Something is afoot in the opinion pages of the Ivy League dailies.  Maybe it's the fresh enthusiasm for the new academic year.  Perhaps it's an infusion of talented new editors.  Perhaps it's a response to public outrage at the appalling degree of apathy that supposedly intelligent and dedicated students display in the quality of their schools' publications. Whatever the cause, things are changing for the better. Which is not to say that every cartoon published this week was good. Every day, some editor decides that a facile, quippy Sarah Palin cartoon is just what his or her page needs, despite having made the same decision only days ago.  But we're staying positive, right?  Come see what happens when people actually draw good cartoons, just after the jump.

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Okay, so we all know this was a big week in for the Democratic primaries. But the number of Obama/Clinton/McCain cartoons printed in the Ivy League this week was absurd. Nine out of the 26 (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9) cartoons printed in the Ivy dailies this week were related to the Democratic primary (that's more than a third). I've made this complaint before... and I got to thinking, what's so bad about it? So perhaps it's time for a little explication of the standards by which I judge these cartoons - an ars cartoonica, if you will. And, of course, I've still got a couple of bad ones, just after the jump.

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When the weather gets warm, two thoughts above all others linger in the Ivy League student's mind: Spring Fling (or whatever variation thereof your particular school may have) and the general desire to leave responsibility behind. Or so one might gather from the frequency with which Ivy League cartoons to voice these sentiments.  This week, Brown, Harvard, and Penn obliged the former, while Penn and Princeton did the latter. There were some headscratchers, too; the Prince's Mariah Min continues to baffle with her too-nerdy, too-wordy (albeit well-drawn) cartoons (complete with recurring characters). And we had some pretty decent political cartoons this week, too, about the pope and George Bush.  But in keeping with the week's warm weather theme, we have some hilarious stuff for you, just after the jump.
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This week had all sorts of really serious cartoons... Tibet, China and the olympics, Charlton Heston, which, as we all know, aren't really funny. And then we had our Campus Issues! cartoons. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we know it's spring, so there will probably be some kind of fling (with - GASP! - alcohol). Then you've got your standard Room Draw! cartoon, your Controversial Campus Issue! cartoon (OMG, you mean I can't transfer to Harvard?), and then a little good old-fashioned Douchebag! cartoon.  And that's only the beginning.  The good stuff's after the jump.

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Our resident toon-tearer, Donny Dietz, does his thing.

Well, this was certainly a "what the hell" sort of week, and not just in cartoons. The slow but steady rise in tired thesis and MCAT jokes ("Like, OMG, we're such nerds!") are a surprisingly accurate measurement of general fatigue and apathy as the semester wears on, both of which were clearly exacerbated this week by post-Spring Break depression. Another emerging trend: it seems that Hillary-Obama cartoons are funny roughly once per week, as many Ivy dailies (Penn is excused for having two, as Obama was actually in Philly) have been running just that (Monday, Brown; Tuesday, Columbia; Wednesday, Penn; Wednesday, Harvard; Thursday, Penn). I just wonder whether the papers actually coordinate to make sure they don't publish on the same day. Our friendly op-editors nevertheless provide us with some awesome stuff this week - both awesomely good and awesomely bad.

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Among the more bizarre institutions of daily newspapers is the idiosyncratic world of op-art, where people and objects frequently wear labels and the metaphors are thick. The Ivy dailies are, of course, no exception, their readerships gathering 'round the lunch table to marvel at the incomprehensible images produced daily in their pages. To mitigate the task of tracking down the week's worst in cartoons, IvyGate introduces a new weekly feature in which we handpick and deliver this week's ripest.

Princeton correspondent Donny Dietz ('09) breaks it down, after the jump.

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