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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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Last week I got back from “The Line of Fire” conference in Mexico City, an editorial cartooning event put on by CartónClub. We’re hoping this will be the first of many annual conferences that CartónClub will be hosting. I’d like to see them succeed – we need more events like this around the world.
I was the only USA cartoonist in the La Linea de Fuego show. A bullet passed through each cartoon about press freedom. Violence against journalists is a big problem in Mexico.
The event was also co-sponsored by Cartooning for Peace (CFP), which works in Mexico and Canada under the terms of their grant from the EU that funds the organization (notably, the grant excludes the USA). CFP does programs about editorial cartoons in schools and prisons around the world and trains participating cartoonists in how to give these presentations in workshops; they pay an honorarium to the participating cartoonists to keep them going, and giving more lectures. It is a nice program, and the days in Mexico City were filled with these training workshops that didn’t involve much of our Cagle Cartoons delegation, so we spent a lot of time as tourists.
I got the chance to talk to representatives of the EU who support Cartooning for Peace at the conference; it was great to hear how they appreciate our art form – I can’t imagine any editorial cartooning programs like these happening through the United States government.
There was a nice exhibition at the El Universal newspaper lobby called “La Linea de Fuego” (The Line of Fire) where a bullet passed through every cartoon, creating some havoc that had something to do with press freedom. That’s my Statue of Liberty entry in the exhibition above. We had panels and discussions. It was all good.
Here are a couple of photos from our trip. Thanks again to CartónClub and to everyone involved!
Here is a gaggle of cartoonists at the CartónClub conference!
Here’s another group pix with even more cartoonists, at the La Linea de Fuego exhibition …
Want to see more pix? Take a look at my new Instagram feed @daryl.cagle I’m just starting Instagram and I don’t know what I’m doing there yet! You can also see more on my Facebook page.
