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South African Political Cartoonist Fired For Being Too Political

 

jerm zuma South African Political Cartoonist Fired For Being Too Political cartoons

South African political cartoonist Jeremy Nell, whose cartoons I syndicate in our Cagle Cartoons package, was fired from his job at The New Age newspaper for being too political.

“The New Age‘s editorial stance became increasingly out of sync with mine,” Nell wrote on his blog. “This was particularly apparent when the current editor recently told me that he doesn’t “like cartoons [that make] political judgements or statements.” My satire can’t really function under such constraints.”

The move has been greeted with lots of outrage from observers that suspect the paper is editorially aligned with the President Jacob Zuma and ruling African National Congress, someone Nell (and other South African cartoonists) have been harshly critical of.

One noted Zumba critic, the great South African cartoonist Zapiro, drew a cartoon today in The Times in support of Nell. Zapiro famously draws Zuma with a showerhead coming out of his head, after the African President claimed taking a shower after having unprotected sex helped cut the risk of contracting HIV.

Its nice to see professional cartooning camaraderie in such a public venue.

120668 600 South African Political Cartoonist Fired For Being Too Political cartoons

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Zyglis on Drawing the Election: ‘Not Enough Days in the Week’

zyglis obama Zyglis on Drawing the Election: Not Enough Days in the Week cartoonsHere a cool video of our talented young cartoonist Adam Zyglis, the staff cartoonist at the Buffalo News. He was interviewed on CNN by Karin Caifa during this years Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC) convention that took place in Washington, D.C. last month.

Check our Adam’s terrific cartoons here.

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Interview With Conservative Cartoonist Eric Allie

eric allie Interview With Conservative Cartoonist Eric Allie cartoonsRecently, I traveled to France to attend the St. Just le Martel editorial cartoon festival. I brought with me our brilliant, knuckle-dragging conservative cartoonist Eric Allie, who seemed like a strange, wild beast to the mostly-lefty French cartoonists.

I had the chance to sit down and interview Eric about his cartooning style and ideas, and I poked and prodded him about all those crazy conservative tropes he enjoys using in his cartoons, like labeling the media the MSM (I actually had to Google it to find out what it meant because I wasn’t living in the right-wing bubble):

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Presidential Debate Number Two Open Thread

Since we have so many devoted readers with as many opinions about politics as our cartoonists (and since it went so well during the first Presidential Debate), here’s an open thread for all of you to have at it LIVE during tonight’s Vice Presidential debate between Joe Biden and Paul Ryan.

To start the discussion, here’s a funny pre-debate cartoon by Nate Beeler of the Columbus Dispatch (check out all our cool Debate cartoons here).

120496 600 Presidential Debate Number Two Open Thread cartoons

Who do you think will win? Are you rooting for anyone? What do you hope they discuss? Will Biden say something crazy? Comment away below!

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Farewell to NBCNews.com/msnbc.com

For the past six years we’ve enjoyed a partnership with msnbc.com (which recently changed its name to NBCNews.com) and for six years before that, with Slate.com when it was part of the Microsoft Network – all in all, twelve years with Microsoft and MSN.com.  I regret to write that our partnership has come to an end.

nbcnews Farewell to NBCNews.com/msnbc.com cartoonsI was the official “editorial cartoonist” for Slate.com, msnbc.com and NBCNews.com.  Of-course, all of the cartoonists that work with us through our Cagle Cartoons syndicate and Politicalcartoons.com were featured on the MSN.com sites, including slide shows on news topics of the day on msnbc.com, the Today Show site and NBC Sports; we did a cartoon week in review and maintained a “CartoonBlog.”

Recently, msnbc.com changed ownership to be run by NBC, and NBC itself recently changed ownership.  It isn’t usual these days for cartoons to be cut to save costs, but we were cut for editorial reasons. The reason I was given for our departure was “the new management wants nothing to do with cartoons.” Msnbc.com/NBCNews.com has never had an opinion section, or other opinion content, so it is disappointing, but not entirely unexpected.

Readers of our Cagle.com site will see very few changes – the NBCNews.com logo is gone from our header and will be gone from my attribution in my future cartoons.  Our site will look the same as always; we’ll continue our syndication business as always at CagleCartoons.com and Politicalcartoons.com.

Our editors at MSN/Slate/msnbc/NBCNews were wonderful to work with all these years; I’ve appreciated their support for our cartoonists and our art form.  They loved what we did, let us do what we wanted and were happy with what we wanted to do – the perfect editors!  They were great.  I miss them already.

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De Rosier’s Final Cartoon For The Albany Times Union

Today on his blog, Albany Times-Union cartoonist John de Rosier filed his final cartoon for the paper. de Rosier was notified earlier this week that he was being laid off due to budget cuts, along with full-time photographer Phil Kamrass. At least the paper let him go out in style, unlike Clay Jones, whose final cartoon was killed by his editor at the Free Lance Star.

john de rosier cartoon De Rosiers Final Cartoon For The Albany Times Union cartoons

Tim O’Brien, the president of the Albany Newspaper Guild, has a nice blog post up about the lost of de Rosier’s cartooning job at the Times-Union, and its larger implications to a newspaper that just earned a Newspaper of Distinction Award from the Associated Press:

A distinctive art form is being steadily destroyed by people who look purely at revenue. It’s hard to say that an editorial cartoonist generates a certain amount of income for the newspaper, just as it is hard to say how much any single reporter or photographer does. But eliminating the cartoonist sends a message to readers: We are taking away something you value, something that makes your newspaper distinctive, something you cannot get anywhere else. We value your newspaper less, and you should too.

It’s a terrible message, and it comes at a price that may not be immediately apparent but will cost newspapers dearly in the long run.

“We know staff cuts can hurt our product,” wrote Times Union editor Rex Smith in an email to employees, “but we also know that we’re working smarter and more efficiently than we ever have before, and we recognize the promise of journalism in the digital age.

It’s a shame Smith doesn’t recognize the importance and promise political cartoons can offer to newspapers online in the digital age.

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My Cartoonist Week in Algeria

My Cartoonist Week in Algiers

One fun thing about being an editorial cartoonist is that I sometimes get invited to strange places as a cartoon celebrity. I just finished a week in Algiers at their second annual comics festival. Algeria is a huge country, a former socialist member of the Soviet bloc and a former French colony in North Africa.

The people here like to be thought of as more European than Arab, and they seem relieved that their country has recently emerged from many years of internal violence. There was an ugly civil war here in the 1990s that has wound down to the point where Algiers is pretty safe, but there are military guards with machine guns everywhere, and we can’t drive very far without going through armed checkpoints. That is probably why it is safe.

The “Casbah” is the old part of Algiers that is a giant bazaar. The streets in the Casbah are too narrow for cars. The bustling Casbah is filled with tiny shops and tables with every kind of stuff – except tourist junk, because there are so few tourists here. Algeria isn’t an easy place for a tourist to visit, so we don’t see Algiers t-shirts or snow globes; I saw no Starbucks and no McDonald’s.

The language here is a confusing mish-mash of French and Arabic. The economy is a mish-mash too; the government seems to still have its head stuck in a Socialist past. Under a new law, consumer credit is banned in Algeria. Any business in Algeria must be 51 percent owned by Algerians, driving foreign investment away. Getting anything done here is a quest. People don’t show up on time and don’t seem to have much concern about productivity. There is a lot of confusion. The economy is sustained by oil revenue.

Since emerging from the violence there seems to be a yearning for a cultural renaissance here, and the cartoon arts benefit from that. Algerians like a strange mix of Arabic manga and euro-style storytelling comics, but the star cartoonists are political cartoonists. The most famous cartoonist here is Ali Dilem, the cartoonist for the French-language newspaper Liberté.

Algerian cartoonists struggle under pressure from the government. I’m told that Ali Dilem, who now lives outside of Algeria, faces 25 lawsuits from government officials he has insulted in his cartoons. The threat of civil suits may keep some cartoonists from criticizing the government, but the cartoonists I met seemed eager to continue pushing the limits. They were all very interested in what the limits were for American political cartoonists, expecting that we had similar problems with our government.

There was an exhibition of the work of a famed Algerian cartoonist named “Slim,” who has drawn socially conscious newspaper comic strips for decades here, and saw some of his cartoonist colleagues killed in the violence of the 1990s. Slim likes making fun of Algerian women who wear veils; he draws the veils much like the beak of a bird, and has the women walk around looking like ducks.

The comics festival invited cartoonists from all over the world to attend; names I’d never heard of, from strange, exotic places. In many countries, editorial cartoonists are the most important cartoonists, and there were quite a few editorial cartoonists here — a candy store for me since I’m an international editorial cartooning buff. The festival was really very nice.

A question I got a lot was, “Have you drawn any cartoons about Algeria?” I haven’t. It is hard to think of when Algeria was in the headlines in America. The only time I remember reading about Algeria is when Algerian President Bouteflika was quietly hanging out with his more vocal buddies Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales, affirming their coalition against evil America.

President Bouteflika won re-election recently with an unbelievable 90 percent of the vote. One Algerian told me that even the Prophet Muhammad himself couldn’t really get 90 percent of the vote.

Maybe I’ll draw a cartoon about Algeria. We’ll see.

Daryl Cagle is a political cartoonist and blogger for MSNBC.com; he is a past president of the National Cartoonists Society and his cartoons are syndicated to more than 850 newspapers, including the paper you are reading. Daryl’s books “The BIG Book of Campaign 2008 Political Cartoons” and “The Best Political Cartoons of the Year, 2010 Edition” are available in bookstores now.

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Burgers Burgers Everywhere

Burgers, Burgers, Everywhere!

For American cartoonists hamburgers are tasty junk food, but for cartoonists beyond our borders hamburgers are symbols of America. In fact, unless we’re told that hamburgers are a symbol for the USA, American readers would have a tough time understanding the feast of international burgertoons.

I once sold a cartoon showing the world as a hamburger, by Chile’s cartoonist Alen Lauzan, to be printed in a High School Social Studies textbook; when I saw the book I was surprised to see that the author wrote that the cartoon meant that everyone in the world loves burgers. In fact, it meant that American is imposing itself on the world. Lauzan also drew Guantanamo as a jail-burger. Swiss cartoonist Patrick Chappatte draws an American burger-nuclear-apocalypse. I drew an illegal immigrant behind a wall, lusting after America, in the form of a burger.

Cartoonists enjoy gay senators and poison Barbies – but sometimes we just need a burger break. Everyone should understand that.

Daryl Cagle is a political cartoonist and blogger for MSNBC.com. Daryl is a past president of the National Cartoonists Society and his cartoons are syndicated to more than 800 newspapers, including the paper you are reading. He runs the most popular cartoon site on the Web at Cagle.msnbc.com. His books “The BIG Book of Bush Cartoons” and “The Best Political Cartoons of the Year, 2005, 2006 and 2007 Editions,” are available in bookstores now.

Daryl is stepping in for Susie Cagle, who is on vacation this week.

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Newspapers and Cartoonists Wandering Blindly

Every day I read something from journalists obsessing about the future of print. The internet is gobbling up newspaper readers and advertisers. The future looks bleak for ink on paper as newspapers respond by downsizing, degrading their product and hastening their own demise. There seems to be a generally accepted axiom that the internet is the future for journalism. Columnists are transforming into multimedia bloggers and cartoonists feel pressure to animate their political cartoons. It makes perfect sense to chase the shifting audience, but the move to the internet doesn’t make much business sense.

Newspapers are bleeding revenue as the web enjoys a rush from new advertisers. The newspaper “group-think” solution is to move onto the internet to reclaim advertising dollars—but the money on the web is flowing to the search engines (mostly to Google) where topical ads are displayed with search results. Ads accompanying original content on the Web still pay poorly. As a political cartoonist, I run some popular Web sites that get millions of page views per month, but the ad revenue only covers the cost of my servers and bandwidth. Newspapers share this problem as they pour resources into building their Web sites and get very little revenue in return. Many try charging their readers to read archives on their Web sites, a strategy that fails almost every time as most Web surfers simply browse somewhere else where content is free.

Newspapers continue to pin their hopes on their Web sites in the belief that their brands carry goodwill into a new medium, when in fact, newspaper brands have little value on the Web. The three most popular news sites on the Web—Yahoo News, CNN and MSNBC.com—dominate the audience, with other news sites trailing far behind. The reason why is simple, each is attached to a huge audience (Yahoo, AOL and MSN.com) which feeds readers into these sites.

My own cartoon site is associated with MSNBC.com, which gets its traffic from MSN.com, which gets most of its traffic from the famous MSN.com home page, the default home page for PC buyers using the Internet Explorer browser, who don’t bother to change their home page. Yahoo and Google channel their huge search engine audiences into their news sites. The trick to finding a big audience on the Web is to bring your site to the audience, not to expect the audience to find your site.

One of the most popular online newspapers, The Washington Post, understands how the Web audience works. The Post partners with MSN.com and MSNBC.com to bring traffic their way. When The Washington Post Company bought my old employer Slate.com from Microsoft, the negotiations focused on Slate continuing to receive a huge audience flow from promotions on MSN.com. The Post understands the Web where traffic flows like a river – the river has to keep flowing or the lake will dry up.

For many newspaper editors, internet strategy is a fantasy from the movie “Field of Dreams.” “If you build it, they will come.” Good content is nice (Slate has great original content) but securing a continuing audience for that content is more important. Yahoo and Google maintain top news sites with almost no original content. That’s journalism 2.0: circulating content that is created in other media, while paying little or nothing for the content.

Reporters, columnists and editorial cartoonists are suffering from ongoing layoffs in the newspaper industry. The cartooning ranks have been thinned and the cartoonists who still have jobs are often asked to do more work online, such as starting blogs and animating their cartoons for the Web. In 2000, Gregg and Evan Spiridellis (JibJab.com) created some animated political cartoons that became hugely popular on the Web and newspaper editorial cartoonists seemed to agree that, in the future, all political cartoons would be animated. The problem for cartoonists is much the same as the problem for other content creators: there is no market for animated political cartoons when Web sites don’t want to pay for content.

I run a popular Web site and I’m the cartoonist for MSNBC.com, but I still make my living selling cartoons that are printed in ink on paper from traditional clients who actually pay. I often get calls from political cartoonists who are starting to animate their cartoons, asking where they can sell their animations; my answer is, “nowhere.” Even the successful JibJab guys use their political cartoons for publicity and make their living doing animations for commercial clients. The editorial cartoonists seem to be charging ahead in their aimless endeavors, typically creating animated political cartoons on the side, for newspaper employers who pay them nothing extra for the extra hours, creating content that no one wants to buy in syndication.

At this summer’s Association of American Editorial Cartoonists conference, there will be two sponsored programs: “What Do You Mean You’re Not Animating Yet?” and “Blog or Die.”

The aimless charge to the internet extends to the Pulitzer Prizes. This is the second year the Pulitzers accepted entries that were not printed, but were posted on the Web sites of paid circulation, daily print newspapers. The winner and nominees this year were all employees of print newspapers who submitted portfolios of animated Web cartoons that could not be printed in their newspapers–a first for the Pulitzers. The editorial cartoonist community is in a tizzy. Cartoonists want to win prizes and keep their jobs, and according to the Pulitzer jury, the way to do that is to jump on an internet bandwagon that no one is steering.

Daryl Cagle won’t be animating his editorial cartoons anytime soon. He is a political cartoonist and blogger for MSNBC.com. Daryl is a past president of the National Cartoonists Society and his cartoons are syndicated to more than 800 newspapers, including the paper you are reading. He runs the most popular cartoon site on the Web at Cagle.msnbc.com. His books “The BIG Book of Bush Cartoons” and “The Best Political Cartoons of the Year, 2005, 2006 and 2007 Editions,” are available in bookstores now.

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Too Many Cartoonists Too Little Time

Too Many Cartoonists, Too Little Time

Whenever cartoonists get together we complain about syndicates (the businesses that sell our cartoons to newspapers). Cartoonists are no businessmen — we want syndicates to be like mothers to us, selflessly nurturing our careers so we don’t have to sully our minds with yucky business thoughts, when we’d rather be thinking about cartoons. But syndicates don’t act like mothers, and cartoonists have some very colorful names for the syndicate executives who sell their work – in fact, some of these colorful names include the word “mother.”

In addition to being a political cartoonist myself, I run a small syndicate that specializes in editorial cartoons; I see that there must be one thousand aspiring cartoonists for every working professional, as I’m deluged with unsolicited submissions that are truly awful. At times like this, when people are passionate about politics, the inner political cartoonist emerges from the psyche of the talentless “wannabe.”

Many wannabe cartoonists recognize that they have no drawing talent, but it seems that everyone thinks they are a writer. I get many submissions from writers who are looking to collaborate with editorial cartoonists. These writers want to send me gags, or want to find cartoonists who will draw their gags. Here is a typical gag submission:

“So, we have President Bush standing there, and he says, ‘Things are improving in Iraq’ and behind him you see two massive armies, the Shiites and the Sunnis, about to fight each other, and the sky is filled with thousands of U.S. helicopters, then, in the next panel …”

These are people who think in words, not pictures. For some reason, this group of wannabes includes lots of lawyers who think they are funny. I think lawyers are funny, but I laugh at-them, not with-them; and it is a dark humor that makes me want to go take a shower afterwards. These guys just don’t get it. The cartoon writers often send obvious or trite gags that they think are brilliant and original. Sometimes the writers follow up with angry mail when they notice that another cartoonist has “stolen” their gag.

The second group of wannabes do their own drawings, but can’t see how truly awful their drawings are. These guys like to use computer fonts in their cartoons instead of hand lettering. Often they will use clip art in their cartoons, or lift photographs from the web, or they will use simple objects like squares and circles, and then have these objects making comments in speech balloons. These wannabes frequently don’t know how to work their scanner and will send murky gray images that show crinkled paper backgrounds from the napkins they drew their cartoons on.

One thing aspiring editorial cartoonists have in common is paranoia. I get inquiries like this: “I’m really funny and I have some great ideas, but I need to know how to get them copyrighted first so you won’t steal them.”

I have a notice on our syndicate web site that that says: “We do not accept and will not review unsolicited submissions from cartoonists.” Often the submissions come in with a note saying, “I know you don’t accept submissions, but …”

Ambitious aspiring cartoonists see syndicates as gatekeepers, guarding a barrier to the success they deserve. Sometimes the passion and perseverance of these wannabes can be frightening. They find my home phone number and my home address. Drive and perseverance in the face of adversity is a virtue, so their quest never ends.

Some horrid amateur cartoonists are convinced that the world of professional cartooning is a closed shop, an old-boy’s network where success is a matter of who you know. Wannabes try to be friendly with my employees or cartoonist colleagues, hoping that the relationship will get them past the barrier. Many terrible submissions are forwarded to me by friends.

When I was an aspiring cartoonist I thought the syndicates were arrogant for sending form-letter responses, or for ignoring submissions – but now I understand why. For many wannabes, any response is an invitation to argue. The aspirants are convinced that their work is great and anyone who doesn’t “get it” needs educating. Giving a polite brush-off sometimes fuels their anger.

Ironically, editorial cartooning is a terrible business. Newspapers pay only a few dollars a week for packaged groups of talented cartoonists who are, in turn, poorly paid. The professionals compete for fewer and fewer staff cartoonist positions at papers that are cutting back, as the internet crushes print. More and more professional cartoonists can’t make ends meet. The syndicates aren’t really a barrier to success for the aspiring cartoonists, just a hurdle on the road to more frustration in a dying profession.

My profession is fading away, I’m poorly paid and there are thousands of rude, talentless wannabes who want my job … but Britney Spears shaved her head – at least the life of a professional editorial cartoonist has its little pleasures.

Daryl Cagle is a political cartoonist and blogger for MSNBC.com. He is a past president of the National Cartoonists Society and his cartoons are syndicated to more than 800 newspapers, including the paper you are reading. His books “The BIG Book of Bush Cartoons” and “The Best Political Cartoons of the Year, 2005, 2006 and 2007 Editions,” are available in bookstores now.

Copyright 2007 Cagle Cartoons Inc. Please contact Sales at [email protected] for reproduction rights.