Existing comment:
An Australian in America
"There is a great opportunity existing in America for the application of a completely new movement in Editorial Cartooning. I would very much appreciate your comments on this and the possibility of us being able to introduce this new form through your editorial pages."
-- Oliphant's application to the Denver Post, 2 February 1964
Oliphant's brash goal came to fruition. He was hired by the Post, and indeed transformed American editorial cartooning. The moment was ripe: 1964 saw draft card burnings, the Warren Commission, the murder of civil rights activists in Mississippi, and the presidential contest between Barry Goldwater and Lyndon B. Johnson. Time took notice of his work, and in a profile piece said of his caricature, "few U.S. cartoonists have so deftly distilled the spirit of those two men as Australia's Patrick Bruce Oliphant, a recent arrival who has not yet set eyes on either Johnson or Goldwater, and who took over the editorial cartoonist's drawing board at the Denver Post only last month." |