The quality of my local Los Angeles Times has sunk so low that I’ve switched to reading the competing Los Angeles Daily News, which employs a full time cartoonist (Patrick O’Connor) and runs great editorial cartoons every day of the week. The LA Times now goes without any editorial cartoon three days a week, prints only one cartoon three days a week, and no longer employs a cartoonist. The Times even dropped their Sunday opinion section and runs Editorials and Op-Ed in the back of the front section on Sundays, like they do on weekdays.

On Sundays, the LA Times runs three cartoons and a little blurb by cartoonist Joel Pett describing the cartoons. The Times calls it "Toon-Op." The competing Daily News has copied the "Toon Op" format and runs the same thing, in the same format, with a similar blurb by Patrick O’Connor describing his three cartoon picks. The Daily News‘ "Toon Op" ran at the top of the page today, and the Pett "Toon Op" ran at the bottom of the page.

Both run the cartoons too small, and both apply a halftone screen to cartoons that are delivered in perfectly good, crisp, line art, degrading the print quality of the cartoons. (Newspapers often do this because they give the layout work to careless, low-paid, graphic-grunts who treat all images as though they were photographs from wire services.)

Which is better? Patrick’s choices today included three Cagle Cartoonists (Fairrington, Cardow and Beeler) while Pett’s included only one Cagle Cartoonist (Beeler) – so I’ll go with the Daily News – yet another reason not to read the LA Times.

Patrick O’Connor’s "Toon-Op" in the LA Daily News:

Joel Pett’s "Toon-Op" in the LA Times:

Yipes! It looks like we need to make last minute changes to the book cover, and the back cover will be yellow. So much last minute book stuff to do! Our campaign 2008 book will be in stores in about 6 weeks.

And a weekly magazine in Kazakhstan just subscribed to our cartoon service. I’ll bet they don’t see many Western cartoons there.

Remember to follow me on Twitter. I’ll try to keep it up with trivial cartoon news tidbits that don’t quite warrant a place on the blog. I think the Twitter format is interesting in that everyone has so much more to say when we don’t have to say anything worthwhile. I’m at twitter.com/dcagle.

Mike Keefe will have an animation on ABC World News Tonight tonight or tomorrow night, he’s doing it specially for them in his “Talking Heads” format, we’ll post it on the site in Mike’s Animation collection when he’s done.

Sorry for being away so long and thanks to all of you who wrote in to complain that I wasn’t drawing cartoons. In fact, we’ve been getting a few complaints about other cartoonists not updating their cartoons. This is summer vacation time for a number of cartoonists; sorry about that.

My blog has finally been updated so that it has modern features, like permalinks and comments. Now I have to learn how to use all this stuff. Thanks to my programmer, Random for setting this up.

I’ve started Twittering, you can follow my exploits throughout the day at: http://twitter.com/dcagle

This is my last week to work on our BIG Book of Convention 2008 Cartoons; my deadline is Monday and the book should be in stores by the first of October. I’m hoping to get McCain’s VP choice in before I have to close this thing out. That’s the book cover, front and back, below.  Brian Fairrington co-edited and did the back cover, as with all of our books.

I had lunch with superstar Canadian cartoonist, Cam Cardow yesterday. Here we are. I’m the wide one, he’s the thin one. It was actually the first time I have met Cam, who is famously reclusive. I had a huge plate of Mexican food and Cam had a tiny bowl of soup, which goes a long way to explaining the wide and thin thing.

Dave Astor of E&P is reporting that Stuart Carlson, the long time cartoonist for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, has been forced out of his job. Carlson, whose work appeared on our site some years ago, has worked for the Journal-Sentinal for 25 years. He was recently asked to draw more local cartoons and said his ratio of local to national cartoons had soared to 70%/30%. Cartoonists often say that the secret to keeping an editorial cartooning job is to draw more local cartoons – that didn’t seem to work here.

At one time the Journal-Sentinal was noteworthy for having two editorial cartoonists on staff, until they laid off cartoonist Gary Markstein, who continues to draw without a newspaper, as Carlson will do – that seems to be what happens when cartoonists are laid off, they keep drawing anyway.

I enjoyed the panel at Comic Con. I had arch-conservative Michael Ramirez speak immediately after arch-liberal Mr. Fish – it amused me to see them adjacent to each other. We had a nice crowd of probably 275 people, which is impressive considering that the people could have chosen to be in another room hearing about the exciting, upcoming season of Stargate Atlantis.

I’ll be moderating a panel of top editorial cartoonists at the San Diego Comic Con this Friday, July 25th from 1:30pm to 2:30pm in room 5AB. We have an impressive, all-star group of cartoonists that will each give short presentations, Mike Peters, Signe Wilkinson, Steve Breen, Mr. Fish (Dwayne Booth), Bill Schorr and Michael Ramirez.

Another Job Loss

It was announced that Dick Adair, the cartoonist for the Honolulu Advertiser, will lose his job.

Dwayne Powell of the Raleigh News & Observer resigned today. He had been laid off and offered a part-time job of drawing three local cartoons a week for the newspaper, but he decided to turn that down. Dwayne, who had been employed at the newspaper for close to thirty years, will continue to draw national cartoons in syndication and his cartoons will continue to appear on our site.

Don Wright, the Pulitzer winning cartoonist for the Palm Beach Post took a buyout today. There is no news yet on whether he will continue to draw only for syndication.