Lynch passes the belly laugh test

How Green is My Planet?
By Mark Lynch
Orin Books, Melbourne, 1998
$14.95 (pb)

How Green is My Planet? brings together Mark Lynch's best environmental cartoons. Comedian Spike Milligan provides the foreword and environmentalist David Suzuki writes the introduction.

The test of any cartoon book is whether it provokes involuntary laughter and Lynch's book passes the belly laugh test with flying colours.

Cartoons deal with the depletion of the ozone layer, logging, greenhouse gases and global warming, the Earth Summit, pollution and the end of the millennium.

Although Lynch's cartoons have been published in mainstream newspapers and magazines, like the Australian and the Bulletin, the cartoons are quite radical.

Devil-horned big business gets a hammering for making profits at the expense of the planet. A tobacco company executive admits smoking "might" be addictive, but not "nearly as addictive as our profits".

Inside the Earth Summit, First World delegates fiddle while outside in the real world fires rage amongst skulls and crossbones.

And watch for the animal characters — they are clever and hilarious!

A weakness is Lynch's stereotypes of workers in his anti-logging cartoons.

From GLW issue 336