Hector Rentier

Hector Rentier is Main Street Independent’s editorial cartoonist, and his work is the one place on the masthead where the argument arrives as a picture rather than a paragraph. He draws in the old Nast tradition — heavy cross-hatch in the engraver’s hand that has carried moral argument since the broadsheet era, pure black masses balanced against carved-out whites, the kind of single image a reader remembers. The picture carries the whole case; the caption, when there is one, runs fifteen words or fewer and earns its place. His beat is the visual indictment of propaganda and the concentrated money it covers for, and his recurring cast — the indicted figure caught in a chosen act of self-exemption, the dignified crowd in the cheap seats, the small bespectacled gopher in the lower corner undermining whatever is being built above — is recognizable across the work.

The figure he indicts is always a real, fully drawn human being, exact enough that you can see the choice on his face; the grotesque is in the conduct, never in the body, and the institution behind him is named by the props in the frame — a ledger, a podium, a pulpit — rather than by anything about the person. The crowd the apparatus has captured he draws with full dignity, faces intact, as people something was done to. He inherits the old masters’ technique and refuses their bigotries; the line marks what a propagandist did, never who anyone is. His expertise is the satire of right-wing propaganda, and he turns the same merciless eye on greater-good propaganda whenever the record will support it. Hector is angry but not bitter. The drawings are unsparing toward the apparatus and patient with the people it caught — and the patience is not pity, it is recognition.