DarylCagle.comI’ll be giving a lecture with lots of cartoons at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee (just south of Nashville). It is a rare opportunity to see the reclusive, elusive Cagle – and it is free to the public! It will be at 4:30pm pon Thursday, October 22nd in the Bragg Media and Entertainment Building, Room 104.
Here’s my second cartoon for the altie-weekly Nashville Scene. It is about a crazy 38 house development, with 35 foot high houses on tiny lots, planned to be built next door to me. This isn’t just a “nimby” (“not in my backyard”) issue, Nashville is growing like a weed, a stupid, unplanned weed, so I’m drawing a series on the topic. “Dale and Associates” is a former Nashville City Councilman, Roy Dale, who lobbies his old cronies to get big construction projects approved in town – a local version of the same nasty kind of lobbying we see in Washington when legislators retire to K Street.
I may get mad at something else and keep drawing local cartoons when this nimby battle is over, or I may pick at this scab for a while. I regret that local cartoons are so rare these days – local cartoons are the most fun and can have an impact, but they have to be drawn out of passion, rather than business sense.
Here’s my long interview with Bob Andelman (Mr. Media) about my work, the editorial cartooning business and editorial cartoons around the world.
This is a cartoon I was working on when I did the interview at my drawing table.
I just got back from our Cagle Cartoons junket to the cartoon festival in St Just France. I’m way behind on my cartoons, but I knocked this one out from a snapshot that I took in an obscure corner of the Louvre.
This is a painting by 18th century Neo-classical painter Louis-Jacque Durameau about the death of Marie Antoinette. It struck me as a multi-panel cartoon with a big Nobel Peace Prize medal for Barack Obama. I almost put labels on the frames, “Then,” “… and Now” but I decided less is more. This painting is really funny – and all the more so because it takes itself so seriously.
The photo below is our group having dinner in Paris. From left to right is cartoonist Adam Zyglis, cartoonist Nate Beeler , me, cartoonist Steve Sack, cartoonist Monte Wolverton, Janelle Beamer, the charming fiancé of charming, conservative cartoonist Rick McKee, Nate’s wife Eve and Adam’s wife Jessica.
Here’s another group shot, around the cow statue at the editorial cartoon exhibition in St Just le Martel, deep in the heart of France near Limoges. Left to right is Nate, Eve, me, my wife, Peg, Justine the cow, Adam, Jessica, Janelle, Rick and Monte. Steve Sack was with us too; looks like he went missing in this one.
The grand prize winner of the festival (the winner of the cow, the “Humor Vache”) was Venezuelan cartoonist Rayma Suprani. The prize is an actual cow. Rayma also got a little porcelain cow.
I’ve long been impressed with Rayma. She drew for the El Universal newspaper in Caracas where she was a brave critic of the Hugo Chavez regime. The government took over her newspaper and she lost her job. Rayma may be moving to the USA next; I look forward to seeing what she draws here.
I won the grand prize cow at the festival last year, and I drew the poster for this year’s salon. As part of the winner from last year thing, the brilliant French caricaturist, Moines, drew my portrait. That’s me, giant me, and Moines at the right. Moines draws on a special kind of scratchboard and he carved each of my whiskers into the board with an X-acto knife. Makes me wanna pinch those cheeks. Moines complains that he’s down to his last couple of sheets of this paper, which isn’t made anymore. Shame.
Our Cagle.com site was down yesterday afternoon with a massive “DDoS Zombie” hacker attack. I’m not sure where they came from this time, but in the past we’ve traced them to China. I drew this cartoon with China looking over my shoulder, at the time of an earlier attack. A “zombie” attack, like the one we suffered yesterday, is one that uses multiple automated scripts; a DDoS is a “distributed denial of service” attack which attempts to flood the server with requests in order to deny it’s ability to serve content or interrupt service. Yesterday we suffered a huge flood of automated zombie requests.
Cagle.com is blocked by the government of Iran, and I’m sure we have some enemies around the world, but I think the attacks we continue to suffer come from criminals. We’ve had hackers insert malware/viruses onto Cagle.com, and we’ve been pretty good about getting that down as soon as it goes up – still, it is jarring. Most often I think the attacks are fishing for ways in to our server, to search for any information, like credit card numbers, that have some value to the worldly crooks.
Just so that all of you hackers out there know, we don’t keep credit card information online. When we have repeating charges for syndicate subscribers, we write the credit card information on a piece of paper, with a pen, and enter it manually into Paypal each month. We don’t store the credit information anywhere digitally. When hackers attack us, all they will find are our cartoons, that are already on display on the Web.
So, please, go attack someone else.
Here’s my non-fiction, autobiographical cartoon about my recently getting my California Marijuana license!
My local altie newspaper, the Santa Barbara Independent, printed this on the back page of their current issue – there it is below. I thought it looked pretty good. The colors always darken up in print, so I try to use light, fruity colors in my cartoons; they hold up better.
And look how cool my autobiographical marijuana license cartoon is in Spanish!
Here is the last poster for the festival.
Winning the grand prix/humor vache (cow) at the St just festival comes with the obligation/honor of drawing the festival poster for the next year’s festival. I thought I would share the rough sketch that was just approved – I’ll start to work on the finish now.
This is based on an old painting of Marie Antoinette, that had such a huge derriere, that I thought it could, ambiguously, hide the body of a cow. In recent years the St Just festival poster has always featured a cow. They have cow statues on the roof of the cartoon museum there, in the middle of French cow country. And they have a recent tradition of dressing a cow statue at the entrance to the museum, to match the dress of the cow in the poster.
Last year, the cow was a ballerina – an easy costume. I thought I would put the volunteer seamstresses in St Just to the test this year, with a much more ambitious project.
Here I am with my cow, Josette. I’m holding the St. Just porcelain statue depicting their logo that they give to grand prix winners.
I just got back from the grand editorial cartooning festival in St. Just le Martel, France where I won the grand prix, the “Prix de l’humor Vache” award, which was an actual cow, named Josette.
The “Salon de St. Just, ” in its 32nd year, draws cartoonists from around the world to a tiny town near Limoges. The townspeople have adopted the cartoonists and hold a party that stretches over two weekends, in a grand cartoon museum they built in the middle of cow country. Most of the cartoonists stay in the homes of volunteer villagers – the entire event is put together by townpeople Cartoonists usually come for only one weekend of the festival, splitting the crowd between what becomes two different weekend groups of roughly 120 cartoonists each.
This was my second “Salon,” last year I went with our knuckle-dragging, conservative, “Tea Party” cartoonist, Eric Allie, who was a strange beast to the French. This year I went with three liberal cartoonists, Pat Bagley of the Salt Lake Tribune, Steve Sack of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and Bob Englehart of the Hartford Courant for three days of open bar and schmoozing with our international colleagues.
Here I am with my Cagle Cartoons colleagues, dubbed “Cagle Cowboys”, from left, Josette, Pat Bagley, Me, Bob Englehart and Steve Sack below.
My festival friends tell me that a cow is usually a placid animal, but sometimes the cow will get annoyed and give a swift, painful kick as a surprise to an unlucky bystander; this contributes to the idea that the cow is a little sneaky, nasty and unpredictable. The “Prix de l’humor Vache,” the grand prize they gave me, is described as an award for “caustic humor.” “Humor Vache” (funny cow) rhymes with “Amour Vache” (love cow, or more accurately “rough love”) a French idiom for a love affair that is nasty, consisting of harsh words and arguments. In France, to refer to someone as a “vache” (cow) is a little bit nasty. In contrast, on the first Saturday of the Salon, they give out the “Humor Tendre” (Tender Humor) award, which is a sheep, given to a sweet cartoonist such as a children’s book illustrator.
The Limoges area is proud of their cows, which are raised for beef and are all a warm brown color. The cow is the symbol and mascot of the Salon. Every year, the “Prix de l’humor Vache” cow is named “Josette” and is actually given to the winning cartoonist. At the ceremony, the mayor of St. Just, Gerard Vandenbroucke, awarded Limoges porcelain cows to my three American compatriots, dubbing them “Cagle’s cowboys.” Bob, Pat and Steve, who can also claim to have won cows (although, not real cows) took their little cows around to all the other cartoonists at the Salon to sign; it was charming.
Typically, the winning cartoonist is expected to take a cash award (I still don’t know how much) in lieu of actually taking delivery of the real Josette, who would be difficult to check on a plane and would likely be an unpleasant roommate in my tiny, Nashville apartment. But, they make it clear that the cartoonist really won a cow and could actually take the cow if he or she chooses to, and there are stories of cartoonists in past years choosing to take the cow. I’m told that are some amusing movies of a past winner taking his cow to Paris, trying to bring the cow on the Metro, and taking the cow up the Eiffel Tower. If anyone can find these movies online, I’d love to take a look.
Part of winning the grand prize cow is the obligation to do the art for the poster for the next Salon. The poster this year featured a lovely Degas-like ballerina cow. The festival people then dress a cow sculpture, in the entry to the museum, to match the cow on the poster. My plan is to give the cow on next year’s poster a very elaborate costume that will be a unique challenge for a St. Just volunteer to create for the cow statue. Right now, I’m thinking of doing the poster cow as Marie Antoinette with a huge, elaborate, flowing gown.
Here’s Bob Englehart with the cow statue at the entrance to the exhibition. The cow is dressed to match the poster which is a ballerina this year. Next year I’ll be doing the poster and I plan to put the cow in a very elaborate costume that will be a challenge for St. Just’s volunteer seamstresses.
The whole event in St. Just is a lovely boost for our beleaguered editorial cartooning profession which is suffering in France as it is here and around the world with newspapers declining everywhere. I’d love to see some of the great French attitude about the value of editorial cartooning rub off on other parts of the world, like America, which treats cartooning as a second class art form. I can’t imagine a whole town in the USA choosing to build a municipal cartoon museum, opening their homes, and pitching together to cook dinner for hundreds of editorial cartoonists – and, of-course, a nine day open bar would be unthinkable in America.
From left to right, Bob Englehart, Stave Sack, St. Just’s Mayor Gerard Vandenbroucke in the red shirt, me holding my “Prix de l’humor Vache” porcelain statue, Josette, and Pat Bagley in the lower right corner.
Below is a scan of the Limoges newspaper front page and interior story from the day after I had a cow.
I will crawl out of my spider hole for two events! Come see me!
I’ll be speaking, and giving a Powerpoint presentation, to the Southeast Chapter of the National Cartoonists Society (NCS) in Knoxville, TN on Saturday, October 26th, at about 11:00am, at the Crowne Plaza Knoxville (University), in Salon B on the mezzanine level. The NCS chapter folks tell me that anyone can come, so here is your chance to tell me off face to face, no hiding behind those nasty e-mails.
I’m impressed with the NCS Southeast Chapter, they put on an ambitious gathering and have a lot of cartooning luminaries in their ranks. I’m looking forward to it.
Next week I’m going to the big, international, editorial cartooning convention in St. Just le Martel, France. This is a little town that has decided that they love editorial cartoons – they built an impressive cartoon museum and the whole town comes out in wholehearted support of our troubled art form. They also love cows; this is French cow country, down by Limoges.
Three of the cartoonists I syndicate are coming along, Pat Bagley of the Salt Lake Tribune, Steve Sack of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and Bob Englehart of the Hartford Courant. I think this will be the biggest American turnout that little St. Just has ever had. And none of us speak French. Here is a list of all the attending editorial cartoonists, and the days that they will be in attendance.
So, if there are any editorial cartooning fans in France who want to visit with some obscure, American editorial cartoonists, the four of us will be hanging with all the other world cartoonists at the cartoon museum the second weekend of the Salon, October 4th, 5th and 6th.
