This wasn’t the first time Charlie Hebdo had been targeted, and other 21st-century cartoonists have faced similar threats. Cartoons have played a part in cultural and political clashes for hundreds of years, and have enraged politicians including Tammany Hall’s Boss Tweed and Adolph Hitler. Why do simple line drawings, sometimes accompanied by a caption, have so much sway? In advance of the Zócalo/Getty “Open Art” event, “Can Cartoons Start Wars?”, inspired by the current Getty Research Institute exhibition “World War I: War of Images, Images of War,” we asked cartoonists and scholars and writers who have studied their work: What is it about cartoons that gives them such power? What do they allow artists to do that they couldn’t do otherwise?

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