In 1993, a former illustrator, named Pam Sommers, asked 84 well known illustrators to contribute to a book she was putting together called “Recipes for Disaster“. In essence, she wanted the illustrators to write out and then illustrate their favorite recipes. Some of the artists chose to take a conceptual approach such as a “recipe for a riot”. We had complete freedom to interpret “recipe” any way we wanted to but most of us did actual recipes of our favorite dish. I was one of those and I decided to combine my text and picture into one linocut illustration. The words became part of the picture.
My favorite food dish is Portuguese kale soup. It’s nickname is “baseball soup” because of the large baseball sized potatoes in it. It also blends the flavors of the Portuguese sausages, chourico and linguica with cabbage, lima and red kidney beans and soup chuck with the large bunch of kale. It’s a thick soup, almost like a stew sometimes although some people, like my Aunt Angie used to make a thinner watery version of it. My father and mom taught my wife, Leann how to make it and she does a PERFECT replica of the version I grew up with … except for the bugs floating in it. You see, we grew our own kale in a little garden in our yard and it was impossible for my grandmother, who lived with us and did most of the cooking, to wash out all these tiny little bugs that were embedded in the kale leaves. So, they got well cooked into the soup. When you were eating it, you could see the tiny little critters who looked like fruit flies floating in the lovely greenish soup. The first time Leann ate at our house and saw the bugs, she was a little put off by them. My father assured her that they were well cooked and perfectly harmless.
I love kale soup. It is truly the best dish I have ever eaten in my life… it’s heaven. And it is truly delicious the days after it is created when the flavors have mingled and steeped. We always make a very big pot of it that lasts a few days.
I decided to do my illustration in a whaling theme because the largest concentration of Portuguese immigrants are located in my home town of New Bedford which was the greatest 17, 18 and 19th century American whaling port in the world. I decided that I would depict whalemen trying to harpoon two large potato/whales. One whaleman shouts, “Baleia Branco”… which means “white whales”,referencing Moby Dick which was written by Herman Melville who shipped out of New Bedford on a whaling ship when he was 25 years old and later wrote probably the greatest novel ever written.
The water, in my picture, is composed of the wavy lettering that makes up the recipe text. White on black at the top of the picture listing the ingredients and black lettering on white in the larger bottom part of the picture listing the cooking procedure.
It was a lot of work and it was very very tiring cutting all those letters backwards… BUT, well worth it for KALE SOUP!
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Patrick made cartoon news last year when he was dropped by the New York Times in response to a cartoon another cartoonist drew, that Patrick had nothing to do with. The Times vowed not to print editorial cartoons at all, so they could be sure they wouldn’t print a bad cartoon. Patrick’s book features his last cartoons from his years working with The New York Times. I asked Patrick to send me some of his favorite cartoons from the book, along with his comments –here are some of Patricks great cartoons along with his comments …
Thanks to Facebook, we have lots of friends, everywhere. Mark Zuckerberg is our friend. Actually, when you think of it, he may know you better than your best friend…
Trump grabbing Lady Liberty – or American democracy – by the … : yeah, I know, it’s a classic. One of those ideas that, the moment you come up with it, you know that other colleagues will revolve around the same visual. So obvious, but also irresistible. I had a tote bag made out of this cartoon, it sold out quick. In January 2017, I took one of these bags with me at the World Economic Forum in Davos, hoping to offer it to Donald J. in person. Of course that didn’t quite work out. Instead, I the bag found a happy owner in the person of Joseph Stiglitz, the economist, Nobel laureate and a supersmart critic of the President. Months later, he very kindly accepted to sign the foreword of my book.
It’s always illuminating when Trump meets other World leaders. Because then, you really get to size up the man. By comparison, you get a measure of his character. When he met Pope Francis in May 2017, I did this cartoon. Do you know the actual answer to this question? Who of the two has the most followers? Which one is the largest church? Any guess?
(Answer: Last time I checked at the end of 2019, pope Francis counted 49 million faithfuls. And the cult of @realdonaldtrump? 66 million followers…)
Whether for Trump or against him, aren’t we all playing into his hands? If he didn’t invent the phrase “There’s no such thing as bad publicity”, he incarnates it like nobody else on this planet. From time to time, it does feel good to get him out of the picture, and just focus on the actual reality and real-life consequences of his politics. Like those tax cuts.
The guns debate: America in a nutshell. The inspiration for this cartoon came from something that happened to me in Nevada a few years ago: I was kicked out of a grocery because, having my hands full, I had asked my 18 years old son to help me carry a pack of beers to the counter. The cashier went crazy. Misdemeanor! Crime! i was obviously trying to cover underage drinking! Had I asked my son to carry my gun for me, it would all have been just fine…
This is one of my favorites. Just like George W. Bush invaded Iraq in order to impress and surpass dad, this cartoon might contain the quintessencial explanation of Trump’s main policies, when it comes to Iran, the affordable care act and some other things he’s obsessing about.
The President choosing a Supreme court candidate. Imagine what it will be like in his second term…
I did this cartoon at the beginning of the impeachment inquiry, in September 2019. Someone brought it back recently and told me how insightful, how prophetic it was! We like this idea, us cartoonist: to be called “prophetic”. A cool compliment. When in fact, regarding Trump’s impeachment, the writing was all over the wall already back then. I was just being lucid. Which is enough of a compliment – and could be a good definition of our job.
On Friday the Senate is expected to vote on whether to call witnesses for the impeachment trial. As of now, it is possible that four Republicans can be found to vote for witnesses, in particular, John Bolton –but it is likely there will not be four Republicans who vote for witnesses. Here’s my cartoon …
I was reminded that people like to see my rough sketches, so here you go.
You can see I fiddled with making the elephant’s butt bigger and moving his head forward, and whether or not to put the tie in front of his shoe. This is an odd angle to draw, but it is the best angle for effective mooning –I’ve done it before. Here’s one that I drew over 20 years ago, during the Florida recount in the Bush vs. Gore election.
My biggest regret from my career as an editorial cartoonist is that I supported the run-up to the war in Iraq, and I believed The New York Times‘ bogus stories about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (I won’t make the mistake of trusting The New York Times again.) Here’s one of my run-up to war in Iraq cartoons, about Saddam obstructing the weapons inspectors in Iraq –we later learned that what Saddam was hiding was his fragile ego, since he had no such weapons.
I think it is a general rule for editorial cartoonists that whenever there is a good excuse to draw a butt, a dog or a Statue of Liberty, you gotta grab it and run.
My obsession with Frida Kahlo started when I turned the page of an Artforum magazine I was reading on the train to New York back in the early 80’s. It hit me with a jolt! Here was a black and white photo of a scowling woman slouched in a chair seated next to a pot bellied man holding a monkey in his arms! The man I recognized as Diego Rivera, the famous Mexican mural painter. I’ve been a fan of his work since I was a kid. Due to his influence, I even painted a couple of murals in our house in the entrance way to my childhood attic studio. Alas, they are no longer there. I recently was alerted, by my niece, Kerry, to a real estate website that showed our old re-modeled home for sale … no murals were to be seen in the entrance way to what now is an attic guest room.
The woman in the photo, apparently Diego’s wife, was the focus of my attention (which was soon to become an obsession). She had on a decorative blouse covered over by a shawl. She had large heavy earrings. Her eyebrows grew together in one line across her brow and she had a moustache! She was gazing directly at the camera. Diego meanwhile was looking askance at the monkey, who I later learned was named Caimito de Guayabal.
In the weeks and months that followed, I couldn’t get her image out of my head. I cut the picture out of the magazine and framed it to hang on my studio wall. Then, I proceeded to try to track down information on this apparition. I had very little luck. I did find out that she was indeed Diego’s wife. I saw somewhere that there was film of her with Diego. I searched for that footage. I had to see this woman in movement … in action. What was she like?I had no luck whatsoever in finding any movies of her.
Frida Kahlo and her husband, Diego Rivera.
Then in 1985, Hayden Herrera’s book, “Frida” was published and the smoke cleared. It informed the world about Frida Kahlo. The big thick book answered all my questions. It told about her terrible childhood accident when she was impaled through the groin when a trolly hit her school bus in Mexico City. She spent the rest of her life mostly corseted up or bed- ridden, going in and out of surgery for her injured spine. There were a few times of mobility when she could walk around and even make visits to the U.S. when Diego was painting murals in Detroit, New York and California. She was an exotic creature wearing long Mexican folk dresses (which helped to hide her polio-withered right leg) and many rings, bracelets and heavy looking necklaces. On the walls of her bedroom hung the pictures of her heroes Marx, Mao, Lenin and Stalin. She had an affair with Trotsky when he escaped from Stalin and lived with the Riveras in Coyoacan, a suburb of Mexico City. She flitted in and out of the Communist Party switching allegiances from one faction to the other from time to time along with Diego. When she died, there was an unfinished portrait of Stalin on her easel which I saw when I visited her famous “blue house” in Coyoacan. She loved animals and had many hairless dogs, tiny deer, parrots and monkeys. She led a fabulous bohemian life creating endless self portraits and cultivating a small cadre of students which were affectionately known as Los Fridos. She was kind and loving and passionate and I was in love with her … and still am.
SO, lots of my friends, family and fellow cartoonists give and send me Frida stuff. I have her images all over the house and 36 pictures of her in my studio alone. I have tee shirts with her picture on them, key fobs, various pins, sticky notes, shopping bags (3), a candle, postage stamps, greeting cards, matchbooks, and on and on and on. Almost all of them have been given to me by friends who feel the need to feed my obsession. I even have an earring which is a little “hand” that matches the earrings that Picasso once gave her.
Frida Kahlo
Of course I’ve made pictures of her and I’ve met her biographer, Hayden, and I’ve collected 16 books on her including her cookbook, her diary, a book of her personal photos, her sketchbook, many biographies and so forth. She had a lot of bed time so she propped up a little easel and mirror and painted more self portraits than probably any other artist that ever lived. She did NOT paint flattering pictures of herself but rather pictures of her sorrow, her ailments, her passion. She had a mirror on the canopy of her bed so she could study her predicament from that angle. The Surrealists loved her and invited her to Paris to exhibit with them. She found most of them to be insufferable snobs and bores.
My wife and I visited her house (now a Frida Kahlo museum) in Coyoacan and I swiped some blue chips of paint that had peeled off the house and fallen in her beautiful garden to put in a frame with one of her pictures in my studio. I picked up some small pieces of lava rock also to make into an earring for myself. See what I mean about obsession?
I’m posting here my favorite photo of her with beads in her mouth, the original photo I saw in Artforum and a large color linocut I made (that’s me on her shoulder as her favorite monkey, Fulang- Chang). Also, a small linocut of her with Diego. I gave a print of this to Hayden Herrera.
I was at a party once, with a bunch of lefties, years ago … I remember my friend, the cartoonist Roy Doty, was there and also an old woman who actually had known Frida. Unfortunately, by the time I found this out, she was on her way out the door leaving the party.
Diego once said that everybody who meets Frida falls in love with her.
WELL … evidently, you didn’t even have to meet her.
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Two sweeping new laws in California have been a heavy burden for us to bear here at Cagle Cartoons, Inc. I wrote about Assembly Bill 5 (AB 5) that limits California freelance cartoonists and columnists to 35 contributions to a publisher each year. Because of this limit, we will no longer consider submissions from California creators and we have dropped a number of California contributors from our Cagle.com site and our PoliticalCartoons.com store. Other California freelance contributors that stayed with us are no longer paid, because of AB 5.
Cartoon by the brilliant Dario Castillejos from Mexico.
The California legislature dropped a second bomb on us with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). This poorly written, overly broad law is intended to affect only very large companies and protect consumer information that should be kept private, but in their sweeping ignorance, the legislature has swept up Cagle.com along with the Silicon Valley giants.
The CCPA imposes a huge $7,500.00 per violation fine for failing to properly disclose information about an individual and delete a user’s data upon request; the colossal fine is intended to threaten Web behemoths like Google and Facebook, who make billions of dollars reselling consumer data. The law applies to companies with over $25 million of revenue, or companies that earn over half of their annual gross income from reselling consumer information, or who maintain data on 50,000 or more people –it is the 50,000 threshold that snares our tiny, little business along with many other unintended small business victims.
We have about 85,000 fans who have opted to subscribe to Cagle.com’s free, cartoon-a-day, email newsletter. We use the mailing list to maintain the community of fans on Cagle.com. The emails include links to my blog posts and new topical sections on Cagle.com; most of the traffic to Cagle.com is sustained by churning, with emails enticing the same fans to come back again and again to look at our new content. (Sign up for our Free Daily Newsletter here.)
50,000 sounds like a lot, but it is a small drop in the ocean of the internet.
Here’s how it works: if one of our emails has an enticing subject line we’ll get about 20% of the recipients to open the email; then, if the cartoon and link look interesting enough, another 20% of that number will click on the link to go to our site; so, perhaps 4% of the list, or around 3,400 fans, end up visiting Cagle.com from a typical email link. Since we have no outside site feeding traffic to us (as we used to have with msnbc.com), the newsletter keeps an active, but small community of political cartoon fans engaged with our cartoons and columns.
We’ve spent thousands of dollars in legal fees to comply with AB 5 and CCPA. The fines for failing to comply with AB 5 are steep, but a handful of $7,500.00 CCPA compliance fines are worse and could put our small business out of business.
Cartoon by the talented Michael Kountouris, from Greece.
Here’s some background to illustrate our risk …
Cagle.com is a target for hackers who we believe come from third world regimes with humorless dictators who don’t like how they are depicted in our cartoons; there are clues that lead us to this conclusion, including the content on our site at the times of the worst attacks and the distribution of the servers delivering the attacks. The hacks we suffer from are often unusually large, complex and sophisticated; they are designed to bring our business and Cagle.com down –unlike the common attacks that normal Web sites see, that are only looking to steal credit card information or to hijack servers for Bitcoin mining. A good example is a sophisticated attack about five years ago on our email server that we used for our Free Daily Newsletter.
Five years ago we had about 150,000 opt-in email addresses on our list. Hackers broke into our email server and, over the course of about eight months, slowly, daily, methodically, added small batches of valid email addresses to our list, which grew over the months of the hack to nearly 800,000 email addresses. We didn’t notice the added addresses. Unlike a more typical attack that would try to delete the data on our servers and bring Cagle.com down, the daily email list continued to be delivered everyday without an apparent problem; we received the newsletters in our own accounts, as did all of our subscribers. We got few complaints from the hundreds of thousands of people who were added to the list by the hackers. We didn’t realize there was a problem over the months as determined hackers were bloating our email list.
Another great cartoon by Michael Kountouris, from Greece.
People who didn’t sign up for our newsletter didn’t complain to us –but some of them complained to their own email providers who placed Cagle.com on blacklists as a spammer. We ended up on all of the major email blacklists. Our newsletters, and our other business emails, were blocked and the newsletter stopped churning our traffic. It took some time for us to figure out what happened. We replaced the newsletter list with a backup we had from a year earlier and set out on a quest to get off of the blacklists, a difficult process that took a couple of years. We moved our email newsletter to MailChimp, which is more expensive but which has better security than we could manage on our own.
The experts who looked at the history of this hack told us that the attack was very unusual, and that the hackers were surprisingly sophisticated, motivated and patient, spending countless hours over the months, manually adding valid email addresses to our list. The experts hadn’t seen anything like it before. Instead of simply taking down our server such that we could put the server back up from a backup copy, this hack poisoned the well for us, with blacklisting that crippled our newsletter and our traffic for years to come. One comment the experts made was memorable, “Those guys must really, really hate you.”
With continuing attacks, we can’t really be sure of what data is on our servers, we react and make fixes as we go along. We don’t keep sensitive data on our servers (like credit card numbers that can be stolen). We don’t run advertising on our sites. We never have and never will sell our data to anyone else.
Which brings me back to CCPA. Our modest, Free Daily Newsletter, that allows our community of fans to function, and which subjects us to a potential $7,500.00 per-violation fine if we’re found to have data on our servers that we didn’t report to any inquiring user. This opens us up to a potential hacker attack that would threaten us with potential CCPA fines for non-compliance in disclosing or deleting data that we never knew had been placed on our servers. It wouldn’t take much of an effort for hackers to subject us to a handful of $7,500.00 fines that could take down our small business.
Companies in California are expected to spend an initial $55 billion simply complying with CCPA, according to The Los Angeles Times, with a “gold rush” of start-ups and consultants looking to take advantage of the anxiety that CCPA is causing countless small businesses in California, like ours.
Beyond the risk, the cost of legal compliance, the programming changes and the fact that we’re not the intended target of this poorly written law, some of the hoops we’re required to jump through are ridiculous; the misleading statements that we’re required to make in our online Privacy Policy are a great example.
As a companion to to Cagle.com, we run a small newspaper syndicate that licenses editorial cartoons and columns to newspaper editorial page editors. We maintain a database of editors at papers that subscribe, for delivery and billing; we also maintain a list of editors who don’t subscribe, who we pitch, trying to get them to subscribe. The newspaper editors list includes the names of editors, publication titles, addresses, and the standard field, “Mr./Ms.” which under CCPA, means that we are collecting and storing sexual identification data on individuals. Because of the “Mr./Ms.” field in our editor database, this is the wording CCPA requires us to post in our required Privacy Policy: … In particular, we have collected the following categories of personal information from its consumers within the last twelve (12) months: C. Protected classification characteristics under California or federal law. Age (40 years or older), race, color, ancestry, national origin, citizenship, religion or creed, marital status, medical condition, physical or mental disability, sex (including gender, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy or childbirth and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, veteran or military status, genetic information (including familial genetic information).
Cartoon by the stupendous Angel Boligan from Mexico.
Since we store street addresses for these editors, we must post this: … In particular, we have collected the following categories of personal information from its consumers within the last twelve (12) months: G. Geolocation data. Physical location or movements.
Since we keep notes on our contacts with the editors, we must post this: … In particular, we have collected the following categories of personal information from its consumers within the last twelve (12) months: K. Inferences drawn from other personal information. Profile reflecting a person’s preferences, characteristics, psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, and aptitudes.
Since we store names and email addresses, we must post this: … In particular, we have collected the following categories of personal information from its consumers within the last twelve (12) months: A. Identifiers. A real name, alias, postal address, unique personal identifier, online identifier, Internet Protocol address, email address, account name, Social Security number, driver’s license number, passport number, or other similar identifiers. B. Personal information categories listed in the California Customer Records statute (Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.80(e)). A name, signature, Social Security number, physical characteristics or description, address, telephone number, passport number, driver’s license or state identification card number, insurance policy number, education, employment, employment history, bank account number, credit card number, debit card number, or any other financial information, medical information, or health insurance information. Some personal information included in this category may overlap with other categories.
The required Privacy Policy could give pertinent information about what data Web sites really gather and store about users, but the crazy, hyperbolic wording that CCPA requires gives the impression that every site is spying and keeping intrusive data on everyone.
Since we acknowledge that we haven’t sold our data, we’re excused from some of the requirements of CCPA, for example, we’re not required to maintain a toll-free telephone number, posting our regular phone number is sufficient. But we’re not allowed to broadly state that we have not sold our data in the past and we won’t sell it in the future, we have to use this wording: In the preceding twelve (12) months, the Company has not sold personal information.
Another cartoon by the brilliant Mexican cartoonist, Dario Castillejos from Oaxaca.
The first advice my attorney gave me, before embarking on our expensive compliance journey under CCPA and AB 5, was, “You should move out of California.”
I’ve lived most of my life in California and I don’t want to move away from family and friends, so Cagle Cartoons, Inc. is suffering through the muck of risky, expensive, bone-headed, bad legislation. Since our business is small, it is fragile. Since we speak truth to power, we have many enemies around the world who would seek to take us down and it is ironic that the worst threats to us, and to the press in California, come from our Democrat controlled legislature in California.
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Randy’s lino-cut print of his mother and father among the workers at the Goodyear factory.
Everybody worked in a factory. In New Bedford, where I was born; we had shoe factories, woolen mills, a Revere Copper & Brass, the golf ball factory, tool and dye factories and many many others including where my mom met my pop, the Goodyear plant. When she first laid eyes on him, she didn’t like him. She thought he was a showoff because he would chin himself with one hand, up and down up and down on a bar that went across the doorway to the men’s room. This was all part of my poor father’s self-improvement regimen that he had adopted for himself along with scrubbing his teeth with some abrasive to keep them clean and white, sending away for Charles Atlas muscle-building equipment and reading all the non-fiction books he could get a hold of to make up for his lack of education.
Randy’s father, from his lino-cut print below.
My father had come from the old country when he was 10 yrs. old and he had only one year of schooling in a class for immigrant kids that couldn’t speak English. That was it. He started out as a newspaper boy selling papers on the street; then delivering coal; then in a bowling alley setting pins; then he went towork for “old man Weeden” who he liked very much. The Weeden Toy Factory made great little steam engines that are now represented in a special display of antique toys in the New Bedford Whaling Museum.
My father was always trying to make up for his lack of education by reading. He never read a book of fiction in his life. When I was a kid, I read the same books he read because they were there in our house. Some of them were the following: The Life of Madame Curie, The History of the World by H.G. Wells, Microbe Hunters by Paul DeKruif, How to Write a Business Letter, High School French Self Taught and a set of the World Book Encyclopedia (which my father read from A to Z).
As he got older he went to work in the mills but one day at his sister’s house he met her insurance man who encouraged him to seek a job at the insurance company. Eventually, many years later, my uneducated father became an insurance executive when he was finally forced to become the district manager in New Bedford of the Boston Mutual life Insurance Company when there was no one else to ascend to the position. Everyone he hired as agents had to have college degrees which he thought was ironic.
My mom worked in a number of factories, Goodyear, the Titleist golf ball factory and a venetian blind factory. My grandfather, her dad, worked in woolen mills and died of lung congestion. He married my grandmother when she was 13 yrs. old and she was illiterate her whole life working as a domestic and cook in the homes of wealthy people. She lived with us while I was growing up because my grandfather had died just before I was born in 1936. She died at the age of 86.
Okay … back to the Goodyear plant where my mom and pop worked. My mother, as I said, thought my dad was vain and a showoff until one day she saw him sitting alone at lunchtime with nothing to eat. She shared her lunch with him … and the rest is history.
Randy’s mother and father among the workers at the Goodyear factory.
On my studio wall I have a photograph of all the workers in one division of the Goodyear plant. My father is in the back row, my mother is sitting down in the first row right next to her sister, my aunt Laura. I don’t know whether or not my mom and pop knew each other at the time this shot was taken. I decided to make a picture of this group. I named it “Portrait of My Mother and Father.” It’s a linoleum cut. I drew it directly from the photograph so when I printed it of course it came out in reverse. I did it mainly with brown ink on brown wrapping paper to give it a bit of an aged, old fashioned look. The heads of my mother and father (which I had circled), I printed in bright colors on bright colored paper. It was a challenge to try to get a caricature of each individual. They stand and sit in such interesting attitudes. There are the tough guy workers, my father among them, with sleeves rolled up, a few guys in caps for some reason, some office workers and obvious minor bosses.
Later, when I was about 5 or 6, the second world war was waging and my mother was working on the large rubber rafts that were dropped down to the water for the use of the parachuting troops that would follow. The strong rafts would hold all the provisions the troops would require.
I don’t know what my father was working on but he was probably still chinning himself with one hand.
We need your support for Cagle.com (and DarylCagle.com)! Notice that we run no advertising! We depend entirely upon the generosity of our readers to sustain the site. Please visit Cagle.com/heroes and make a contribution. You are much appreciated!
We need your support for Cagle.com (and DarylCagle.com)! Notice that we run no advertising! We depend entirely upon the generosity of our readers to sustain the site. Please visit Cagle.com/heroes and make a contribution. You are much appreciated!
As a kid I loved the shapes of states and countries. Especially the really interesting ones like California, Texas, and Nebraska. In my grade school classroom we had a really big map of the United States, which reminds me of that joke by the comedian, Steven Wright: “At home I have a map of the United States. Actual size.”
So, okay, the map at school wasn’t quite that big, but it was large enough to constantly distract me from paying attention to my teacher. Mostly, I found myself focusing on the middle of the map, on the city in which I was born and raised —Omaha, Nebraska.
Like most kids, I believed that the world revolved around me. And to reinforce this idea I was at the center of all things, it didn’t help that Omaha was at the center of that map, smack dab in the middle of the country.
As an adult and as a cartoonist, I have remained fascinated with maps. And whenever the opportunity arises for me to include a map in one of my cartoons, I’ll certainly draw one in.
But in adulthood, something would shift from how I viewed maps in childhood. This shift began when I first traveled to Russia one cold and snowy January and found myself feeling disoriented. I felt like I was on the Moon. To ground myself I studied a map of Russia and found myself looking to the middle of that map, fully expecting to find … Omaha. You know, just east of Moscow.
But it wasn’t until a few years ago, when, for the first time ever, I moved away from Omaha for nearly two years and found myself living in Innsbruck, Austria. That’s when my world —and my view of maps —literally turned upside down.
So much so, I gave a recent TEDx talk on the topic:
And if you missed it the first time around, here’s my previous TEDx talk on how embracing one’s vulnerabilities can increase one’s creativity—in my case how my having Tourette Syndrome helped me to become a better cartoonist:
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Look at our other, great collections of Cartoon Favorites of the Decade, selected by the artists, in the links below. ( There is ONE more artist decade to go!)
We need your support for Cagle.com (and DarylCagle.com)! Notice that we run no advertising! We depend entirely upon the generosity of our readers to sustain the site. Please visit Cagle.com/heroes and make a contribution. You are much appreciated!
Dave Whamond’sfavorite cartoons of the past decade are below! Dave’s work has appeared in magazines and newspapers including The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, Readers Digest and many more. He has won 7 Silver Reubens from the National Cartoonists Society and several book awards. Dave has written and/or illustrated over 50 books and his syndicated comic, “Reality Check”, has appeared in newspapers since 1995. He hails from Alberta, Canada. See Dave’s favorite cartoons of the decade on USA Today, where you can click on each cartoon and see it blown up to fill the screen with a pretty, high-resolution image. See the complete archive of Dave’s editorial cartoons here.
Look at our other, great collections of Cartoon Favorites of the Decade, selected by the artists, in the links below. ( I didn’t quite keep up the pace and there are a couple more artist decades to post here!)
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Years ago, my wife was doing a lot of theater work both acting and directing with small groups mostly in New York. One time, however, in June of 1989, she was called to Washington, D.C. to direct a play there. A few days later, while she was there, our anniversary came along and we decided that I would take the train down to Washington to celebrate it with her.
When I got to Washington, my wife had arranged an evening out at a small jazz club she had been told about called Blues Alley. It turned out to be a small, brick-walled, intimate little place with a small stage and little bar at the rear. The performance that evening was a quartet whose leader was not “small” or “little”at all. It was none other than the legendary Dizzy Gillespie. I couldn’t believe it. There he was a few feet in front of us with that trumpet bell pointed up at the ceiling wailing away. Every player had a mic on their instrument which I thought was odd because the place was tiny and it didn’t seem to require any amplification at all. It was incredibly loud but … what the hell, it was Dizzy Gillespie.
Dizzy’s autograph!
I had this great icon standing right in front of me so decided that I should make a sketch that I could take home and amplify into a nice caricature. I had drawn him for Playboy back in the 60’s from photos but here was my chance to draw him in the flesh, with those big cheeks of his, blown out like a squirrel packing nuts. I scribbled away on a napkin feverishly. When I finished, he was finished playing and went to the back bar to have a drink. I showed my drawing to Leann. She said, “I’m going to give it to him!” I said “NO, I need it, I’m going to do a major caricature of him from this when I get home!” Naturally, she snatched it from me and got up. I said, “You can’t go over there and bother him –he’s DIZZY GILLESPIE!”
My caricature of Dizzy for Playboy.
She went right over to him. He was alone at the bar. I watched her chatting away to him for about 5 minutes before I got up the courage to go over. He asked where we were from, and when we said “Westport, Connecticut,” he said, “Oh, I know Westport, I’ve been there, I have friends there!” To which I replied, “Oh, of course you do, Dave Brubeck and Gerry Mulligan live there!” He said, “Well Brubeck is a friend of mine but not Mulligan.”H-m-m-m-m … I don’t know what that was all about but I didn’t comment on it.
We continued chatting away for some time. He talked about his wife, family etc., and he asked about ours, and he was so “down-to-Earth”, so “ordinary”, so “regular”, that I quite forgot that I was talking to one of the most famous and greatest jazz musicians of all time.
I broke my rule of never asking for autographs so he scribbled one out for me on the back of a stained little bar menu. It hangs on my studio wall.
It was a good trade for my little sketch.
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Today’s cartoon is about California’s new law, AB 5, that went into effect this week. The law is terrible for cartoonists and Cagle.com. It was intended to force Uber to make their drivers into employees, but overzealous lawmakers overextended into other areas that they didn’t understand, including journalism. Here’s my cartoon …
The law is decimating publishers throughout California. AB 5 affects us at California-based Cagle Cartoons also, because we publish Cagle.com, we’re defined as a publisher rather than just as a syndicate. We’ve dropped a number of California cartoonists from our roster and some of the changes that we were forced to make were painful. Some contributors who were paid are now paid nothing, to comply with AB 5. Cagle.com features almost all non-California cartoonists and columnists now. (Out-of-state cartoonists and columnists are exempt from AB 5.)
Under AB 5, self-syndicating California cartoonists and columnists are screwed. The bill has a limit of 35 “contributions” per year that a writer or cartoonist can make to a publisher. The bill’s author is quoted as saying that the arbitrary number was selected so that weekly newspaper columnists could not be freelancers and must be employees.
A self-syndicating California cartoonist or columnist might have ten newspaper clients who each subscribe to the same cartoons or columns, each might pay $40/month; AB 5 mandates that this cartoonist or columnist has to be taken on as an hourly employee by each and all of her ten subscribers –of-course, no subscriber would take on a self-syndicating cartoonist or columnist as an employee.
Thirty years ago, altie weeklies were thriving and there were a bunch of self-syndicating cartoonists. It used to be that young cartoonists were advised to start their careers drawing local cartoons for their local paper for a tiny fee. Self-syndicating cartoonists were diverse, with more women and minorities and more diverse points of view than among the mainstream editorial cartoonists. AB 5 would have had a big impact years ago, snuffing out these California cartoonists –but today I fear that the self-syndicating California cartoonists have already died off; young, local cartoonists no longer exist, so there are few or no independent newspaper cartoonists that are left for AB 5 to crush. (If there are any, I’d like to hear about them.)
There’s another interesting point about AB 5 and editorial cartoonists. Some years ago it was conventional wisdom that, “in the future,” editorial cartoons would be animated. The big editorial cartooning awards wanted to be seen as forward-thinking so they selected award winners who did animated cartoons and many award-hungry editorial cartoonists spent a lot of time learning animation techniques. With very few exceptions, animation never caught on in the editorial cartooning business. The Web never developed a culture of paying for content and the remaining political cartoonists have been clinging to the sinking ship of print. AB 5 expressly bans freelance cartoonists from doing even one animation. Animated editorial cartoons can only be done by employees in California. California Democrats slammed the door on our future that never happened.
Legislators who supported AB 5 argue that it is good for journalists and cartoonists, because they need better jobs that get employee benefits. What is actually happening is that the journalists simply don’t get hired and they lose their freelance gigs; the journalism doesn’t get done and the publishers are shrinking and suffering even more. At Cagle Cartoons, we can’t afford to hire any cartoonists or columnists as employees, and none of them would want to suffer the restrictions of being our employees. The idea that publishers, including little Web sites, would hire cartoonists as employees now is whimsical nonsense from another era. In California, the “Gig Economy” is now the “can’t get a gig” economy.
It is ironic that we read so much about President Trump attacking journalism, but the truly effective attacks on journalism come from liberal Democrats in Sacramento.
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In 1993, a former illustrator, named Pam Sommers, asked 84 well known illustrators to contribute to a book she was putting together called “Recipes for Disaster“. In essence, she wanted the illustrators to write out and then illustrate their favorite recipes. Some of the artists chose to take a conceptual approach such as a “recipe for a riot”. We had complete freedom to interpret “recipe” any way we wanted to but most of us did actual recipes of our favorite dish. I was one of those and I decided to combine my text and picture into one linocut illustration. The words became part of the picture.
It was a lot of work and it was very very tiring cutting all those letters backwards… BUT, well worth it for KALE SOUP!
As a kid I loved the shapes of states and countries. Especially the really interesting ones like California, Texas, and Nebraska. In my grade school classroom we had a really big map of the United States, which reminds me of that joke by the comedian, Steven Wright: “At home I have a map of the United States. Actual size.”
But in adulthood, something would shift from how I viewed maps in childhood. This shift began when I first traveled to Russia one cold and snowy January and found myself feeling disoriented. I felt like I was on the Moon. To ground myself I studied a map of Russia and found myself looking to the middle of that map, fully expecting to find … Omaha. You know, just east of Moscow.
A few days later, while she was there, our anniversary came along and we decided that I would take the train down to Washington to celebrate it with her.
