Here is my newest coronavirus cartoon followed by a new batch of my COVID-19 favorites.
I’ve been getting requests to show my messy rough sketches, so here you go. This one is scribbled on the back of a page of CagleCartoons letterhead.
I enjoyed this cartoon from Gary McCoy. We’ve been getting a lot of COVID-19 cartoon with the virus as an alien. This is funnier.
This one is by our Greek cartoonist, Michael Kountouris. We’re seeing quite a few cartoons with Adam and God from the Sistine Chapel for some reason.
Here’s another nice Sistine Chapel cartoon by Ed Wexler.
This one is by Adam Zyglis. Editors typically prefer cartoons that are funny and that don’t criticize President Trump, so this one won’t get reprinted as much as the cartoons above. I’m working on a Trump virus cartoon now that probably won’t get much ink.
This one by Rick McKee doesn’t really speak to the coronavirus, unless you got it from your own butt, after someone coughed on your butt –still, it makes me laugh. Cartoonists love cartoons about butts, even when there isn’t really a reason for a butt.
As a last thing –when I do blog posts I choose keywords to help in a search. I thought the keywords for this post were particularly funny. Here are the keywords: coronavirus, COVID-19, President Trump, pandemic, empty shelves, Sistine Chapel, God, Adam, creation, aliens, Jack and the Beanstalk, health, medicine
The keywords make me laugh.
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These are the most popular and most reprinted Coronavirus cartoons, as chosen by newspaper editors. Enjoy!
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Here are my three most recent Corona Virus cartoons.
This is the most recent one, on the stock market drop, the oil price drop and the Corona Virus …
I actually like the line art better than the color version.
Editors and readers always like color or grayscale better than line art like this – but I like line art versions of cartoons best –without tone. There is something more elegant about line art, even if I can’t convince anyone else that line art is nicer.
My next cartoon has the Corona Virus licking the continental United States. Here’s my rough sketch. I looked up a map of the USA on Google, printed it and taped it into place, so I could get the shapes of the states right when I traced it with my finished lines. In the old days I would do things like this on a “lucygraph”. (These are better days.)
And here’s the final art …
Back in February, when the Corona Virus was only in China, I drew this one about the world freaking out …
That’s it! Three cartoons today!
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Here are the most popular cartoons from February. 20% of the cartoons get 80% of the reprints in newspapers, because editors tend to like the same things at the same time. Editors also tend to like the same, small pool of cartoonists, even though all of our cartoons and cartoonists are presented to editors in the same way –so these are the cartoons that got the vast majority of reprints in American newspapers last month.
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20% of our cartoons get 80% of the reprints. Editors tend to like the same cartoons –and these are the cartoon the editors liked most and published most this week. Enjoy!
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UPDATED March 6, 2020, with a new cartoon – scroll to the bottom of the post to see it, along with another explanation from Benedick.
I got some interesting emails from Chinese cartoonist and freelance photographer, Benedick Bowen, with some cartoons about his experiences with China’s extreme quarantine measures to restrict the spread of the Corona Virus, COVID-19.
At first, Chinese authorities tried to downplay the threat and punished a few whistleblowers who sounded the alarm –we had the same experience his with Preisdent Trump’s comments minimizing the virus threat. Benedick writes:
“… I heard about the ‘unexplained virus’ was was told it could be controlled and not contracted from human to human, many times on the the Chinese domestic media.
When I heard the news, I heard many people were rushing to buy face masks and medical alcohol and food. Some pessimistic friends thought that the material supply shortage would keep long and may wreak famine. My father asked me to buy rice, wheat flour and oil for months use. I didn’t agree with them … but I did buy much more food than before.
Finally Beijing was quarantined. People were not allowed to go on the street at will. Employees have to ask their companies to write out a “testimony” to get a pass for an employee to leave his home for work. I am not an employee so I can not leave my house. I can only go out within 3 hours per day to buy food. My son’s kindergarten delayed the opening time few times. By now we have bought 60 kilograms rice and 50 kilograms wheat flour and many bottles of oil. “
Benedick has been suffering from the quarantine, and from not being able to ply his trade as a freelance photographer while he’s stuck in his house, because he has no employer to write a note to the authorities, he is stuck at home. (We might face Corona Virus quarantines in California too, where freelance photographers are banned under the new law AB 5, so there will be no employer excuses in the USA either.)
Here are more of Benedick’s cartoons …
UPDATED March 6, 2020
Benedick writes: “This cartoon is about the quarantine in China’s rural areas. The security guards who wear red armbands supervise the people to wear face masks and stay home. The security guards have no enforcement power so they always make violence when people don’t obey them.”
During the second World War, British cartoonist David Low was despised by Hitler because he relentlessly refuted the lies broadcast by the Nazi propaganda machine with every stark cartoon. We’re a long way from the age in which internationally applauded cartoonists such as Sir David Low were knighted for their heroic defense of liberty.
When I opened my annual trade journal, The American Association of Editorial Cartoonists Notebook, the bell tolled for my profession, page by page, cartoonist by cartoonist. This year our annual AAEC convention will convene in Ottawa, Ontario, with our Canadian colleagues because our numbers are so small we could meet in an abandoned Fotomat kiosk.
Political cartoonist Bruce Plante called me from Oklahoma when his paper, the Tulsa World, had just been acquired by Lee Enterprises. Needing reassurance I told him, “Lee values cartoonists.” When we began our careers four decades ago there were hundreds of us. Today there are 25 newspaper editorial cartoonists left drawing truth to power in the United States.
A lot of giants have been kicked to the curb. After winning the Pulitzer, Mike Keefe was laid off from the Denver Post. Pulitzer winner Steve Benson was laid off last year from the Arizona Republic. The Houston Chronicle, Knoxville News Sentinel and Indianapolis Star summarily jettisoned their beloved veteran cartoonists Nick Anderson, Charlie Daniel and Gary Varvel.
Most troubling, Rob Rogers, the popular political cartoonist of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, was fired by a pro-Trump editor who replaced him with Steve Kelley, a cartoonist who once informed me the most oppressed group in America was white men. Rob relies on syndication and Patreon online subscription patrons to get by.
Scott Stantis has a pseudo-freelance arrangement with his Chicago Tribune. Pat Bagley’s Salt Lake Tribune miraculously survives because it’s owned by a nonprofit corporation. Jack Ohman’s Sacramento Bee is part of the McClatchy chain, which just filed for bankruptcy. My friend and Tucson resident, Chris Britt, formerly of the Illinois State Journal-Register and News Tribune of Tacoma, transitioned to creating children’s books to supplement his syndication earnings.
Syndication is no longer reliable career insurance. Luckily, I’m syndicated to over 700 sites worldwide by Cagle Cartoons. In my AAEC Notebook, Daryl Cagle notes that newspaper chains are consolidating their editorial staffs into one central staff that generates cookie-cutter editorials for the entire chain, adding, “Newspapers are shutting down editorial page staffs faster than they are dropping editorial pages.”
When I was a kid I didn’t listen when the Master Sergeant sarcastically encouraged me to consider a backup plan.
“Doing what?”
“Carving gargoyles. See all the cathedrals in the want ads — hiring stone masons? Your odds of finding work are just as bright, Sunshine.”
I’m glad I didn’t listen. I got lucky. I drew in the last century during the Golden Age of Print and my luck continued through this century’s turbulent transition to digital. These days when young cartoonists ask me for career advice I tell them, “Learn to carve gargoyles.”
It’s impossible for cartoonists to keep up with today’s relentless whirlwind of news. By the time we’ve inked, scanned and uploaded our cartoons our subject’s been eclipsed by 12 new scandals. By the time we upload our hand-rendered cartoon it’s been preceded online by a multitude of memes and YouTube rants; not to mention overshadowed by the comic observers of late night TV. We can see why the producer of “This American Life,” Ira Glass, derided editorial cartooning as “a 17th century medium.”
Ironically, practitioners of our dissed and slowly dying 17th century art form are still sufficiently feared by tyrants to get killed, imprisoned or banished in this darkening century. To the benefit of tyrannies too many regions have become news deserts.
Too many citizens are now completely dependent on the internet for their news, a treacherous cyberswamp teeming with toxic lies and divisive disinformation. The radical right’s war to sow mistrust of the critical mainstream media, which began in the ’70s, along with the rise of Limbaugh, and the billionaire-funded right-wing propaganda mills like Fox, coupled with algorithm-driven cybermanipulation, have all been effective at rendering our citizenry ill-informed and factionalized — two outcomes fatal to democratic republics.
Undaunted by these challenges this “fake news peddler” and “obscene excuse for a mudslinging hack” is proud to be in the honorable company of those persistent resisters labeled the “Enemy of the People” by fascist despots.
Legend has it that David Low had designs for an underground shelter behind his modest London home into which he had placed supplies, a drawing board and a printing press. If his beloved nation were to fall to Nazi occupation, Low had plans to smuggle his family out of the country while he would remain behind, in hiding, churning out anti-fascist cartoons and spreading sedition until his home land was free.
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Here’s an interesting post from my brilliant buddy, Taylor Jones. –Daryl
It’s very rare that I draw cartoons in advance of a news events, because it’s taking a gamble that the cartoon will prove inappropriate or just plain wrong. However, last Friday, when the news reported that there might be a hung jury, I thought I’d give my rather simple Harvey Weinstein idea a shot.
Today, the jury came through with guilty verdicts on the two lesser counts, sending the ex-movie mogul to jail while the appeals process begins. However, what rendered the cartoon moot is society’s gain. –Taylor Jones
Here is another great, Taylor Jones Harvey Weinstein cartoon. It is an oldie …
The subject that got to me the most was the “World’s Ugliest Woman”, Julia Pestrana. The backwards “S” in the linocut was an honest mistake I made in the cutting… I decided to leave it in. I think it’s my favorite part of the picture. Julia was from a tribe of very short Mexican Indians. In her life she was exploited by an agent who married her and toured her around the world. She was presented before the public always beautifully dressed in bright dresses. She had children.
When I was at my busiest in the 70’s and 80’s, I would occasionally take a little time to do a personal project. I used to call them “suites”. They would be a small set of linocuts on some subject that interested me at the time. In truth, I wanted to periodically break from having to work for an art director and fulfill the expected results in a manner that would be appealing to a large audience of readers. I was, of course, mainly working for magazines and newspapers. With these personal projects, I could be my own art director and BOY did I give myself a lot of freedom! I didn’t intend for anyone other than myself to see them so I could break from my usual style a little. With my “suites” I could stretch my creative, more “abstract” muscles a bit.
I first did some pretty abstract little small illustrations for Edgar Allen Poe humorous stories of which I am a big fan. Then I did a group of pictures called “Various Lumpen” in which I got to exorcise feelings I had against certain elements in our society.
The series I’m going to tell about here is called “Sideshow”.
The Scarecrow, of OZ fame, said, “I am convinced that the only people worthy of consideration in this world are the unusual ones. For the common folk are like the leaves of a tree, and live and die unnoticed.”
I decided to do a seres of portraits of human curiosities, anomolies, special people or those commonly known as “freaks”.
When I worked at the Famous Artists Schools, bunked into the cartoon dugout was a man names Fred Drimmer who was the school’s language expert and editor. He was a great guy and I got very friendly with him. Later in life, I received an email from his daughter telling me that Fred had died. In answering her, I referred to a book about human oddities that I knew Fred had written and that I had never read. She replied by sending “Very Special People” to me along with some other books he had written like The Elephant Man.
Buoyed by these wonderful books and another I got from an art director friend of mine, I embarked on my project. I call it Sideshow because mostly all of these people earned their meager living by working for Barnum and Bailey and other circuses and shows.
I approached the project as I did with all my others by drawing only on the linoblock with the lino cutter without benefit of a drawing or sketches. I wanted them to be as direct, unaffected and honestly crude as possible. I present most of them here in this article.
Prince Randian the Caterpillar Man was an extraordinary legless and armless man of great character and talent. He was in show business for 45 years entertaining folks with his feats like rolling his own cigarettes and then lighting them using only his lips and mouth. He was married and fathered 5 children. He was a carpenter and wanted to someday build his own house. He has the distinction of having been featured in the famous cult movie “Freaks” by Todd Browning. I printed my cut as I did the others on brown wrapping paper using minimal color and lettering in a brief synopsis of their history or story.
Charlie Tripp was billed as “The Armless Wonder”. Eli Bowen was billed as “The Legless Wonder”. Together they formed an act in which they rode a tandem bicycle, Charlie doing the peddling and Eli the steering. All through the act they would make wisecracks at each other like Eli saying, “Keep your hands off me!”
If you’re old enough, you’ll remember Philip Morris cigarettes’ human trademark, the bellboy, Johnny. His name was Johnny Roventini and he worked at The New Yorker Hotel. An advertising man heard about the marvelous quality of his voice as he would sing out when he paged people for telephone calls in the lobby so he went over to the hotel and tipped Roventini to page a “Philip Morris”. The result off this was that Johnny went from $15 a week to $50,000 a year as the living symbol of Philip Morris cigarettes until he died at the age of 81. He was the most famous midget in the world. I think he felt that his crowning achievement was when he got to sit on the lap of his screen idol Marlene Dietrich so that’s the way I drew him.
The subject that got to me the most was the “World’s Ugliest Woman”, Julia Pestrana. The backwards “S” in the linocut was an honest mistake I made in the cutting… I decided to leave it in. I think it’s my favorite part of the picture. Julia was from a tribe of very short Mexican Indians. In her life she was exploited by an agent who married her and toured her around the world. She was presented before the public always beautifully dressed in bright dresses. She had children.
And… she was in possession of a sweet… and beautifully sad singing voice.
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We’ve made some changes to the front page of our syndicate site, CagleCartoons.com that will affect our contributing artists. Here is my latest Bloomberg cartoon that I will use an an example below.
I’ll use my recent Bloomberg cartoon as an example of the changes on CagleCartoons.comThis is the revised front page of CagleCartoons.com, our syndicate download site for editors, as it appear today.
The CagleCartoons.com site is the core of our little business. This is where our subscription customers get their cartoons and columns; these are mostly daily, paid-circulation newspapers in the USA who put our content on their editorial pages. (If you only read our blog and Cagle.com you may want to read no further, as this doesn’t affect you. This may be a bit wonky for most readers.)
–The Issues and the Changes
We’re the only syndicate that has their client download site (CagleCartoons.com) available for everyone to see. We’ve been addressing some nagging issues with how we deliver the cartoons on the site. Most editors only look for what is new on the front page of the site and don’t consider older cartoons in our vast database. Often (such as every Thursday) we had too many new cartoons for the front page and cartoons that were loaded early in the day were gone later in the day, pushed out by the newest contributions. Unless an editor visited twice a day, she wouldn’t see all of the new cartoons –and most editors don’t visit every day.
In general, 20% of the cartoons get 80% of the reprints. In other words, editors don’t like 80% of the cartoons, and with all of the cartoons rushing to leave the front page, too many editors complained that they were not seeing enough cartoons they liked.
We encourage our cartoonists to submit black and white versions of their cartoons, because cartoons designed for black and white look better than color cartoons converted to grayscale where some colors come out too dark and cartoons often flatten to a dull gray. The many black and white duplicate versions of the cartoons were taking up front page space that now goes to displaying more color versions of cartoons. The black and white images are now available on the “preview” download pages of the color “parent” cartoon.
We encourage cartoonists to upload their cartoons in a higher resolution than the cartoonists prefer, and we encourage cartoonists to save their work in tiff format, which is not “lossy” like jpg and png formats. (Editors prefer jpg).
Cartoons should be archived in tiff format, so there is no loss to the original. We see our archive as a library and we want to treat the original cartoon files like historical documents that deserve to be preserved without loss –as high resolution tiff files.
We also encourage artists to save their work in CMYK format so their black lines are crispy and the cartoons don’t suffer from bad printing with poor registration. Editors prefer RGB. Until now editors have had to suffer from cartoons in different formats as the unruly herd of cartoonist/cats saved their work in different formats, now editors can download the tiff files as jpg files.
Trump-Friendly, Popular, and the World …
Some time ago, in response to complaints from Trump-supporting editors, we added a section near the top of the page called TRUMP FRIENDLY CARTOONS. This went a long way to dealing with the complaints from red state editors. We recently added a new section called POPULAR CARTOONS that pushed the WORLD CARTOONS section down the page below the fold; the purpose of the new section is to keep the most popular cartoons on the front page longer so editors don’t miss what they want most. The TRUMP FRIENDLY CARTOONS are often among the most popular cartoons with editors. We won’t put the same cartoons in both sections so they won’t be shown twice (or three times) on the front page, so if a TRUMP FRIENDLY cartoon is also a POPULAR CARTOON, it will appear only in the TRUMP FRIENDLY section.
The POPULAR CARTOONS aren’t really “trending” in the internet sense, because readers tend to like different cartoons than editors. In general, editors prefer funny cartoons that don’t express a strong point of view, while readers on the Web respond most to cartoons that pull no punches and reinforce their existing points of view. We still have all kinds of cartoons, strong and soft, left and right, but we’re making it easier for editors to see cartoons they prefer on our site. After all, this site is designed for ease of use by editors. (Cagle.com is designed for readers.)
We love the world cartoonists, but American editors don’t, and these are the least downloaded cartoons by our newspaper subscribers –so we’ve pushed the WORLD CARTOONS down the page –they are still there, and there are just as many of them displayed.
The black and white versions of cartoons are no longer taking up spots on the front page, they are displayed on the preview pages of their accompanying “parent” color versions that editors see when they choose to download cartoons after logging in. Cartoons that exist only as black and white will still appear on the front page.
This is an example of an image preview or download page on CagleCartoons.com today, this is our syndicate download site for editors, as it appear today. This is what editors see after they log in, giving them options to download the high resolution version of the cartoon in different formats.
Preview Page Changes
Clicking on any thumbnail image on the site brings up a “preview page” that looks different for editors who have logged in. An example of what editors see is at the right.
Editors have many options for downloading cartoons, they can download the high resolution images to their device, or email the cartoon to themselves, or to another email address. They can also choose to receive different versions of the cartoons. I upload my cartoons in CMYK tiff format, which is “non-lossy” and best for some kinds of printing. Editors prefer RGB jpg format which is what they are used to getting from photo services like AP. Now editors can download in tiff, jpg and png formats, as CMYK or as RGB if the cartoonist saved her cartoon in CMYK format, as we recommend and as few cartoonists do.
When cartoonists prepare a separate black and white version of a color cartoon, it now appears as a “related variation” only on the preview page for editors to download, rather than with the thumbnails on the front page and in searches. In general, when a black and white version of a cartoon is available, one third of the downloads for the cartoon are for the black and white version.
In the future we may make other variations available to editors on the preview pages, such as foreign language versions or different dimensions that cartoonists may want to do, or such as a taller version or wider version.
Newspaper editors hate when cartoonists use dirty words, but many cartoonists love dirty words which are commonplace on the Web. We’re considering allowing cartoonists to do “dirty word versions” of their cartoons that would be available as variations since there is so much demand for that among the cartoonists. We haven’t quite convinced ourselves do that yet, since most of our subscribers are traditional newspapers. Maybe we will.
We’re also considering adding a feature that will allow editors to select the resolution of the cartoon they download. For now, the resolution of the cartoon is displayed on the preview page. Sometimes we get complaints about cartoons that artists uploaded in low resolution (this is more often a problem with the world cartoonists who have a harder time accepting higher resolution). Unfortunately, it does no good to try to increase the resolution of a low resolution original; this option is only good for resizing cartoons to lower resolutions or dimensions, which would be helpful for Web clients.
Editors can see the resolution on the preview page so they won’t be surprised after downloading the cartoon. There is more demand for higher resolution cartoons now as new devices have higher resolution displays and as better printing processes demand more from cartoon files that are blown up as illustrations.
That’s it for now. More changes will be coming soon!
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Attorney General Bill Barr had an interview last week with ABC News where he said, “The President’s tweets make it impossible to do my job.” The interview pushed up against the weekend, a sure way to make the cartoons come in on Monday, like mine.
Yes, I know that editors don’t want to print fart jokes, so this cartoon probably won’t get much ink. But you gotta draw what you gotta draw. Here are some of the other Barr cartoons that squeezed in before the weekend. The first one is by Adam Zyglis my Pulitzer Prize winning buddy from the Buffalo News.
This beauty is by Rick McKee, who may be our most popular cartoonist right now.
I think this Barr cake cartoon is my favorite, by my Pulitzer Prize winning buddy Steve Sack from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
This bouncy Barr is by my Pulitzer Prize winning buddy, Kevin Siers from the Charlotte Observer.
This Tweety Barr is by my buddy Jeff Koterba from the Omaha World-Herald.
This one is by my pal Bruce Plante from the Tulsa World in Oklahoma.
This crazy charmer comes from Bart van Leeuwen, our Photoshop savant from Holland.
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I seem to be the only cartoonist who is disappointed by a Best Picture Oscar going to a foreign language movie with subtitles. I can’t bear subtitles. Here’s my cartoon and some of my other Oscar favorites. And here’s my archive!
There were lots of complaints about a lack of diversity this year. This one is from Pat Bagley.
Conservatives love to hate the Oscars. This evergreen is from Rick McKee.
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The Scarecrow, of OZ fame, said, “I am convinced that the only people worthy of consideration in this world are the unusual ones. For the common folk are like the leaves of a tree, and live and die unnoticed.”
