Jose Rizal may have been the first Filipino political cartoonist. In his sketchbooks he drew cruel lampoons of Chinese merchants; and the cover he designed for “Noli Me Tangere” included, among other allegorical symbols, the hairy calf and slipper-shod foot of a friar.
The truth is that for a profoundly visually-oriented people, cartoons are often a more effective weapon with which to slay the arrogance and expose the wrongdoings of officials. Cartoons expose the dealings of the craven, cowardly, corrupt and covetous to deserved ridicule by the public and history. In their fight against the abuses of Spain, our propagandists proved that the pen is indeed mightier than the sword; in the hands of a younger generation, the artist’s pen would prove as fearsome a weapon as the words of our best journalists.
Cartooning as a phenomenon began to flower in the first decades of the 20th century when, after rescinding the sedition acts, the American colonial government allowed a free press to flourish. Well-known and obscure artists such as Fernando Amorsolo (1892-1972), a national artist, and Jorge Pineda (1879-1916), who drew for The Independent (and, incidentally, invented that enduring symbol of the common Filipino, salakot— and slipper-wearing Juan dela Cruz), at one time or another worked as political cartoonists, in part because other work was hard to come by and publishers paid well.
From the start, the Spanish-language daily El Renacimiento and the bilingual weekly Philippines Free Press featured political cartoons in their editorial pages; soon they were joined by the only satirical journal ever to have published, Lipang Kalabaw. Alas, this particular publication, begun in 1907, lasted 33 issues, closed, and was resurrected a few weeks later; died again in the next year; revived 13 years later in 1922, just in time for the fireworks between Leonard Wood and Filipino politicos; closed once more in 1924, only to mutate into a propaganda organ for President Quirino’s Nacionalista campaign in 1949! Lipang Kalabaw (the prewar versions of it, anyway) featured the works of artists who used pseudonyms, the most famous being Taga-Isarog and the coquettish Makahiya.
However, the editorial cartoons of the Philippines Free Press were to prove the most influential in terms of style, and the most enduring in terms of serving as a historical record. From the 1920s to the 1930s the chief cartoonist of the magazine was Jose Perreira (1901-1954), whose elegant, cross-hatched (almost engraving-like) style and themes would continue to echo in the works of postwar artists. But the longest and most distinguished record for editorial cartooning belongs to the late Esmeraldo Z. Izon (1911-1997), whose prolific work, starting in the mid-1930s, became an institution in the Philippines Free Press, interrupted only by the Japanese Occupation and martial law. After the war (during which he joined the guerrilla movement and drew illustrations for anti-Japanese propaganda) he resumed work at the Free Press and became the dean of the postwar crop of editorial cartoonists who drew fulltime and not just to augment their income as was the prewar custom.
The next generation of political cartoonists who came of age after the war, some of whom reaped international success, such as Corky Trinidad who started with the Philippines Herald and eventually settled in Honolulu and is a syndicated cartoonist. Another well-known member of the new generation was Severino “Nonoy” Marcelo, who drew cartoons for pre-martial law broadsheets and eventually created the most popular satirical cartoon strip ever, Ikabod. Also familiar to present day readers is the work of Dany Dalena, who started with the Free Press, moved to the Nation, and (after losing his job in the wake of the martial law suppression of the media) thence to Veritas after which he worked in the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
Even this generation of new artists, who matured in time to experience the repression of martial law together with their elders, have been joined by yet a younger set, including Deng Coy Miel, onetime cartoonist of the Star, and Net Billiones, who gained notoriety for his work with the oppositionist paper Malaya. A more surreal and disturbing style, which goes beyond traditional conventions, can be seen in Today’s Lontoc.
At present the art of editorial cartooning, of political commentary and lampooning through drawn images, is flourishing, though it may have lost much of the vigor that characterized the art in the exciting days leading up to, and continuing for a few years after, EDSA. But whatever the present state of the art may be, it has proven that great tradition of free-thinking and independence of mind exists among our artists.
At a time when Filipino journalists have been hit with libel suits, no cartoonist has been the target of such harassment.
