A cartoon is a precise, beautiful thing. Most often a single panel with minimal text, it is the most sublime, elegant way to encode a thought. Sometimes the panel is slight, but often it trembles with the sheer power of the idea it holds. The cartoon is among the finest distillations of the creative thought-process. This column is the opposite of that; this is a “think piece”, the open-ended, non-committal pond scum of the creative universe. But, today, it’s all I’ve got.

A man holds up a copy of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo reading ‘Love stronger than hate’ in tribute, after gunmen attacked the weekly publication’s Paris office and killed 12 people. Pic/AFP