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HELP
SAVE MULLETS! "No sooner had our press kits and promotional material been printed" groans Steve "than the UPN network launched the most awful, critically-panned, universally-derided sitcom in TV history, which just happened to have an uncomfortably similar premise and an almost identical title. It was that bad, it was canned within a month, but the stench of death has inevitably wafted in our direction. And then Berkeley Breathed decided to rise from the grave ... by launching "Opus" the day before "Mullets." Rather than buying new features, editors have been canning or shrinking existing strips to make room for his space demands. In the middle of one of the most atrocious syndication markets in recent memory, when newspapers are actually cancelling existing features to make room for the one thing (Opus) that is actually selling, with the grim specter of that short-lived, hideous sitcom still looming ominously over us, we unveiled our new baby." The adventures of likeable losers
Kevin and Scab, "Mullets" is centered around Mildew's
Hardware Store (where the hapless duo work for Kevin's dad
) and the Yewtopia Trailer Park (home to Scab's dilapidated
Airstream.) It's wonderfully drawn, laugh-out-loud funny
and we think it deserves to succeed. If you agree, drop your
local paper a line telling them that you love "Mullets"
and want to see it in your newspaper each day. If we lobby newspaper
editors strongly enough, hopefully "Mullets" will pick
up enough client newspapers to survive!
December 20, 2003 Recent losses in cartoonists'
jobs come from a change in attitude at newspapers that have been
cutting back on all of their staff. When I look at newspapers
now I see less and less original content and local coverage,
along with fewer staffers that are each burdened with a bigger
work load than their predecessors. Yesterday's article by Michael
Miner, and the mention of the current number of editorial cartoonists
jobs, prompted the response below by Cullum Rogers. Cullum is
the treasurer of the Association
of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC), he draws local
editorial cartoons part time, so he wouldn't count himself as
one of the "jobs." Cullum also works as a cartoon illustrator.
--Daryl Cagle For years, we cartoonists have been saying there was a time in the not-so-distant past when there were 200 full-time editorial cartoon jobs in the U.S. (This time is usually given as "a decade ago," which right now would mean 1993. I was on the scene in 1993, and at that time we were all comparing our sorry state to the glory days of the early 1980s.) Bruce Plante quoted the 200 figure this summer to Howard Finberg, who was writing an article for the Poynter Institute website. When Finberg asked where the number came from, Bruce referred him to me, and I did a little research. My apologies to those of you who've already seen this, but here it is again: The fact is, almost all figures on the number of staff cartoonists past or present are very rough estimates, because there's no way to tell, except by contacting newspapers individually, whether a cartoon for a given paper was drawn by (1) a full-time staffer whose only job is editorial cartooning, (2) an art-department staffer for whom editorial cartooning is only one part of the job (or just a hobby the paper indulges as long as it doesn't interfere with "real" work), or (3) a freelancer who might draw one picture a week, if that. In his 1956 anthology "The People's Choice," Pierce Fredericks of the New York Times said that there were "something like" 275 political cartoonists in the country, a claim he repeated in a Saturday Review article the next year (November 23, 1957). But, like everyone else who's written on the subject, he didn't say where his number came from -- or what kind of working arrangement those cartoonists had with their papers.
[Digression: Of those 76 newspapers, 25 have folded, two have merged with another paper on the list (taking a job with them), and 15 are still around but no longer have staff cartoonists. If the founders of the AAEC were to take a time machine to the year 2003, over half of them would find their jobs no longer existed.] In a July 21, 1961, cover story on Bill Mauldin, Time magazine said that "after the 20th century began, U.S. political cartooning entered its golden age. At a time when there were some 500 more daily papers than today, most of them had staff cartoonists." Later in the same article, Time said, "only 119 men now work at the art, one for every 15 daily newspapers." [Digression 2: If Time's numbers are right, there were 2,185 daily papers during the "golden age" (15x119+500). If "most of them" had staff cartoonists, there were at least 1,093 jobs. Somehow, I doubt all these folks were full-time editorial cartoonists.] In 1962, cartoonist John Chase of the New Orleans States-Item edited an anthology, "Today's Cartoon," that devoted two pages to every full-time U.S. editorial cartoonist he could persuade to participate, including such usual holdouts as Herblock and Mauldin. It featured work by 140 artists, and I haven't noticed any significant omissions. Some of those 140 were recently retired or working in Canada, and another dozen or so were contributing to weeklies or specialized publications, so the total number of active daily newspaper cartoonists in the U.S. was probably around 110 to 120. In an October 11, 1980, cover story on Jeff MacNelly, Newsweek said that the number of cartoonists had "increased by nearly half in the last decade, to an estimated population of 170." Again, no source was cited. In 1997, I set out to determine exactly how many editorial-cartoon positions there were at U.S. newspapers by asking folks on the AAEC-L (a cartoonist e-mail forum --ed) to list all the jobs they knew of in their own areas, and checking the results through the E&P Yearbook, Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year volumes, and, in a few cases, phone calls to the papers themselves. Lucy Caswell, curator of the Ohio State State University, Cartoon Research Library, later said that, to her knowledge, it was the first time anyone had attempted a survey of that sort. The results were published in the Fall 1997 issue of the AAEC Notebook and -- after the inevitable corrections came pouring in -- the Spring 1998 issue of Hogan's Alley magazine.
Which raises the question: At what point does a person cease being an editorial cartoonist and become a staff artist who draws editorial cartoons? Based on the info I gathered in 1997 and the stories I've heard at AAEC conventions, I'd say that as of 2003 there are at most 100 "pure" full-time editorial cartooning jobs at U.S. newspapers, and only a handful outside them (such as Pat Oliphant, who makes a living solely from syndication). As for the "impure" editorial-cartoon jobs -- my categories (2) and (3) -- who knows? Like Time magazine, I suspect the heyday of editorial cartoon jobs was the early 20th century -- after daily newspapers became the chief venue for political cartoons, but before syndication made hiring your own cartoonist unnecessary. The numbers probably started declining in the 1910s or shortly thereafter, and didn't go up again until the 1970s, when a bunch of us former youngsters entered the field under the varied influences of Mad magazine, Oliphant and MacNelly, the Vietnam War and Watergate. The total number *may* have touched 200 for a nanosecond sometime in the early 1980s, if you allow a fairly generous definition of "full-time." But if you eliminate the folks (like me) who also had to do maps and charts and food-section illustrations as part of their job, I suspect the number would be closer to 150, at most. To sum up: All of us believe that the job situation for editorial cartoonists is worse now than it was several decades ago, and a lot worse than it was in the early 20th Century. As near as I can tell, that belief is accurate, but anybody who thinks he can tie it to specific numbers is kidding himself. Further research is called for, as they say in the grant proposals. Thank you to Michael Miner and the Chicago Reader, for allowing us to reprint this interesting article about John Sherffius, who recently resigned as the cartoonist for the St. Louis Post Dispatch. Mr. Miner and the Chicago Reader have done an excellent, ongoing, job of covering events in the editorial cartooning profession. The Chicago Reader is in the backyard of the Chicago Tribune, which is notorious for not hiring an editorial cartoonist, and Michael Miner does an excellent job of pointing out the Tribune's embarassing situation. Another One Bites the Dust, By Michael Miner Something shocking happened last week in the small world of editorial cartooning. A cartoonist quit. John Sherffius of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch suddenly resigned, though he had no place better to go. Predecessors Daniel Fitzpatrick and Bill Mauldin had won Pulitzers during the 1950s and rank among the greatest cartoonists of the last century. Five years ago, after a blue-ribbon committee made a nationwide search, Sherffius was hired to do their job. The liberal Post-Dispatch of Fitzpatrick and Mauldin exists today mostly as legacy. For most of the 20th century conservative readers -- who abound in Saint Louis -- had other daily papers to turn to. Those papers are history; the Post-Dispatch survives as a sort of utility, a local monopoly that must try to have something for everyone. In the eyes of readers and staff, if not her own, editor Ellen Soeteber has been moving her editorial page toward the center and prodding Sherffius to follow along. "I love the rumor that John was too liberal for the Post-Dispatch editorial page," Soeteber says. "That's like being too communist for Fidel. We're the only metropolitan-wide paper. We do have a special responsibility to serve up a menu of ideas. But I would never presume to alter the 125-year -- as of today -- tradition of what I call the progressivism of the Post-Dispatch. I was deputy editorial-page editor of the Chicago Tribune for three years. You can't be making U-turns all the time." But "progressivism" can mean whatever a newspaper wants it to, and a U-turn isn't the same as a slow but steady change of course. About a year ago, coworkers say, Sherffius's bosses started getting after him to tone down his more liberal cartoons. "Everybody improves by editing," says Soeteber. "I would put [cartoonists] in the same category as columnists -- nobody is 100 percent sacrosanct. I don't believe in messing [with cartoons] except in the most extreme circumstances, but I think we all get better by giving and taking."
Sherffius was told the cartoon was unbalanced. "We had some disagreement,"says Soeteber, "about whether the cartoon captured what was going on in Congress." So Sherffius added a donkey. It's hard to say what this donkey was supposed to signify about the Democrats. An elephant was riding it, but there was a cigar in its mouth. "An editorial cartoon is sort of a creative bubble," says Matt Davies, cartoonist at the Journal News in Westchester, New York. "It takes hours to build, and if it's right, it's a perfect bubble. It's unlike a column. A column you can tweak and mess with. In the ten years I've been doing this I've seen maybe three cartoons that could have been tweaked. 'The party of fiscal restraint.' Everybody knows that's supposed to be the Republicans. If you put a Democrat in there you negate it. As soon as you try to dumb the thing down for the reader you kill it." Sherffius's changes didn't ruin his cartoon -- the original idea was strong enough to survive the incongruity. But he told Soeteber and the editorial-page editor how upset he was, and before the day was over he resigned. He says, "I felt that ultimately my cartoons were not a good fit for the page." Davies, who's president elect of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, can't think of another cartoonist who walked out the way Sherffius did. "It takes a lot of courage," he says. "It takes a lot more courage to quit your job than to put out a cartoon that gets you in a lot of trouble." Soeteber posted a statement online praising Sherffius's work and wishing him well. But among cartoonists, the most important thing the statement said was said in passing: "Until we complete a search for his replacement, the newspaper will run a number of syndicated cartoons." It's no longer a given at American newspapers that a departed cartoonist will be replaced at all, not even at papers with the traditions of the Post-Dispatch. Cartoonists at the Buffalo News have won two Pulitzers, but when one of them, Tom Toles, moved to the Washington Post last year the News decided not to replace him. Steve Breen won a Pulitzer at the Asbury Park Press in New Jersey in 1998, and when he left for the San Diego Union-Tribune three years later he wasn't replaced. The New York Daily News lost its cartoonist two years ago, began carrying syndicated cartoons, and recently redesigned its editorial page so that there's no need to run a cartoon at all. And of course the Chicago Tribune's still looking for a successor to Jeff MacNelly, a three-time Pulitzer winner. MacNelly died three and a half years ago, during the Clinton presidency. "With the job outlook as thin as it is," says Davies, "the idea that you would be so unhappy with overt editorial control that you would be willing to subject yourself to the unhappiness of unemployment -- to me that says a lot about the value of editorial freedom. And maybe that's why the Chicago Tribune doesn't want to hire a cartoonist. They might understand that." Davies is suggesting that the most important reason the Tribune hasn't replaced MacNelly isn't budgetary. "A big salary for a cartoonist is a rounding error for a paper like the Tribune," he maintains. It's that a cartoonist worthy of the Tribune would demand more freedom than the Tribune might be willing to give. "Do they really want to deal with that?" he says. "I want somebody who really provokes people," Soeteber says. "A cartoonist should be provocative. He should make you laugh, make you cry, make you think. I'm more concerned about that than the politics." That said, before she can replace Sherffius she has to define the job she needs to fill, and she volunteers that she's not sure how she'll do it. "One, you say it's their viewpoint, and you label it as such. Two, some newspapers take the stance that the cartoonist should be an extension of the editorial page and their positions should match. I'm not sure where I land on that." Either way, an editor is asking for trouble. A cartoonist who brings many more readers to the editorial page than will ever read the editorials hijacks the page. Even if he's not, he's assumed to be speaking for the paper that's given him such a conspicuous platform -- why else would he have it? As for the cartoonist who'll take his cue from the editorials -- advertise the job that way and take your pick of mediocrities. "I don't want to say anything that will deter really talented cartoonists from applying here," says Soeteber. "I'm pointing out the philosophy out there at some papers." I asked Bruce Dold, editor of the Tribune editorial page, his concept of the job his paper's been in no hurry to fill. He e-mailed me: "I would expect a cartoonist to live with the same kind of scrutiny as a columnist, but I don't expect columnists to follow the Tribune editorial line. They are entirely free to disagree with the editorial views of the paper. . . . The op-ed page, though, presents a clash of columnists. There is only one cartoon. So I would like a cartoonist to be a good fit philosophically with the Tribune, as Jeff was. By a good fit, I mean a cartoonist who disagrees on some issues with the editorial page, but who is not constantly at war with the editorial page." Robert Ariail of the State newspaper in South Carolina thinks he'd be a good fit with the Tribune. Six months ago he talked to Dold and got the idea Dold was very interested. But instead of an offer, silence followed. Other cartoonists before Ariail who thought they were close to a job experienced the same thing. Ariail has the impression that it's people above Dold who won't let him act. "I have spoken to Bruce as recently as last week," Ariail told me a few days ago. "I had sent him a cartoon for his eyes only kind of gibing them -- just as a release for me. He called me back. I think he's interested in me. But I say that and I don't really know." Ariail wanted to hear about Sherffius.
When I said why he'd quit, Ariail responded, "Well, good
for him." Ariail has a properly gloomy outlook on the trade
he's in. "A decade ago there were 200 full-time editorial
cartoonists," he said. "Now there are only 100. Make
it 99." Posted with permission. Many
thanks to Mr. Miner and the
Chicago Reader.. December 16, 2003 There are only four women who draw cartoons on our site. I asked each of them to write a short piece for the blog about why they think there are so few women editorial cartoonists. Today I have two very different responses; the first is from Jen Sorenson, who draws the alternative weekly editorial cartoon, SLOWPOKE. The second is from Sepideh Anjomrooz who draws cartoons in Iran, where the barriers to women entering any profession must be terrible. JEN SORENSEN, SLOWPOKE Political cartooning is probably an extreme case, because the treatment of subject matter is often not exactly nice. Also, there are likely some lingering beliefs about politics being a man's field, the treatment of Hillary Clinton being a case in point. Again, I'm speaking broadly -- heaven knows there are plenty of women out there who are into politics and would not hesitate to skewer the powerful in print. Thankfully, a greater precedent of funny females in the media is now being established, which may lead to more women cartoonists... and more competition for me.
In my country, male cartoonists get paid very little for their drawings. They must work for a minimum of four to five newspapers or magazines just to make a living. Their cartoons are published based on their relationship with the editor and not based on the quality of their work. This is discouraging to women. It is more difficult for us to build these relationships so we must be brave and continue to do what we love despite these obstacles. Hopefully, our work will then speak for itself. Cartoons in our newspapers are
scrutinized closely. Cartoonists must stay away from "the
red line." Cartoons that cross "the red line"
will encounter some problems. Two topics that cross the red line
are: cultural beliefs that are different from ours, and problems
with the government. We are asked to honor these restrictions
and not write or illustrate about cultural beliefs or government
problems. All of these issues combine to make it much more difficult
for women to become editorial cartoonists. December 15, 2003 December 14, 2003
And I have to laugh. In an earlier post I linked an image of the winning/offending cartoon on another web site. The owner of the other site seems to have noticed the increase in traffic to this image, and he added an ad for his own cartoons at the top of the image. Sometimes I forget that this blog gets a lot of traffic and can be viewed as a publicity opportunity. I have to appreciate his entrepreneurship. See the winning/offending cartoon cartoon here, below the ad for "Eric M's Fetus-X Political Horror Comix."
The Columbia
Journalism Review has an interesting article by Tallahassee
Democrat cartoonist, Doug
Marlette, detailing hate campaigns conducted against him
by CAIR (the Council of American-Islamic
Relations), protesting the cartoon at the right. Doug's experience
reminded me of our own saga as CAIR targetted us for hate mail
and spam to protest a Sandy
Huffaker cartoon. Here
is an interesting example of the nutty thinking that fueled
the campaign against Doug.
John's liberal leaning cartoons
have a distinctive graphic style. He is known for often using
logos and graphic symbols in stark, wordless cartoons, like the
one at the right. See
an archive of John's work here.  December 9, 2003 December 4, 2003
 December 3, 2003
Here is an article where the president of the Political Cartoons
Society defends the award. Thanks again to the Comics
Journal Blog for finding this one. I'm sure we'll have another
one next week.
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Cartoonists typically
blame syndication for the loss in jobs in our profession. When
an editor can buy cheap, timely cartoons from the best cartoonists
in the country, why should he pay a salary to a staff cartoonist?
My friend Barbara
Semonche, who used to run the library at the Durham Morning Herald,
once made a statement I have come to call the Semonche Rule:
"When a quotation in a newspaper contains three or more
numbers, at least one of them is wrong."
When
the AAEC was founded in 1957, it had 84 charter members, working
for 76 newspapers, three newspaper chains, and three syndicates.
(Unlike today, there were no student, associate or retired members.)
This wasn't the total number of cartoonists in the country, as
several big names, including Herblock and Bill Mauldin, were
absent, and who knows how many lesser ones.
My
survey found that there were at least 131, and maybe as many
as 154, newspapers in the United States that (a) had a full-time
staffer who (b) regularly drew editorial cartoons. I'd say at
least a quarter of them were not solely editorial cartoonists,
but had other duties ranging from drawing the occasional op-ed
caricature to running the paper's art department.
On
Monday, December 8, Sherffius had the idea of drawing elephants
whooping it up. They wore party hats and lamp shades, lugged
bags stuffed with swag, and waved champagne bottles and fistfuls
of cash. The caption: "The party of fiscal discipline."
SEPIDEH
ANJOMROOZ
That being said,
some of the cartoons which are critical of Sharon and current
Israeli policy, do bring a bit of trouble upon themselves in
ways which can be avoided without diluting the impact of the
cartoon.
Another more recent
cartoon by 
December
12, 2003
