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OPUS 208 (July 22, 2007). What with the annual convention of
editorial cartoonists and the death of Doug Marlette, most of this edition of
R&R is devoted to political cartooning, past, present, and, perhaps,
future. We also review a truly stupendous (that’s good, kimo sabe) book, Dreams
of the Rarebit Fiend, just out, and toss out a few other tidbits. Here’s what’s
here, by department:
NOUS R US
Morrie
Turner at Sandy Eggo
Jerry
Robinson, Playwright
Comics
on Cell Phones
Out of the Gene Pool Changes Its Name
Bo Nanas Ceases
BOOK MARQUEE
Schulz
Bio in October
Classical
Comics Does Shakespeare In
Sundays with Walt and Skeezix
A
Colossal Dream of the Rarebit Fiend
El Libbre
Scooter
Becomes a Folk Hero
COMIC STRIP WATCH
Excellent
Sampling for Readers
EDITORIAL CARTOONISTS CONVENTION
The
Founding 50 Years Ago
The
Plight Then and Now
The
Panels
The
Guest Speakers
Cartoonists’
Rights Menaced Around the Globe
How
Many Editoonists Are There, Actually?
Steve
Bell Rings in Britain
FUNNYBOOK FAN FARE
Perusing
Previews
WE’RE ALL BROTHERS
And We’re Only Passing Through
Obits
for Doug Marlette, Buck Brown, Howie Schneider, J.B. Handelsman, Silas Rhodes
And
our customary reminder: don’t forget to activate the “Bathroom Button” by
clicking on the “print friendly version” so you can print off a copy of just
this lengthy installment for reading later, at your leisure while enthroned.
Without further adieu—
ANOMALY ALERT
For
the next month, you’ll notice a certain irregularity in our usual bi-weekly
visitations. And the visits themselves will be lacking, somewhat, in the usual
plethora of newsy bits. That is because the Rancid Raves Intergalactic Wurlitzer
is entering upon a new plane of existence. In short and without any more of our
customary linguistic tripe and rhetorical embroidery—we’ve moving. We’re moving
from Champaign, Illinois, where we have resided for over 30 years, to Denver,
Colorado, where it all began with the Happy Harv (in the tiny hamlet of
Edgewater, as it happens—Nell Brinkley’s hometown). Quite apart from the difficulties imposed upon Your Conscientious
Chronicler who will not have his Vast Research Library and Emporium available
to him—that is, unpacked—for some weeks, there are the Mysterious Questions
surrounding hooking up to the Internet. And getting a new Email address.
Trepidation and trembling. And all like that.
While you may be feeling deprived at
the prospect of this peradventure descending, willy nilly, upon you, unbidden
and, surely, unwanted, we hasten to reassure you: in the interim, as we unpack
boxes and hook up wires, you will be shipped regular doses of cartooning lore
and history and a few timely book reviews, too. Here’s what we have planned for
the next few weeks:
In Hindsight
Clay
Geerdes
John
Held, Jr.
In R&R
Excerpt
from the Milton Caniff biography
The
True Story of Tony the Tiger
Reviews
Yoshihiro
Tatsumi’s Abandon the Old in Tokyo
Eddie
Campbell’s Black Diamond Detective Agency
The Professor’s Daughter
The Artist Within, the best photos
Plus—plus
we’ll have an assortment of Rare Old Cartoon Art, culled from the Compendious
Vaults in the Rancid Raves Grotto. Don’t miss it if you can.
And
now, we resume our regular programming—
NOUS R US
All the News That Gives Us Fits
When
the San Diego Comic-Con debuted in the early 1970s, syndicated comic strip
cartoonists were as large a presence as comic book ’tooners. As time unraveled,
however, the strippers receded into the considerable background; and then when
the longjohn legions of comic books took to cavorting on the big screen,
Hollywood invaded the Con, displacing all other considerations. But a remnant
of those dear old days when cartoonists ruled the Con—cartoonists, by nature,
being directors, producers, screen writers, actors, and extras all in one
creative consciousness—is the annual Syndicated Comic Strip Cartoonist
Appearance wherein one cartoonist is called upon to represent the entire enterprise.
This year, July 26-29, it’s Morrie
Turner, billed, correctly, as “America’s first African-American syndicated
cartoonist, creator of Wee Pals, Dinky
Fellas (his earliest effort, inspired by Charles Schulz’s Peanuts) and ABC-TV’s ‘Kid Power.’” He
also coined the expression Rainbow Power to describe the harmonious fellowship
enjoyed among the multi-cultural multi-racial kids in Wee Pals. Turner’s strips have been syndicated for over 30 years
and appear, it sez here, in 110 newspapers. Turner will be interviewed on stage
by Sergio Aragones and will
subsequently present his celebrated chalk talk.
Jerry
Robinson has done a whole lot more than invent Batman’s arch foe, the
Joker, and name the Caped Crusader’s Boy Wonder sidekick “Robin,” the
achievements that are usually draped across his shoulders every time he appears
in public or in the press. He was also a syndicated cartoonist and founded, and
is still president of, an international syndicate, Creators and Writers
Syndicate, which distributes the work of more than 550 artists from 75
countries. Robinson, 84, may also be the only cartoonist to be president of
both the National Cartoonists Society and the Association of American Editorial
Cartoonists, and, not content with all that, he’s also a playwright: the
musical he co-authored with Sidra Rausch, “Astra: The Manga Musical about
Meteor Girl,” ran at the Warehouse Theater in Washington, D.C., July 7-8 and
11-13, as one offering in Laptop Ladies Playfest, a fortnight of plays from
Washington Women in Theatre, a festival dedicated to nurturing original plays
by women writers. Astra is a female superhero, who, encouraged by her mother
(in what Rausch and Robinson claim as one of the Jewish motifs in the story),
battles an evil corporate villain, Dr. Light. According to Lisa Traiger in Washington Jewish Week, “Robinson sees
in Astra a Jewish propensity to repair the world, although he won’t go so far
as to bring up the Hebrew principle of tikkun
olam” [which means “repair the world”]. Robinson is also a noted historian
of comics and is presently revising and up-dating his landmark 1974 opus, The Comics: An Illustrated History of Comic
Strip Art for Abrams.
As cell phone hardware and the
networks they operate improve, entrepreneurs are gearing up to expand the amount
of comics content that will be available. Tokyopop Mobile already offers eight
manga titles, mostly adapted from print originals; but the company is exploring
options that will incorporate sound as well as motion in a new form of comics
storytelling. “They represent a new form and look very different from the
traditional ways of bringing comics to life,” according to Jeremy Ross,
Tokyopop’s director of new product development, quoted by Trevor Sopoinis in Publishers Weekly online. DC and Marvel
haven’t jumped into this stream just yet although DC’s investment in Flex
Comics, a new Japanese manga production company, effectively announced DC’s
intention to wade out there.
At the Nashua Telegraph online, a letter to the editor, after noting that
the paper “hesitated” to continue B.C. and Wizard of Id after the deaths of Johnny Hart and Brant Parker, wondered whether it wasn’t time to “retire the work
of the ‘second highest paid deceased person in America’ (Forbes Magazine), Peanuts, and give some other aspiring artist a chance.” ... Harlan Ellison has abandoned his lawsuit against Fantagraphics;
with their lawyers in tow, the opposing parties met and arrived at a
resolution, the details of which the resolution forbids the parties to reveal.
... Hugh Hefner will be the subject
of a new bio-flick, entitled, coincidentally, “Playboy,” and directed by Brett
Ratner, whose previous movies include “Rush Hour” and “X-Men: The Last Stand.”
Ratner sees plenty of drama in Hef’s life, which, while not a rags-to-riches tale,
is certainly a Puritan to libertine epic. Hefner, now 81, qualifies as “an old
roue.” ... Matt Brady at forum.newsarama.com tells us that Brian Bendis has renewed his exclusive contract with Marvel Comics
for another ten years, saying that “the company been really outstanding to me,
allowing me to write how I want to write and letting me work with who I want to
work with.” He will continue with the Avengers and the Ultimate Spider-Man and
take on some new projects. ... A judge in Napa, California, temporarily barred
a local middle school from enforcing its “appropriate attire policy” that
prohibited a seventh-grader from wearing Winnie
the Pooh themed socks; meanwhile, AP tells us, the judge will ponder
whether the policy is legal.
George
Zeleski, 86, who has been drawing
cartoons about his hometown, San Clemente, for the Sun Post News for 20 years, had to put his pens down recently due
to failing eyesight. Zeleski had a career in the meat industry, and after
retirement from that, he took up cartooning for amusement, landing, eventually,
at the local paper. But last year, he developed macular degeneration. Andrew
Good at the Sun Post News finishes
the story: “His doctor had given him an eye chart with straight lines on it,
instructing him to check it every day. When the lines appeared wavy one day,
Zeleski realized it was time to put his pens away. Well, not completely. He
said he’ll probably continue drawing for pleasure.” Recently, he’s tried a new
drug which has enabled him to read again, and if that works, he speculates, “I
might start drawing again” for the paper. ... A press release online announced
that Stan Lee is the subject of a
video biography from Peoples Archive. Drawing upon more than three hours of
footage of Lee reminiscing about his life and career and the state of comic
books yesterday and today, the video is divided into 42 “stories,” all of which
are apparently free for viewing on the Peoples Archive website; there’s also a
DVD-ROM for purchase. ... Incidentally, Stan
Lee has now doubtless achieved his heart’s desire—a star on the Hollywood
Walk of Fame; he or his sponsors paid $25,000 for it. Oh, and there was some
sort of selection process, too. ... From Reuters, we learn that a Hamas tv
station last week killed a Mickey Mouse character that had been instructing young viewers on Hamas’s militant brand of
Muslim piety, urging children to support armed resistance against Israel. An
actor wore a Mickey Mouse costume, and the last week in June, the character was
beaten to death by another character posing as an Israeli. I don’t suppose that
will improve relations between Palestinians and Israelis, but the Disney empire
might rest easier. ... Daryl Cagle’s “massive editorial cartoon website,” Editor & Publisher notes, has added
to its roster: Mike Luckovich rejoins the line-up after a four-year hiatus, and Jeff Darcy of the Plain
Dealer, alternative ’tooner Tim
Eagan, and the conservative team of Allen Forkum and John Cox also climbed
aboard lately.
On July 30, the comic strip Out of the Gene Pool will assume a new
name, Single and Looking, reflecting
the ambiance of the strip as it has morphed during its first few years. The
cast will be the same—divorced mom Jackie and her son Travis, 20-something
bachelor Sam and his obnoxious roomie Zoogie, and the irrepressible Madame
Red—but the emphasis will be on “single-hood” and the perpetual search for a
suitable mate. Many strips evolve into something somewhat different than their
initial conception, but few take the next logical step and don a new title. Polly and Her Pals is a classic example:
although envisioned as a strip about a young “New Woman” of the nineteen-teens,
cartoonist Cliff Sterrett got more
involved in Polly’s father’s reactions to modern times than in Polly’s fate or
that of her alleged pals. The strip was very quickly more about Paw Perkins
than it was about his daughter or her cohorts. Steve Canyon was always Steve
Canyon, but for the last 10-15 years of its run, Steve was on stage only a
few months every year; the rest of the time, the spotlight shifted from one
member of the repertory cast to another. But Milton Caniff didn’t change the title to fit. Other mutants,
however, have adjusted to their new realities. Barney Google became Barney
Google and Snuffy Smith and then just Snuffy
Smith. Fritzi Ritz became Nancy when the statuesque Fritzi was upstaged by her fire-plug shaped young niece. Matt Janz, the creator of Gene Pool, describes a similar change
that took place in his strip: “This is a natural progression from Out of the Gene Pool,” he said. “Over
the past five years, some of my characters moved to the forefront while others
faded into the background. I started focusing on the lives of my most popular
characters and, since most of them happened to be single (and looking), I found
myself writing more dating-oriented material.” The shift in focus and title
incidentally makes for sound marketing. Said Writers Group Comics Editor Amy
Lago: “When we looked at the marketplace of comic strips, there seemed to be
all kinds of single-parenthood strips, family strips and relationship strips,
but nothing that really spoke to the millions of people out there still
searching for ‘the one.’” Now there will be.
Lago also announced the end of John Kovaleski’s Bo Nanas, a strip with a monkey as its eponymous protagonist, drawn
in an attractive quirky style with a simple bold line. The last strip is July
28's. “It was a financial decision,” Lago explained in a press release, “—John
has a number of other projects that are requiring more of his time.” But my
guess is that he wouldn’t need the other projects if the circulation of his
strip had been enough to pay some of his bills. It’s too bad because Bo Nanas was almost unique, a non-niche
strip, rare in this age of intense demographic targeting, and it was well done.
It was also the scene of nearly unprecedented action. Said Lago: “Kovaleski
proposed to his future wife in the strip on July 6, 2004, and even had Bo
attend a comic strip version of the wedding the next spring.” The strip started
in May 2003 after Kovaleski had worked for a year in WPWG’s “FineToon
Fellowship” for aspiring cartoonists. “The final week of the strip, July
22-28,” Lago said, “will wrap up the last four years and show a bit of Bo’s own
wonderful life, particularly his influence on the lives of his friends—the
strong, silent Hot Dog Guy, Brittany the Squirrel Scout, and, of course, his
landlady, Mrs. Yannes. Bo will be missed.”
Larry Doyle, who teamed with Neal Sternecky to write the revival of Pogo in the early 1990s, reprising a
writer-artist relationship they’d established on the campus newspaper at the
University of Illinois, has just published his first novel, I Love You, Beth Cooper, and is featured
in the June 15 issue of The Week, listing his “best books,” among which is “the funniest book ever written,” The Dog of the South by Charles Portis,
who also wrote True Grit. The strip
Doyle and Sternecky produced at the U. of I. 1981-84 was Escaped from the
Zoo, a funny animal strip completely unlike Pogo. After leaving Pogo,
which Sternecky then produced solo for nearly a year, Doyle went to Hollywood,
where he wrote for “The Simpsons” among other things.
Fascinating
Footnote. Much of the news
retailed in this segment is culled from articles eventually indexed at http://www.rpi.edu/~bulloj/comxbib.html, the Comics Research Bibliography, maintained by Michael Rhode and John
Bullough, which covers comic books, comic strips, animation, caricature,
cartoons, bandes dessinees and
related topics. It also provides links to numerous other sites that delve
deeply into cartooning topics. Three other sites laden with cartooning news and
lore are Mark Evanier’s www.povonline.com, Alan Gardner’s www.DailyCartoonist.com, and Tom Spurgeon’s www.comicsreporter.com.
And then there’s Mike Rhode’s ComicsDC blog, http://www.comicsdc.blogspot.com
Persiflage
and Badinage
“A fanatic is one who can’t change
his mind and won’t change the subject.” —Winston Churchill
“Experience is the name everyone
gives to their mistakes.” —Oscar Wilde
“The very word ‘secrecy’ is
repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and
historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret
proceedings.” —John F. Kennedy
“A cultured person is one who can
entertain himself, entertain guests, and entertain ideas.”—Lawrence J. Peter of The Peter Principle
BOOK MARQUEE
The
definitive biography of Charles Schulz,
six years in the making, is due in October from HarperCollins. Written by David
Michaelis, author of N.C. Wyeth: A
Biography, the 600-plus page volume, Schulz
and Peanuts, is based upon more than 200 interviews and Michaelis’
unrestricted access to the famed cartoonist’s archives and files. I’m only a
few pages into an advance copy of uncorrected proofs, but I’ve already
discovered details about Schulz’s first negotiations with his syndicate that
I’m sure have not surfaced before. Editor
& Publisher reports that a PBS documentary of the cartoonist’s life,
“Good Ol’ Charles Schulz,” is scheduled to air coincident with the book’s
release; it will include an interview with Michaelis.
A new book, Brush Strokes with Greatness, by Tim Lasiuta covers the 56-year
comic book career of Joe Sinnott,
who, among many other achievements, inked Jack
Kirby’s Fantastic Four for 48
issues, beginning with No. 44; he’d done No. 5 earlier. Said Papul Sebert in
the online Herald-Dispatch: “While
Lee and Kirby remain the most celebrated creators of their era, the work of
Sinnott and other inkers has sometimes been overlooked. Lasiuta has paid a
worthy tribute to one of the hardest working talents of any era.”
In England, Classical Comics is
poised to begin its series of comic book adaptations of famous literary works
in October with the publication of its version of Shakespeare’s “Henry V.” Penciled by Neill Cameron and inked by
Bambos, the 132-page paperback in full color will be available in three
versions: original text (full and unabridged—and in only 132 pages?), plain
English (Elizabethan usage modernized), and “quick text” (the Bard
abbreviated). Anything but the original text seems to me an unqualified
desecration: Shakespeare is language, and therefore to change
the language is to destroy Shakespeare. What’s left is the story, but the story
isn’t Shakespeare. On the boards for next year are Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,”
Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. The
latter is being illustrated by John M.
Burns in a painterly manner; sample pages at classicalcomics.com are
spectacular.
Peter Maresca, whose Sunday Press
Books brought forth that stunning life-size reprint of Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland, has
assembled a selection of the best of Frank
King’s Gasoline Alley Sunday
strips 1921-1925, starting with the first one. Designed by Chris Ware, Sundays with Walt
and Skeezix costs not quite a dollar a page—$95 plus p&h for 96
16x21-inch pages in full color—and features an introduction by Jeet Heer, who
is making a career of Gasoline Alley and
King. The book will be available August 15. Those who pre-order through www.sundaypressbooks.com will receive a poster-size 20x27-inch
facsimile of the Sunday strip for August 19, 1934, reproduced from King’s
hand-colored original. In November, Maresca will bring out his collection of
all of McCay’s color Sammy Sneeze pages, which, Maresca says, “will feature the ‘B-side’ comics from the New York Herald of 1904-05 printed on
the back of each Sammy page. This includes McCay’s Hungry Henrietta pages”—all in the “original half-page size, 11x16
inches.”
And, while we’re on the subject of
McCay and stupendous undertakings, here’s Ulrich Merkl’s complete Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, a giant 464
17x12-inch pages, 139 in color, hardcover, handbound, weighing almost ten
pounds. It reprints 369 of the “best” strips, and all the remaining 452 appear
on the accompanying DVD. The book qua book is a masterpiece, a spectacular example of the book designer’s art. A
masterpiece for a masterpiece—how apt. Rarebit
Fiend remains today almost as famous an exemplar of cartooning artistry as Nemo. In both strips—and in Sammy Sneeze as well as Hungry Henrietta— McCay explored the
capabilities of the new comics medium, and in Rarebit Fiend, his purely playful experimentation reaches an almost
giddy apogee as he examines the humorous potential in metamorphosis. In each
strip, a person, different in each episode, falls asleep after partaking of a
melted cheese dish (welsh rarebit) and has a nightmare in which some ordinary
happening turns vicious or some everyday object is animated into a menacing
monster. The dreamer awakens in the last panel, vowing never to eat rarebit
again. In one strip, a father gives his infant son a teddy bear; the bear
becomes real, first a cub then an adult, and then the creature eats the infant
and turns on the parents. In another, a man’s big toe swells up until it is the
size of a small sofa. In these visual extravagances, McCay indulges a fascination with the sequential progressions
that comic strips encourage, metamorphosis being just another way of engaging
with such a progression. He also displays an intuitive awareness of the
psychology of dreams. Some of the rarebit fiends’ dreams are frighteningly
authentic: one dreams of being buried alive; another, of being nearly
suffocated by birds building nests in his mouth and nose.
Merkl’s book is more than an sampling of the adventurous playthings of a cartooning genius’s imagination. It is also an exhaustive essay on the Rarebit Fiend. The first 100 pages are devoted to a copiously illustrated chronology of McCay’s life and work, sources of inspiration, visual curiosities to be discovered in his oeuvre, essays by McCay on various aspects of the art of cartooning, and other ephemera either vital to an understanding of the cartoonist or oddly insightful (lists of prominent persons depicted in Fiend, for instance), concluding with two articles: “Dream Travelers 1900-1947: Precursors and Epigones of Winsor McCay” by Alfredo Castelli (20 pages) and “A Dreamer with His Feet Planted Firmly on the Ground” by dream worker Jeremy Taylor (8 pages), detailing some of the archetypal symbolic aspects of Rarebit Fiend. Here are pictures of one of the illustrated chronology pages and a page displaying various transformations McCay effected in drawing, in this case, circus animals.
Then follows the Rarebit
Fiend reprints, 80 of which are reproduced either from the original art or
from reproductions of the original art (not, in other words, from newsprint
pages). And the piece de resistance: commentary
on each strip, explaining references that are now obscure, including customs
and costumes of the period. Quoting from a press release (because I think it is
an accurate description and one I not only agree with but applaud): “Apart from
the strip’s fascinating content and outstanding graphic qualities, Dream of the Rarebit Fiend is also an
important source of information about everyday culture in the United States
during the early 20th Century. It was here, and only here, that
McCay incorporated real daily life into almost every episode—from fashion,
sports and politics through work, architecture, technical progress and
celebrities. One could view the feature as an encyclopedia, or a mirror on the
United States in the early 20th Century.” The book is a mesmerizing
tour of a gallery of superb cartooning and of American society, its culture and
customs, at the time the strips were originally produced. The book is not
available through ordinary bookstore channels or from comic book shops: it can
be obtained only from the author/publisher and a few selected
booksellers—online, go to www.rarebit-fiend-book.com. By
limiting sources, Merkl explains, he has eliminated the percentage usually
taken by wholesalers, thereby keeping the cost as low as possible—$114. A
treasure at bargain prices.
Finally, not to neglect an
opportunity to flog my own efforts in the McCay realm, for someone not yet
ready to spring for $114 because you’re not familiar with the genius of McCay,
you can become familiar, albeit not as intimate as Merkl’s book and Maresca’s
will make you, by purchasing, for a modest price, my book, The Genius of Winsor McCay, a sort of “introduction” to McCay; for
more about it, click here.
LATE
BREAKING NEWS
I
don’t know who wrote this. It just came over the Internet transom. And I suspect
its imagined target is a little off-base. It’s probably not the Bush League’s
position on immigration—which is in support of the alleged “amnesty”—but the
conservative right wing of the Republican party whose position on immigration
might be affected. Whatever (as everyone these days is saying, so helpfully),
here ’tis (thanks, Roy):
Illegal Immigrants Seek Scooter’s Deal
‘El Libbre’ Becomes Folk Hero, Beacon
of Hope
In
a development that could complicate the Bush administration’s position on
immigration, millions of illegal immigrants over the past few days have sought
an amnesty deal similar to the one obtained by the former chief of staff to
Vice President Dick Cheney, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. Just hours after
President George W. Bush commuted Mr. Libby’s prison sentence, news of the deal
spread like wildfire through the illegal immigrant community, inspiring many
who have sought amnesty to view Mr. Libby as a beacon of hope.
According to reports, immigration
officials across the country have been deluged in recent days by illegal aliens
willing to plead guilty to perjury in exchange for a deal similar to Mr.
Libby’s. The former chief of staff’s story has become so compelling, in fact,
that Mr. Libby himself has become something of a folk hero to illegal
immigrants across the U.S. At a café in El Paso, Texas, illegal aliens referred
to Mr. Libby reverentially as “El Libbre,” loosely translated as “the free
one.”
“If I get an amnesty deal, I will
owe it all to El Libbre.” said Juan Carmelo Gutierrez, 35, who plans to plead
guilty to perjury this week.
But “not so fast,” says White House
spokesman Tony Snow, who today tried to pour cold water on the plans of illegal
immigrants hoping to follow in Mr. Libby’s footsteps: “Before these folks
expect to get Scooter’s deal, they should ask themselves, ‘Can I cut a check
for $250,000?’”
Elsewhere, people with no lives have
stopped waiting in line for the iPhone and started waiting in line for the new
Harry Potter book.
COMIC STRIP WATCH
My
hometown newspaper, the News-Gazette, which
has maintained a solid comics section for years and studiously re-assesses it
at comparatively frequent intervals, is doing it again. “We’re looking to
replace some of our current comics that may be past their prime,” reads the
blurb that introduces the “Guest Comics” feature by which the News-Gazette aims to familiarize its
readers with an assortment of strips it is considering running in place of
those it will determine are “past their prime.” John Beck, the executive editor,
told me: “We are going to sample 9 to 12 strips over the next several months, 3
at a time for a month.” That seems to me an
More Badinage
“I always wanted to be somebody, but
I should’ve been more specific.” —Lily Tomlin
“If you’ve been in the game for 30
minutes and you don’t know who the patsy is, you’re the patsy.” —Warren Buffett
“When the facts change, I change my
mind. What do you do, sir?”—John Maynard Keynes
THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY
CONVENTION OF
THE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN EDITORIAL
CARTOONISTS
The
AAEC celebrated its golden anniversary by returning to its birthplace,
Washington, D.C. Hovering over the July 5-7 meeting at the historic Mayflower
Hotel was a fresh manifestation of the same ominous cloud that prompted the
founding of the organization in the spring of 1957—namely, the impending
extinction of the profession and the art form. It was to protest against
reports, then somewhat rampant, of the deterioration of political cartooning in
America that John Stampone, at the time editoonist for the Army Times in Washington D.C., rummaged around to drum up a cadre of cohorts to proclaim the contrary. And
editoonists have been contrary ever since.
In the dead of that winter of 1957,
Stampone had read an article from the Saturday
Review entitled “The Rise and Fall of the Political Cartoon.” The author of
the piece was Henry Ladd Smith, a professor of journalism at the University of
Wisconsin and co-author of the Prentice-Hall standard history of American
journalism, The Press and America, who, by virtue of his credentials, ought to know whereof he speaks. But
Stampone begged to differ. Actually, he thundered his disagreement by
engineering the founding of the AAEC.
The Spur to
the Founding
Smith’s
incendiary article was published three years before Stampone read it—in the May
29, 1954 issue of the Review—but
Stampone probably hadn’t read it when it came out. He said he read the article
in his office, which, if it were a typical editoonist’s office (and why
wouldn’t it be?), was likely heaped up with empty coffee cups, dirty ash trays,
dried out brushes, and scraps of paper in addition to stalagmites of magazines,
newspapers, and miscellaneous clippings, all waiting to be read. Some doubtless
never would be read. But Smith’s was. Smith began by alluding to the glory days
of American political cartooning when “almost every self-respecting daily
newspaper” had its own staff editoonist and published his daily iconoclastic
imagery on the front page, where a glimpse of it on the newsstand would so
incite the citizenry that they’d buy the paper in huge clumps. In those dear
dead days of yesteryear, newspapers delighted in making waves: they were always
going on crusades either to establish Good Things or to demolish Bad Things,
and they did it at the top of their lungs, deliberately provoking readers, making
them angry enough to Take Action (an unheard of strategy these days, when no
editor wants to make anyone angry). Not at all incidentally, this sort of
muckraking reportage sold newspapers, by clumps, as I said.
But the free-for-all glory days
began to fade in the 1920s, and by the 1930s, Smith said, three developments
had changed the front pages of newspapers dramatically. First, public issues
became complicated, too complex to be easily explained in the daily doses of
traditional newspaper journalism. Screaming headlines vanished because they
misled readers, and editors, prompted by the third circumstance (below), wanted
their readers to trust them over all other sources of information. Second,
journalism became standardized: in every city, newspapers relied upon the same
wire services for newsstories and photographs and feature material. News
reports distributed nation-wide had to be fairly tepid in their political and
social views in order to secure newspaper clients in every hamlet, subscribers
whose views might vary but who would eagerly purchase luke-warm material that
wouldn’t offend any reader’s sensibility. And third, in virtually every city,
only one newspaper remained in business. These three factors combined to reduce
the heat that newspapermen once wanted to generate with their papers. And as
editors sought a suitable tepidity, the political cartoon lost its bite.
“The modern publisher is likely to
be the owner of the only newspaper in town,” Smith wrote, assuming a
professorial tone. “He has competition he never knew before, from radio,
television, news magazines and home-delivered regional dailies, but he must
presume that his readers depend upon him for information and that his views
must be secondary in importance, and above all, temperate. Editorials express
opinion, perhaps, but usually with qualifications. Temperance and compromise
are seldom exciting, and so the editorial began to decline in emphasis and
appeal. So did the cartoon, and for the same reasons. The cartoon is strictly an
offensive weapon. Even when the cartoonist defends his hero, he usually does so
by attacking the hero’s enemies. Like any good fighter, he must put his heart
into the battle. Asking a cartoonist to attack delicately is like arguing with
a cannon to do its work without so much noise.”
In the trend towards timidity that
Smith saw all around him—then, in 1954—there was no place for the essentially
one-sided opinion mongering that is the forte of the political cartoon. Only in
a few newspapers, he claimed, could one find strenuous political cartooning.
“But who can name the cartoonist of the New
York Times, which emphasizes coverage, rather than opinion, and never
raises its voice?” So is the decline of the political cartoon of any
consequence? Nope, saith Smith: “For the political cartoon is a caricature—an
exaggeration, or inaccuracy, which should have no place in responsible
journalism. The cartoonist must tell his story in black and white, literally
and figuratively. He cannot qualify without weakening impact, and impact is
everything to a cartoonist. Yet we know that the complex issues of today can
seldom be presented in terms of black-and-white. Too much misunderstanding has
been produced by spokesmen who refuse to qualify charges. If our press is
concerned with producing light instead of heat, then the political cartoon
doesn’t deserve better.”
Smith also decried the editoonist’s
use of threadbare symbols “to tell his story quickly”—the GOP elephant, the
Democrat donkey, Uncle Sam “are a few of these overworked symbols used to
describe complicated institutions at a glance. The cartoonist manipulates these
symbols, or stereotypes, as though they were puppets. He cannot modify his
puppets without destroying the meaning he has built up around them. And so the
cartoonist ends up as the prisoner of his own creatures.” Only one task remains
legitimate for the editoonist: social satire. But, concludes Smith, that field
has already been invaded and is fully occupied by comic strip cartoonists. And
so the political cartoon is as good as dead.
The
Founding
Stampone,
understandably, was enraged by this premature obituary. That winter, with the
backing of his publisher, Melvin Ryder, he contacted other D.C. editoonists,
touting a proposal to form an association that would “encourage, develop, and
promote a greater public understanding and appreciation of the editorial page
cartoon and to sustain, encourage, further, assist, aid, promote, foster and
create a closer contact among the editorial cartoonists through mutual interests.”
Everyone he talked to was enthusiastic; thus encouraged, Stampone sent a letter
to every editorial cartoonist for whom he could find an address. By
mid-February, he knew he had a winning proposition in hand, and on February 28,
1957, he met with attorneys to incorporate an organization to be named the
Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. And within a month, Stampone
issued to fellow ink-slingers an invitation to the first meeting of AAEC, the
weekend of May 17.
Thirty-four of the 84 charter
members massed at the Statler Hotel in D.C. Only six of the roster of 84 founders are still alive, and three of
them, all now retired from their newspapers, attended the 2007 gathering: Hy Rosen, Times Union (Albany, NY); Jim
Lange, The Oklahoman (Oklahoma
City); and Jim Ivey, Washington Times, St. Petersburg Times, San
Francisco Examiner, and Orlando
Sentinel. Paul Conrad of the Los Angeles Times was too ill or too
antique to attend, as were the other two, Bob
Artley, Des Moines Tribune (who,
according to his son Steve, is 90 and still drawing), and Jon Kennedy, Arkansas
Democrat.
Yet More
Criticism circa Mid-fifties
Ivey,
curator of the Cartoon Museum in Orlando and elsewhere, editor of cARToon, and founding chairman of the
Orlando Comic-Con (1973-95), also played a role in shaking American editoonists
out of whatever complacency they might have otherwise enjoyed in that bosky
summer afternoon of the Eisenhower Years. Others besides Smith had found fault
with editorial cartooning in the U.S. In a review of the 1955 volume, Herblock’s Here and Now, the New Republic emphasized Herblock’s
superiority to all other contenders in his profession, implying thereby the
staggering inferiority of all other contenders. And in its issue for November
23, 1957, the Saturday Review launched
again into an attack on editorial cartooning with a piece by Pierce Fredericks
entitled “The Cartoonist’s Bite,” which, the author contended, was mostly
nonexistent. Ivey’s contribution to the furor was conveyed in a Newsweek report entitled “A One-Man
Crusade” that appeared in the magazine’s issue for September 14, 1959. Although
the report was published well after the founding of AAEC, it continued to rub
salt in the old wound.
Late in 1958, Ivey had earned a Reid
Foundation fellowship that sponsored him for an eight-month European tour in
order that he might examine and assess the state of political cartooning in the
Old Countries. He traveled 25,000 miles, visited 11 nations, and interviewed 55
of Europe’s best cartooners. When he got back to the U.S., he wrote a report of
his study, which Newsweek summarized.
In describing European editooning, Ivey contrasted it often to the American
brand, and the Americans didn’t come off well in comparison, which Newsweek eagerly pointed out: “European
cartoonists emphasize sharp, black-and-white contrast and simplicity of line.
‘Their cartooning,’ Ivey said, ‘has a crisp, modern look,’ contrasted with the
hoary cross-hatched traditionalism of most of the editorial-page work in this
country. Europeans make more use of caricature, and invent ‘new, imaginative
symbols. In Athens, for example, the cartoonist Demetriades draws minor politicians with blank faces to symbolize
their lack of power.’ Fewer labels are employed in their cartoons, and they
often use none at all. As French cartoonist Jean Effel told Ivey: ‘A Frenchman would feel insulted by all your
labels.’ In contrast to the dead seriousness of many U.S. cartoonists, European
cartoonists often make their political points ‘under a layer of laughter.’ The London Observer’s A.M. Abraham (Abu), rated by Ivey as Europe’s ‘most promising’
young cartoonist, explained: ‘Humor is the best weapon. It softens your
opponent and makes him easier to convert.’”
Among Ivey’s other discoveries: The
average European cartoonist’s work appears only 3-4 times a week, which gives
cartoonists time to develop strong ideas instead of forcing them, as London’s Michael Cummings said, “to use weak
ideas to fill the space.” Europe has a “great tradition of caricature,” Ivey
noted, “and the average cartoonist is a very good caricaturist.” They don’t use
symbols. “Why the use of old, out-of-date symbols?” David Low asked; “Uncle Sam is gone, as our John Bull is gone. They
are figures out of the past.” Ivey reported that he heard quite frequently the
question: “Why hasn’t the high quality of U.S. social cartooning reflected
itself in U.S. political cartooning?” There is little political cartooning in
Spain, Portugal and Turkey: the cartoonists in those countries operated under
strict government control. But in most countries, the cartoonists had greater
editorial freedom to express themselves than their American counterparts
enjoyed. England’s Victor Weisz (“Vicky” of the London Evening Standard) wondered: “By-lined columnists are given freedom to state their opinions in
America, why not cartoonists?”
In England, Ivey found the “joke”
cartoon had gained popularity—a cartoon that uses a political event “as an
excuse for a joke rather than making a comment or taking a stand on the issue.”
Many British cartoonists alternate “joke” cartoons with political statements
“for a change of pace,” Ivey supposed. “A Daily
Mirror editor told me that ‘newspapers are in the entertainment business’
and that applies even to the political cartoon. David Low said, ‘The joke
cartoon came into being because no one turned up with a political sense, with a
real grasp of politics—without which you have no genuine political cartoonist.’ Leslie Illingworth wonders if
political cartooning might not eventually become all ‘joke’ cartoons.”
As a group, English cartoonists are
very well paid, compared to their compatriots on the Continent. “The top men
are so well paid that, when taxes make further raises ridiculous, publishers
woo them with Rolls Royces, mortgage payoffs or even farms,” Ivey observed. In
other countries, editoonists typically work for several publications and/or
hold day jobs to put bread on their tables. “Financially,” Ivey concluded, “the
American political cartoonist [who usually holds a salaried staff position on
his newspaper] is in a better position than most of his European colleagues.”
By the time he had traversed several
European countries, Ivey had concluded that the American political cartoon was,
comparatively speaking, in decline. He asked the Europeans why. In Greece,
Demetriades said: “Perhaps Americans are not so interested in politics. When in
New York, I noticed people read the sports page, the comics, the headlines, and
then toss the paper away.” Britain’s Illingworth “suggested that political
cartooning is dying everywhere. With fewer partisan papers and with huge
circulation papers trying to please everyone, strong, gutty political
cartooning is getting scarcer all the time.” David Low chimed in, speaking of the political cartoonist “on two
levels: the artist (good caricature is good art) and the politician (the idea,
the stand). He believes that the first, the artist, is disappearing. ‘The
weakness of the daily paper is that it’s concerned with the distribution of ideas,
not art,’ Low said. ‘Good caricature is art. With this accent on ideas, we’ve
produced a generation that can’t draw.’”
On another occasion, quoted by Ivey,
Low elaborated, suggesting that “art” in political cartooning is more than
pictures: it is also satire. “On balance,” Low said, “this association of the
caricaturist and the popular press is perhaps an unhappy association, tending
to emasculate and stultify his art. There are still some worthy descendants of
Gillray and Daumier—though they are lamentably few in comparison with the
numbers of tame cats. Fortunately, it lies within the bones of a caricaturist
himself to decide whether he will be a mere drawer of funny pictures or a
worthy satirist; whether he will dispense cheap laughter or the ridicule that
kills; whether beneath the surface of his cartoons lies nonsense or the visible
operation of human intellect in the presentation of truth.”
Ivey rehearsed the substance of his
report in an article in Editor &
Publisher on September 26, 1959; and he repeated it again in other articles
over the next few months. In short, he made as much of crusade as he could.
Ivey’s adventure was not without an
ironic punchline, which Newsweek was
prompt in pointing out, concluding its report: “Last week, Ivey learned that a
prophet can be without honor right in his own back yard. Preparing to return to
the St. Petersburg Times after his
sabbatical, Ivey—the paper’s full-time cartoonist since 1953—was told by owner
Nelson Poynter that he would have to restrict his cartooning to local topics
and handle routine art department chores, too. With his eye on wider horizons,
Ivey promptly quit.” He was soon in San Francisco, cartooning at the Examiner.
Reading Ivey’s report, I was mildly
amazed at how contemporary some of it seemed. So many of the conditions under
which political cartoonists worked in 1959 still obtain today in the American
press. Equally amazing is the odd fact that today almost none of the criticisms
Europeans leveled at their American brethren still apply: it is as if American
editoonists took European comments to heart and reformed completely along the
lines the appraisal suggested. American political cartoons, Ivey believes, are
no longer the enfeebled brand he once joined European colleagues in criticizing.
At the banquet that closed this year’s festivities, Ivey joined the other two
attending founders on stage for brief remarks. Ivey opined that the editorial
cartooning profession is, at present, in good shape. “Not in numbers,” he said,
“but in the work. Great art, great caricatures, and a strong bite.” And later,
he wrote me: “I caught hell for my European cartooning report in 1959, but
everything I endorsed then is happening today: good art, good caricature, few
labels, strong ideas, and more freedom! U.S. editorial cartooning is in good
hands!”
Today, some of the younger
generation of editorial cartoonists, Ted
Rall most notably, have scoffed at the traditional political cartoon with
its ancient symbols and labels—the GOP elephant, the Democrat donkey, Uncle
Sam, and so on—opting instead for highly verbal cartoons. While Rall (incoming
president of AAEC, by the way) and Tom
Tomorrow and their ilk are undeniably witty commentators, they traffic
pretty heavily in irony and sarcasm, and neither irony nor sarcasm work well in
a mass market as expressions of opinion. Both can be easily misunderstood, and
American readers, on the average—taken en masse—are prone to misunderstand. As
a class, they haven’t the sophistication to grasp such esoteric devices. This
is the nation, remember, that elected George W. (“Whopper”) Bush. Twice. The
traditional device of the mainstream editorial cartoonist, the visual metaphor
and the memorable image, are blunter instruments, but they tend to lurk in the
minds of readers longer than a witticism. Herblock gave Richard Nixon a five o’clock shadow to suggest his incipient villainy,
branding Nixon forever. Ditto Joseph McCarthy. These days, GeeDubya appears frequently as a tiny figure surrounded by
menacing giants, an image that takes the measure of his incompetence. It isn’t
by accident that Rall and Tom Tomorrow thrive in the pages of alternative
newspapers, the ones with a readership presumed to be more discerning than that
of the mainstream press, but even so, the most memorable of Rall’s comments are
those that involve his image of Bush as a dictatorial general in a banana
republic.
Despite the implication of Rall’s
remarks—that editoons today are still too populated by pachyderms, domesticated
asses, and top-hatted old gents with a wispy beards—few of the mainstream
press’s cartooners use these tired symbols. And that flutter of paper labels
attached to symbolic figures like “Kick Me” placards has also diminished
noticeably. In fact, as Jim Ivey observes, today’s crop of political cartoons
looks remarkably like those European specimens that he admired five decades
ago. No wonder he approves.
Alas, professional polish and
quality do not, in the marketplace of a capitalistic society, assure survival.
The Present
Predicament
Yet Another Chapter and Verse in the Same Old Song
Much
of what Smith alleged a half-century ago about timidity (which he called
responsible objectivity) in American newspapering—reflected not only on the
papers’ front pages but on their opinion pages in both written and drawn
editorials—remains true today. Reading his 1954 essay is a startling experience
in finding the present foreshadowed precisely in the past. Today’s editorial
cartoons, however, are not, as I’ve said, quite the whimsical superfluities
Smith thought them to be. They have as much bite today as newspaper editors
allow them. Which sometimes isn’t much more than a nibble but sometimes is
quite a mouthful. It is not for artistry or argumentativeness that editorial
cartoonists are in dire straits today.
Political cartooning as a profession
is in trouble, but it’s economic not creative trouble. As a profession,
cartoonists are more accomplished these days than ever: they wield the weapons
of their craft, visual metaphor and imagery, with great skill and panache. And not since the early days of the 20th Century has so much variety in drawing style and graphic technique been on
display. But the economic peril is pervasive. Full-time staff political
cartoonists are an endangered species. Every time a newspaper loses its staff
editoonist—through death or retirement—the almost universal expectation among
the inky-fingered fraternity is that the position will not be filled. Staff
cartoonists are increasingly seen by publishers as costly luxuries. Although
daily newspapers still create a profit of 20-25%, higher than nearly every
other industry, newspapers tend to be owned by corporate entities these days,
entities on the stock market with legions of investors. Investors want ever
spiraling profits, not steady income. And newspapers, with slowly evaporating
circulation and declining advertising revenues, cannot hope to generate
increased profits; the best they can do to enhance their bottom line is to
reduce expenses. And the salaries of staff editorial cartoonists mark the most
obvious place to begin cutting expenses. To many editors, cartoonists are the
most superfluous of staff members. Newspapers still value editorial cartoons
enough to flag their opinion pages with them, but they can get all the cartoons
they need for that purpose by buying packages of syndicated cartoons, which
they can do at a cost ridiculously lower than salaries and benefits for staff
members. A package of syndicated cartoons has other advantages for editors:
consisting, usually, of the offerings of several cartoonists, they provide
newspaper editors with a range of opinions and topics to choose from. And—an
incidental benefit—since syndicated cartoons focus entirely on national issues,
none of the community moguls in a newspaper’s circulation area are likely to be
offended by syndicated cartoons.
Cartoons on local issues are
traditionally—and historically—more incendiary than cartoons on national
issues. Draw a cartoon ridiculing the mayor, and the mayor’s office phones; draw
a cartoon about the president of the U.S., and no one phones: the White House
remains mute. A newspaper giving up its staff political cartoonist forfeits a
powerful voice in commenting on local issues; but, as compensation for the
loss, editors don’t have to spend any time placating irate neighborhood
businessmen and politicians. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising to
learn that the number of full-time staff political cartoonists is smaller today
than twenty years ago. Some enthusiasts say that there were 250 full-time
editorial cartoonists in the 1970s and 1980s; and today, there are less than
80. Both numbers, I suspect, are somewhat exaggerated. Probably we never had
more than 200 full-time staff editorial cartoonists in recent decades; and today,
the number is closer to 90 than it is to 80. Still, the number is declining,
whether by leaps and bounds or by dribs and drabs. In a publication environment
of about 1,500 daily newspapers, even if full-time staff political cartoonists
numbered 100—or 200—the profession scarcely looks healthy. (See “The Numbers
Game” down the scroll.)
The faux economy of firing a staff
political cartoonist achieved unintended satire in the fate of conservative cartoonist Michael Ramirez, who was fired from the Los Angeles Times, ostensibly to save
money, but was then promptly hired by the Investors
Business Daily. A scrumptious irony.
Despite today’s dire circumstance
for political cartoonists, many newspaper editors value highly their staff
cartoonist. The Washington Post, for
instance, took a long time to find a replacement for the legendary Herblock,
but find a replacement it did: the paper clearly wanted the editorial page
clout that an outstanding editorial cartoonist could provide. Tom Toles isn’t the draftsman that
Herblock was, but Toles hits hard. The Chicago
Tribune, on the other hand, has never replaced Jeff MacNelly, who died in 2000. But even among newspapers without
staff cartoonists, the political cartoon is a fixture on the editorial page:
it’s the flag, the signal, that the newspaper’s opinions can be found here,
under this graphic banner. The power of the political cartoon has never been
seriously in question. Every editor knows how effective his cartoonist is when,
after publishing a particularly blunt cartoon on a local issue, the phones
start ringing. Perhaps the most compelling testimony to the power of editorial
cartooning took place in the aftermath of 9/11. Nearly every editorial
cartoonist commented on the disaster, creating powerful and memorable images.
And newspaper readers responded by phoning their newspapers and asking for
copies—for prints—of the cartoons. Newspapers ran off thousands of copies and
sold them, turning over the profits to charities for 9/11 victims. I haven’t
heard of a single newspaper that experienced any demand whatsoever for prints
of photographs of the horrific event. Cartoons combined a visual commemorative
with an opinion, and no other medium can achieve this effect as powerfully.
AAEC Seeks
Solutions to the Profession’s Dilemma
The
shadow under which AAEC convened this year is not quite the same as the shadow
that attended its birth fifty years ago. Then the profession was fighting for
its good name; today, it is scrambling for its very survival. And the weekend
program aimed to confront the problem with a two-part “Town Hall” meeting. The
purpose of the event was not to whine and complain about the present state of
the job market but to explore ways out of the predicament—or ways to live with
it. On Thursday, cartoonists were invited to brainstorm ideas; on Saturday,
they reconvened to assess the ideas and to determine which of them the AAEC
could adopt as a plan of action.
Among the ideas deemed the most
workable were these: Commission a poll to discover how popular editorial
cartoons are with newspaper readers; no editor, it is assumed, would willingly
cast aside a highly popular feature. Assemble a barrage of talking points for
members to use in interviews so that the case for editorial cartoons will be
made consistently and repeatedly. Individual editoonists should meet with their
editors and publishers to discuss what they, the cartoonists, can do to best
help the newspaper, thereby enlisting all concerned parties in a common cause.
Conjure up website money-making programs (selling merchandise—caps, t-shirts?)
on the supposition that “money equals power,” and with power, AAEC could
achieve more. Devise several “outreach” strategies: invite newspaper editors to
the annual AAEC convention; make presentations at the conventions of editors
and publishers; make presentations individually before educational groups and
at schools (particularly at journalism schools); solicit comments of support
from prominent personages outside the profession (Paris Hilton? Does she read?);
give an annual award to an editor or publisher who best demonstrates an
appreciation for what political cartoons do in the journalistic enterprise.
AAEC already supports a “Cartoons for the Classroom”effort at its website (www.editorialcartoonists.com) wherein suggestions are made about
how political cartoons can enrich teaching in classrooms at various levels.
Many ideas assumed that it is the
general public, or the newspaper reading public, that needs to be educated
about the worth of editorial cartoons. With that in mind, individual
cartoonists were urged to see that their newspapers publicize any beneficial
effects on the community produced by a series of editorial cartoons. Some
suggested that AAEC hire a public relations person to tout political
cartooning. Another suggestion was based upon the “Cartoonapalooza” event held
the evening before the convention—a panel of editoonists made presentations to
an general public audience and responded to questions. Despite faulty
publicity, the event was well attended by an enthusiastic audience. Which
seems, on its face, to indicate such efforts to involve the general public are
pointless: we already know this body of people likes editorial cartoons—what’s
the education to achieve? And even if the general population weren’t already
fans of cartoons and emerged from such events as enthusiastic fans, what could
they do for editoonists in a newspaper environment that is being run by bean
counters and Wall Street investors? Would even a public fanatic about editoons
achieve the objective imagined by Kevin
“KAL” Kallaugher of the CAI/New York Times Syndicate, who noted wryly: “At
the end of the day, when a newspaper has only five people working for it, we
want one of the five to be a cartoonist.”
The appeal of the political cartoon
has never been at issue in the current crisis. Every editor knows that
cartoons—specifically, comic strips—are a vital ingredient in the newspaper.
The comics page has been, since its inception over a century ago, one of the
most popular of a paper’s pages. A newspaper could achieve a substantial saving
by simply giving up its funnies. A week’s worth of comic strips—say 30
individual titles—dailies and Sunday, cost a minimum of $30,000 a year for a
newspaper of modest circulation; the big city newspapers budget three times
that figure for a comics section. Yet none of these papers have, yet,
contemplated discontinuing comic strips: what with the popularity of comics
among readers, giving them up would be nearly suicidal. It’s only the staff
editorial cartoonist who is being killed in the current economic maneuvering.
But the popularity of the cartoons he/she produces is not much in question; if
it were, none of those syndicate packages would still be around.
Suspiciously, none of the “Town
Hall” suggestions came face-to-face with that 8,000-pound primate skulking in
the hallway—the syndicated political cartoon. No one suggested that a solution
to the problem of the shrinking ranks of editoonists could be found by exploiting
a hoary economic mechanism, the relationship between supply and demand. The way
to enhance and preserve the staff position of editorial cartoonist is to
increase the demand for the staff editorial cartoonist. And one way to increase
the demand is to dry up the supply that encroaches from places other than the
drawing board of the staff editoonist—namely, nationally syndicated political
cartoons. If a newspaper editor could not obtain a suitable editorial cartoon
from a package of cartoons sent to him by a syndicate, he would have to resort
to his own staff, among which, he’d be likely, under the circumstance we’re
imagining, to include an editorial cartoonist. Nobody mentioned this otherwise
obvious tactic because the room was full of staff editorial cartoonists who are
also syndicating their cartoons nation-wide. Most of those who are syndicated
think of syndication as one of their profession’s career goals: an editoonist
who achieves national syndication gains a little extra money and a measure of
prestige. Syndication becomes, in effect, a stamp of approval, a badge of
acceptance and status. Why would anyone give up the added prestige that
national circulation yields? I have no answer for that; and neither did anyone
in the room. Wiley Miller once suggested (see Opus 174) that if syndicated
editoonists would not give up syndication, they should at least conspire with
their syndicates to increase the fees that subscribing papers pay. At present,
newspapers can obtain a package of several cartoons a week for pittance, $30,
$50, even $200-300, depending upon the paper’s circulation and the fame and
status of the cartoonist whose work is being rented. Even at the higher end of
the pay scale, the rate is low. If a paper had to pay more, then the economic
compulsion to abandon a staff editoonist in favor of a cheap assortment would
be reduced. Not eliminated, alas, but reduced. Probably, however, the reduction
would not be enough to stem the tide of editors abandoning staff editoonists in
favor of syndicated “employees.”
It may be impossible to increase the
demand for a staff editorial cartoonist by reducing the supply of extra-mural
cartoons, but all is not lost: it is possible to enhance the value of the staff
editoonist—or at least sustain the value of the position— without tinkering
with the laws of supply and demand at all. And as it happens, cartoons are
constituted in almost exactly the ways that lend themselves easily to
heightening their value to a newspaper. But newspaper people would have to
change the way they think about the Internet Crisis in order to realize that
enhancement.
Print media have reacted to the
advent of the Internet by using the Web as a supplementary adjunct. Newsweek and other national
magazines—and newspapers—almost routinely include notices attached to various
articles that tell readers they can find out more about the subject at hand by
visiting the publication’s website. Print media think they are adapting to the
future with this tactic, but the mindlessness that results in this reaction to
a new and menacing technology is boggling. Newspapers and all print media are
threatened by the Internet, so the sensible reaction is to refer their readers
to the Internet? What’s sensible about that? At a time when print media verges
on the brink of extinction, the print media react by encouraging the use of the
technology that threatens it. A more sensible—and strategic—reaction, it seems
to me, would be to use the Internet to refer interested persons to the print
vehicle. Since “everybody” is using the Internet as the chief source of news
and information, the strategy ought to be to treat the Internet as the gateway
to the print medium, to capture the Internet users and re-direct their
attention to print. “If you want to find out more about this topic, buy a copy
of Name of Local Newspaper, where we are devoting pages to a discussion of this
subject.”
The cartoon is wonderfully suited to
fit into such a strategy. An editorial cartoonist could produce, say, a
four-panel cartoon—a comic strip with a satirical message; the first three
panels could be available on the newspaper’s website, but to see the last
panel, the one with the punchline, the viewer would have to get the day’s
paper, wherein the whole four panels would be published. A single-panel
editorial cartoon could be devised with the same tactic: put the picture up on
the website, but the verbiage, the text that explains the picture and gives it
its satirical impact, would appear with the picture only in the print venue.
A species of low-tech light-labor
animation could also be deployed to seduce readers into buying the print
version. Once the cartoonist has produced the “print version,” he then puts a
piece of tracing paper over it, and traces the outlines of the drawing.
Periodically, as he draws, a camera records the emergence of the lines on
paper—photographing just the changing linear image, not the cartoonist’s hand.
Almost everyone is fascinated by the act of drawing and loves to watch an
artist draw, so this maneuver would capitalize on this fascination by
presenting, in effect, a drawing that is drawing itself as we watch. But when
the outline is completed, a faux caption appears: “To see how this drawing is
captioned, consult today’s Name of Newspaper.” Animation and seduction in the
same maneuver.
But it’s likely to be a while before
any such mechanisms are in place. It’ll be a while before we recognize the flaw
in the ointment of the website adjunct. We are not, as a culture—or as a
cartooning profession, embedded in that culture—likely to see the suicidal
hazard of sending readers of print media to the Internet for “more
information.” We tend not to see the obvious. It took a century for us to see
the folly in the manufacture of train locomotives. For generations, the makers of
locomotives put the steam-generating boiler at the very front of the vehicle.
With the need for more power, the boilers got larger and larger. Finally, they
were so huge that the engineers steering the train could not see the tracks in
front of them because the massive boiler blotted out the view. And so the
cabins for locomotives were designed to stick out on the sides, so engineers
could see “around” the boiler in front of them to the tracks beyond. A
solution, yes, but awkward in the extreme. Finally, some gifted soul realized
that the boiler didn’t need to be at the front of the locomotive:
steam-generated power was powerful enough to pull the train even if its boiler
were located behind the engineers’ cabin in the locomotive. So the engineers’
cabin was moved up to the very front of the locomotive, where it ought to have
been all along, where engineers would have an unimpeded view of the track ahead
of them. And why wasn’t the giant boiler located behind the cabin to begin
with? Because of horses. In a horse-drawn society like that which was invaded
by the railroad’s locomotive, the horse—the pulling power—was in front of the
load. That’s the nature of a horse-drawn society. In some crucial ways, we’re
still in a horse-drawn society. So, it wouldn’t surprise me if newspapers took
awhile yet to realize that they’re committing suicide every time they send
readers to their websites.
The Rest of
the Program
This
year’s AAEC convention was attended by 132 of the association’s 392 members, or
exactly a third of the membership—a more than respectable turn-out. A sterling
performance. By comparison, at the convention in May of the larger cartooner
group, the National Cartoonists Society (548 members strong), only 145
cartoonists were pre-registered—or 26%, a respectable showing in the world of
membership organization conventions but nothing to rave about. In both
meetings, the membership attendance is doubled by accompanying wives and
children; at the D.C. AAEC gathering, the total reached almost 250 persons.
“The real legacy of the AAEC is its
conventions,” said Rob Rogers, the current president, who editoons for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “Most of us
work in one-newspaper cities with one staff cartooning position. There aren’t a
lot of chances to bond with other cartoonists during the year.”
The bonding, this year as in
previous years, takes place in an assortment of social gatherings and formal
presentations over the three-day convention. In sessions during the days,
editoonists considered a variety of topics from stereotyping with caricature to
blogging to the so-called “war in Iraq” to animating political cartoons on the
Web. And at a special adjacent event, the annual dinner of the Cartoonists
Rights Network, a South African cartoonist was given the Courage in Editorial
Cartooning Award, and at the banquet finale on Saturday evening, Dick Locher,
who does political cartoons and Dick
Tracy for the Tribune Media Services, presented the Locher Award for
excellence in college editorial cartooning.
Many cartoonists now spend time
blogging. Tom Tomorrow (aka Dan
Perkins), one of the first to start blogging, believes a blog builds a
“personal relationship with an audience,” but he also regrets the hours that
blogging can consume, taking him away from his drawing board. Lee Judge (Kansas City Star) runs a blog of mostly the rough sketches for the
cartoons that were rejected by his editors.
At a session on stereotyping with
caricature, the typical American cartoon portrayal of Arabs and Muslims was
decried. The image of Americans has also suffered throughout the world, due,
chiefly, to the Bush League’s warlike action in the Middle East. Joe Szabo, president of Witty World
International Features, reported on an informal survey he’d conducted, asking
people to list “good” and “bad” words for Americans; among the latter,
“expansionist,” “hypocritical,” “materialistic,” “self-absorbed,” “landfill,”
and “political whorehouse.” In many Muslim countries, he added, the U.S. is
seen as a pawn of the much-hated Israel. Mideastern cartoonists typically
portray the U.S. in grossly unflattering terms, Szabo said, citing as examples
an image of the Statue of Liberty stomping on a globe of the world and a
picture of U.S. soldiers dragging one of their victims along the ground, his
blood forming the stripes in the American flag.
At the same session, Flemming Rose, the Danish newspaper
editor whose commissioning of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad precipitated
rioting and bloodshed in the streets of Islam, made several pungent comments
about the state of journalism and cartooning. “The only right we don’t have,”
he said, emphasizing the negative, “is the right not to be offended.” He said a
distinction must be drawn between “good manners” and “self-censorship,” but “by
not publishing the Mohammad cartoons [once they had become news], U.S.
newspapers gave the impression that the cartoons were far more offensive than
they were.” Journalism was not well served by such timidity. One American
editor told Rose that he didn’t print any of the cartoons because he had
reporters in the Mideast, and he didn’t want to risk their becoming targets for
extremists. The principles of journalism would be better sustained, Rose said,
if the editor had given that as his reason for declining to publish the
cartoons—instead of claiming his paper was simply exercising good taste out of
a desire not to offend devotees of another religion.
Another panel presentation was
entitled “What’s So Funny about War?” Cartoons done by cartoonists in the
Mideast continued to portray the U.S. in quite unflattering ways. One cartoon
showed Uncle Sam painting a portrait of two people standing before him—one is
holding a pistol to the other’s head; in Uncle Sam’s portrait, the pistol has
been transformed into a flower. A powerful visual indictment of the duplicity
of the Bush League propaganda machinery. Signe
Wilkinson (Philadelphia Daily News) showed slides of some of her cartoons—all bitterly anti-war. In a two-panel
cartoon, the first panel depicts GeeDubya saying, “We shoulder every cost, bear
every burden, to bring democracy to Iraq!” In the next panel, a soldier
carrying a wounded or dead comrade on his shoulders, says, “Umm ... when you
say ‘we’...”
In another cartoon, a busload of tourists taking the “Taliban Tour of Afghanistan”
is being lectured by the tour guide, who says, “Unlike you in the decadent
West, we don’t need to bomb abortion clinics.” As he talks, the bus drives by a
mound of rocks upon which is posted a sign: Stoned for Adultery. In another, a
pencil sketch, a character proposes a toast heavy with contradictory irony:
“Here’s a health to the next one that dies.”
Another of the panelists at the same
presentation offered a somewhat different view. David Axe, whose graphic novel War
Fix reveals him as unabashedly addicted to war, now bills himself as a war
correspondent and is doing gag cartoons about soldiers in Iraq. If he doesn’t
think war itself is funny, he is nonetheless able to find humor in this most
bleak and grim of human conditions. So
did Bill Mauldin, but Axe is not Mauldin: Axe writes the cartoons; he doesn’t
draw them. Ted Rall, who rounded out
the panel for this session, is another outspoken critic of the Iraq fiasco and
is angry at Americans generally for their nonchallant acceptance of the war and
their ignorance of its conditions and the cultures it is disrupting.
Not in attendance for the panel
presentation but present nonetheless was Vaughn Larson, a cartoonist at The Review in Sheboygan County,
Wisconsin, who is currently deployed as a platoon sergeant with his National
Guard unit in Iraq. Rob Rogers interviewed Larson, transcribed it, and passed
out copies of it during the session. In his spare time, Larson does cartoons
for his paper and occasionally gets into Stars
and Stripes. “My original intent,” he explained, was to depict ‘soldier
moments’ from our deployment, similar to what Bill Mauldin did with Willie and
Joe.” But he finds himself so close to some issues that he’s afraid he’ll sound
strident. “It’s hard not to take some issues personally, like Congressional
maneuvers over funding or timelines on the war, or U.S. Senator Harry Reid
declaring that the surge has failed just as all the soldiers have been put in
place.” Cartooning is a form of relaxation for him, Larson said: “when I am on
multiple-day missions in Iraq, I bring a small notebook to sketch ideas in.
When I have time later on, I try to flesh those ideas out into cartoons. Keep
in mind that I don’t see much of the Iraq War that you draw in your cartoons,”
he continued, addressing his civilian brethren. “The enemy I know is cowardly
and not prone to face us on a traditional battlefield. He will dress as a
civilian, or coerce civilians into placing his roadside bombs to hurt or kill
U.S. and coalition troops. The enemy is not stupid, but he is not honorable,
either. Also keep in mind that a gripe from a soldier, sailor airman or Marine
is not necessarily indicative of sentiment at ground level. This is a tough
job, if for no other reason that it puts us in a hot desert far away from
family and friends. Many of us will complain about the food or living
conditions (which are pretty good for the most part, by the way) and express a
strong desire to be back home (can you blame us?), but that is not the same as
being critical of the decision to be here. We agreed to serve in the military
for a number of different reasons. We understand that we don’t gt to pick and
choose the military conflicts we serve in. Most of us just want to do a good
job and go home in one piece. Most of us are proud to be in the military, and
to serve our country. So please be careful when you assign troops as proxies
for your own opinions in your cartoons.”
Larson also suggested that
editoonists cut back on the use of flag-draped coffins as visual metaphors. If used too often, the metaphor
loses its power. But flag-draped coffins also means something more than death
to soldiers in the field. “It may sound like that Vietnam War cliche—‘You
weren’t there, man; you don’t know!—but veterans recognize and honor the
sacrifice involved in being at war. There can be resentment even toward other
members of the military who served honorably but never set foot in a theater of
war, or never ventured onto the battlefield. And there is a definite gap in
perspectives between veterans and many cartoonists—for example, my beef with
the flag-draped coffin cartoons has just as much to do with the fact that I, or
someone I know, may still go home in one as [it has with] my empathy for the
families and friends of the fallen.”
Larson’s unit conducts convoy
security missions, and he has seen his share of comrades wounded by roadside
bombs. But he soldiers on. “My overall opinion on the war has not changed,” he
said, “we need to finish the job we started. Granted, that job has become more
difficult, but quitting is not only dangerous: it would be dishonorable.”
For many editoonists who see their
profession on the brink of dissolution, the Web is seen as the last refuge of
the species. And the Web means animation. During a panel on animation, three
cartoonists presented samples of their work. Mark Fiore, called by fellow panelist Walt Handelsman, “the Jeff MacNelly of our day,” was perhaps the
first editoonist to animate political cartoons and subsequently make a living
at it by self-syndicating his work to a small list of newspapers that use his
cartoons on their websites. “I’ve always loved animation,” he said, but he
disliked the layers of laborers that typical animation studios breed. “Then I
stumbled into Flash animation,” he said, “and found that I loved doing that
more than print cartoons.” With Flash animation, Fiore is virtually a one-man
show.
He produces one animation a week,
aiming for Wednesday delivery. He begins with a storyboard, then goes to final
art—which is produced the old-fashioned way, with a brush on paper; then
scanned into his computer. Along the way, he engages friends to voice the
cartoon and, very often, adds music and sometimes song lyrics, which he must
write himself. It’s a complex creative challenge for a single artistic
intelligence, but much as he enjoys the challenge, Fiore can see down the road
that he might be employing others if the demand for his product grows. Noting
that many newspapers want their editoonist to try animation, Fiore cautioned against
doing it “unless you love it.”
“Mark is a trailblazer,” Handelsman
said. He taught himself to use Flash while also doing a cartoon for print at Newsday, and the portfolio he submitted
to the Pulitzer committee last winter included several animations. When
Handelsman won, many saw his win as a foot-in-the-door for animated political
cartooning. His animations, like Fiore’s, were both funny and inciteful (pun
intended) satire.
The third panelist, Kevin “KAL” Kallaugher, who accepted a
buy-out in lieu of being laid off at the Baltimore
Sun last year, went into motion-capture technology with his “digital Dubya”
puppet. David Astor at Editor &
Publisher described KAL’s method: “The cartoonist first sculpted an image
of George W. Bush using clay and other material, after which the image was
scanned and painstakingly digitized. The presidential puppet can be animated in
real time: at a 2006 ‘press conference,’ KAL and assistants manipulated
joysticks that made Dubya ‘answer’ questions. All this time, quipped KAL, Bush
thought Karl Rove was his puppeteer.” Because motion-capture animation permits
“real time” performances, it’s possible to produce a weekly show, and KAL is
now working up a half-hour satire for television.
The
Distinguished Guest Speaker Roster
The
AAEC program included several events at which notables who are not cartoonists
spoke. At Thursday’s luncheon at the offices of the Washington Post, Dana Priest, one of the reporters who broke the
story of neglected outpatients at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, thanked
cartoonists for keeping the scandal in the spotlight. “Your work provided the
cultural cement that embedded the story in the country’s psyche,” she said.
“You put the punctuation mark on the sentences we constructed.” As reported in E&P, she also said she regretted the
failure of the press to be more skeptical of GeeDubya’s war plans in 2002.
“Look what happened when we didn’t push hard enough on WMD before the War,” she
said.
That evening, AAEC convened at the
American University’s Katzen Arts Center where a display of Dubya attack
cartoons was on exhibition under the title that looked suspiciously as if it
had been misapprehended from This Colyum: “Bush Leaguers: Cartoonists Take on
the White House.” The speaker, Helen
Thomas, once the queen of White House correspondents and now a syndicated
columnist, minced no words in her scornful description of the Bush League,
which, she said, is now “running on empty and heading for collapse.” The
invasion and occupation of Iraq, “—which didn’t attack us—was illegal, immoral,
and unconscionable. George W. Bush struck a match inflaming the whole Mideast,
and no one has laid a glove on bin Laden.” In Astor’s E&P report, she said, “I can’t think of one good thing Bush has
done,” adding that she’s appalled that Bush doesn’t seem to be losing sleep at
night about how disastrous things are in Iraq. Thomas didn’t spare the news
media either. “I do believe journalists have let the country down. They were
cowed, and afraid to be called unpatriotic. The real journalists are the
editorial cartoonists who don’t fear the truth.”
During a short question-and-answer
period, Thomas was asked why she thought more Americans weren’t outraged about
Bush. “There’s no draft,” she said. “People don’t feel personally affected by
the war.”
In response to other questions, she
told several anecdotes about the Presidents she’s covered in decades of
Washington journalism. She recalled the time that Lyndon Johnson, who affected
a simple country boy persona, was presented with the draft of a speech that
included a quotation attributed to Voltaire. Johnson scratched out the
scholarly attribution and wrote in “as my dear old daddy used to say.”
At the luncheon the next day,
columnist Mark Shields riddled the room with one-liners in a practiced stand-up
fashion. He joked that his fellow political pundit, Robert Novak, with whom
Shields has had a long association on CNN, couldn’t be with him at the AAEC
meeting because “Friday is his day to get his rabies shot.” About John Kerry as
a presidential candidate, Shields quipped that he “was so unexciting that his
Secret Service code name was John Kerry.”
But Shield’s thesis wasn’t funny.
“This is singularly the most incompetent administration across the board,” he
said of the Bush League. “No one who has served in this administration has been
enhanced by the experience.”
He continued: “Those in power today
are totally divorced from those in peril.” Only one of the 500-plus members of
Congress has a child in the enlisted ranks. “War demands equality of
sacrifice,” Shields went on, quoted in E&P.
“This is the only war in history fought without a draft and with six tax cuts.
We should be ashamed that all the burden and suffering are being borne by less
than one percent of the population.” And this observation led Shields to Darth
Cheney, who enjoyed five deferments to avoid serving in Vietnam but who seems
the most bellicose of the Bush Leaguers. “The Bush administration was guilty of
a lack of planning on Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War,” Shields said, “but
when it comes to bird flu, the Vice President has a solution—bomb the Canary
Islands.”
Americans, Shields said, are
typically both optimistic and pragmatic, but he finds the optimism fading. “For
the first time, a plurality of Americans believe their children’s lives will
not be as rich and full as their own lives.” But they will look at the 2008
presidential candidates and hope to find an optimistic pragmatist. Hillary
Clinton, Shields said, represents for many a pragmatic politician; Barack Obama
seems to embody optimism.
Ronald Reagan was the most
optimistic politician Shields could remember. If Reagan were brought into a
room full of manure, the columnist averred, he would immediately grab a shovel
and start digging—knowing that there would be a pony under all the shit.
At Saturday night’s banquet, the
guest speaker was presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, a liberal Congressman
from Ohio and former boy mayor of Cleveland. His speech pleased editoonist and
syndicate mogul Daryl Cagle, who
wrote appreciatively: “I was surprised and impressed with Kucinich because his
whole speech was written for the cartoonists. That might seem to be a natural
thing to do when speaking to editorial cartoonists, but almost all of the
politicians who speak to us only say a couple of sentences about cartoons and
then launch into their regular stump speeches. Kucinich clearly was a political
cartoon fan; he knew his cartoons and cartoonists, and he showed respect for
and interest in our profession that we seldom see from politicians.” Moreover,
after the banquet, “he came up to the hospitality suite with us as we drank
ourselves into our nightly ’toon-stupors—another thing politicians rarely do
after their speeches.”
At the beginning of his speech,
Kucinich promised that if he is elected President, “I’ll ask Congress to pass a
law requiring every newspaper to hire an editorial cartoonist.” Quoted in E&P, he said he had seen a secret
document indicating that Cheney wants to amend the Patriot Act to get ink,
pens, and paper classified as weapons of mass destruction. “He knows what
you’ve been doing,” the Ohioan said, “—I can protect you!” Lagging
significantly in the polls, he begged the assembled ’tooners to draw cartoons
about him
In the Q&A session afterwards,
Kucinich was forced to be serious by the questions. Steve Kelley (New Orleans
Times Picayune), who claimed to be only one point behind Kucinich in the
polls—“and I’m not even running”—asked why Kucinich feels he should be in the
White House. Kucinich reminded us that he has 40 years of political experience,
including more than a decade in Congress, plus his term as mayor of a major
city. In answer to another question, Kucinich said he believes in “security
through peace.” Astor’s E&P report
summarized: “He said the U.S. needs to defend itself when necessary, but also
needs more diplomacy and less ‘us versus them’ saber-rattling. He added that
Americans and their government leaders need to remember that the hundreds of
thousands of Iraqis killed since the U.S. invasion were human beings with the
same hopes and dreams as everyone else.” And he referred to his recent trip to
Iraq during which he met Iraqis who took him to the graves of their sons and
daughters, killed in the hostilities. “The world is ready for an America that
will open its heart again,” he said.
Earlier in the evening, Dick Locher presented the John Locher
Memorial Award (named for Locher’s son, a promising artist, who died too young)
to Kory Merritt of the State
University of New York at Brockport. Later, asked what had become of the
previous winners, Locher said that 13 of the 21 winners have full-time jobs as
editorial cartoonists, an astonishing statistic that suggests the profession
isn’t in as much trouble as nearly everyone in it says it is.
Other awards that evening included
the coveted Ink Bottle Award for good deeds and the Golden Spike Award for the
best cartoon killed by an editor. The Herb Block Foundation received one of the
former in recognition of the grants it has extended to AAEC; another Ink Bottle
was awarded posthumously to Jay Kennedy, the King Features editor who drowned a few months ago. The Golden Spike went to Nate Beeler of the Washington Examiner, whose cartoon
depicted GeeDubya saying that “artificial deadlines embolden the enemy,”
accompanied by a drawing of several soldiers with artificial limbs, which also
embolden the enemy.
Preserving
Cartoonists’ Rights Around the Globe
On
Friday evening, most of the AAEC membership donated to the coffers of the
Cartoonists Rights Network, International, by buying a ticket to the CRNI’s
Annual Awards Dinner, held this year at the National Press Club. CRNI was
started in about 1992 by Robert “Bro” Russell, whose travels around the world
to various trouble spots made him aware of the plight of editorial cartoonists
in many countries where oppressive regimes seek to silence all dissenting
voices. Cartoonists are particularly vulnerable because their “damned pictures”
can speak to the masses of often illiterate audiences in Third World countries.
Russell found that cartoonists are frequently threatened, intimidated, beaten,
imprisoned, “disappeared,” and, on occasion, assassinated for expressing their
opposition. Russell slowly formed CRNI in the fashion of Doctors Without
Borders and a kindred group, Journalists Without Borders. A sort of
counter-pressure group, CRNI has monitored and been active in the resolution of
over 47 cases of free speech abuses against editorial cartoonists in 14
countries since 1992. The chief strategy has been to publicize cases in which
cartoonists have been threatened and attacked in the conviction that an
authoritarian government is less likely to proceed against a cartoonist if it
knows it’s being watched. In 2000, CRNI created the Award for Courage in
Editorial Cartooning “in order to bring the world’s attention to the dangers
many editorial cartoonists face every day int heir fight to freely express
their opinions.” Russell is CRNI’s Executive Director, and its Board of
Directors includes notable American editoonists Joel Pett (President; Lexington
Herald Leader), Keven “KAL”
Kallaugher, Signe Wilkinson, and Steve Benson (Arizona Republic). This year the Courage Award went to South Africa’s Jonathan Shapiro, “Zapiro,” of the Cape Times.
Zapiro’s crime was to ridicule the
former Deputy President of South Africa, Jacob Zuma. Zuma is virtually assured
of the Presidency in the 2008 election if he gets the nomination of the famed
ANC party, which dominates South African politics. Unfortunately, in 2006, Zuma
became embroiled in a scandal when he was arrested and charged with rape.
During testimony at the ensuing trial, it seems the woman Zuma allegedly
attacked was HIV positive. When Zuma was asked by the court if he was worried
about getting infected himself, he said, No—that he had showered after having
sex with her. He was eventually acquitted when the court determined that the
woman hadn’t struggled enough to be able to claim she’d been forced to have
sex. Zuma resigned as Deputy President and is awaiting court appearances on
charges of corruption, but he is still seeking the ANC nomination for
President. While the rape trial was taking place, Zapiro drew cartoons
ridiculing Zuma. One of them showed Zuma naked but “wearing” a shower head that
sprinkled him as he wandered around, brandishing an automatic rifle. Zuma was
enraged and, maintaining that his reputation had been besmirched by the
cartoons, sued Zapiro’s paper for $25 million. Zapiro was scarcely fazed, and
neither was the Cape Times: after the
lawsuit had been filed, Zapiro did a few more cartoons making fun of Zuma. During dinner, I sat next to Nik
Kowsar, an Iranian cartoonist now living in Canada. Although educated as a
geologist, Kowsar made his living in Iran as a cartoonist—and a good living it
was: the equivalent, he told me, of $100,000 a year. He drew for three
different newspapers, going every day from one office to another in succession.
Five years ago, he was arrested. Because of the views he expressed in his
cartoons, he was suspected of being in a cell of revolutionaries. “Being
arrested in Iran is not good,” he said, eyebrows raised quizzically. He was
tortured to divulge the names of the others in the dissident cell he was
alleged to be a member of. Since he wasn’t in such an organization, he could
reveal nothing. But when he was again at liberty, he was so fearful for his
life that he fled the country, and CRNI was instrumental (in some unspecified
way) in getting him to Canada, where he is now working on a newspaper and
taking courses in journalism. Kowsar received the CRNI Courage Award several
years ago, and his story has, for the moment, a happy ending: he was
particularly jubilant during our conversation because he and his family, his
wife and children, have just been reunited in Canada—“after four years,” he
kept saying, holding up four fingers.
Here are some of Your Reporter’s scribbles, made on-the-spot, and some photographs of the attending dignitaries.
THE NUMBERS GAME
About
a hundred years ago when the number of daily newspapers was more than twice
today’s total of 1,500, many ran political cartoons on their front pages. But
my guess is that the number of full-time staff political cartoonists never
approached 3,000. The key qualifier is “full-time”: many of the front page
cartoons in yesterday’s newspapers were drawn by staff cartoonists whose
assignment included a wide range of decorative and artistic endeavors, and they
did an editorial cartoon occasionally as one of those many assignments.
The diminishing number of full-time
staff editorial cartoonists has been rumored in alarm more often than proved
with facts in recent years. But just as it was openly acknowledged on the front
page of USA Today for June 14, 2005
that global warming is a scientifically demonstrable fact no longer just a
politically sponsored urban legend, so is it a demonstrable fact that there are
fewer editoonists working full-time today than, say, five years ago. The exact
number of this endangered species is still at issue, but the number is surely
smaller now than it was. Writing in the Winter 2004 issue of Nieman Reports, J.P. Trostle, editor of the AAEC newsletter, The Notebook, and of the AAEC showcase collection of editorial
cartoonist biographies and cartoons, Attack
of the Political Cartoonists, opined that there were "fewer than 90
cartoonists working full time" as political commentators in American
newspapers. However, if we consider the number of part-time editoonists (those
who work in newspaper art departments and occasionally draw an editorial
cartoon or whose cartoons appear in weekly newspapers), Trostle estimates the
number at 234 "regularly published" editoonists. That's somewhat
comforting, but is the number of full-timers smaller now than it has been?
V.
Cullum Rogers, the estimable long-time secretary-treasurer of AAEC and a
dedicated student of the medium, once attempted on the AAEC listserv an answer
by reviewing various articles about the profession that appeared at intervals
between 1956 and 2003. If an estimate in a Time magazine cover story about Bill Mauldin in 1957 (July 21) is accurate, Rogers calculated that there were "at
least" 1,143 full-time editorial cartoonists in 1900. Time's estimate was the dubious assertion, without documentation,
that "most" of the nation's 2,285 daily newspapers in 1900 had a
staff editoonist, implying that the job was a full-time position—an implication
that Rogers finds extremely doubtful. The 1,143 figure is one more than
half—ergo, "most" or a simple majority. More realistically, we might
guess that a quarter of the nation's newspapers had a staff editorial
cartoonist, who probably also did other kinds of drawing in the paper; that's
571 'tooners, a smaller but thoroughly respectable number. Later in the
article, Time asserts that there
were, then, in 1957, 119 staff editoonists in the nation, an 80% reduction in
the ranks over a half-century, again without giving any source for the figure.
In 1956, the New York Times asserted
that there were 275 full-time editoonists, again without citing a source. In a
1980 cover story about Jeff MacNelly (October 11), Newsweek claimed there
were 170—still, without documentation. In 1997, Rogers himself tried to
ascertain, for once and all, how many there were, drawing upon his knowledge of
AAEC membership and various other factors; he determined that there were 154.
By 2003, he'd adjusted the number to suit the facts as he then perceived
them—dropping it to 100 "pure, full-time editorial cartooning jobs at U.S.
newspapers" ("jobs" not cartoonists; so the number does not
include Pat Oliphant or Ted Rall or Ann Telnaes, none of whom work at newspapers). The progression of
the numbers, then, is as follows: 1900–1,143 (or, maybe, 571); 1956–275;
1957–119; 1980–170; 1997–154; 2003–100.
Whatever the exact numbers, it's
inarguable that there are fewer today than there were a hundred years ago—or
fifty years ago. Or, even, ten years ago. Editooner Milt Priggee, who has been freelancing for several years after
losing his berth at the Spokane
Spokesman-Review, maintains a website at www.miltpriggee.com where he posts
the names of newspapers that haven't filled staff editoonist vacancies in
recent years. The vacancies appear as a parade of coffins (click on Cartoons,
then Animation, then Paul Revere). To-date, Priggee's posted nearly four dozen
of these zombies—nearly four dozen fewer political cartooning jobs today than
ten years ago. Among them, most conspicuously, the Chicago Tribune, where MacNelly's slot has been empty since his
death in June 2000 despite the paper's claim that it is still looking for the
perfect successor. In one of the grander ironies of the age, in January 2004,
the Tribune mounted a "permanent
exhibit" of MacNelly's work on the 24th floor of the Tribune Tower as
"a reflection of the esteem in which Jeff was held here." To which Mike Ritter, AAEC president at the
time, responded: "Putting up a cartoon show as a permanent exhibit but not
hiring a new cartoonist comes off as a tombstone more than anything else."
(A month ago, Ritter's paper, the East
Valley Tribune near Phoenix, laid him off, and he hasn't been seen or heard
from since.)
VISITING THE SEAT OF GOVERNMENT
On
Sunday, I had a few hours in Washington before my plane was scheduled to leave,
so I strolled along the Mall to the Capitol, thinking I’d like to go in, stand
in the Rotunda and look up, and then visit the Hall of Statues to look at
Charlie Russell again. Nothing extravagant. Just a sentimental visit. As I
approached the front of the building, I noticed there were suspiciously few
people in sight. Mostly security guards, looking furtively over their shoulders
for marauding Islamic hostiles. I asked the security guard at the foot of the
steps if I could go in. He said, No. The only way to get into the Capitol
building these days is to be part of a tour group, he told me. Well, that’s it
then: citizens can no longer just walk in whenever they want and see
“their”government at work. So it’s effectively no longer “our” government, the
government of the people, by the people, and for the people. It belongs to
someone else, and it works unobserved. In secret. The terrorists have won.
BELL RINGERS
A few weeks ago, I slipped through a sentence that glibly dropped an aside about how savage British political cartoonists are these days. Now comes the proof in the form of a sample of the oeuvre of Steve Bell, who cartoons at the Guardian. In the Preface to a 1994 collection of Bell’s cartoons, Tony Benn wrote: “In Steve Bell, we have a cartoonist whose instinctive radicalism places him clearly on the side of the poor and the oppressed, and against the might of the rich and powerful—be it the President of the USA or the Conservative Government. His cartoons are dark, pessimistic and cynical, a vision emphasized by his distinctive use of heavy shading, coils of black smoke, and bleak landscapes. ... Nothing is sacrosanct in Bell’s cartoons. The horrible image of the burnt corpse of an Iraqi soldier sitting upright in the turret of his tank is used to shocking effect; and Bell neatly epitomizes the irony of environmentally-conscious America as it sends missiles labelled ‘phosphate free’ and ‘not-tested-on-animals’ into the Gulf War. ... It is against the background of Thatcherism, the break-up of the Soviet Union and the ‘New World Order’ imposed by American power that Steve Bell—one of the most biting and successful cartoonists of his generation—has to be viewed.” The accompanying gallery comes from the Tony Blair era, not the Margaret Thatcher period, and by this time, Bell is using color dramatically, tinting every picture in blood, gore, and human excrement. Writing in the Guardian in November 2003, Bell said he experienced “no more ‘censorship’ than usual” during the Iraqi War. “The only thing I’ve been obliged to adapt slightly,” he confessed, “was the ‘turd count’ in my cartoon on the role of the U.N. ... I agreed to remove three splattered turds from the version that appeared in the printed edition of the Guardian. The version on the Web went out unaltered.” And I think it’s unaltered here, too: looks to be more than three turd splatters. What do you think?
Onward, the Spreading Punditry
The Great Ebb and Flo of Things
We
learned, from his testimony on July 10, that former Surgeon General Richard
Carmona was required by the Bush League to mention “President” Bush three times
on every page of his speeches. Three times every page! Wondrous. Here we have
yet another manifestation of the Big Lie strategy that has been
enthusiastically practiced ever since GeeDubya was appointed to the office by
the Supreme Court. Mentioning this Yalie cheerleader three times on every page
of any speech Carmona gave necessarily did two things simultaneously. It made
it appear that George W. (“Whopper”) Bush was a hands-on, in-charge President,
in touch with every nuance of his administration’s administration—portraying
him as an authentic hard-working leader of men, a master manager, which was the
objective, I’m sure. But the other thing this tactic accomplished was probably
unintended: in order to mention George WMD Bush three times on every page,
Carmona (and every other member of the Bush League, presumably similarly
instructed) had to attribute to GeeDubya activities or intentions or some sort
of machination that GeeDubya hadn’t even imagined yet. There’s no way GeeDubya
could have his finger in so many pies all the time: he could scarcely do so and
still meet his daily work out schedule. Carmona simply had to lie, to make up
things GeeDubya did—or to assume (and portray) an intellectual engagement that
George W. (“Warlord”) Bush seldom exhibits about anything but exercise.
Misrepresenting the facts is the same as lying. And every other member of the
so-called “administration” who mentioned their Beloved Leader at every other
breath did likewise. The Big Lie is alive and well in America. (Three times on
every page—sheesh.)
As for the troop reduction we’re
contemplating in Iraq, it is, alas, inevitable, regardless of how the debate in
the hallowed halls of Congress proceeds. The Army’s formula for rotation of
combatants— a year in the field, two years rest and relaxation at home (already
modified for the Iraq fiasco)— is going to hit a mathematical impossibility by
next spring, according to some reports, so we’ll either need a larger Army (and
recruiting failed for the last two months to make its quota) or we’ll have to
start bringing the troops home. As long as the politicians in Washington can
make partisan hay out of the debate over withdrawal, this curious fact will
remain obscure and, for all practical purposes, wholly unknown. I am reluctant
to accept the prognostication that when we withdraw, the Iraqi landscape will
be littered with bodies in an all-out sectarian slaughterhouse; this kind of
alarmist talk appeals to the irrational rather than the thinking part of our
citizenry, it seems to me, and so I am always tempted to see it as rampant demagoguery rather than serious discussion.
But I am also mindful of what happened in 1948 when the British withdrew from
Palestine: five Arab armies immediately sought to settle the partition question
by invading and attacking the Israelis (see Opus 190 for more, if you want
more). The British presence had forestalled Armageddon. Their withdrawal was
regarded in some quarters as a betrayal of both sides. The Arabian culture has
a long memory, and that makes me wonder just how effective Tony Blair will be
as an envoy to settle matters in that sad region, where, as Prime Minister
Nouri al-Maliki said, “There are two mentalities—conspiracy and mistrust.”
FUNNYBOOK FAN FARE
Browsing
the July issue of Previews, I bumped
up against more than one picture that made me pause and smile. Here, for
instance, is a x’ed-up version of a Norman
Rockwell cover for the New X-Men, No. 42.
WE’RE ALL BROTHERS, AND WE’RE ONLY
PASSIN’ THROUGH
Sometimes happy, sometimes blue,
But I’m so glad I ran into you---
We’re all brothers, and we’re only
passin’ through.
Old Folk Ballad Lustily Sung By Walt
Conley in His Trademark Husky Rasp of a Voice at the Last Resort in Denver, Lo
These Many Years Ago
It’s
been a bad month for the inky-fingered fraternity: we lost a few irreplaceable
confreres—so many, in fact, that I couldn’t do justice to an appreciation of
them all. I managed Doug Marlette, who follows forthwith; but for Buck Brown,
Howie Schneider, J.B. Handelsman, and Silas Rhodes, founder of the New York
School of Visual Arts, I’m importing professional help.
DOUG MARLETTE, 1949-2007
Doug
Marlette, a Pulitzer-winning editorial cartoonist, creator of the Kudzu comic strip, and, lately,
novelist, died Tuesday morning, July 10, when the Toyota Tacoma pickup truck in
which he was a passenger skidded off the rain-slick road near Holly Springs in
northwest Mississippi and crashed into a tree. The driver of the car, John
Davenport, was not seriously injured but was taken to a hospital in nearby
Oxford. Davenport had picked up Marlette at the Memphis airport and was taking
him to Oxford where he was planning to watch a highschool production of the
musical based upon his comic strip. Marlette had just come from Charlotte,
North Carolina, where he’d attended the funeral of his father, who died July 2. Marlette was 57 and, since 2006, was
the staff political cartoonist at the Tulsa
World. Born in Greensboro and raised in Durham, Marlette graduated from
Florida State University and took his first job drawing political cartoons at
the Charlotte Observer in 1972. He
joined the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1987, New York Newsday in 1989,
the Tallahassee Democrat in 2002,
cartooning from his home in Hillsborough, North Carolina, and then, in 2006, he
shifted again, still working at home and sending his cartoon electronically to
the Tulsa World.
While at the Observer, Marlette joined that small fraternity of editoonists who also do daily syndicated comic strips, launching Kudzu in 1981. Kudzu is the name of a pernicious plant that had been imported to the South during the Depression to control erosion, “but it got out of hand,” Marlette said, “and now covers barns, fields, trees, and slow-moving children. It grows a foot a night and nothing can kill it.” At its rapid rate of growth, kudzu, choking off all other plant life as it spreads, is more of a threat to the nation’s well-being than Islamic terrorists.
The strip
features a Southern youth with the same name, Kudzu Dubose, who, like the
plant, Marlette explained, “is something of a pest and is defined by its
propensity to grow.” The eponymous Kudzu comic strip character pines for the
Southern Belle-shaped Veranda Tadsworth and is counseled, occasionally, by the
local preacher, a wannabe televangelist named with Dickensian extravagance,
Will B. Dunn. These worthies and all the other denizens of Bypass, North
Carolina, are “both singularly imagined and archetypal at the same time,” said
novelist Pat Conroy in the Introduction to a tenth anniversary collection of Kudzu. Marlette’s strip, Conroy
continued, “is the first to come out of the American South that celebrates the
Southern experience.” Al Capp in Li’l
Abner and Billy DeBeck and Fred Lasswell in Snuffy Smith ridiculed the rural South; but in Kudzu, “you are solidly placed in the New South in all its fullness
and ludicrousness and its stumbling and hilarious attempts to fit into the
modern world. The strip’s Southernness is both its glory and its built-in
affliction. Marlette writes and draws about the South as though it were not a
major crime to be Southern.”
A celebrated novelist of the
Southern experience, Conroy was a close friend of Marlette’s. In addition to
their Southerness, they shared a similar childhood: they both grew up in a
military family. “My dad was in the Navy,” Marlette told the Christian Science Monitor in a 1983
interview; “we lived in little towns all over the South.”
Marlette’s grasping, self-serving
preacher, a scathing indictment of televangelism, arrived just as Jerry Falwell
and the Moral Majority were emerging on the national political landscape to
claim our attention and inspire satire. But Falwell and his ilk, although
kindred souls, were not the direct inspiration for Marlette’s Will B. Dunn, as Marlette
wrote in his autobiography, In Your Face. “He’s based on my own southern Baptist rearing and also to some degree on a
funky preacher who married my wife and me and christened our child. Will
Campbell is a self-described ‘bootleg preacher’ without portfolio (that is,
sans steeple), who, like Will B. Dunn, wears an Amish hat and cowboy boots and
carries a cane. But Campbell also farms and writes novels and tends to the
spiritual needs of a flock that includes radicals, Kluxers, black activists,
outlaw country singers, rednecks, and cartoonists. He is a very funny man and a
natural performer who does a terrific self-parody of a pompous, pious,
flatulent preacher.”
Against all reasonable expectations,
the fatuous Will B. Dunn became hysterically popular, even in the South, and
threatened to take over the strip; he starred in several reprint collections,
one of which is aptly entitled There’s No
Business Like Soul Business. In his political cartoons, Marlette
was “as tenacious as kudzu,” according to Linton Weeks at the Washington Post. Surprisingly in a
person who grew up in the South, Marlette was a social liberal and militant
about it in his editorial cartoons, but he went after politicians “across the
board,” said John Shelton Reed at the Center for the Study of the American
South at the University of North Carolina. Quoted in the Washington Post, Reed remembered Marlette giving a slide show of
his Bill Clinton cartoons when Hillary Clinton walked in. “She was not too
happy,” Reed said. “He did awful things in his cartoons with Jesse Helms. But
Helms’s office phoned and asked him for originals to frame. Doug was very
disappointed.”
Three-time Pulitzer winner Paul Conrad said: “Doug was one of the
very few talented cartoonists working today. He had a very different
approach—all the good ones do—and a marvelous way of needling people, which was
all too rare.”
Another Pulitzer winner, Mike Peters, agreed: “His cartoons would make you stand up when you were reading the paper,” he told Motoko Rich at the New York Times. Quoted by the Washington Post’s Patricia Sullivan, Peters said: “His cartoons were as strong as anything that Conrad could do, that Herblock could do. He had strong beliefs and he was able to put that into visuals. He would do humor, too, but when he got mad about something, he could do a devastating cartoon.”
Marlette amazed his editors at Newsday with his work ethic. “By 10
a.m., he knew what he would draw for the following day’s paper, colleagues
recalled,” said Michael Amon and Carl MacGowan at newsday.com.
Steve Buckley, publisher of the Times-News in Burlington, remembered
watching Marlette make a presentation four or five years ago. “It was right
after one of his controversial cartoons had been published, and he was talking
about how he got ideas for cartoons. He picked up a newspaper, selected a
story, and drew a cartoon on the spot to demonstrate. It was amazing.”
Marlette was an articulate and
thoughtful practitioner of his craft, and in his autobiographical volume, In Your Face, he provided ample insight
into both editorial cartooning and comic stripping. It was Marlette who
described editoons as ”unruly, impertinent, and bristling with attitude. ... A
cartoon cannot say ‘on the other hand,’ and it cannot be defended with logic.
It is a frontal assault, a slam dunk, a cluster bomb,” and he went on to
pinpoint the reason political cartoons so often upset newspaper editors:
“Journalism is about fairness, objectivity, factuality; cartoons use
unfairness, subjectivity, and the distortion of facts to get at truths that are
greater than the sum of the facts.” And it was Marlette who settled, for once
and all, the question of whether editorial cartoons have any impact. When asked
if his cartoons impinged at all upon the world they satirized, his reply was
both short and simple (and typically satirical in a self-deprecating way):
“Yes,” he deadpanned, “—I ended the Vietnam War.”
Marlette also used recent Islamic
criticism of his cartoons to make a larger point: “What I have learned [from a
30-year career as a cartoonist] is that ... no one is less tolerant than those
demanding tolerance. ... Despite differences of culture and creed, they all
seem to share the egocentric notion that there is only one way of looking at
things, their way, and others have no right to see things differently. ... Here
is my answer to them: In this country, we do not apologize for our opinions.
Free speech is the linchpin of our republic. ... Granted, there is nothing
‘fair’ about cartoons. You cannot say ‘on the other hand’ in them. They are
harder to defend with logic. But this is why we have a First Amendment—so that
we don’t feel the necessity to apologize for our ideas.” (See Opus 205 for more in this vein.)
About the shrinking ranks of
editorial cartoonists, Marlette again spoke to the importance of the First
Amendment in the winter 2004 issue of Nieman
Reports: “It order to maintain our true, nationally defining diversity, it
obligates journalists to be bold, writers to be full-throated and uninhibited,
and those blunt instruments of the free press, cartoonists like me, not to
self-censor. We must use it or lose it. Political cartoonists daily push the
limits of free speech. They were once the embodiment of journalism’s
independent voice. Today, they are as endangered a species as bald eagles. The
professional trouble-maker has become a luxury that offends the bottom-line
sensibilities of corporate journalism. ... We know what happens to the bald
eagle when it’s not allowed to reproduce and its habitat is contaminated. As
the species is thinned, the eco-balance is imperiled. Why should we care about
the obsolescence of the editorial cartoonist? Because their cartoons push the
boundaries of free speech by the very qualities that have endangered them.
Because cartoons can’t say ‘on the other hand,’ because they strain reason and
logic, because they are hard to defend and thus are the acid test of the first
Amendment, and that is why they must be preserved. As long as cartoons exist,
Americans can be assured that we still have the right and privilege to express
controversial opinions and offend powerful interests.”
A deft wordsmith as well as a
superior cartoonist, Marlette took up the novel in 2002 with the publication of
his first, The Bridge; earlier this
year, his second, Magic Time, came
out. “You can get a whole range of emotions in a novel,” he said, deploying
again his gift for a figure of speech, “—the complexities, contradictions, and bittersweetness of life. That’s
harder to do in a cartoon. A good cartoon is like a slam dunk. A good novel is
the whole basketball season.”
Judging from the comments on an
Email list for editorial cartoonists, Marlette enjoyed the esteem, if not
always the affection, of his colleagues. Writing in the Independent Weekly in Durham, V. Cullum Rogers, a stalwart in the
ranks of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, said: “ My favorite
memory of Doug Marlette dates from the 1981 AAEC convention in Nashville, Tenn.
A group of us were closing down some dimly lit dive, and at one small table
Marlette and Jeff MacNelly spent nearly a hour trying to make headway with a
beehived blonde who’d never heard of them and didn’t seem to regard artistic
talent as much of a turn-on. MacNelly died in 2000, and now Marlette is gone,
too. ... Marlette had intelligence, talent and energy. Over a career that began
in 1972 at the Charlotte Observer, he
published nine volumes of editorial cartoons; won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988;
created a comic strip, Kudzu, that he
later adapted into a musical; and wrote two novels. He also had an eye for the
brass ring and the ability to shrug off critics—common traits in the ed-toon
biz, but Marlette had them more than most. His relations with his colleagues,
like the Hillsborough neighbors he satirized in his book, The Bridge, could be rocky. But in person he was unfailingly
courteous, and on paper he was often deadly, a potent combination. He’ll be
missed.”
Some of Rogers’ cohorts in AAEC
remember Marlette as an arrogant self-promoting egotist and recalled that he
was once physically thrown out of their convention. Reportedly, it was at the
1982 gathering in San Francisco, and Marlette, who was scheduled to be on a
panel presentation, assumed, incorrectly, that the Association would pay for
his hotel room and instructed the front desk accordingly. When he was
confronted by the AAEC secretary treasurer, who attempted to advise him of his
error, Marlette brushed him off, which was the mistake. The man grabbed
Marlette by the collar and marched him away; he never came back, and no one
ever attempted to get him back.
But that was in 1982, just after the
launch of Kudzu, and Marlette might
have been a little more full of himself than usual. Even those who harbor
unflattering memories of Marlette admit that in person he was always pleasant
and thoroughly professional and that he was a well-spoken voice for the
profession. Others remember his kindness and courtesy.
Author, illustrator and one-time
political cartoonist Kate Salley Palmer wrote: “Doug was the first working
cartoonist I ever met. It was 1976, I believe, and I drove from Greenville to
Charlotte (in the rain). He let me spend the day with him. Even gave me his
collection of Best Cartoons of the Year, dating back to the early '70s—which I tried to return, but he told me to keep
them. He signed a copy of his latest collection of cartoons and then politely
mentioned that he had a deadline. I was so thrilled—he made me believe I could
be a cartoonist, too. He was really nice to me that day—and on other occasions
as well. I don't feel safe any more,” she added, “—like if Doug could get killed, anybody can. I know that sounds
stupid, but there it is. We all have to make sure we live till we die.”
I like to think the Marlette whom
Kate met in 1976 was the actual Marlette, the authentic cartooner before fame
set it. But even if it wasn’t, who can fault someone for promoting himself? And
who among us doesn’t envy fame in others? We’re all flawed with our humanness,
after all.
Sources: In addition to the publications cited in the
foregoing, I relied upon AAEC gossip, eye witnesses, and several obituaries
posted online from Newsday, Burlington
Times News, Los Angeles Times, and news.yahoo.
GRANNY’S SUGAR DADDY DIES
By
Azam Ahmed, Chicago Tribune, with
odds and addenda
In
1961, Robert "Buck" Brown submitted
a cartoon drawing to Playboy, then a
fairly new and wildly popular skin magazine. A student at the University of
Illinois, Brown offered the drawing on a whim, already having resigned himself
to a career in advertising. But his drawing was accepted, sparking an artistic
career that would span more than four decades. Brown would go on to become an
iconic cartoonist, best known for his Granny character, a bespectacled lady
with salacious habits. An African-American artist, his work often brimmed with
social commentary on the civil rights movement.
Brown, 71, died of a stroke Monday,
July 2, in St. James Hospital and Health Centers in Olympia Fields, said his
daughter Tracy Hill. Brown was a longtime Chicago resident and contributed more
than 600 cartoons to Playboy during
his four decades there. His last cartoon is published in the August 2007 issue.
According to his daughter, he sold thousands more to other publications; his
work also appeared in Ebony, Jet and Esquire. While he was most famous for
his cartoons, Brown also was a noted painter of what he called "soul genre
paintings" — humorous, slice-of-life images.
"Buck's cartoons ranged widely
in subject matter from the sexual revolution, golfing and westerns to parodies
of figures from history and literature," wrote Playboy cartoon coordinator Jennifer Thiele in an online memorial.
"His cartoons depicting relations between black and white Americans are
perhaps the most poignant. As an African-American, his insight and humor were
an important contribution to the magazine during and after the American civil
rights movement."
Brown moved to Chicago from
Morrison, Tennessee after his parents separated. He attended Sexton Elementary
School and Englewood High School on the city's South Side. After he graduated
in 1954, he joined the Air Force. There he would pin up his work in the
barracks, eliciting laughs from his sergeant and fellow soldiers, his daughter
said. By the late 1950s, Brown was taking art classes and driving a Chicago
Transit Authority bus. While attending the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign in 1961, he stopped by the Playboy offices in Chicago to drop off some ideas and sketches. His first cartoon, a
black-and-white drawing of a boy holding a trumpet, ran the next year. The
character that became Granny [a lusty insatiable old bag beloved by young studs
as well as old codgers like me—RCH] came four years later in his first color
cartoon for the magazine.
Brown was a warm father and husband.
"As busy as he was and as famous as he was, he would always take the time
to really show me things. I used to be absolutely petrified of spiders when I
was a little girl, but he'd have me watch a spider spin a web after it
rained," his daughter said. "I really did have a different
perspective after that."
His humor and distinct voice
extended beyond his artwork, exhibited in ways like his manners of speech,
dubbed "Buck-isms" by his family.
"Dad would call milk
'moo-juice,' and before he left to go anywhere, he'd always say 'It's time to
get my hat,'" his daughter said.
The family keeps a book of
"Buck-isms."
Hill said her father kept a sense of
humor about everything, and she laughed about some of the more titillating
images her father drew, especially the sex-addled Granny character. Her father
showed her some of his drawings when she was a little girl, she said, but
reserved others until she grew older.
"As a child, I was teased every
once in a while [about her father doing cartoons for Playboy]. But it never really stuck with me," Hill said.
"We never had this loose household. You wouldn't have Playboys lounging around."
Brown never fully retired from
drawing sketches, his daughter said, and he remained committed to his work,
passionate about the drawings around which he formed a life. His artwork graces
the collections of Bill and Camille Cosby as well as Johnny Mathis.
[Some of us remember another African
American cartoonist, a pioneer in fandom circles, Richard “Grass” Green, who
died a few years ago. And it was Don Thompson, then co-editor of the Comics Buyer’s Guide, who once wrote the
sentence that many scribblers among us envied when he said that both Brown and
Green were black.]
SUNSHINE SETS FOR SCHNEIDER
By
E&P Staff
The Sunshine Club cartoonist Howie
Schneider died June 28 from complications due to heart surgery, according
to a Provincetown (Mass.) Banner obituary. Schneider, born in
1930, was probably better known for the long-running Eek and Meek comic he did from 1965 to 2000. He also produced The Circus of P.T. Bimbo, which ran
1975-83. Schneider began The Sunshine Club, which focused on a group
of older characters, in 2003. He also did editorial cartoons for the Provincetown Banner. “He made us laugh,
each week, time and again,” wrote Sally Rose at the Banner, “—at ourselves and at the rest of the world. He had a
quirky and comical lens through which he observed life's events, both national
and local, and an incredible talent for sharing that humor with the rest of us
through his cartoons and comic strips. He also found great humor in both local
and national politics and could point his arrow of fierce wit at Provincetown
Town Hall or the White House with equal and great ease.” The cartoonist was the
subject of an April 15, 2004, profile by Dave Astor on E&P’s website. Here's that story:
Howie Schneider feels that the many
newspapers looking for younger readers shouldn't ignore their older audience.
That's one reason that he created The
Sunshine Club—Life in Generation Rx, a humor strip which entered
syndication in the fall of 2003.
"Seniors represent an enormous
and growing group in this country"— and many are loyal newspaper readers,
said Schneider, who did the Eek and Meek strip from 1965 to 2000. The "over-65" cartoonist added that the
oldest baby boomers will reach retirement age in just a few years, making the
senior category even bigger. Older characters appear in a number of comics, but
usually as part of a cast that includes younger characters, noted Schneider.
"The thing that makes mine different is that it's focused just on a
community of seniors," he said. Many seniors have similar lifestyles and
interests. Schneider cited about a dozen examples of this, including:
"They have a lot of time on their hands, they may no longer be earning
money, they talk about EKGs and blood tests, and their favorite movies are out
of date."
There's potential for humor in all
those situations, as when Schneider did a Sunshine
Club strip in which one senior character says: "They're not making
movies for us any more." Another replies: "That's why they give us
discounts." But the comic also offers universal humor many younger readers
might relate to. "There's nothing that can't be looked at through the lens
of the aging," said Schneider .
Indeed, the ideas flowed when
Schneider came up with the concept for his comic. "I filled three
sketchbooks in two or three weeks," he recalled. Then he showed his work
to 30 seniors to make sure that the material—which included things like a
character talking with his late wife and a reference to early-bird specials at
funeral homes— wasn't offensive to that audience. The seniors weren't bothered.
The strip’s main characters include
friends Uncle Bunty and George, the Bovines married couple, Edna (who doesn't
understand her children), Willard (who rails against changing times), Fran the
flirtatious widow, the TV-watching Badgers, the wise and lovable Professor
Noodle, and others. All of them are drawn— in a minimalist style—as animals.
Why? "I didn't want to do stereotypical old people with gray hair and
wrinkles," said Schneider. "I indicate age in subtle ways—the leaning
of the body, not looking too energetic. ..."
How energetic is the comic's client
list? The Sunshine Club has about 60
newspapers—a respectable total in an economic climate that has made many
editors reluctant to buy new features. Schneider’s syndicate, United
Media, said subscribers include the Denver Rocky Mountain News, Detroit Free
Press, and Las Vegas Sun. One
reason the Free Press began running The Sunshine Club last December was that
"the aging populace is obviously a big part of newspaper readership,"
noted John Smyntek, the paper's special features and syndicate editor. He said
it's too soon to say how Free Press readers will take to Schneider's comic; Smyntek explained that many readers
resent a new strip when it first starts (partly because it often bumps an
established comic), then feel more neutral about it after six months or so, and
then might warm to it after a year.
"I'm a late convert to niche
strips," added Smyntek, who said many of the comics introduced during the
past few years are geared toward specific audiences. So, the editor said with
wry exaggeration, "it was either move with the crowd or have empty spaces
in the comics section!"
The award-winning Schneider, who
resides on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, doesn't have much empty space in his
artistic life. He's also an editorial cartoonist for the Provincetown Banner, a sculptor, and a children's
author/illustrator who has done books solo and with his wife, writer Susan
Seligson. But Schneider is glad to be doing a comic strip again four years
after Eek and Meek ended. "You
get in the habit of looking at the world through these little droplets of
humor," he said. "If you don't have characters' mouths to put
observations in, you feel frustrated. It's like taking away a ventriloquist's dummy."
To Astor’s story, we add what the Banner’s Rose wrote: “In addition to his
popular weekly cartoon in the Banner, called Unshucked, he was well-known
as the author of several children's books, including his two most recently
published, Wilky the White House
Cockroach and Chewy Louie.
Schneider won two first place awards from the New England Press Association for
his Banner cartoons. For more about
Schneider and the unique evolution of Eek
and Meek (characters who began as mice and finished as people), visit Opus
124 and/or Opus 171. The last Sunshine that Schneider shed will be published September 1.
THE ELEGANT PENMAN HANDELSMAN LEAVES
By
Martin Plimmer, London Independent
J.
B. Handelsman [known on this side of the Atlantic as a New Yorker cartoonist] died in Southampton, New York, June 20; he
was 85. The signature is the most extravagant feature of a Handelsman cartoon.
The drawing style is economical and unadorned—even restrained—yet the sign-off,
which eschews the graphic abbreviations favored by other cartoonists, lopes
across the white space at the bottom with writerly expansiveness:
"Handelsman.” For many readers who looked out for that signature in Punch, The NewYorker and other magazines
(and perhaps for himself too), the writing was the most important aspect of a
Handelsman production. He was the most literary and intelligent of cartoonists,
famous in a profession of knowledgeable wits for his "encyclopedic"
brain. Few other cartoonists divided their attentions between such polar
extremes as the European Common Market and the Garden of Eden. His cartoons
were as likely to comment on the Iraq war ("We are among those chosen to
bear the burden of rebuilding Iraq. A thankless job, with no reward apart from
obscene profits.") as he was the Trojan War ("These Trojans—they like
women, don't they? The pansies!"). In fact, few wars can have succeeded in
keeping out of range of his ironic gaze.
As can already be seen from the two
gags above, drawing plays a secondary role in Handelsman cartoons. Though he
was an excellent draughtsman, seemingly undaunted by any mode of behavior or
setting, the humorous idea is seldom visual, but is played out in the longish
captions. Two men face each other across an office desk and one of them is
saying, "I'm afraid I can't help you; civil liberties are outside my
domain. I specialize in jungle law." In another, two men face each other
across another office desk. One says, "That's my advice as your
accountant. Speaking as your friend, I'd have to say it was pretty lousy
advice."
John Bernard Handelsman (known
informally as Bud) was born in NewYork's Bronx district in 1922, the grandson
of an immigrant Hungarian Jew. Both parents were teachers. He drew cartoons as
a child, and was famous at family functions for producing likenesses of Popeye
to order. He soon decided he wanted to be a comic-strip artist and on leaving
school, attended the Art Students' League. He served briefly in the Army Air
Corps during the Second World War and after a brief flirtation studying electrical
engineering, found work as a commercial artist and typographic designer in
advertising agencies. At the same time he submitted cartoons to magazines
including Esquire, Playboy and The Saturday Evening Post.
"I did a lot of angry
things," he said later, "about the KKK and Civil Rights and neo-Nazis
coming to power in Germany." The first cartoon he sold to The New Yorker was of two Nato Germans
at the Arc de Triomphe; one of them is saying, "Memories, memories
..."
He had enough work to go freelance in
1960, but it evidently wasn't of the right caliber because by 1963 he had
decided that America wasn't an appreciative enough market for his brand of
intelligent irony, and he packed up his wife Gertrude and young family, and
relocated to England—namely, Leatherhead in Surrey. Handelsman found an
enthusiastic welcome in this irreverent land, and was soon contributing to The Observer and New Statesman, as well as pocket cartoons [small, column-wide
drawings] for the news columns of the Evening
Standard that demonstrated a keen grasp of political subtleties and also
revealed a deft skill at caricature. He was not interested in rendering his
subjects as grotesques, in the manner of Gillray or Scarfe, preferring to let
the captions spell out their absurdities and follies. He drew Harold Wilson,
Willy Brandt, Lyndon B. Johnson and other famous players of the period in an
elegant and economical line that made them instantly recognizable, despite the
visual limitations of the single column space.
Handelsman was enthusiastically
welcomed by Punch, the home of
British literary humour, which commissioned some of his finest work. He is best
remembered in England for his 11-year series Freaky Fables, a comic strip that facetiously revisited biblical
stories, Greek myths and other tales of folklore, giving them modern and
delightfully irreverent interpretations. When the Philistines marched against
the Israelites in Handelsman's world, they chant the spine-chilling cry,
"We like Walt Disney!"
Perhaps realizing what it was
missing, The New Yorker now clasped
him to its bosom. He slotted in well to a cartoon culture which required
independent and innovative ideas from its contributors. He drew almost a
thousand cartoons for The New Yorker, including front covers, and became a regular guest at the magazine's lunches.
His last drawing was published just a few months before his death. He was as
sharply topical then as ever.
Freaky
Fables was published in book form. He also illustrated several other books,
including Families and How to Survive
Them (1983), and Life and How to
Survive It (1993), both by John Cleese and Robin Skynner, and The Mid-Atlantic Companion (1986) by
David Frost and Michael Shea. On Christmas Eve 1992, BBC television broadcast
his 10-minute animated film “In the Beginning,” based on the Creation and Fall,
with the voices of John Cleese, Harry Enfield and Michael Hordern. Handelsman
and his wife returned to live in the United States in 1981. "I Bud Handelsman was known for his gentle touch and, despite his liberal and compassionate convictions, never came across as brutal or bitter. Nonetheless, he was not without bite, particularly if the object of his humour lacked compassion or was illiberal. Always he was funny and wise. "Can you fold your legs like this?" asks an ascetic guru in one of his cartoons. "Without it, there can be no wisdom."
SILAS H. RHODES DIES AT 91
Founder of New York’s Legendary School
of Visual Arts
By
Randy Kennedy, New York Times
Silas
H. Rhodes, co-founder of a trade school for cartoonists and illustrators in
Manhattan that he built into the School of Visual Arts, one of the nation's
most important colleges for art and design, died on Wednesday at his home in
Katonah, N.Y. He was 91. Rhodes, who remained active as chairman of the
school's board, died in his sleep after spending a full day at his office, said
his son David, who is the school's president.
Rhodes and the illustrator Burne Hogarth, who is perhaps best
known for drawing the Tarzan of the Apes comic strip for many years, founded the Cartoonists and Illustrators School in
1947, primarily to serve returning veterans, most of whom worked during the day
and took courses at night to compete for better jobs in the advertising and
publishing worlds. The school began with a faculty of three, a student body of
35 and a budget largely supplied by the G.I. Bill. Rhodes, who had earned a
doctorate in English literature from Columbia University before serving as a
pilot during World War II, insisted early on that humanities and liberal arts
education take a prominent role alongside studio courses. In 1955 Rhodes changed
the name of the institution to the School of Visual Arts to reflect its broader
mission.
Just as the school was beginning, it
ran into trouble that threatened its existence. In 1956 Rhodes and Hogarth were
called before a U.S. Senate investigations subcommittee and asked whether they
were members of the Communist Party. The committee was trying to determine
whether Communist influence had tainted vocational schools that were supported
largely by federal money. Both men said they had not been members since
founding their school but they invoked the Fifth Amendment when asked about
prior involvement. Their refusal to testify provoked Senator Joseph R.
McCarthy, who was quoted in an article in The
New York Times saying that it proved the men were Communists.
Rhodes shouted back: "I'll
match my record against yours any day in the service. That's a horrible thing
to say."
The senator responded, "I don't
doubt a bit you are a full-fledged Communist."
David Rhodes said his father had
been a Communist but left the party in 1936; he said his father told him that
the Veterans Administration later audited the school and contested some of the
money that had been provided to it through students who were veterans. The
dispute between the school and the government was later settled, he said. [I’m
not sure of the chronology herein. Assuming the date 1956 is correct, McCarthy
was by then a toothless relic of the fearsome crusader he had been. He had
disgraced himself during the televised Army hearings in the late spring of
1954, and the Senate, now thoroughly embarrassed by his antics, censured him on
December 2 that year, stripping him of his committee chairmanships. He drank
himself to death, dying on May 2, 1957. Could be Rhodes’ confrontation with
McCarthy was earlier than 1956; maybe the Times goofed.]
Silas Harvey Rhodes was born on
Sept. 15, 1915, in the Bronx. His father worked for many years as a postal
clerk, and his mother ran a wholesale egg business that failed. (Both his
parents later worked in longtime administrative roles at the School of Visual
Arts.) Rhodes received a bachelor's degree from Long Island University and
master's and doctorate degrees from Columbia. He wrote a dissertation on the
poet Robert Burns and intended to become an English teacher. But he enlisted
after Pearl Harbor and flew missions with the Army's elite First Air Commando
Group in Burma, India and China. When he returned, he worked for the Veterans
Administration and, with Hogarth, came up with a plan approved by the
administration to create an art school to help veterans.
Rhodes was a longtime humanities
teacher at the school and was its president for six years. In the 1970s he
negotiated successfully with the New York State Board of Regents to allow the
school to confer bachelor's degrees in fine arts, an authorization not
typically given to proprietary schools like his. During his term as president,
the school grew to become the largest independent college of art in the United
States, with 2,700 students; it now enrolls more than 3,000 undergraduates and
graduate students. Some of the more illustrious teachers and students over the
years have included the graphic artists Milton Glaser and Paul Davis, and the
artists Joseph Kosuth and Keith Haring. [Not to mention, which the Times doesn’t, Harvey Kurtzman, Will
Eisner, and Art Spiegelman.]
In addition to pursuing his
administrative and teaching duties, Rhodes was also creative director for one
of the school's signature public projects, the visually adventurous posters
that the faculty has produced for the New York subway for more than 50 years to
promote the institution and recruit students. Rhodes, who was given to quoting
Socrates, ultimately saw the school and its students as promulgators of much
more than just good art, advertising and design.
"Education is a moral
affair," he wrote in a 1963 essay, "and the ultimate concern of the
school is with moral values, while society is concerned with such matters
indirectly and only occasionally."
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