In April of last year, Minnesota-based political cartoonist, Kirk Anderson, created the art above in response to the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. Anderson's commentary on the outsourcing of torture to foreign security agencies was made nearly a year before the CIA extraordinary rendition story hit the news wires recently. Anderson's work is both prescient and insightful.
Yesterday, while listening to NPR, I heard a story about the CIA's secret program. The story was an interview with New York Times reporter Douglas Jehl's coverage of how an al Qaeda suspect fabricated information about Iraq's links to the militant group in order to avoid being tortured by foreign agencies outsourced by the CIA.
According to Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, "extraordinary rendition had been devised as a means of extraditing terrorism suspects from one foreign state to another for interrogation and prosecution. Critics contend that the unstated purpose of such renditions is to subject the suspects to aggressive methods of persuasion that are illegal in America—including torture."
Anderson's cartoon is a fusion of image and text that expands the boundaries of traditional cartooning by adding photographic elements. The persuasive determinacy of this cartoon is supported by the evidential nature of the photographic images. Not only do the pictures from Abu Ghraib provide a context for understanding the intention of the text in the cartoon balloons, but the images also ground personal opinion in a form of visual truth -- one that presupposes that pictures don't lie.
The relationship between images and text are interdependent in communicating a cohesive message. The juxtaposition of Anderson's commentary over the images from Abu Ghraib produces a more complex reading than if the drawing and text appeared alone.
The signification or meaning-making that emerges from the multimodal treatment of typography, photography and line drawing in the cartoons relects complimentary relationship that does not seek to subordinate image over text, or, text over image. Instead, the three distinct representational forms combine to form a new "whole text."
If you want to read more about how image-text relations work, see Radan Martinec and Andrew Salway's essay "A system for image-text relations in new (and old) media" appearing in the October 2005 edition of the journal Visual Communication, pages 337 - 371.