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I think this was the most satisfyingly creative picture I’ve ever made… full of improvisation. I had been trying to think of a unique way to illustrate my favorite book “Moby Dick” and I had hit upon this idea of doing a large picture consisting of just words… the first page of Moby Dick. Mystic Seaport sells giclées of it along with my whaling picture called “New Bedford Boys At Toil”.
Back in 2005 when my wife and I visited my ancestral homeland, the Azores, at one point, we stayed on the lovely island of Fayal in a hotel which was once a fortress right on the water’s edge replete with cannons on an upper deck next to a big swimming pool and a castle-like entrance. One afternoon we encountered an American artist and his small group of watercolorists. I’ve known a few guys that did this European tour-thing with a gaggle of amateur artists/students who would sign on for a package deal of touring various countries, lodging, visiting museums and painting with critiques from their instructor-guide. The instructor was an amiable chap and he invited us to sit in on a critique of that day’s watercolors by his little gang of students. One woman had put some words into her picture for some reason which prompted the admonition from the instructor, “Never put words in your pictures!” He explained to her that written words have no place in a piece of art and that it had ruined her picture.
I wondered what he would think of a picture I had made 4 years earlier which I named “Call Me Ishmael” (the most famous opening three words of any American novel). I had been trying to think of a unique way to illustrate my favorite book “Moby Dick” and I had hit upon this idea of doing a large picture consisting of just words… the first page of Moby Dick.
The picture is 26″ X 40″. It’s a linocut. What I like to call a “linocut-collage” because I print on a variety of colored papers inking the block in a variety of colored inks. Then I select parts of each print and paste it all up to create my full color picture.
I penciled in the words in mostly capital letters, inventing shapes with them using positive and negative spaces as the forms presented themselves to me. It’s very hard to exactly explain so I am submitting here a few details from the picture along with a photo of the whole thing to show what I mean.
After I had carved all the lettering, I proceeded to ink the block and print on the colored papers. I stuck to mostly greenish and bluish, waterish colors. I made a blue print, a green print, a purplish print, black print, white print on black paper and so forth. I kept inking the block different colors and printing on many many Pantone papers until I had this bunch of prints. Now all I had to do was select parts of those prints and paste it all up as a collage. First I used one of the prints as a “master” to paste the other little letter forms from the big prints on to it.
I think this was the most satisfyingly creative picture I’ve ever made… full of improvisation.
Mystic Seaport sells giclées of it along with my whaling picture called “New Bedford Boys At Toil”.
When I show this picture to people, I tell them that I’m illustrating Moby Dick and that this is the first page… and I have only 822 pages to go!
Amidst my picture puzzle of letter forms in “Call Me Ishmael”, I have buried a few whaling images. There’s a harpoon, whaling spade, killing lance and a small white whale.
I guess the admonition to me would have to be… “Don’t put pictures in your words!”
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Here are John Cole’s favorite cartoons of the past decade! John is the staff cartoonist for the Scranton Times-Tribune in Pennsylvania, and he also draws local cartoons about North Carolina for NCPolicyWatch.com
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Our talented Cagle-Cartoons-Colleague Patrick Chappatte lives in Switzerland and drew for many years for the international edition of The New York Times; his cartoons appeared prominently on The New York Times Web site and it looked like Patrick was close to getting the cartoon-phobic Old Gray Lady to embrace him as it’s editorial cartoonist for all of their editions when an obscure editor in Hong Kong selected an anti-Semitic cartoon by another cartoonist to run in the Times’ international edition. The Times over-reacted, not by educating, or firing the errant editor, but by banning all traditional editorial cartoons from all of the their editions. Patrick is the only cartoonist I’ve ever heard of, who was fired because of a cartoon that someone else drew, and because of a bad decision made by someone else’s editor.
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I’d like to call attention to a new cartoonist who recently joined us –Canadian Guy Parsons.
Guy joined Cagle.com and our PoliticalCartoons.com store. He has a funky style that looks like he is drawing with pastels on a piece of orange paper. Guy’s cartoons appear in the Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald, and he has won a bunch of awards for his illustration work.
My buddy, Nate Beeler, drew for many years for the Washington Examiner and the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch. Alas, Nate recently left the Dispatch with a round of brutal cost cutting –a common story for editorial cartoonists these days. Nate is brilliant, and his cartoons occupy the political center, which is unusual and which gets his cartoons reprinted more than the majority of cartoonists who draw from the left. Nate’s favorite cartoons from the past decade are shown below.
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Nate drew the first cartoon, showing the Statue of Justice hugging the Statue of Liberty, when the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage. I think this was one of the most popular and reprinted editorial cartoons ever.
Pat taking a selfie at his recent party celebrating 40 years as the cartoonist for The Salt Lake Tribune.
The photo shows Pat taking a selfie at his recent party celebrating his 40 years as the editorial cartoonist for The Salt Lake Tribune.
Today is the first day of our CagleCartoonists’ “Favorites of the Decade” slideshows that we prepared for the USA Today Network sites. Twenty-nine of our cartoonists selected their twenty-two favorites for the slideshows and USA Today seems to be running them in alphabetical order, starting with Pat Bagley today. (The first days of December were devoted to Gannett’s staff cartoonists.) Take a look at Pat’s slideshow on USA Today’s site.See an archive of Pat’s latest cartoons on Cagle.com.
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Every day the news is full of Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine. We just can’t seem to get enough Ukraine.
We have a great CagleCartoonist from Ukraine, Vladimir Kazanevsky, who has probably won more international cartooning competitions than any other cartoonist in the world –but the international competition world is a different world, with different aesthetics that seem strange and foreign to an American reader.
I noticed that Vlad hadn’t posted any cartoons about the Ukraine/impeachment scandal and I told him that he is the only cartoonist from Ukraine that American readers are likely to see. Vlad’s perch in Kyiv could make his cartoons interesting to Western editors. Vlad then uploaded these three.
It looks like this jester-trap will draw Trump in as he is lured into watching himself on TV.
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Here Ukraine is a clown-seal that is getting Trump’s attention …
Here the jester appears to be Ukraine’s brain that is commanding heavy-Trump-the-elephant’s attention.
Vlad’s cartoons are charming, although I must admit that I don’t really understand most of them. This is typical of the international contest cartoonists who have a different cartoon language that doesn’t make much sense to Americans like me. Charming, though.
Here are selections of some of Vlad’s cartoons that I can understand – the first one shows refugees fleeing from a repressive regime.
This one shows our climate-change future.
Here man struggles with oil.
Putin doesn’t seem happy as his cold, Russian Trump-Vodka seems to have turned into poop, which doesn’t go well with caviar.
This charming cartoon shows animals who seem to be demonstrating in favor of their own predators.
All of this is only to show that Vlad is great, but I’m not surprised that we don’t see cartoons from Ukraine in American newspapers even while Ukraine dominates the news.
The photo below shows me with Vlad in Vlad’s studio in Kyiv a few years ago. Behind us are some of Vlad’s trophies from over 500 international cartooning prizes he has won in 52 countries. See Vlad’s archive on Cagle.com.
… And here’s an endangered tree, praying while stuck in place.
Peter has an impressive cartooning resume! He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, The Nation and MAD magazine where he has written and illustrated SPY vs. SPY in every issue since 1997. He is the co-founder and editor of World War 3 Illustrated, a political graphics magazine that has given a forum to political artists for 40 years. He has produced over two dozen books including The System, Diario de Oaxaca, Ruins (winner of the 2016 Eisner Award) and adaptations of many of Franz Kafka’s works into comics including The Metamorphosis and Kafkaesque (winner of the 2018 Reuben Award). Check out all of Peter’s books on Amazon.com.His latest graphic novel is an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Peter has lectured around the world and has taught comics courses at The School of Visual Arts in NYC and Harvard University.
I’m delighted to have Peter join us! Here are Peter’s selections of his favorite 22 cartoons of the past decade that he chose for USA Today.
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I pitched the idea to Gannett of running collections of favorite cartoons of the decade every day in December, the last month of the decade, with a selection by a different cartoonist each day. We, along with USA Today, selected the CagleCartoonists we would invite to participate and we asked them each to choose their favorite cartoons from the past ten years. I submitted twenty-nine batches of cartoons, selected by each of twenty-nine of our CagleCartoonists. USA Today plans on showcasing their own Gannett employee cartoonists, Thompson, Marlette, Murphy and Archer, through Thursday, with our CagleCartoonists finishing out the month, starting this Friday with Pat Bagley.
USA Today started off their daily, decade slideshows today with their talented cartoonist, Mike Thompson, who also did the work of laying all of these collections out for The USA Today Network sites (that includes the individual Web sites for all of Gannett’s 100+ daily newspapers). Visit USA Today’s Opinion page online to see these every day this month. Click on each cartoon in each slideshow to see a full-screen, high-resolution version of each cartoon, which is very nice.
It is very difficult to select a small batch of cartoons to represent an entire decade!!
Getting twenty-nine CagleCartoonists to each select a decade of favorites was challenging. Obama certainly got shorted as many cartoonists are obsessed with Trump now. A couple of cartoonists selected only Trump-bashing cartoons, which made for a poor representation of the decade –but hey, the fact that the cartoonists chose their own favorites made this project interesting. Some cartoonists, who have been with us for less than ten years, had to dig into their personal archives to cover the whole decade, so some of the cartoons haven’t been seen on Cagle.com. New Yorker/Mad Magazine/graphic-novelist Peter Kuper joined CagleCartoons.com just a couple of months ago and had to dig up his whole collection from his magazine gag cartoon archives. Dave Whamond and Ed Wexler, who joined us more recently, reached into their vaults for some of their early-decade cartoons; Ed selected some from when he was regularly drawing for US News & World Report magazine. Mike Keefe and Bill Schorr came out of their recent retirements to contribute their selections of favorites.
I wouldn’t call these selections the “best” of the decade, they are just the artists’ choices. I also can’t say that they represent the decade well (but what the heck).
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