Is the pen mightier than the sword? Cartoonists respond after Nice attack

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First they targeted the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo. Then football fans and people who loved music, food and entertainment in November’s attacks in Paris. On Bastille Day the idea of going for a walk along a beach came under brutal attack.

The murder of journalists and cartoonists at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015 prompted a flood of cartoons in an effort to show the pen was mightier than the sword.

Friday was no different as cartoonists from around the world attempted to graphically interpret the deaths of over 80 people after a truck rammed into a crowd celebrating a national holiday in the French Riviera city of Nice.

A number of cartoonists, notably Jean Plantureux, who goes by the professional name Plantu, used images of doves in their drawings.

In November after the attacks in Paris, Brazilian cartoonist Carlos Latuff, who describes himself on Twitter as a “visual chronicler of barbarism,” had drawn a bleeding French Tricoloure with four dead bodies beneath it.

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Latuff was quickly back to work after events in southern France, depicting a child holding the hand of a victim in a body bag.

The vivid red in the French Tricoloure was used by many other cartoonists, notably John Meija, who had that color in the flag bleeding along the Promenade des Anglais, which lies next to the Mediterranean.

French-Lebanese artist Swaha Christiane, whose Facebook page says “a drawing speaks more than a thousand words,” focused her attention on the havoc a 19-tonne truck does when it rams into a crowd.

The front of the lorry drawn by Jordanian cartoonist Abu Mahjoob was in the shape of a skull.

Meanwhile Jean-Charles de Castelbajac riffed on the name of the southern French city to get his message across.

Initially graphic designer and illustrator Rachid Sguini pondered: “To be an artist today is not know what to draw in front of horror.”

He followed that drawing with another saying he was thinking of the children that had been killed in Thursday’s attack.