This is part three of a collection of my favorite coronavirus Grim Reaper cartoons. The Reaper (or “Death” for short) is a standard cliché for editorial cartoonists; he is a character that belongs to every cartoonist, like, Uncle Sam, Lady Liberty and the donkey and elephant …
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Here are the ten most popular cartoons of the week (May 9 -May 16).
The big winner this week is Jeff Koterba of The Omaha World Herald, who has the most popular cartoon of the week and dominates with four cartoons in the top ten – an impressive performance that has never been matched. With the #2 cartoon, and two cartoons in the top ten, is Dave Granlund. Special congratulations to Bill Day who is making his first appearance in the Top Ten this week.
Our top ten is a measure of how many of our subscribing newspaper editors choose to reprint each of our cartoons, from the approximately 60 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.
The 6th most popular cartoon of the week is this one by Jeff Koterba, who has a whopping FOUR cartoons in the top ten this week.
#7
The seventh most popular cartoon is the unprecedented fourth cartoon from Jeff Koterba.
#8
The eighth most popular cartoon this week is the second cartoon in the Top Ten from Dave Granlund. This is also the only Top Ten cartoon that is not about the pandemic.
#9
This cartoon marks Bill Day‘s first appearance in the Top Ten.
#10
This cartoon is from Adam Zyglis of The Buffalo News.
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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.
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I get a cable TV channel that lets me see a view of four news networks at once and I regularly switch back and forth between CNN, BBC, MSNBC and Fox News – and Fox News is a completely different world, especially the past couple of days as they have obsessed over the Michael Flynn story while other news focuses almost exclusively on the pandemic.
One thing I wanted to do in the cartoon was to draw the screaming Democrat donkey with a mask, and the daydreaming, pandemic-disinterested Republican with no mask. It occurred to me – what if I wanted to draw the elephant with a mask; how would I do that? A mask is supposed to cover your nose. Would the elephant have a mask the size of a bed sheet? Would his mask have a hose-like extension for his trunk? If I drew anything like that, would it even look like a mask?
These are important questions for Republicans, but only if they are going to wear masks. Wearing a mask is effective in protecting others, not yourself, so it makes ideological sense why Republicans would not want to wear them … still, if MAGA Republicans did want to wear them, I’d be in cartoon trouble.
Here is the rough sketch for this one, that I drew on a piece of Cagle Cartoons letterhead.
Notice that I thought about drawing the elephant in a Fox News t-shirt, but I decided against it. FoxNews.com used to be a great subscriber to CagleCartoons, but they recently cancelled their subscription. That’s very disappointing and a giant step in their descent into hell.
This post got me to thinking, so I drew this …
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.
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Cartoon by CagleCartoonist, Dave Whamond from Canada
May 12, 2020
Congressman Salud Carbajal
District Office
Santa Barbara, CA
Dear Congressman Carbajal,
… I run a constituent small business in Montecito, Cagle Cartoons, Inc., that syndicates editorial cartoons and columnists. About half of America’s daily, paid-circulation newspapers subscribe to our service that you can see at CagleCartoons.com.
Journalism has been in decline for years, but the newspaper industry now faces sudden extinction with the pandemic as newspaper advertising revenue has crashed. A large percentage of our subscribing newspapers have simply stopped paying their bills; a good example is our local Santa Barbara News-Press that has run our cartoons and columns on their editorial page on most days for over 14 years – they are now seven months behind in their payments.
Industry experts predict that as many as two thirds of newspapers may not survive the pandemic. We saw the stock price of Gannett, the largest newspaper chain, drop from over $10/share to under a dollar in a matter of months (USA Today runs our cartoons). The loss of newspapers would also sink the editorial cartooning profession and our small business along with it.
Cartoon by CagleCartoonist, Bill Day
Our Web site, Cagle.com, is the face of the editorial cartooning profession to the world and we suffer for that as press freedoms around the world are in decline. Humorless despots hate seeing themselves in our cartoons and our sites are targets of sophisticated hacker attacks that clearly come from state actors. Although America benefits by demonstrating our values around the world through journalism and editorial cartoons, the US government does little or nothing to support editorial cartoonists and other journalists who suffer from foreign attacks.
We received an SBA PPP loan in the amount of $10,600.00; we applied for a very much larger loan based on our expenses which mainly consist of royalties to our artists and our tech expenses that are bloated by defenses against foreign hacker attacks. Our small business is unusual in that we have only two employees, our income from newspapers is broadly distributed to our contributors and the loan amount was not based on our actual expenses, it was based only on the salaries of our two employees, me and my bookkeeper. We have over 75 great cartoonists and columnists, who depend on us, who were ignored in the process because their income is reported on 1099s. The PPP program was not designed for us.
By CagleCartoonist Michael Kountouris from Greece
For many years I traveled around the world giving lectures through the US State Department Speaker Program. In nations without press freedoms, audiences were shocked to see how American cartoonists were free to criticize their government. Well more than half of the world’s population lives in countries where cartoonists are not allowed to draw their nation’s leader. The Speaker Program was effective in spreading our values and promoting press freedom. American editorial cartoonists are seen as stars around the world where we are well respected, like American astronauts, basketball players and jazz musicians. These effective State Department lecture programs have stopped featuring American editorial cartoonists during the Trump administration.
The impending collapse of journalism is a national tragedy that threatens our democracy. The newspaper industry has been lobbying in Washington seeking government support that is unlikely to happen during the Trump administration which has shown hostility to press criticism – criticism that is strongest and most visible among editorial cartoonists. If Democrats win the White House, I fear that any support for journalism may not include small syndicates and press services because our businesses are unusual. We are likely to be overlooked, as we were with the PPP program.
When legislators think of journalists they don’t think of editorial cartoonists. Editorial cartoonists are journalists. We are important. Don’t forget us.
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.
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Last year an author friend of mine asked me a favor. He wanted to know whether I’d forsake my regular drawing style to illustrate a book he was writing which consisted of interviews he had with 47 well known writers of popular fiction. He had seen some artist who had done realistic simple line drawings for, I think, The New York Times Book Review section. He didn’t want color or shading and he certainly didn’t want caricatures. Would I be willing to try drawing something realistic and not cartoony for him? I thought it might be a challenge and an interesting adventure so I agreed to try it.
James Rollins
Only a couple of times in my career have I ventured into this arena. Once was a series of realistic hands I had done for New York Magazine and the other was a few ads for N.B.C. back in the late 60’s. They would run these “piggy-back” ads for various shows, one on top of another in the Times. They preferred to work with just one artist on these projects so I was compelled to work in three different styles so it would look like three different artists. I would do one in my regular linocut style and one in a stylized pen and ink style and one very realistically drawn.
Faye Kellerman
In both of these cases, I don’t think I did a very good job with the “realism”. So, here I was once again giving it a try. I’m a masochist.
At first, I just couldn’t help it… the exaggeration just kept creeping in. I had been doing caricatures for too many years and it was hard to break out of that mold. My friend, the author, wasn’t pleased but he had so much faith in me that I was determined to make it work. It was kind of a little vacation from drawing cartoons. I kept plodding on. I decided to draw them in pencil and I forced myself to “play it straight” and resist all my urges to make that nose a little bigger…exaggerate those face wrinkles and have a lot of fun with those ears.
Harlan Coben
The idea was that I would just do a simple head of each author for the beginning of every chapter.
I searched the web for photos of them being baffled at times to see how different they looked at different times. When they were posing for a book jacket shot, they were prettied up a lot so I preferred it when I could find candid shots of them at home or at a gathering or a book signing. I was blowing up some very blurry photos sometimes to see what they looked like. You see, I was working under the disadvantage of not knowing what any of them looked like before hand. I was not familiar with any of the writers in this genre.
I ended up surprising myself by actually enjoying this foreign exploration into the world of a realistic illustrator.
I’ll probably never do it again. It’s really not as much fun as being a caricaturist.
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!
Here are the ten most popular cartoons of the week (May 2 -May 9).
The big winners this week are Jeff Koterba of The Omaha World Herald and Canadian cartoon maestro, Dave Whamond, each with three cartoons in the top ten. These are the cartoons that are chosen by most newspapers editors to be reprinted on their editorial pages. 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.
The most popular cartoon of the week is this one by Jeff Koterba, who has three cartoons in the top ten this week.
#2
The second most popular cartoon of the week is by Canadian cartoonist Dave Whamond, who also has three cartoons in the top ten this week.
#3
The most third most popular is my own graduation cartoon. I haven’t been drawing many cartoons lately as I’ve been spending most of my time on business stuff, keeping things going with all the pandemic chaos going on and a surge in hacker attacks. I know I should pick up the pace. See the Daryl Cagle cartoon archive on Cagle.com.
#4
We have a tie for the fourth most popular cartoon, here’s Dave Granlund.
#4
The other cartoon in a fourth place tie is this one from Jeff Koterba.
#6
We also have a tie for sixth place. This is the third cartoon in the top ten this week, from Jeff Koterba.
#6
The other cartoon tied for 6th place is this one from Dave Whamond.
#8
The eighth most popular cartoon is another one from Dave Whamond, the third of his whopping three cartoons in the top ten this week.
John Cole of The Scranton Times Tribune rounds out the list at number ten.
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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 top ten most popular cartoons of the pandemic, from February 1st through May 4th, 2020. These are the cartoons that our newspaper subscribers chose to print from nearly 2,000 pandemic cartoons delivered from our syndication service, CagleCartoons.com. About half of America’s daily, paid-circulation newspapers subscribe to CagleCartoons.com, so these are likely the cartoons that most newspaper readers have seen in the past three months, appearing in hundreds of newspapers.
Regular readers of our blog and newsletter see our collection of the top ten cartoons every week, and have probably already seen all of these in our weekly collections, but this list puts them in perspective. (Subscribe to our free email newsletter so you never miss our weekly “Top Ten Most Popular Cartoons”.)
What really stands out is the stellar performance of freelance cartoonist, Rick McKee, who has the number one most popular pandemic cartoon and who crushes the coronavirus field with a whopping three cartoons dominating the pandemic top ten. Rick was recently laid off from The Augusta Chronicle newspaper in Georgia (what a mistake that was). The number two cartoon belongs to Steve Sack of The Minneapolis Star-Tribune. The rest in the top ten will be familiar to all of our fans.
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.
The fifth place cartoon comes from Gannett freelancer, Dave Granlund.
#6
The sixth place cartoon is the third cartoon in the top ten that comes from Rick McKee.
#7
The seventh place cartoon is the number one cartoon from last week, by John Cole of The Times-Tribune in Scranton Pennsylvania.
#8
The eighth place cartoon comes from the Canadian cartoon maestro, Dave Whamond, who is the only non-American in the top ten.
#9
The ninth place cartoon comes from Adam Zyglis, the cartoonist for the Buffalo News in New York.
#10
The tenth place cartoon comes Dave Fitzsimmons of The Arizona Daily Star.
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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.
#4
Don’t miss my other Coronavirus posts:
