Here are the most popular cartoons of the month of May, 2020. Regular readers of my blog and newsletter will have seen all of these cartoons in our weekly roundups of the Top Ten Most Popular cartoons. Our Top Ten is a measure of how many of our subscribing newspaper editors choose to reprint each of our cartoons, from the 63 cartoonists in our syndication package. The list clearly shows that newspaper editors have been looking for cartoons about the lighter side of the pandemic.
I’d like to keep these lists to only ten cartoons, but this month we had a three way tie for the 10th place cartoon so there are 12 cartoons on the list. Out of the top 12, a whopping five cartoons are by Jeff Koterba of The Omaha World-Herald (Jeff sneaked two of those into the tie for 10th place). The #1 cartoon is by Steve Sack of The Minneapolis Star-Tribune. I had two cartoons on the list myself. Congratulations to the other cartoonists with the most reprinted cartoons this month, RJ Matson, Nate Beeler, Dave Granlund and Randy Enos.
20% of the cartoonists get 80% of the sales and reprints, and most of the cartoonists never make it into the Top Ten. If you don’t like the Top Ten, take it up with your local newspaper editor. Just about half of America’s daily, paid circulation newspapers subscribe to CagleCartoons.com.
Our reader supported site, Cagle.com, still needs you! Journalism is threatened with the pandemic that has shuttered newspaper advertisers. Some pundits predict that a large percentage of newspapers won’t survive the pandemic economic slump, and as newspapers sink, so do editorial cartoonists who depend on newspapers, and along with them, our Cagle.com site, that our small, sinking syndicate largely supports, along with our fans.
Here’s Randy Enos in a three way tie for 10th place.
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Jeff Koterba has two of the three cartoons tied for #10
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This is Jeff Koterba‘s second cartoon tied for #10. Jeff dominates with an impressive five cartoons on our most reprinted cartoons of the month list.
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Here are the ten most popular cartoons of the week (May 23 -May 30).
The stats this week were unusual. The beginning of the week followed a familiar pattern of editors choosing light cartoons about the mature coronavirus story, with my own, light virus cartoon from last Sunday claiming the week’s top spot. Later in the week the news turned to Trump’s Twitter distraction and the murder of George Floyd. Few cartoons stood out in the stats this week as usage was flattened among a larger number of topics. The international cartoonists were virtually shut out and not reprinted at all. There is a disconnect between what cartoonists want to draw, what editors want to print and what readers want to see; this week that divide was plain to see as cartoons that were popular on social media were ignored by editors.
Our top ten is a measure of how many of our subscribing newspaper editors choose to reprint each of our cartoons, from the 63 cartoonists in our syndication package. 20% of the cartoonists get 80% of the sales and reprints, and most of the cartoonists never make it into the Top Ten. If you don’t like the top ten, take it up with your local newspaper editor. Just about half of America’s daily, paid circulation newspapers subscribe to CagleCartoons.com.
Our reader supported site, Cagle.com, still needs you! Journalism is threatened with the pandemic that has shuttered newspaper advertisers. Some pundits predict that a large percentage of newspapers won’t survive the pandemic economic slump, and as newspapers sink, so do editorial cartoonists who depend on newspapers, and along with them, our Cagle.com site, that our small, sinking syndicate largely supports, along with our fans.
Please forward this to your friends – tell them our Cagle.com email newsletters are FREE and FUN! They can join the newsletter list at Cagle.com/subscribe.
Here’s my new “back to school” cartoon. This isn’t the “back to school” time of year, but there is a lot of news now about when and how schools will reopen with the coronavirus still raging.
Everyone tells me that I should post my messy rough sketches online. I’m told that this shows I’m a real person, and that readers love a “window into my process.” The temptation is to draw nicer looking roughs since I know people will see them, but that would take me down a slippery slope into cartoon madness.
Our reader supported site, Cagle.com, still needs you! Journalism is threatened with the pandemic that has shuttered newspaper advertisers. Some pundits predict that a large percentage of newspapers won’t survive the pandemic economic slump, and as newspapers sink, so do editorial cartoonists who depend on newspapers, and along with them, our Cagle.com site, that our small, sinking syndicate largely supports, along with our fans.
Please forward this email to your friends – tell them our Cagle.com email newsletters are FREE and FUN! They can join the newsletter list at Cagle.com/subscribe.
Here’s a special advance look at my new cartoon that goes out to newspapers tomorrow. Cartoons about about kids sheltering at home, while schools are closed for the pandemic, are among the most popular cartoons with editors. I have included a batch of my favorite pandemic/school cartoons below.
Our reader supported site, Cagle.com, still needs you! Journalism is threatened with the pandemic that has shuttered newspaper advertisers. Some pundits predict that a large percentage of newspapers won’t survive the pandemic economic slump, and as newspapers sink, so do editorial cartoonists who depend on newspapers, and along with them, our Cagle.com site, that our small, sinking syndicate largely supports, along with our fans.
Please forward this email to your friends – tell them our Cagle.com email newsletters are FREE and FUN! They can join the newsletter list at Cagle.com/subscribe.
Here’s my new cartoon, on graduation with social distancing. The scene of a graduation with masks and grads, standing on the lawn, at least six feet apart, amused me, but what’s really happening is the graduation ceremonies are being cancelled, which isn’t so funny.
Drawing this made my mind wander back to past graduation cartoons. This graduate lemmings cartoon harkens back to 2008 when there were no jobs for grads. It would be just as true today, if the grads were sitting at home watching TV and falling off a cliff, but I can’t think of how to draw that.
This old student debt cartoon seems to still be good year after year, and seems to be a yahtzee.
Here’s an old TRUE! graduation cartoon that I drew 25 years ago.
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Here are the ten most popular cartoons of the week (April 25 -May 2). Sorry I’m a little late this week, we had some technical problems over the weekend –but here they are!
20% of the cartoonists draw 80% of the cartoons that get reprinted. We have dozens of cartoonists in our little syndicate, but only a few cartoons each week catch the fancy of editors and that is easy to see this week. Bruce Plante of The Tulsa World newspaper in Oklahoma has three cartoons in this week’s top ten most reprinted cartoons. Gannett’s freelance cartoonist Dave Granlund and John Cole of The Times-Tribune in Scranton Pennsylvania round out the list with two each, with John taking the prize for the most popular cartoon of the week –about golf.
Our reader supported site, Cagle.com, still needs you! Journalism is threatened with the pandemic that has shuttered newspaper advertisers. Some pundits predict that a large percentage of newspapers won’t survive the pandemic economic slump, and as newspapers sink, so do editorial cartoonists who depend on newspapers, and along with them, our Cagle.com site, that our small, sinking syndicate largely supports, along with our fans.
Please forward this email to your friends – tell them our Cagle.com email newsletters are FREE and FUN! They can join the newsletter list at Cagle.com/subscribe.
No coronavirus cartoons today (you should go to Cagle.com for that). My legendary cartoonist buddy Randy Enos shares another story about his early days as a cartoonist.
We had all heard the stories, of course, but we didn’t really believe them. So, when I graduated from the 5th grade at the Merrimac Street School in 1946 and was about to start at the Parker Street School, I went with no real idea about the awful terrors I, and my doomed classmates were about to encounter.
Life at Merrimac had been sweet and carefree. Behind the medieval- looking building, there was a nice little playground. I envied my best friend Ottello because he lived but a few strides across the street. He could wake up late and just saunter over to school, whereas I had to often brave snowstorms that pushed so hard on my little body as I crossed the Common that many times I almost gave up to go back to my warmhouse.
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Each morning all the classrooms assembled in the halls, upstairs and down, as we pledged allegiance to the flag. An old Victrola was hand cranked. The little wooden doors on its base were openedand the creaky sounds of The Star Spangled Banner wafted up the stairway to our young ears. Ah, the good ol’ days… we’d soon be missing them … very … very … soon.
I went on through the 6th grade at Parker St. School and then it happened. In the 7th and 8th grade, for the first time we had a home room and went off to other rooms for other classes. My home room was my English class. I had a wonderful teacher, Mrs. Brown, who happened to live in my neighborhood . I would see her sometimes sitting on her front porch rocker.
Across the hall was my history/geography class presided over by a viciously cruel and petty teacher… the absolute WORST teacher in the New Bedford school system known all over town by kids who didn’t even go to this school … the infamous, BULLDOG BENNET!
Parker St. School
She was very short and squat with a pile of grey hair on her head and squinty slanted eyes and a face that looked EXACTLY like a bulldog. She had a permanent scowl. We never saw her smile. We came to think that she wasn’t even capable of smiling. Almost everyone in class was in terror of her and kids could be seen visibly shaking as they entered her class every day. Of course there were a few goody- good “teacher’s pets” who sailed through the two years unscathed, but certainly not your humble narrator. I got insanely awful grades. My father, a former dirt-poor immigrant kid who had never attended school in his whole life, was a stickler for me getting good grades (which I did achieve in Geometry, surprise surprise) and English. But, fortune, never the less, shined down on me due to the fact that Miss Bennet was an ardent right-wing, very outspoken bigot and snob. My father was an ardent Socialistic union man who loved Roosevelt. When my dad heard my terror tales of the horrors going on in my history and geography class, he forgave my bad grades … PHEW!He hated her as much as I did.
She loved to embarrass us kids in class. One time she made us stand and tell what church we went to. I was a product of an atheist household without benefit of a religion so I had to make up a lie about going to some Portuguese church to avoid the obvious confrontation that would have ensued. Anything she could pick on with a kid-victim was fodder for her seething, snarling scorn. Each day she would feed us her political propaganda woven into the history and geography lesson and I would report it back home to dad.
My home room, with the wonderful Mrs. Brown, was my safe haven. One day, knowing my interest in becoming an artist, she asked if I would like to undertake a mural for the classroom. It was to go all the way around the room except for the front blackboards which were used for the lessons. For some reason we were blessed with blackboards on the sides and back of the room. Supplied with colored chalks, I decided I would create a detailed jungle masterpiece peopled with parrots, monkeys, vines and colorful flowers. Sometimes Mrs. Brown would excuse me from the regular class involvement (remember I got good grades in English) to work on my project while the other poor slobs had to recite and compose and read. I loved my mural commission and really got lost in the jungle, inventing the swooping branches, vines and flora that housed my acrobatic monkeys and wildly colorful parrots. I’d stay late in class after school often to work on it.
One day, as I was engaged in my artistic endeavor with only Mrs. Brown at her desk, I became aware of another presence in the room. I turned slowly around to see the awful Bulldog Bennet standing in the doorway glowering at me. Time stopped dead as she spoke … “If he spent half the time attending to his lessons as he does to his art, he’d probably make something of himself!” By Mrs. Brown’s expression and the comments, she made at that point, I could tell that she shared my dislike for our neighbor across the hall.
Bennet went on for those two years bragging that when she was a schoolgirl she would weep if she got only an A, instead of an A+. She would invite the two or three girls who were her favorites to her house for tea and then, the next day, tell us all what fun they all had.
When we all finally graduated to New Bedford High School it was like a deadly curse had been lifted from our battered psyches.
Years and years later, after I was well into my illustration and cartooning career and my mother had died and my father had retired and was doing volunteer work for the Red Cross, he told me that he was regularly taking residents of a nursing home for drives in his car just so they could get out and around a little. He said, “You’ll never guess who is one of my regular ladies … Bulldog Bennet! He said that she was a little shriveled and quite senile version of her old self. He also told me that he always stopped somewhere to buy the ladies an ice cream cone on their trips. He said that the only thing he would ever hear out of her little high, squeaky, cracked voice was… ” Ice cream … ice cream … ice cream!”
And, so, that’s the way it ended for the infamous Bulldog Bennet … a tiny pitiful voice pleading to my dad “Ice cream … ice cream … ice cream!”
Our newspaper clients are crashing now as Coronavirus is crushing their advertisers. We need your support for Cagle.com (and DarylCagle.com) now more than ever! Notice that we run no advertising! We depend entirely upon the generosity of our readers to sustain the site. Please visit Cagle.com/heroes and make a contribution. You are much appreciated!
Most of this new batch of my old TRUE panels came from my collection about entertainment and celebrities. I ended up killing most of these cartoons because they were so stale. I forget how different things were back in 1995. This edited batch of cartoons makes 1995 seem not so different from today – even though one cartoons shows a guy reading a book on the toilet; we may not read books anymore, but toilets haven’t changed much.
Star Trek is still familiar 23 years later. Mattel’s Barbie is still popular, but other toys in my TRUE cartoons are forgotten – for example Barney the Dinosaur was big in 1995. I forgot all about Barney. The first cartoon below is about Lassie, who we remembered as a doggie celebrity back in 1995. Do people remember Lassie now?
Here’s another batch of my TRUE syndicated newspaper cartoons from 1995. I’m culling out the cartoons that are not too stale to include in our PoliticalCartoons.com database and making little changes so that don’t seem too dated; sometimes that is hard and I have to delete some of my favorite oldies. I’m letting quite a few old style TVs and land line phones sneak through.
I suppose it is more interesting that so little has changed.
Here’s another collection of my TRUE cartoons about kids!
I’m loading my oldies into our PoliticalCartoons.com database, and making some editorial decisions on what to edit or cut. These TRUE cartoons ran in newspapers back in 1995. It is interesting to see how many of them hold up well over the years. Things don’t change much. The TRUE cartoons that look stale have land-line phones, phone booths, and old style televisions. I’m culling out the cartoons that refer to events and politicians in 1995 – after all, our database is an online store and I don’t think people will be interested in licensing stale cartoons. Political cartoons in general go stale fast, which is both a problem and a blessing for us.
Don’t miss my other Coronavirus posts:
