment about something else entirely, say, purple hearts, the heartless Osama or heartening polls for the incumbent. So that’s what we did.

An inside-baseball note: I and my three colleagues represented here all come from the minimalist-linear school of cartooning. We’re a lot like heart surgeons: stick the knife in, twist it around a little and try not to get things too messy. Now, if we could only figure out a way to bill the insurance companies.