Arguably, editorial cartoonists exploit Halloween more than any other holiday period of the year. (With a close second place going to Christmas -- whose ho ho ho themes will be showing up in cartoons as soon as the flames of Jack 'O Lanterns burn out.

The problem is the limitations imposed on cartoons with holiday themes like Halloween. Daryl Cagle's cartoon site has a refreshing gallery of Halloween themed cartoon which does not have even one example the overplayed. line of costume kids lined up with the oddball at the end.

From me this year, I just recycled an old one I did from 3 years ago:

Editorial cartoonist Art Young, who worked for several Chicago newspapers in the early 1900s, had a simple motto: "To have a life as a caricaturist of the kind whose pictures 'never hurt' is my idea of futility." Cartoonists such as Young, unafraid to hurt, are the inspiration for Donald Dewey's new book The Art of Ill Will: The Story of American Political Cartoons, which looks at the development of the form from the Colonial period through the present.

"If they don't hurt," Dewey wrote in a recent e-mail, "editorial cartoons are just taking up space in a paper that might be used more profitably for a McDonald's ad. . . . The cartoonist who worries about 'alienating consumers' isn't worth your time, my time or anybody else's. Unfortunately, there are far too many of them around."

Similarly, in Dewey's estimation, "A cartoonist who isn't partisan isn't worth looking at. What's the point otherwise?

"Many of the rules for cartooning stem from syndication and a greater reliance on generic themes so nobody feels left out in Oregon about a reference to Pennsylvania.

"The usual result is toothlessness. Syndication has made cartoonists richer at the expense of the relevance of the form."

The Art of Ill Will features more than 200 illustrations, including Benjamin Franklin's 1754 image of a snake cut into pieces with the caption "Join, or Die" -- considered the country's first editorial cartoon.

Q: Can editorial cartoons turn elections?

A: I think it's been demonstrated fairly clearly that cartoonists don't swing elections. Even the fabled story of Thomas Nast bringing down Boss Tweed is more romance than fact. What really brought down Tweed was a New York Times expose in which a bookkeeper from Tammany Hall traced the passage of dollars from taxpayers to private pockets. (And even with this, remember, Tweed was re-elected to his City Council position.)

Another glaring example is Richard Nixon -- every political cartoonist's favorite subject for mockery since he had been vice president. But despite that, he was elected to the White House twice.

Overall, you would simply have to say that political cartoonists are preaching to the choir, not least because of the newspapers they are working for. Somebody in New York who reads Newsday regularly is not going to be exposed to the right-wing frothings of a Post cartoonist, and vice versa.

Q: To what should cartoonists aspire?

A: I would hope it would be humor and originality at the service of political relevance. In the best of cases, their images can outlive a given political issue or social event -- witness Nast on the Catholics in the New York City schools, (Bill) Mauldin on Lincoln's statue after Kennedy's assassination. These have as much power today as when they were done.

Q: Early political cartoons were wordy, with loads of texts accompanying the drawings. Was the move away from that convention a positive one?

A: In my opinion, they definitely improved with fewer words, and this was inevitable given the newer cartoon vehicles (daily and weekly publications) and the enhanced printing methods.

The most interesting thing about the transition was the growing community of symbols.

Q: Our political cartoons have been full of racial and ethnic stereotypes, haven't they?

A: The starting point for any discussion of ethnic-racial stereotypes is that they are created by the prevailing power structure.

Let's take a very common example: the Irish drunk. In the 19th century, the English were as alcoholic as the Irish. In fact, penny gin almost crippled the country -- so much so that the broken pub hours were introduced to discourage drunken bodies clogging up the main thoroughfares of London and Liverpool.

Which isn't to suggest that the Irish have never been known to drink. But when they came off steerage in New York in the 19th century, they walked into an Anglo-Scots society that controlled, among other things, the media. Suddenly, they were the epitome of the drunkard in word and picture. The fact that they were poor didn't help, either.

The above cartoon is the first draft to the original that was printed in The Hamilton Spectator. It was one of those cartoons that I thought I could safely draw even before the event took place. The going presumption was that there were just two unpalatable options before Stephane Dion in response to the Throne Speech. Several news agencies had sources saying that the Liberals in the House of Commons would opt to support the government rather than declaring non-confidence and subsequently pushing Canadians into a Federal election campaign.

It wasn't until about 4:30 that Stephane Dion announced that the Liberals would propose amendments to Mr Harper's agenda but, if they were rejected, his party would abstain from the confidence votes in the national interest. That's not exactly a decaration of "confidence in Mr. Harper's Conservative government." So I had to do something about the chalk board scrawlings by humiliated boy Stephane just to be fair, (not that it's necessary to be fair when editorial cartooning.)

If fairness is the strength of this cartoon, cheating may be its weakness. Through the magic of photoshop, I've banked images for future reuse. The classroom background is completely recycled from a cartoon I drew 2 years earlier:

...and funny enough it features Stephen Harper as opposition leader in the very same embarassing spot as Stephane Dion. The modification only had to be made in the content of the chalk writing.

...and as it turns out I was able to make the letters easier to read than the previous version. The only problem is that I jumped the gun before Dion's decision was made and I sent the early version to my syndicate. Oh well. Here's the final version: