My Missing Donald Trump Cartoon
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Tennessee NRA Goes Hunting
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Cartoon Revenge Through Hacking
Want to help? Visit cagle.com/heroes. We need more heroes.
There was a time when readers who are offended by a political cartoons would write a letter to the editor. Now angry readers rant online; they demand apologies or retribution for being offended.
I run a “syndicate” that distributes editorial cartoons and columns to about 850 subscribing newspapers in America. I’m perceived to be the “boss” of the cartoonists, and I get angry demands that I fire cartoonists I work with, who drew cartoons that offend. Just draw about abortion, the Confederate Battle Flag, gun control, religion, Israel or the Palestinians – and the cyber outrage will flow.
One of our cartoonists drew a cartoon a few years ago that showed an Iraqi soldier holding a book titled, “The Koran for Dummies.” The cartoon motivated a group called the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to put a call out to their members to e-mail me, demanding that I punish the cartoonist; I received many thousands of crazy e-mail threats in response. Whenever there is a big response to a cartoon, it is usually because some group is organizing the effort.
Recently my political cartoon web site at Cagle.com has been getting hacker attacks. New, crazy, huge, sophisticated, brute force, distributed denial of service hacker attacks, from IP addresses all over the world, focusing on taking us down.
The hackers succeeded in breaking through to erase data on our hard drives on our servers and bring our Cagle.com site down. Luckily, we had an unconnected backup in the cloud, and this attack had us down for only a day rewriting the hard drives. We don’t keep credit card information or salacious emails about movie stars online, so there isn’t much for hackers to do except to take us down.
The new attacks started before the Charlie Hebdo tragedy, back when we were featuring cartoons about North Korea and the Sony Pictures hackers. Cagle.com is still going down occasionally as the hackers change their strategies. I suppose this is the new reality for editorial cartoonists, who have never been well paid by newspapers that are continuing to cut their budgets. Editorial cartoons seem to be the new flashpoint for a clash of civilizations, even as we tighten our belts.
The bottom line is that our Cagle.com site is now expensive to host as the attacks continue to become more costly and time consuming for us. We thought about dropping the site and concentrating on our little newspaper syndicate, but we’re trying something different.
We’re putting up a plea to our readers to make contributions to help us keep the Cagle.com site online. I see lots of other sites with “donor” buttons, including opinion sites like Slate.com and Truthdig.com, but this is new to us. Visitors to Cagle.com will see a pop-up window this week, asking for support, and offering lots of nice perks for different levels of support.
We’re hoping the love and support of editorial cartoon fans can overcome the costs of the evil editorial cartoon haters.
Want to help? Visit cagle.com/heroes. We need more heroes.
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Standing My Ground
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The Boston Bombing and the Gun Bill
The two big news stories this week were the Boston Marathon bombing and the sinking of the gun bill by Republicans in the Senate. Of-course, the gun bill got lost in the media focus on the Boston Bombing (we have a great collection of cartoons on the Boston Bombing here).
The problem with dominant news stories is that every cartoonist is drawing the same thing at the same time – why? Editors all want the same thing at the same time. Usually I like to steer a little different path then the cartoonist pack, because of supply and demand. There were just too many similar cartoons about the Boston Marathon Bombing this week, with bloody tennis shoes, bowed heads on statues, damaged Boston logos, symbolic metaphors breaking ribbons at finish lines – just what editors wanted, but too much of it for them to use. I tried to take a bit of a different tack with memorial candles, and I wanted to avoid drawing something bloody, still, I’m sure my cartoon didn’t get reprinted much because of oversupply. Here is the rough pencil sketch.
…and here is the black and white line art, that most people will see in the newspaper.
… and here is the color …
If I use colors in cartoons that are too dark, I get complaints from editors, so the color was a compromise. I’m not sure I’m happy with it. Oh well, it is a cartoon I was obligated to draw and the marketplace didn’t need – the story of my career.
The next cartoon was about the Republicans sinking the gun bill in the Senate. Republicans love their guns a bit too much – and that’s all that this cartoon says. Here is the rough sketch.
I found a photo of an assault rifle on Google and printed it out for my rough sketch. For a moment, I thought about Photoshopping the actual photo into the cartoon – it would be a jarring contrast to have the drawing of an elephant with what looks like a real, nasty, assault rifle photo – then I thought about how Bill Day tried that and was pilloried by this colleagues, and my good judgement got the better of me. Gotta watch out for those gun photos, they can get you labeled as a “plagiarist” and make you the wallflower at AAEC cartoonist parties.
Here is the black and white art …
and the color …
Ah! Love in the springtime!
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GOP and Guns
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Mail, China, Immigration and More!
Here are my most recent cartoons! Here’s the rough sketch for today’s cartoon, a little snarkiness pointed at troubled newspapers. I drew the three characters on the left, and then took a piece of tracing papers to make some changes for the panel on the right, to keep them looking consistent.
Then I drew it up as line art, in pencil on vellum. This black and white version is what most people will see in the newspaper – if newspapers will print this one. I always like the black and white version best.
And here I added color, in Photoshop layers behind the black line art.
Those young people are so disrespectful of Grandpa! Here is yesterday’s cartoon …
My wife’s Uncle Keene e-mailed this idea to me, which he tells me was given to him by a friend who prefers to remain anonymous. I usually don’t draw other peoples ideas, but what the heck, I liked this one. Thanks, Keene. Here it is as it looked in my local newspaper this morning.
I notice they picked up some gray scuzzy tone in the background. Yuck. Why do newspapers take pretty, clean crispy cartoons and muck them up? Here’s a previous cartoon, about the terrible air pollution in China.
This one was fun, and it is nice to do cartoons with no words. The previous cartoon was this quicky for Groundhog’s Day.
I didn’t bother doing color for this one. The previous one was about the immigration debate …
Now I’m caught up! I need to post more often.
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Bill Day’s Gun Control Cartoons
Back in May, columnist Tina Dupuy (who I syndicate to newspapers and Web sites nationwide) wrote about the need for gun control in America, noting that the NRA was for gun control over its first hundred years and only recently started to mention the Second Amendment as their cause.
There’s no cartoonist who cares about the issue of gun control more than Bill Day. Here are some of Day’s best cartoons about guns in America, including some of his recent cartoons following the tragic school shooting in Connecticut.
(Donate to our Bill Day fundraising campaign and help keep the him drawing!)
What do you think – do we need more gun control laws, or less? Comment below or weigh in on our Facebook page!
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School Shooting Vultures
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Synchronized Campaign Swimming
We’ve heard a lot about the NRA and gun control in the wake of the tragic shooting in Aurora, Colorado. Lots of our cartoonists have already weighed in on the issue (check out our collection of Gun Control cartoons), but readers seem polarized by conservative cartoonist Gary McCoy’s cartoon about the call for increases gun control laws following the shooting:
Here’s a sampling of some of our readers’ comments on Facebook:
David Wilder MaGoo: Sorry, don’t see the correlation. Guns don’t fall out of the sky.
Suzanne Chiles: When it’s easier to buy 6000 rounds of ammunition than it is to buy a box of Sudafed, I’d say that yes, we probably do need some more laws concerning the ownership and operation of firearms.
Ivy C Maile Boley: you can’t make laws that make people less crazy, less mean, less marginalized – – laws are supposed to step in when society has failed to uphold our inherent cooperativeness.
Tim Campbell: Stopping deranged people from killing – (left solution) harder access to guns. Stopping teens from having sex – (right solution) harder access to birth control.
Steven Pennella: Total cheap shot considering Democrats are pro-solar power and the fossils of the GOP are pro fossil fuel.
Michael A. Cooper: Why are ALL the gun laws aimed at the law abiding and NOT the criminals?
Rick Wade: If the existing laws were enforced the situation would improve dramatically.
Bob Jones: Cartoon is a non sequitur. Guns and gun violence, unlike sunshine, are not naturally occurring phenomena.
Eric Nelson: Here’s a thought, let’s enforce our laws on the books and close loop holes for gun shows. Tax ammunition like talons out of existence and bring back an assault weapons ban. For those enthusiasts who love assault weapons, I’m sorry. Hell pot is illegal.
What do you think? Comment below or drop us a note on our Facebook page.