Cartoonists say: ready, set, draw. (Convention Panels).

Editorial cartoonists want to be taken seriously as commentators. And they're willing to use just about any weapon they can find to make it happen, including the one they know best: humor.

Joel Pett of the Lexington Herald-Leader, Bruce Plante of the Chattanooga Times Free Press, Rob Rogers of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Scott Stantis of The Birmingham News stepped all over each others' lines as they joked their way through the workshop.

Their verbal meanderings were not designed for linear thinkers--or people looking for pithy quotes to put in The Masthead. The pith was in their art.

But in the course of their audiovisual presentation, the quartet from the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists made their views clear on several cartoon-related issues, not least of which is that good editorial cartoons make comments that can't be matched by words.

The tensions that exist between cartoonists and editors, Rogers argued in one of his cartoons, result from two very different ways of thinking. Cartoonists push the envelope. They "take risks," Pett said.

Many editors, in the eyes of the cartoonists, are too stodgy. They lack a sense of humor and they clearly don't understand the nature of cartoons. Or so it seems to the cartoonists on their side of the divide.

"Educate yourself about cartoons," Stantis urged the audience, which he and his fellow cartoonists tried to do by displaying a collection of good and not-so-good cartoons.

Okay, the not-so-good were actually horribly cliched and uninspired. How many hands in cookie jars do you need on your editorial page? And Bill Clinton's heart-decorated boxer shorts look just like the ones Ted Kennedy wore in cartoons of several years ago. But they were perversely funny in the context of this workshop presentation.

None of the cartoonists defended the cliched cartoons, but Stantis did suggest that individual cartoonists ought to be judged like professional baseball players. If two out of five cartoons are excellent, that cartoonist is batting .400.

While visual cliches and stereotypes are most often found in uninspired cartoons, current AAEC president Plante showed how a stereotype can provide continuity to a cartoonist's commentary. When readers see Plante's hillbillies in their various guises, they know he is taking on the Tennessee Legislature again.

Stantis, immediate past president of the cartoonists, provided an example of creating a recurring character with "Tinker Fob." (To fully appreciate this character, it helps to be familiar with the Never-Never Land thinking of former Alabama Governor Fob James, who once walked into a state board of education meeting imitating an ape to show his contempt for the theory of evolution. In the first of two widely separated terms as governor, James flew to Washington so he could personally deliver the state's appeal of a lower federal court ruling to the office of the clerk of the U.S. Supreme Court, getting there well after normal business hours.)

The hillbillies and Tinker Fob are also illustrative of something the cartoonists later said they want to see more often: cartoons that deal with local issues. Like editorials on local issues, these are the cartoons that have the most impact on readers and on public officials. To do them right, the cartoonist must have an intimate knowledge of the community and the people being portrayed and must understand the issues.

Yet Rogers and Pett noted that the newspaper industry has set up a marketplace that encourages cartoonists to concentrate on national issues. In a few cases, nationally syndicated cartoonists don't even live in the area where their "home" newspapers are published, which is a handicap in dealing with local matters.

Adding a dark edge to the cartoonists' humor is the decline noted by the panel in the number of cartoonist jobs at daily newspapers. With fewer cartoonists there are fewer cartoons on local, state, national, or international issues, which leaves editors with fewer choices for making points with cartoons.

NCEW member Karl Seitz is editorial page editor of the Birmingham Post-Herald in Alabama. E-mail him [e-mail]