I’d like to introduce everyone to my brilliant cartoonist/journalist daughter, Susie Cagle. Unlike the cartoons that everyone is used to seeing on Cagle.com, Susie’s work is non-fiction; she does original reporting in cartoons.
Cartoon journalism is still pretty rare, but it is very effective, especially for making dry topics more interesting and adding some feeling and humanity to stories where text falls flat. And as photojournalism has been made more difficult in our current strange circumstances, cartoon journalism works even when access is difficult. I’d love to see publishers embrace more reporting through cartoons.
Susie freelances from her home in Oakland, California for many major publishers. Here are links to more reporting gems that Susie did for The Nation, WNYC in New York, The Guardian newspaper and another one for The Nation. She’s busy while she’s sheltering in place and I’m delighted to write that she’s expecting a baby boy in November, who will be my first grandchild.
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Randy Enos’ stories inspired me to tell an old story from my own New York cartooning days.
I only draw Muppets occasionally in political cartoons now. I drew this one when it was revealed that the brokers at Goldman Sachs referred to their clients as “Muppets” meaning they were dumb puppets who would do whatever the greedy brokers wanted.
When I was a young cartoon illustrator in New York City my biggest client was Henson Associates, the Muppets, who kept me busy drawing pigs and frogs all the time.
I think it is 1981 and I’m 25 years old in the photo below. The Muppets were hugely popular in 1981 and I had already drawn them so many times that the Muppets all lived in my head; I knew all the names and I didn’t need to look at photos to draw them all.
The Muppets had taken over a large part of the Macy’s Herald Square department store with Muppet licensed merchandise and they did a promotion where I would sit in the middle of the Muppet products and draw Muppets at the request of customers. I hadn’t done anything like this before, but it sounded like it would be fun. They hired me to sit and draw for three hours.
Here I am, looking young in 1981, just starting to draw Muppets at the Herald Square Macy’s before the crowd thickened.
Some people from the Muppets and Macy’s set me up with a table and made an announcement over the PA system to come to the Muppet section of the store to get a free, live drawing from an official Muppet artist –and then they left. The photo shows me just as they left. The calm before the storm.
I asked people to request a Muppet, and asked them what they wanted the Muppet to be doing, and I drew pretty fast. Most of the requests were for Kermit, Piggy, Gonzo and Animal. I signed them with a Muppet signature, like “Kissy, Kissy, Miss Piggy.”
I couldn’t see beyond the edges of my table where people were standing, pressed up against me. What I didn’t know is that the line of people waiting for their free drawing snaked all through the floor at Macy’s, doubling back and forth with hundreds of people waiting for their free drawing. There was no one managing the line –the Muppets and Macy’s people had walked away when I first sat down and they didn’t come back.
I drew this Muppet political cartoon when the Muppets withdrew from a licensing campaign in protest because of Chick-fil-A’s apparent opposition to gay marriage. Good for the Muppets!
After about two and a half hours I yelled out, “I’m only here for another half hour!” The people only pressed in harder. At the three hour mark, I stood up to gather my materials and the people turned surly. Some guys yelled, “I’ve been waiting for my drawing for THREE HOURS!” I learned that my drawings weren’t really free –the people had been paying for them with the time they spent waiting in line and they wanted what they paid for!
Women held up their kids and whined, “Just one more for little Doofus?” The men were angry. They mulled around me, making their demands as I tried to sulk away through an endless mass of people that seemed like a crowd crushed into a subway car at rush hour.
I see how lines like this are supposed to be managed at the San Diego Comic Con, where volunteers keep the line single file, estimate the time remaining and hang a sign on someone that says, “Last in Line.”
At Macy’s I was chum thrown to the sharks!
When I was 25 in 1981, the Muppets were promoting their movie The Great Muppet Caper, and I was doing lots of art projects tied into the movie. Here are a couple memorable ones from my garage.
These maze cartoons were a proposal for a maze puzzle that I pitched to the syndicates as a Sunday funnies weekly feature way back in 1992.
I like drawing mazes; there is something relaxing about the mindlessness of it. When this feature didn’t get syndicated, the “Really Amazing” “drop panel” on the right evolved into the pitch for my TRUE cartoons in 1994.
Editors often ask us for puzzles, but not enough to pay someone to create puzzles for Cagle Cartoons, I think. Still, if there was something amazing, we’d consider it.
Here’s a new batch of my old TRUE cartoons. I’m disappointed that so many of these are are dated and don’t hold up over time. I think the stats have only gotten worse in the past 20 years. I’m this batch, there must be twice as many taxing agencies, and the national debt must equal four times the number of grains of surface sand on Jones beach, times $2. I’m putting these up on PoliticalCartoons.com and CagleCartoons.com and I see that newspapers are starting to run them. I hope those newspapers aren’t counting grains of sand.
