This Skrlin cartoon distinguishes itself in that it presents a large single main image with which to make its point. The artist abandoned all former reliance upon employing multiple small images and visual puns to support his thesis with this thesis being: a main image blending the human Mayor Dyster with a canine/inhuman pit bull. We have no doubt that this is indeed Mayor Dyster since the “dog tag” echoes the mayor’s automobile “tag” of NF-1. The pun is as obvious as it is clever: Dyster thinks he is the top or number one dog in the kennel of Niagara Falls politics. Immediately the image brings to mind the mayor’s plans to open an animal shelter using $3.2 million in casino funds with which to rescue the city’s pit bulls. And this leads us to the heading referring to canine behavior in a meat market. The carton title/simile refers to out of control and confused behavior, “like a blind dog in a meat market.” This homespun saying summarizes the Dyster administration: out of control spending, blind to good government, and dangerous in its wild abandonment of transparency. In the end the cartoon has us believe that while Dyster is the “top dog” the city of Niagara Falls has, during his tenure, quite literally gone to the dogs.
Geoffrey Saltonstall
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