My buddy, Nate Beeler, drew for many years for the Washington Examiner and the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch. Alas, Nate recently left the Dispatch with a round of brutal cost cutting –a common story for editorial cartoonists these days. Nate is brilliant, and his cartoons occupy the political center, which is unusual and which gets his cartoons reprinted more than the majority of cartoonists who draw from the left. Nate’s favorite cartoons from the past decade are shown below.
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Nate drew the first cartoon, showing the Statue of Justice hugging the Statue of Liberty, when the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage. I think this was one of the most popular and reprinted editorial cartoons ever.
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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I wear three hats, as a cartoonist and as the leader of a “syndicate” that resells a package of editorial cartoons and columns to over 800 newspapers in the USA –my third hat is running our big Cagle.com Web site. I love editorial cartoons. I do what I love. But, love can be painful …
Our troubled editorial cartooning profession has been losing employee positions in roughly the same proportion as all newsroom jobs lost over the past couple of decades. Journalism has become a freelance profession, and so has editorial cartooning. Three of our CagleCartoonists recently lost their jobs, Patrick Chappatte with The International New York Times, Nate Beeler with The Columbus Dispatch and Rick McKee with The Augusta Chronicle. Bad news for editorial cartoonists seems to be coming in at a faster clip.
Conservative editors don’t like the liberal cartoons; angry readers demand retribution from newspapers and cartoonists who offend them; timid newspapers fear losing readers who are easily offended; all are just spice in our complex stew, which started brewing when newspapers lost their the bulk of their advertising revenue to the internet, and began a slow decline in circulation.
Online clients haven’t replaced print clients for us. As print declines, online publications don’t hire cartoonists and have not developed a culture of paying for content, and few of them purchase syndicated cartoons. We have some great online clients, like FoxNews.com and CNN.com, but they are the exceptions.
There are now between 1,300 and 1,400 daily, paid circulation newspapers in the USA. Thirty years ago there were over 1,800 dailies and over 130 employee editorial cartoonists –only a very small percentage of newspapers ever hired staff cartoonists. The vast majority of American newspaper readers have seen editorial cartoons through syndication. The number of syndicated editorial cartoonists hasn’t changed much in the past 50 years.
In recent years as newspapers continue to struggle, rates for syndicated cartoons have declined, but cut-rate deals for packages of syndicated cartoons have driven rates close to zero. Larger syndicates “bundle” editorial cartoons with their comics, essentially including the editorial cartoons for free. Editorial cartoons are thrown into packages with puzzles and advice columns, in cheap weekly, college and specialty offerings. Editorial cartoons are sometimes sold in group deals for “pennies per paper.”
In general, 20% of the cartoonists get 80% of the reprints, so the majority of editorial cartoonists have always struggled in a difficult profession and have never earned a lot. The same percentage still applies to slices of today’s smaller pie.
American editorial cartoonists are mostly liberal, and most American newspapers are rural and suburban papers serving conservative readers, so there is a supply and demand disparity. Liberal cartoons don’t get reprinted as much, because there is an over-supply of liberal cartoons. That said, conservative cartoons expressing strong opinions also don’t get reprinted much. The cartoons that are increasingly the most reprinted are the funny cartoons that express little or no opinion at all.
One of our clients, The China Daily, is owned by the Communist government in China; they asked me, “Daryl, how many of your cartoons express no opinion? Those are the cartoons we want.” The Chinese aren’t much different from American editors in this regard –except that they are more blunt.
When Trump was elected we were flooded with calls from unhappy editors complaining that, “all the cartoons I like have stopped!” The problem was that cartoonists stopped drawing the Hillary and Obama bashing cartoons that conservative editors preferred. We put up a selection of “Trump Friendly Cartoons” near the top of our CagleCartoons.com site that helps conservative editors find the cartoons they like in a sea of liberal cartoons they dislike; this helped to stop the hemorrhaging of conservative subscribers.
Cartoonists don’t draw for their clients, we draw whatever we want. We’re macho like that. Clients be damned. Sometimes that attitude comes back to bite us. Everything seems to be biting us these days.
We’ve also seen a continuing trickle of newspapers drop their entire editorial pages, including the editorial cartoon. I’m told that editorial pages make readers angry and don’t bring in income. And, of-course, newspapers are going out of business.
Cartoon by Robert Rousso!
I’m often asked about whether Trump and our polarized political environment are behind the decline of editorial cartoons. There is plenty that is wrong in our troubled profession, but it isn’t as simple as editors rejecting the Trump-bashing cartoons. This stew was brewing long before Trump.
Editorial cartoons are an important part of journalism. Don’t let editorial cartoons disappear!
Here at CagleCartoons we syndicate a package of great cartoonists to more than half of America’s daily, paid-circulation newspapers; we’re an important source of income to our struggling cartoonists. Our Cagle.com Web site is free and runs no advertising –the site is entirely supported by contributions from our readers. We need your support. Cagle.com is an important resource for editorial cartoonists around the world and is used in Social Studies classrooms throughout America. Help us survive!
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Anti-Vaxxers have been out in force, protesting California’s Senate Bill 276 that would make it harder for unethical doctors to grant bogus medical exemptions to parents who don’t want to vaccinate their children. Ignorant celebrities have been leading the charge. Last week we got stories about Justin Timberlake’s wife, Jessica Biel doing the lobbying rounds both evil. anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
The dangerous, celebrity idiots don’t like to be called “anti-vaxxers,” they prefer to be described as “pro-informed consent,” or “pro-vaccine choice,” or “anti-forced vaccination,” or “vaccine risk aware,” all of which mean the same thing. Dangerous and ignorant. Here’s an cartoon about the anti-vaxxers that I drew three years ago …
Here are some of my favorite anti-vaxxer cartoons by my buddies – these first two are by Nate Beeler.
Editorial cartoonists losing their staff jobs has become old news as staff cutbacks at newspaper chains continue, but yesterday was an especially bad day. The Gatehouse chain laid off three staff cartoonists, Nate Beeler of The Columbus Dispatch, Rick McKee of The Augusta Chronicle and Mark Streeter of The Savannah Morning News. They have been regular contributors to our Cagle.com site for close to fifteen years. Gatehouse’s fourth cartoonist, Dave Granlund, was not laid off, apparently because he works under a freelance contract and was not an employee. Beeler and McKee are part of our CagleCartoons.com newspaper syndicate and are among our most popular cartoonists.
Gatehouse is America’s largest newspaper chain in terms of number of newspapers. (Gannett is the largest newspaper chain in term of number of readers.) The three cartoonists who were laid off were part of Gatehouse’s “More Content Now” shared services, distributing their work in internal syndication to all of the Gatehouse newspapers, so their loss will be felt by a large number of newspapers. Even though the value of the creative contribution of the three cartoonists’ work was multiplied across all the newspapers in the Gatehouse chain, making them much more valuable than the other employees laid off in this round of cuts, this cost-cutting move by Gatehouse doesn’t come as a surprise.
Rick tells me he hopes to continue drawing cartoons for the approximately 850 newspapers that subscribe to our syndicate, and I hope the same will be true for Nate. My sincere condolences go out to all three, and I am confident that they will continue to have successful cartooning careers as their work turns in new directions.
Here are the most recent cartoons by Rick McKee of The Augusta Chronicle, Nate Beeler of The Columbus Dispatch and Mark Streeter of The Savannah Morning News.
I voted today. Everything on the ballot was unpleasant. There was nothing there that I wanted – only things I dislike less than other things. Which led to this cartoon.
Yes, I know, all of my Uncle Sams look more or less like congressman Steny Hoyer.
As I was finishing this one up, I saw Rick McKee’s election day cartoon, which is basically the same gag.
Rick’s cartoon will get reprinted more than mine, because he doesn’t have any vomit. Editors don’t like vomit. I think Rick wins on this gag.
Taylor Jones drew this one a couple of years ago – it goes well with Rick’s cartoon.
I took a look in the database and I found this nice oldie by Joe Heller
The story about President Trump’s awkward condolence call to the widow of a fallen soldier has dragged on for more than a week. I wasn’t going to draw about it, but as the story droned on and on, with more awkward false tweets and statements from the White House, it looks like I can’t avoid this one.
I think the image of Trump throwing paper towels to the hurricane victims in Puerto Rico, and Trump’s love of walls struck a chord with Marian Kamensky.
Sean Delonas may be our most conservative cartoonist. Here Sean shows his disgust for Congresswoman Frederica Wilson.
Our consistently conservative cartoonist, Rick McKee, seems to like Chief of Staff John Kelly’s statement, even though it contained false accusations about the Congresswoman.
There were lots of cloud cartoons after former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony last week about President Trump asking Comey to “lift the cloud” of the FBI’s investigation into former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. I drew a cloud cartoon myself!
The Comey testimony was a TV ratings hit and I was impressed by how different the coverage was on CNN and MSNBC versus Fox News – that’s what led to my cloud cartoon, and another one I’m drawing up today.
Editorial cartoons: Great antidotes for bloated egos By Dianne Hardisty
You can almost hear the screams of editorial page editors: “Find me a pro-Trump cartoonist!”
Good luck finding a “pro-Trump” cartoonist of any political stripe, including conservative, these days.
“A real editorial cartoonist is not pro-anything,” explains Rick McKee, a staff cartoonist with The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle. His work is distributed to hundreds of newspapers around the country by the Cagle Cartoons syndicate.
“Editorial cartooning is a negative art. You may be more supportive of a certain point of view. But it’s criticism. You don’t want to be a cheerleader for any particular politician,” says McKee, who takes a conservative approach to most political issues.
Since Donald Trump was sworn in as president in January, editorial cartooning has kicked into high gear. And the new president’s combative nature, compulsive tweeting, political stumbles and thin skin have been the gifts that keep on giving to the nation’s cartoonists.
Cartoon by Nate Beeler
“It’s like drinking from a fire hose. It’s overwhelming,” says Nate Beeler, a conservative staff cartoonist with The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, whose work also is distributed by Cagle Cartoons.
“You can’t keep up,” says Adam Zyglis, who draws five cartoons a week for The Buffalo (NY) News and is the president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. “You have to prioritize. You could easily do two, three, maybe more cartoons a day.”
And on the receiving end of this avalanche of cartoons are the nation’s opinion editors, who often struggle to give political “balance” to the commentary they present to their readers.
In emails and calls to their colleagues, editors have been searching for conservative – yes, especially pro-Trump – columnists and cartoonists. Some also are looking for columnists to explain how the largely ignored people who live in the fly-over states were able to surprise all those “brilliant” political pundits by electing Trump.
Editors are looking for the Holy Grail of “balance” for their pages. And the job is made tougher in this Trump era by 2016 voters handing control of Congress, as well as the White House, to the Republican Party.
“Power corrupts, no matter who is in power,” says the conservative Beeler, explaining that it is his job “to take on people in power.” And with few exceptions, those people will be the Republican politicians, who now have absolute power.
This imbalance has happened before, when absolute political power has shifted to one political party or another after an election. But it seldom lasts. Usually within an election cycle or two, fickle voters return to divided government, splitting up power between parties in Congress and the White House.
Cartoon by Adam Zyglis
But in the meantime, the life of an opinion editor can be pure hell, with readers screaming about what they perceive is bias in the newspaper’s sometimes lopsided criticism of those in power.
Good luck achieving some ideal concept of balance in an opinion section, when there is little balance of power in the halls of government. And with the election of Trump, there is also no shortage of criticism.
The president’s critics are not confined just to the Democrats, snotty cartoonists and the “dishonest media.” They include many people in his own political party.
With Trump showing no signs of mellowing and a small group of advisors in the White House egging him on, the fire-hose-flow of controversies shows no sign of abating, and neither does the flow of cartoons that criticize and ridicule the president.
During last summer’s presidential campaign, Daryl Cagle, a cartoonist, who worked for more than a decade drawing The Muppets, and was later on the staff of The Honolulu Advertiser and MSNBC before creating his Cagle Cartoons syndicate, wrote prophetically about how a Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton administration would look in cartoons.
“Cartooning is a negative art and a supportive cartoon is a lousy cartoon. Hillary is a rich character that we have known for decades. There is a grand history with Hillary and Bill Clinton that gives us many more clichés for a broader cartoon palette.
Here is Dianne Hardisty, who wrote this article. Thanks, Dianne!
“If Trump loses in November, we should enjoy four years of great Hillary cartoons. If Trump wins in November, the Trump-monster cartoon-apocalypse will continue. God save us.”
And, indeed, it has continued. In fact, Trump seems to be invigorating cartoonists.
“We have a newfound mission,” Zyglis says. “What we do is important. It always has been. But there is more immediacy today. This is a time we are needed the most.”
“Editorial cartooning becomes more important as democratic institutions are threatened,” Zyglis says, noting the insults Trump throws at just about every institution that stands in his ways, including the courts, intelligence agencies and news media.
“It is clear how much he despises the media. And in authoritarian regimes, satire is the first target. Look how ‘Saturday Night Live’ gets under Trump’s skin. An editorial cartoon is just a single panel form of a ‘Saturday Night Live’ skit.”
But Beeler is confident his colleagues will stand strong and prevail against Trump’s attacks because “editorial cartoons are great antidotes to bloated egos.”
Dianne Hardisty is a former editorial page editor, who now writes about the media and politics.
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 troubled editorial cartooning profession has been losing employee positions in roughly the same proportion as all newsroom jobs lost over the past couple of decades. Journalism has become a freelance profession, and so has editorial cartooning. Three of our CagleCartoonists recently lost their jobs, 
This is a painting by 18th century Neo-classical painter 
