Time & Perspective Quote by Pat Oliphant

Perfectionism is almost a job requirement in political cartooning, but Oliphant frames it as a kind of lived disappointment: decades of prolific work, and only six pieces that feel like they actually landed. The line is disarmingly plain, which is the point. It strips away the romance of the “great artist” narrative and replaces it with an ethic of ruthless self-auditing. For a medium built on speed, topicality, and daily deadlines, that’s a quiet rebuke to the idea that volume equals mastery.

The subtext is also about how cartoons fail. A political cartoon isn’t just a drawing; it’s a tightly timed argument that has to be legible in seconds, funny without becoming cute, angry without becoming sermonizing. It has to survive the news cycle’s decay and still read as something more than yesterday’s inside joke. Oliphant’s “truly happy” implies a high bar: the rare moment when craft, clarity, and moral temperature align, when the image bites cleanly and the target can’t wriggle out of it.

There’s humility here, but not the performative kind. It’s closer to a warning label about the form itself. Editorial cartoonists are expected to be instant historians, compressing complex power dynamics into a single frame while dodging libel, backlash, and oversimplification. Saying only a handful meet his standard is less self-flagellation than a statement of how narrow the bullseye really is - and how seriously he thinks the shot should be taken.