EDITOR'S COLUMN: Cartoons are back!

Next year, the City of Wasilla will celebrate its 100th year. Also, in September of 2017, the newspaper that’s covered Wasilla, Palmer, Houston and the unincorporated areas of the Mat-Su Valley celebrates a round-numbered birthday, turning 70.

Thumbing through the archives, it would appear as though the Frontiersman has been a pretty solid paper through the decades. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of gaps where it didn’t have some sense of vision, direction or competence.

That may not sound like huge praise, but there’s not many community papers out there that can say that.

In recent years, however, it seems as though the Frontiersman has backed itself into a corner somewhat for reasons I don’t totally understand.

Though it serves a community that leans politically right, it seemed to have made a point of going hard left and becoming an unapologetically ‘liberal paper,’ antagonizing conservatives at every turn.

Our publisher, Dennis Anderson, who arrived here in April, and I, who arrived in July, find ourselves spending more time than we’d like visiting with influential people in the community, trying to repair relationships, some that seem to have severed so long ago they’d long since gone cold.

We’ve made a lot of changes in 2016, and the vast majority of them have been received positively. The closest thing to pushback we’ve received has been from a contingent that, I gather, liked things the way they were before.

Pulled apart in the middle of this tug-of-war was the political cartoons of one Chuck Legge, whose work ceased appearing in the Frontiersman in the spring. Legge’s cartoons, I’m told, were caustic toward Republicans, in general, and the Palin family, in particular.

Everyone I talk to, it seems, is either glad his cartoons no longer appear, or are upset they don’t. It’s one of those issues where there appears to be no middle way.

I’ve never met Chuck, but we’re Facebook friends so I see the cartoons he posts almost daily. I love Chuck’s style. Artistically, he hangs out somewhere between the New Yorker and The Far Side and holds his own in that kind of company just fine. The problem I have with them — and maybe I’m just daft — is that the captions usually don’t make much sense.

The Frontiersman has remained free of locally produced cartoons since Legge’s last. That is until today.

Vickie Schultz, a longtime Valley resident, who used to do occasional cartoons for the paper years ago, has graced us with her amusing right-leaning take on Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski and her wavering alliances.

I don’t know whether I agree with Vicky’s contention in the cartoon, but that’s not what matters. It makes a point and it makes sense, just like any letter to the editor or guest column should.

And really, if you break it all down, that’s all a political cartoon is — a letter to the editor that uses images as a dominant form of communication instead. Why should the written word be the only way one gets to make their point on the opinion page?

Starting today, we’ll begin running cartoons from anyone who submits them using the same criteria we would for a letter to the editor or guest column. We approve more than 90 percent of submitted letters and guest columns, which we call “Spectrum” pieces.

Left, right, center, apolitical, well drawn, poorly drawn — it doesn’t matter. We want to run your cartoon attempts because we believe in more speech, not less.

The Frontiersman not a liberal paper; it is not a conservative paper; it is a community paper.

The opinion page of a good community newspaper is a place where everyone is welcome to share their viewpoint without fear of reprisal, but with the expectation of response and rebuttal from others.

One of the things that has impressed me most about the Valley has been the courage people have to put pen to pad.

Whether that’s a drawing pad or a note pad matters not. What matters is the free-flowing exchange of ideas.