Topic: big media
Even allowing for convalescence it may be the public consumer of mass media will have to moderate their expectations.
Bill ran a cartoon about a week back in The Australian here:
It's a bit jarring for our taste. Very confronting. Not quite sure about it. Bush's redneck reputation? Record on capital punishment? White supremacists voting for Obama? Bill has always been a take no prisoners kind of cartoonist and often brilliant like David Rowe at the Australian Financial Review/Sunday Herald.
There is something just too over the top about a corpse on a rope even in cartoon form.
For Bill's undoubted artistry to really work he also needs to get across the current affairs material in a 24 hour cycle. We imagine his job as catching the political economic context of his audience awareness just right - like the take off surfing a wave, not too far ahead where the water has already broken, not too far back so the pulse leaves you behind dithering.
And that's very demanding and why he was really so good pulling it off most days. It's hard enough for this writer to keep a weather eye without a serious brain injury to recover from, let alone drawing it too.
We fear that we may never quite see Bill at the cutting edge again day after day with a ground breaking insight.
It's a shame because there is an obvious hole in the principal cartoon space of the opinion page in The Australian bravely filled by Kudelka and Nicholson lately, but not really to the old Leak standard.
