Of dingoes, dogs, ducks and men

When I saw Bill Leak's cartoon in response to the Indonesian 'two dingoes', my first thought was, 'Will he get away with that bone through the nose'? By and large, it looks as though he has. As for those tender souls who worry about Indonesian Muslim sensibilities over being depicted as a dog, has anyone asked the Papuans how they feel about it?

I saw Leak being interviewed briefly on ABC news on this issue, and was struck by a couple of things. Firstly, he is well known as someone who has an absolutely pathological hatred of Alexander Downer, and of Downer's supposed patrician accent. (I've never been able to hear it myself, but maybe you have to have grown up in Adelaide, as Leak did.) Knowing this, I was surprised to hear a distinctly plummy tone in Leak's own voice. Bit of transference going on, perhaps? In fact, the conspiracy theorist in me wonders if Leak didn't stage this piece of provocation just to rattle Downer's cage.

Secondly, I was interested to see that Leak draws his cartoons directly on one of those digital tablets. I'd like to know whether that's his own choice, or whether his editors foisted it on him in the interests of efficiency. Leak, despite his pretensions as a painter, is a fairly middling cartoonist to begin with, and I strongly suspect that a recent decline in the quality of his drawing could be traced to the use of this technology. The Age's John Spooner - a genuine artist-cartoonist - has no truck with these things, and creates all his work as an ink-on-paper original. Leunig makes some use of this technology, but I suspect he also starts with a pen and ink original.

I'm reminded of a rather sad story about one of my favourite comic artists, the great Carl Barks, creator of the authentic Donald Duck comic books. Barks was one of those artists who, in a funny, clever story for kids, could craft parables of the human condition which were all the more penetrating for the apparent slightness of their means. The kind of thing many a Booker Prize winner can only dream of doing. Anyway, Barks, who laboured for years in anonymity - fan letters came addressed to 'the good duck artist', to distinguish him from the lesser talents working in that field - happily received a full measure of recognition and material reward late in his life. In one interview, he spoke of the decline in the quality of his drawing late in his career. Partly it was due to old age - you can see the hand shaking in some of his lines - but he explained that it was also because, after a certain point, in order to save a few dollars, Disney started supplying him with cheaper, inferior artists' board, which simply didn't take the pen as well.