Categories
Cartoons

McCain Palin Republican Happy Face

McCain Palin Republican Happy Face © Daryl Cagle,MSNBC.com,McCain Palin Republican Happy Face, senator, president, campaign

Categories
Cartoons

Obama McCain and the Economy

Obama McCain and the Economy COLOR © Daryl Cagle,MSNBC.com,Barack Obama, John McCain, Senator, president, republican, democrat, graph, economy, stock market, concussion

Categories
Columns

See Me at the University of Virginia

I’ll give a speech, show a lot of cartoons
and answer questions at the University of Virginia on October
22nd in Charlottesville, Virginia. It is a rare opportunity to
see me, since I’m such a recluse. Here is what the University
has announced …

The daily editorial cartoonist for MSNBC.com,
Daryl Cagle, will discuss with words and artwork the sometimes
seemingly irreverent and provocative role of editorial cartoonists
in capturing and dissecting issues and events in politics. Mr.
Cagle’s recently published Big Book of Campaign 2008 Cartoons
will be available for sale at the event and he will sign books
following his presentation. The event is free and open to the
public, but advance registration
is required.

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

Drawing Politics
is part of the University of Virginia Center for Politics National
Symposium Series of 2008, titled Not Taboo at Our Table! Race,
Religion and Gender in American Politics
. The Center for
Politics launched the National Symposium Series in 1999 to explore
current and relevant issues in American politics. For questions,
contact Megan Davis at [email protected]
or 434-243-3539.

This event is co-sponsored by the University
of Virginia Center for Politics

and the University
of Virginia Miller Center of Public Affairs
.

Categories
Columns

Our New Campaign Book is in Stores Now!

Our big collection
of cartoons covering the presidential campaign is out in bookstores
a month before election day!

We’ve got the best of the campaign from
start to almost-finish, with Obama, McCain, Sarah Palin, the
convention, Hillary Clinton and all those wonderful memories,
like 3:00am phone calls, super-delegates and crazy preachers!
We even have a chapter on John Edwards’ affair!

This book is a must have for every political
wonk! And you must have it now, while we’re still obsessed with
the campaign!



Click here to order The BIG Book of Campaign
2008 Political Cartoons, from Amazon.com at a nice discount

I have to thank our editor, Laura Norman,
at Que Publishing, division of Pearson, for being so fast getting
the book published and shipped to stores. We closed the book
after we had a whole lot of cartoons for a chapter on Sarah Pain
and her pregnant daughter, and we have the book in stores a month
later, which is amazing for book distribution. Still, everyone
is better off ordering from Amazon.com, where it is cheaper.
You can even search inside the book on Amazon.com, which is pretty
cool.

Right now we’re busy working on our regular,
annual Best Political Cartoons of the Year book, which is due
at the printer on the day after election day, and should be in
stores the first week of December. These deadlines are why I’m
not drawing as many cartoons as I should be right now. Sorry
about that.

Categories
Columns

Two of our Favorite Cartoonists Retire









I’m sorry to
write that two of my favorite political cartoonists have retired
from our tiny profession.



Sandy Huffaker is one my cartoon heroes.
When I was in college I was a big fan of his cartoons that were
running every week in Time Magazine. Sandy worked as a regular
editorial cartoonist for a newspaper when he was young, then
spent his career as a cartoon illustrator. Now he spends
most of his time at his ranch in Virginia doing paintings. He
had been drawing editorial cartoons regularly for our syndicate
for the past few years.

Sandy called me a couple of months ago
to say he was tired of the daily editorial cartooning grind.
He is an Obama supporter, he thinks Obama will win and prospect
of losing President Bush makes him lose his anger and passion.
I encouraged Sandy to draw whenever the inspiration hits him,
and last week he sent us this portrait of McCain and baby Palin
(right).

If any of our readers are Huffaker fans,
as I am, and are sorry to see him go, send
Sandy an e-mail
and tell him he is missed!

The other cartoonist we’re losing is M.e. Cohen, a freelancer with a wild style
from New Jersey. M.e. is retiring from editorial cartooning because
of a detached retina. He plans to keep doing illustrations, but the daily, freelance political
cartoons were just too much. I’m also hopeful that M.e. will
come back; it is tragic to see him leave us.

See more cartoons by M.e.
here
. That is one of his samples
below. Click here to send
M.e. an e-mail
and let him know he is also missed.

Categories
Columns

I’m asking for your help

I’d like to ask our readers to help our
cartoonists with an urgent problem. We are asking you to send an email on behalf
of the cartoonists
. The Senate just passed the "Orphan
Works Bill," quickly, behind closed doors and without a
vote, through a controversial practice known as "hotlining."
The bill rewrites the copyright law in ways that are devastating
to cartoonists, artists, writers, photographers and songwriters.

The two artists organizations I’m active
in, the
National Cartoonists Society
and the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, and dozens
of other trade organizations
, are
urging their members to write to their congressmen at this hour,
because there is a risk that the House will pass the Senate version
of the bill, again without debate and without a vote, by adding
it to a larger budget or bailout bill at the end of the current
session, in the next few hours.

The Orphan Works bill is being pushed by
Google, which plans to catalogue millions of images and doesn’t
want to deal with the rights of copyright holders. The bill
will make it easy for anyone to reprint copyrighted work, without
the permission of the copyright holder, and artists will find
that it is difficult or impossible to control where their work
is reprinted. The bill also imposes new costs and procedures
on artists, all to benefit Google.

I’d like to ask everyone who reads my blog,
or subscribes to my newsletter, to do the cartoonists a favor
by emailing their congressman and asking him or her to oppose
the Orphan Works Bill now, by visiting this web site, which helps you to
send an automatic email to your congressman. It is quick and
easy to send this email, and it would be much appreciated by
the desperate cartoonists.

To learn more about the Orphan Works Bill,
visit here.

I’ve never asked my readers for help before.
I’d really appreciate your help now.

Many thanks,

Daryl

Categories
Columns

The Future of Editorial Cartoons

One of our good foreign customers wrote to me, and to a batch of top international cartoonists asking them what they thought the future of editorial cartooning would be. Here is my response:

I disagree with most of my cartoonist colleagues on this – most cartoonists view the future creatively, arguing that there will be more animation in cartoons and more cartoons created to take advantage of the interactivity of the internet. I disagree, because I also run a syndicate and I see no trend for web customers to be willing to pay for interactive or animated cartoons. This is just cartoonists describing what they hope will happen.

The big change I see happening is the decline of big newspapers, and an increase in small clients, free weekly newspapers and non-traditional clients who would not buy cartoons before, because the process was too difficult or expensive. As the big publishers die off and cut back, we pick up new small web sites, newsletters, weeklies and foreign publications, which wouldn’t have found us before, if not for the internet.

The future is not a change in the nature of cartoons, which remain popular in their current, static form, it is a change in distribution of cartoons to more clients, smaller clients, and more obscure clients in more faraway places, as publications become smaller and more numerous, as more people become easier to reach and as more people around the world have interests in the same issues.

Categories
Columns

Cagle FAQ

We get the same questions in the email
box every day and I thought I would take some time out to respond
to some of the most frequent ones.

You say you update the cartoons "every
day" but I see lots of the same cartoons are up now that
were there yesterday. What’s up with that?

The fact that we update the cartoons everyday
doesn’t mean that each cartoonist draws a new cartoon every day.
Most editorial cartoonists draw between three and five cartoons
per week, some draw once a week. Some draw six times a week.
Some draw local cartoons some days, that they don’t send to us.
Some take vacations. On the busiest days of the week we update
the site with 100 new cartoons per day ­ there are 175 cartoonist
slots on the site.

Why can’t you set up your site so that
I don’t have to look at those same cartoons that I saw yesterday?
I want to see only the new cartoons.

Look at our RSS feeds which feature only
the newly updated cartoons at the top of each page.

Where are your RSS feeds?

Go to our daily updating cartoons pages and click on
the orange button to the left of any cartoonist’s name, or scroll
to the bottom to click on the RSS feeds for batches of artists.
We can’t include all of the cartoons in one RSS feed because
the pages are too long with 100 new cartoons on busy days.

Why don’t you make the cartoons in your
RSS feeds full sized? I have to click on each cartoon to be able
to read it.

That’s so that you have to look at an ad
and we don’t go broke.

I have a great idea for a cartoon! Want
to hear it?

No.

I have lots of great ideas for cartoons,
but I can’t draw. Can you tell me which editorial cartoonist
I should contact to draw my cartoons?

I don’t know any editorial cartoonists
who work with gag writers.

I would like to have a cartoon logo
drawn for my business and I like your style. Could you do that
for me? I can’t afford to pay any more than $50.

No.

I have to write a paper about an editorial
cartoon and I picked yours. Can you tell me what it means? Please
tell me right away because my paper is due tomorrow.

Sorry, I get too many requests like this.
I have to let the cartoons speak for themselves. Besides, you’re
supposed to be following the news and the meaning of the cartoon
should be obvious to you ­ if it is not, then it wasn’t a
good cartoon.

Would you like to: Enlarge your penis?
Get cheap drugs? Refinance? Help us move millions of dollars
from a foreign dignitary’s bank account?

No. No. No. No.

May I run your cartoon in my blog?

If you are on Myspace.com, yes, go to any
cartoon on
caglepost.com’s cartoon ticker
page
, click on the thumbnail image
for any cartoon, then click on the Myspace.com link to put the
cartoon on Myspace.com. If you are not on Myspace.com, you can post
any of our caglecartoons.com cartoons on your blog for a nominal
fee, just visit Politicalcartoons.com. We may do a Facebook application
in the future.

May I use your cartoon for my class
at school?

Yes. In fact, "in-classroom"
use is one of the "Fair Use" exceptions to the copyright
law. You can use any copyrighted materials you want in the classroom
without asking.

May I post your cartoon on my high school
class web site? Or in my school newspaper? Or on posters at school?

No, unless you want to pay the nominal
fee on politicalcartoons.com ($3 for school use). These school
uses are not "in-classroom."

Why don’t you let us use your cartoons
for free in schools?

We tried that, but we found that letting
people download free, high-resolution cartoons on Politicalcartoons.com
was a bandwidth hole. Suddenly everybody was saying they wanted
cartoons for schools and our bandwidth went through the roof.
When we put a $3 fee up for schools the bandwidth bleeding stopped.

I have to write a paper on the career
I want to go into and I chose cartooning. Please tell me:

1) How much money do you make?

2) How much education was required for you to get your job?

3) How much time does it take you to draw a cartoon?

4) How did you get into this business?

1) Cartoonists make anything between $0
per year and $50,000,000 per year ­ just like actors, musicians
and basketball players. And, like actors, musicians and basketball
players, most cartoonists make closer to $0 than $50,000,000.

2) No education is required, only quality
of work and some business acumen ­ but that is true of most
careers. Education is very important and it is unusual for anyone
to be successful without a good education.

3) All my life. Some cartoonists brag about
drawing quickly; I think this diminishes the value of their work
in the eyes of their editors and readers. Good cartoonists think
about their work all the time and spend a lit of time working
to improve.

4) I started as a general illustrator,
and then worked as a cartoon illustrator, then I worked as a
toy inventor, I did a syndicated cartoon, then editorial cartoons.
I drew other people’s characters in other people’s styles, working
on projects for others before my career got to the point that
I could draw as I wanted.

Why don’t you have any conservative
cartoonists on your site?

We have a lot, but conservatives, like
you conservatives notice the cartoons you disagree with more
than the others. It is an optical illusion for you.

When are you going to stop bashing President
Bush?

Be patient. It won’t be long.

I can’t cancel my newsletter subscription!
What do I do to make it stop?

Most people who can’t cancel are replying
to the email with a note asking to cancel ­ we don’t get
these replies. To cancel you have to click on the unsubscribe
link in the newsletter, or go to our newsletter subscriptions page and follow
the instructions. Another problem is with people who have the
newsletter forwarded from another email address ­ there is
no way for us to know that, and clicking on the unsubscribe link
won’t make any change to a different email address. If you are
flummoxed, email us.

I tried to subscribe to your newsletters,
but I don’t get anything! What’s wrong?

You probably have an email account with
a company like Earthlink, which does "whitelisting"
­ that is, these providers send an email reply to us, asking
us to confirm that we are a real person who wants to send an
email. This is a method of preventing spam. We don’t respond
to the "whitelisting" replies. Your only solution is
to try subscribing from another free email service, like Yahoo,
Google or Hotmail, which doesn’t do "whitelisting."

You might have a spam filter – take a look
at your blocked emails and approve us as a sender.

I was getting your newsletters, but
they suddenly stopped. What’s wrong?

If we get the email bounced back from your
email address a couple of times, your subscription is automatically
cancelled. You may have had technical problems with your email,
or you may have had a full mailbox. You need to go to our newsletter subscription
page
and resubscribe.

Another problem is spam filters. You might
have a new spam filter, or a new setting on your spam filter
– take a look at your blocked emails and approve us as a sender.

I was getting your newsletters fine
for a while, and now I don’t see the images in the newsletter
­ they are all broken image links? What’s wrong?

Some email services, like Hotmail, will
occasionally ask you to approve images from senders and will
block the images in an email from displaying until you approve
the images from us, or any other sender. This is to prevent users
from accidentally seeing pornography in a spam email. Just approve
us for image display in your email program.

I want you to syndicate my cartoons.
Will you look at my samples?

No, sorry. We get too many requests from
aspiring cartoonists and just don’t have the resources to deal
with unsolicited submissions. Also, we have had bad experiences
with angry amateur cartoonists who won’t take "no"
for an answer and now we are skittish.

Your site is slow!

No it’s not! The problem is on your end,
or in between you and our server ­ Microsoft serves the Cagle.MSNBC.com
site ­ it is like getting electricity from the utility. We
can blast as much bandwidth as all of MSNBC.com. Our cartoons
are bandwidth heavy compared to other sites that are mostly text,
so our pages will naturally take longer to load.

But, if you’re complaining about Polticalcartoons.com
or Caglepost.com, we serve those sites outside of MSNBC.com,
and yes, sometimes we have too much traffic. We’re upgrading
from two servers to four and we should be speedy all the time
with our new load balancing. We’re working on it and we apologize
for any hassles.