DarylCagle.comI expect that the Los Angeles teacher strike will be ending this afternoon. My teacher/wife just went to her school to vote on the settlement. Here’s my cartoon anticipating a deal.
In case everyone forgot, here’s my teacher strike cartoon from last weekend!
I think the strike left teachers with a better sense of camaraderie, and even more disgust for superintendent Austin Beutner and the school board.
Hey, sometime I have to draw local cartoons.
Here another flashback from by cartoonist buddy, Randy Enos.
Along with my regular free-lance work, I took on a job as a film designer in the mid 60’s, 1964 actually. It was for a small off-beat film house called Pablo Ferro Films in New York City (more about them in future posts). It consisted of myself, the supremely innovative Pablo Ferro and his brother Jose, who were originally from Cuba.
Pablo hired me because I knew absolutely nothing about film production, animation etc.. He liked my crazy off-beat style and he wanted someone who was a film virgin because he didn’t want to do anything ordinary or like anything anybody else was doing.
Pablo had done the titles for Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” which were quite innovative. Now, Kubrick had won the N.Y. Film Critics Award for the movie and Pablo wanted to send him something in congratulations. Pablo tasked me with the project. Recognizing Pablo’s penchant for unusual approaches, I suggested that I would make a large “cardboard” cut (I was occasionally deviating from my normal linoleum cutting) of Dr. Strangelove in his wheel chair, half rising, struggling to contain his right arm which was trying to affect a Nazi salute. I completed it and then we wrote in a large scrawling hand “Congratulations, Stanley”. We then, at my suggestion, folded the large piece of paper into a small, tiny compact unit and stuffed it into a modest envelope.
The next day, Pablo received a phone call from Mr. Kubrick.
“Who did this drawing?” Kubrick said.
Pablo explained that I was a new “kid” that had just joined the studio. I was only a year younger than Pablo, by the way.
Kubrick said, “Put him on the phone.” He asked me if I would like to work with him on his new movie called “2001: a Space Odyssey.” He said I could be a “sketch man” for him in a yet to be determined spot on the crew, following him around and helping to visualize various scenic inventions. He said that perhaps I would also do the titles for the film later on. Kubrick said that he would pay me $200 a week (because he really didn’t have a budget yet for this position he had just invented).
Kubrick said I should also be prepared to spend two years in England during shooting. He told me to think about it and I handed the phone back to Pablo. I told Kubrick the next day that I couldn’t do it because I had just bought a house and I was just beginning to start my job with Pablo etc. etc.. I didn’t know much about this director who was just going to make a science fiction movie… big deal. I did suggest some friends for the job who also turned it down (not enough money).
BUT… while Kubrick was talking to Pablo, he had asked Pablo for a favor. Kubrick needed a temporary logo for pre-production stationery. Pablo thrust it in my lap and told me to pick out some type and slap together a logo for Stanley. I called the type house and ordered some Futura type … got it … and with photostats I “boxed” the lettering, tightened up the spacings, upper and lower case and threw in a logo in italics for good measure.
To this day, that “pre-production stationary logo” is the one that has been used on the movie posters, book jackets, record covers, etc..
The Saturday Evening Post or How I Got Married
By Randy Enos
When I was a tadpole, my family subscribed to The Saturday Evening Post. Each week when it arrived at our house, I would have my little sister take it, before I could see it, and stand across the room from me and turn the pages slowly as I named off each illustrator and cartoonist recognizing them by their styles. As I grew older and read more and more about these artists in books and magazines, I found a common thread. An awful lot of them lived in Westport, Connecticut. Curious!
Later on, after I graduated from high school, I went to art school in Boston which was not far from my hometown of New Bedford. In my second year there, a beautiful girl showed up in the classes. I asked her name and where she was from. She said Westport, Connecticut!
I said, “That’s where all the illustrators live.”
She said, “Yes, I know them all!”
I said, “What do you mean you know them all?”
She said, “My mother is a painter and she and my father own a frame shop and they frame all the artists’ work and my mother and the illustrators get a model and draw and paint from them every week. I go to the life classes and sit there with them and draw right next to Steven Dohanos and Harold von Schmidt and Robert Fawcett and…”
So, I married her immediately.
And I went to live in Westport and got to not only meet all my heroes, but become close friends with many of them.
The tit for tat between President Trump and Speaker Pelosi looks like a lot of middle school nonsense, and inspired my cartoon yesterday. I decided to give them a lot of spittle, because the whole thing is a bit slimy.
This is a “pox on both their houses” cartoon, which tend to make everyone mad. Cartoons, like this one, that bash both sides equally, tend to get more reprints from “even handed” editors.
My cartoonist buddy, Randy Enos, will be writing some short remembrances here in the blog; he has had a long career with many stories that he needs to tell. Randy has had a fantastic career, drawing for all the top publications; he was a regular in the old National Lampoon with his Chicken Gutz comic. Randy was working with all the top cartoonists and illustrators in the New York scene since the year I was born (1956). Randy draws his editorial cartoons with a knife, cutting into linoleum block, backwards. Check out his archive.
An Evening at the Society
In the late 50’s into the early 60’s, I often attended the meetings of The National Cartoonists Society as a guest of my friend and co-worker Pete Wells (once a Katzenjammer Kids cartoonist). The meetings were held in New York at the old Lamb’s Club which was really a club for actors, playwrights and the like. I would often see some very familiar faces of old timey actors there because they all enjoyed honorary membership in the Society as exchange for loaning us their home for our meetings.
On this one night, I was employed drinking at the bar, half listening to the two guys standing next to me discussing their work, but mostly I was paying attention to the antics of the Smokey Stover cartoonist, Bill Holman, who was gleefully glad-handing every one who approached and chortling like a little kid when they were “shocked” by the buzzer he had concealed in his right hand.
One of the two next to me was the great DC comics artist Jerry Robinson. I don’t remember who the other guy was. As I listened to them, I became aware of a small man with a large head who had approached and was in rapt attention to the speakers, darting his enormous noggin back and forth between them as though watching a tennis match. Every now and then he would attempt to interject something to no avail. He would say, “Hey… hey, fellas”. This went on for a time and then, through utter frustration, he finally exploded, “Hey, you guys. You never talk to me!” It was then that I recognized one of the founders of the Society, Otto Soglow, former political cartoonist who was now famous for “The Little King”.
“You realistic guys never want to talk to me” he went on, “I draw realistic too… I do. I draw realistic . I can’t help it… that’s the way people look to me!”
Well the evening went on to include a near fist fight between a very drunk Walt Kelly and the evening’s guest speaker, my favorite radio guy Jean Shepherd (A Christmas Story) who was dressed in a gamy tux with holes in his socks.
It was just another typical evening at the Cartoonists Society.
PS from Randy:
Daryl, In case you’re wondering what the fight between Shepherd and Kelly was all about, here’s what transpired:
Shepherd’s talk that evening was about freedom and bucking the system and speaking out. He was admonishing a lot of the cartoonists for being very tame and not pushing the boundaries etc.. At that time in his career he was without a sponsor. There were brief periods when he did have a sponsor but he was so irreverent to them that it never worked out very well. He was fired at one point and then re-instated when his listening audience rose up and demanded his return. so, I tell you this because Kelly’s point was that Shepherd could play Mr. High & Mighty because he didn’t have sponsors to deal with and answer to while the cartoonists worked for papers that had editors and ads to contend with and didn’t have that freedom. Kelly was very drunk at that point in the evening and started shouting from the floor, openly arguing nastily with Shepherd. It got so fierce that I honestly thought they were going to come to blows but finally Kelly staggered off and left the building.
Teachers in Los Angeles go on strike on Monday. My wife teaches math in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and tells me that her colleagues are all charged up. The teachers have chosen to wear red as their strike color, so the picket lines and demonstrations will have coordinated look.
The teachers are unified in their disdain for the district superintendent, Austin Beutner, a billionaire known for being pals with local power brokers; he did a stint as publisher of the Los Angeles Times; he was a failed candidate for mayor, and he is a tireless promotor of privatizing schools. Teachers love to deride Beutner for having no experience in education, although he created a lovely charity for giving eyeglasses to poor children and he’s a bigwig behind Cal Arts, the excellent, Disney-created art college. Beutner is seen as a union-busting oligarch and a bad guy in teachers’ circles.
We see red-clad groups of protesting teachers all over town this weekend and we’ll see lots more next week. I rarely draw local cartoons, but there’s good reason for this one. The local newspapers oppose the teachers so my cartoon may not get much press, but my wife will carry it on her sign.
It seems that we get news of editorial cartoonists being laid off from newspaper jobs every couple of weeks, but it is unusual to hear of a cartoonist resigning from a rare newspaper job.
This week, our own Stephane Peray resigned from his job as the editorial cartoonist for the “Arab News” newspaper – a major daily newspaper in Saudi Arabia. Here is his letter of resignation, along with some of his cartoons that could not or would not run in Saudi Arabia. Some samples of Stephff’s cartoons about Saudi Arabia are below
–Daryl
To the management of the Arab News and to my readers, from Stephane “Stephff” Peray,
I’ve been very happy to work for the past 10 years with the Arab News, the leading daily English language newspaper in Saudi Arabia. Today I made a decision to resign with the newspaper because, since the Khashoggi scandal, I have a problem with the moral issues involved with the cartoons that are allowed to reprinted in Saudi Arabia.
Of course, my editors at the Arab News are not responsible for the war in Yemen, or for the assassination of a Saudi dissident journalist, still I face a difficult dilemma in deciding if I should continue to work with any media in Saudi Arabia.
For the past months, for obvious reasons, the Arab News couldn’t use any of my cartoons that were relevant to the Khashoggi affair and couldn’t publish any of my cartoons that relate to the war in Yemen – a war that killed thousands of innocent Yemeni children. In recent days, the Arab News cannot use any of my cartoons about the Saudi teenage girl, Rahaf, who escaped from Saudi Arabia and asked for asylum in Australia.
Sometimes I draw cartoons about my French government that has no problem with selling weapons to the Saudi government, exposing the double standard of western countries when it comes to choosing between human rights and lucrative defense contracts. If I keep publishing cartoons in a Saudi newspaper that will never publish any controversial cartoons, am I not guilty of hypocrisy myself?
I am just a cartoonist. I do not earn much money and taking the decision to resign from the Arab News was painful because I need the income, but I firmly believe that I must resign.
So I tender my immediate resignation from my collaboration with Arab News and ask my editors to please accept my apologies for any inconvenience I am causing to them by my abrupt departure. Please understand this has nothing to do with editors at the Arab News.
Best,
Stephff
