DarylCagle.com

One of our good foreign customers wrote to me, and to a batch of top international cartoonists asking them what they thought the future of editorial cartooning would be. Here is my response:

I disagree with most of my cartoonist colleagues on this – most cartoonists view the future creatively, arguing that there will be more animation in cartoons and more cartoons created to take advantage of the interactivity of the internet. I disagree, because I also run a syndicate and I see no trend for web customers to be willing to pay for interactive or animated cartoons. This is just cartoonists describing what they hope will happen.

The big change I see happening is the decline of big newspapers, and an increase in small clients, free weekly newspapers and non-traditional clients who would not buy cartoons before, because the process was too difficult or expensive. As the big publishers die off and cut back, we pick up new small web sites, newsletters, weeklies and foreign publications, which wouldn’t have found us before, if not for the internet.

The future is not a change in the nature of cartoons, which remain popular in their current, static form, it is a change in distribution of cartoons to more clients, smaller clients, and more obscure clients in more faraway places, as publications become smaller and more numerous, as more people become easier to reach and as more people around the world have interests in the same issues.

We get the same questions in the email
box every day and I thought I would take some time out to respond
to some of the most frequent ones.

You say you update the cartoons "every
day" but I see lots of the same cartoons are up now that
were there yesterday. What’s up with that?

The fact that we update the cartoons everyday
doesn’t mean that each cartoonist draws a new cartoon every day.
Most editorial cartoonists draw between three and five cartoons
per week, some draw once a week. Some draw six times a week.
Some draw local cartoons some days, that they don’t send to us.
Some take vacations. On the busiest days of the week we update
the site with 100 new cartoons per day ­ there are 175 cartoonist
slots on the site.

Why can’t you set up your site so that
I don’t have to look at those same cartoons that I saw yesterday?
I want to see only the new cartoons.

Look at our RSS feeds which feature only
the newly updated cartoons at the top of each page.

Where are your RSS feeds?

Go to our daily updating cartoons pages and click on
the orange button to the left of any cartoonist’s name, or scroll
to the bottom to click on the RSS feeds for batches of artists.
We can’t include all of the cartoons in one RSS feed because
the pages are too long with 100 new cartoons on busy days.

Why don’t you make the cartoons in your
RSS feeds full sized? I have to click on each cartoon to be able
to read it.

That’s so that you have to look at an ad
and we don’t go broke.

I have a great idea for a cartoon! Want
to hear it?

No.

I have lots of great ideas for cartoons,
but I can’t draw. Can you tell me which editorial cartoonist
I should contact to draw my cartoons?

I don’t know any editorial cartoonists
who work with gag writers.

I would like to have a cartoon logo
drawn for my business and I like your style. Could you do that
for me? I can’t afford to pay any more than $50.

No.

I have to write a paper about an editorial
cartoon and I picked yours. Can you tell me what it means? Please
tell me right away because my paper is due tomorrow.

Sorry, I get too many requests like this.
I have to let the cartoons speak for themselves. Besides, you’re
supposed to be following the news and the meaning of the cartoon
should be obvious to you ­ if it is not, then it wasn’t a
good cartoon.

Would you like to: Enlarge your penis?
Get cheap drugs? Refinance? Help us move millions of dollars
from a foreign dignitary’s bank account?

No. No. No. No.

May I run your cartoon in my blog?

If you are on Myspace.com, yes, go to any
cartoon on caglepost.com’s cartoon ticker
page, click on the thumbnail image
for any cartoon, then click on the Myspace.com link to put the
cartoon on Myspace.com. If you are not on Myspace.com, you can post
any of our caglecartoons.com cartoons on your blog for a nominal
fee, just visit Politicalcartoons.com. We may do a Facebook application
in the future.

May I use your cartoon for my class
at school?

Yes. In fact, "in-classroom"
use is one of the "Fair Use" exceptions to the copyright
law. You can use any copyrighted materials you want in the classroom
without asking.

May I post your cartoon on my high school
class web site? Or in my school newspaper? Or on posters at school?

No, unless you want to pay the nominal
fee on politicalcartoons.com ($3 for school use). These school
uses are not "in-classroom."

Why don’t you let us use your cartoons
for free in schools?

We tried that, but we found that letting
people download free, high-resolution cartoons on Politicalcartoons.com
was a bandwidth hole. Suddenly everybody was saying they wanted
cartoons for schools and our bandwidth went through the roof.
When we put a $3 fee up for schools the bandwidth bleeding stopped.

I have to write a paper on the career
I want to go into and I chose cartooning. Please tell me:

1) How much money do you make?

2) How much education was required for you to get your job?

3) How much time does it take you to draw a cartoon?

4) How did you get into this business?

1) Cartoonists make anything between $0
per year and $50,000,000 per year ­ just like actors, musicians
and basketball players. And, like actors, musicians and basketball
players, most cartoonists make closer to $0 than $50,000,000.

2) No education is required, only quality
of work and some business acumen ­ but that is true of most
careers. Education is very important and it is unusual for anyone
to be successful without a good education.

3) All my life. Some cartoonists brag about
drawing quickly; I think this diminishes the value of their work
in the eyes of their editors and readers. Good cartoonists think
about their work all the time and spend a lit of time working
to improve.

4) I started as a general illustrator,
and then worked as a cartoon illustrator, then I worked as a
toy inventor, I did a syndicated cartoon, then editorial cartoons.
I drew other people’s characters in other people’s styles, working
on projects for others before my career got to the point that
I could draw as I wanted.

Why don’t you have any conservative
cartoonists on your site?

We have a lot, but conservatives, like
you conservatives notice the cartoons you disagree with more
than the others. It is an optical illusion for you.

When are you going to stop bashing President
Bush?

Be patient. It won’t be long.

I can’t cancel my newsletter subscription!
What do I do to make it stop?

Most people who can’t cancel are replying
to the email with a note asking to cancel ­ we don’t get
these replies. To cancel you have to click on the unsubscribe
link in the newsletter, or go to our newsletter subscriptions page and follow
the instructions. Another problem is with people who have the
newsletter forwarded from another email address ­ there is
no way for us to know that, and clicking on the unsubscribe link
won’t make any change to a different email address. If you are
flummoxed, email us.

I tried to subscribe to your newsletters,
but I don’t get anything! What’s wrong?

You probably have an email account with
a company like Earthlink, which does "whitelisting"
­ that is, these providers send an email reply to us, asking
us to confirm that we are a real person who wants to send an
email. This is a method of preventing spam. We don’t respond
to the "whitelisting" replies. Your only solution is
to try subscribing from another free email service, like Yahoo,
Google or Hotmail, which doesn’t do "whitelisting."

You might have a spam filter – take a look
at your blocked emails and approve us as a sender.

I was getting your newsletters, but
they suddenly stopped. What’s wrong?

If we get the email bounced back from your
email address a couple of times, your subscription is automatically
cancelled. You may have had technical problems with your email,
or you may have had a full mailbox. You need to go to our newsletter subscription
page and resubscribe.

Another problem is spam filters. You might
have a new spam filter, or a new setting on your spam filter
– take a look at your blocked emails and approve us as a sender.

I was getting your newsletters fine
for a while, and now I don’t see the images in the newsletter
­ they are all broken image links? What’s wrong?

Some email services, like Hotmail, will
occasionally ask you to approve images from senders and will
block the images in an email from displaying until you approve
the images from us, or any other sender. This is to prevent users
from accidentally seeing pornography in a spam email. Just approve
us for image display in your email program.

I want you to syndicate my cartoons.
Will you look at my samples?

No, sorry. We get too many requests from
aspiring cartoonists and just don’t have the resources to deal
with unsolicited submissions. Also, we have had bad experiences
with angry amateur cartoonists who won’t take "no"
for an answer and now we are skittish.

Your site is slow!

No it’s not! The problem is on your end,
or in between you and our server ­ Microsoft serves the Cagle.MSNBC.com
site ­ it is like getting electricity from the utility. We
can blast as much bandwidth as all of MSNBC.com. Our cartoons
are bandwidth heavy compared to other sites that are mostly text,
so our pages will naturally take longer to load.

But, if you’re complaining about Polticalcartoons.com
or Caglepost.com, we serve those sites outside of MSNBC.com,
and yes, sometimes we have too much traffic. We’re upgrading
from two servers to four and we should be speedy all the time
with our new load balancing. We’re working on it and we apologize
for any hassles.

My buddy, Jonathan "Zapiro" Shapiro is having
a bit of a cartoon controversy down in South Africa with the
Zuma rape cartoon (right). Here are some excerpts from a Los Angeles Times article about the cartoon:

The cartoon shows Zuma preparing to rape
the justice system, portrayed as a blindfolded woman pinned down
by his political allies in the ANC, the Communist Party, unions
and the ANC Youth League.

Published in the Sunday Times of Johannesburg,
the cartoon lampoons a campaign by Zuma’s supporters to throw
out charges of corruption, fraud and racketeering that he faces
so he can seek South Africa’s presidency. In a country with one
of the world’s highest rates of rape — and one deeply divided
between supporters and opponents of Zuma, who was acquitted of
rape charges in 2006 — the drawing has been explosive.

The nation’s high court is due to rule
today on Zuma’s bid to have the charges against him dismissed
…



As he has done since the 2006 rape trial, Zapiro drew Zuma as
having a shower sprouting from his head — a reference to the
party leader’s testimony that to avoid AIDS he showered after
having unprotected sex with an HIV-positive woman. Zuma has thrice
sued the cartoonist for libel. Two suits were withdrawn; the
third is pending.

Quotes from Jonathan:

The central message is that Jacob Zuma
is about to violate and rape the justice system with the help
of his political allies. Justice is an allegorical figure but
she does have a certain amount of humanity in the way I’ve drawn
her, which added to the shock value. It’s [Zuma’s] own rape trial,
for which he was acquitted, that makes it more explosive.

It wasn’t my being worried about Zuma’s
rape trial that made me think twice, three times, four times,
five times before doing this drawing. It was women’s feelings
I was more worried about. I sent the cartoon around to some very
trusted female friends. The initial shock at seeing the drawing
almost made people draw breath. You gasp when you see it. But
within a brief amount of time they considered the drawing and
said it’s valid both in terms of what it’s saying about Zuma’s
violation of our justice system and our constitutional tenets
but also in terms of the very violent and patriarchal society
that we have …



There were plenty of people who were offended by it, but what
I found fascinating is that on some of the talk shows where I
have taken some flak, the proportion of flak-givers is much higher
from men than women. There was one call that came from a gang-rape
victim, who said that she was shocked by it and felt very uncomfortable,
but then she proceeded to support it.