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Cartoons

Bush Supports Gonzales

Bush Supports Gonzales Color © Daryl Cagle,MSNBC.com,President Bush, Alberto Gonzales, Trash can, trash, garbage, scandal, attorney general

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Cartoons

Falwell Pearly Gates

Falwell Pearly Gates Color © Daryl Cagle,MSNBC.com,Jerry Falwell, Pearly Gates, heaven, obituary, tribue, Tinky Winky, Teletubbies, TV, Children, gay, purse, evangelist, preacher, reverand

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Cartoons

Bush and Vetos

Bush and Vetos © Daryl Cagle,MSNBC.com,democrats, donkey, president, bush, brand, cowboy, branding, brand, iron, branding iron

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Columns

Cinco de Mayo – Cartoonists Day

Cinco de Mayo: Cartoonists Day?

On Saturday we’ll all sip our Margaritas, munch on our burritos and think about cartoonists. Saturday, May 5 is “Cartoonists Day.”

Some readers will remember when most of the newspaper comic strips touted Cartoonists Day. As a cartoonist, I love the idea of having my own day where my fans shower me with gifts and adoration – in fact, that was pretty much the idea behind Cartoonists Day. The date was chosen because the first recurring character in American newspaper comics, the Yellow Kid, first appeared in print on May 5, 1895. Cartoonists are suffering from a painful transition now as newspapers decline and their traditional markets for gag cartoons and advertising work suffer a prolonged slump. We can cheer Mom up on Mothers Day, make the secretary happy on Administrative Professionals Day and feed the government on Tax Day — even trees and flags have their own days — why not make long-suffering cartoonists happy with their own day?

The first Saturday in May is also “Free Comic Book Day,” where comic book stores join in a promotion to give away comic books and which happens to fall on May 5 this year. This is also Cartoon Appreciation Week. The stars are aligned for cartoonists this Saturday.

Unfortunately, Cartoonists Day has had a bumpy ride and cartoonists have allowed it to fade away. It all started back in 1997 when Jerry Scott and Rick Kirkman, the creators of the comic strip “Baby Blues,” organized “The Great Comic Strip Switcheroonie,” where cartoonists traded places to draw each other’s comic strips on April Fools’ Day. It was great fun and a creative success.

When I was president of the National Cartoonists Society (NCS) in 2000, Charles “Sparky” Schulz, the creator of “Peanuts,” passed away and I oversaw a special day in the comics where almost all of the cartoonists drew a comic strip tribute to Sparky. After 9/11 the NCS organized a successful Thanksgiving Day tribute on the comics pages to raise money for victims of the World Trade Center disaster.

Cartoonists usually work in isolation and the opportunities to work together were great fun at first – then the glow started to fade. Some cartoonists were enthusiastic about the idea of Cartoonists Day, and pushed the idea of every comic strip artist participating to display the Cartoonists Day logo in their strips, and write something about it in their strip to “raise awareness” of underappreciated cartoonists. The strip cartoonists were urged to do this every year on May 5. Then charities got the idea; they called the NCS saying, “Hey! You cartoonist guys all got together to raise money for the 9/11 victims, how about raising money for this terrible disease, or that one – you can’t believe that Cartoonists Day is more important than my horrible disease, do you? Where are your priorities?!” Of-course, they were right, but there were just too many terrible diseases and social ills waiting in line for space on the comics pages.

Then many of the star cartoonists became weary. They would say, “Why are we doing this Cartoonists Day thing in our strips again?” and “Isn’t it kind of egotistical and self-serving for us to use our strips to call attention to ourselves like this?” Of course, they were right.

Then there was the problem of Cinco de Mayo. Cartoonists who wanted to generate publicity for themselves had to share their day with another topic. Cartoonists in the Midwest couldn’t understand why the cartoonists in California were busy with their Margaritas on Cartoonists Day.

The NCS stopped promoting Cartoonists Day and it slowly faded away. Some cartoonists hated to see it go. There is still a Web site at cartoonistsday.com. Some cartoonists still lobby for the return of Cartoonists Day, but the day has disappeared. Mexico won the cartoon war because the cartoonists took their pens and went home.

And I never got my presents.

Daryl Cagle is a political cartoonist and blogger for MSNBC.com. He is a past president of the National Cartoonists Society and his cartoons are syndicated to more than 800 newspapers, including the paper you are reading. His books “The BIG Book of Bush Cartoons” and “The Best Political Cartoons of the Year,” 2005, 2006 and 2007 editions, are available in bookstores now.

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Cartoons

George Tenet Book

George Tenet Book © Daryl Cagle,MSNBC.com,CIA, Central Intelligence Agency, Iraq, George Bush, book, At the Center of the Storm, War, Saddam, Hussein

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Cartoons

Iraq Out No!

Iraq   Out   No! © Daryl Cagle,MSNBC.com,Bush,Democrats,donkey,democrat,out,no,Iraq,congress,surge,pullout,war,military,army

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Columns

Newspapers and Cartoonists Wandering Blindly

Every day I read something from journalists obsessing about the future of print. The internet is gobbling up newspaper readers and advertisers. The future looks bleak for ink on paper as newspapers respond by downsizing, degrading their product and hastening their own demise. There seems to be a generally accepted axiom that the internet is the future for journalism. Columnists are transforming into multimedia bloggers and cartoonists feel pressure to animate their political cartoons. It makes perfect sense to chase the shifting audience, but the move to the internet doesn’t make much business sense.

Newspapers are bleeding revenue as the web enjoys a rush from new advertisers. The newspaper “group-think” solution is to move onto the internet to reclaim advertising dollars—but the money on the web is flowing to the search engines (mostly to Google) where topical ads are displayed with search results. Ads accompanying original content on the Web still pay poorly. As a political cartoonist, I run some popular Web sites that get millions of page views per month, but the ad revenue only covers the cost of my servers and bandwidth. Newspapers share this problem as they pour resources into building their Web sites and get very little revenue in return. Many try charging their readers to read archives on their Web sites, a strategy that fails almost every time as most Web surfers simply browse somewhere else where content is free.

Newspapers continue to pin their hopes on their Web sites in the belief that their brands carry goodwill into a new medium, when in fact, newspaper brands have little value on the Web. The three most popular news sites on the Web—Yahoo News, CNN and MSNBC.com—dominate the audience, with other news sites trailing far behind. The reason why is simple, each is attached to a huge audience (Yahoo, AOL and MSN.com) which feeds readers into these sites.

My own cartoon site is associated with MSNBC.com, which gets its traffic from MSN.com, which gets most of its traffic from the famous MSN.com home page, the default home page for PC buyers using the Internet Explorer browser, who don’t bother to change their home page. Yahoo and Google channel their huge search engine audiences into their news sites. The trick to finding a big audience on the Web is to bring your site to the audience, not to expect the audience to find your site.

One of the most popular online newspapers, The Washington Post, understands how the Web audience works. The Post partners with MSN.com and MSNBC.com to bring traffic their way. When The Washington Post Company bought my old employer Slate.com from Microsoft, the negotiations focused on Slate continuing to receive a huge audience flow from promotions on MSN.com. The Post understands the Web where traffic flows like a river – the river has to keep flowing or the lake will dry up.

For many newspaper editors, internet strategy is a fantasy from the movie “Field of Dreams.” “If you build it, they will come.” Good content is nice (Slate has great original content) but securing a continuing audience for that content is more important. Yahoo and Google maintain top news sites with almost no original content. That’s journalism 2.0: circulating content that is created in other media, while paying little or nothing for the content.

Reporters, columnists and editorial cartoonists are suffering from ongoing layoffs in the newspaper industry. The cartooning ranks have been thinned and the cartoonists who still have jobs are often asked to do more work online, such as starting blogs and animating their cartoons for the Web. In 2000, Gregg and Evan Spiridellis (JibJab.com) created some animated political cartoons that became hugely popular on the Web and newspaper editorial cartoonists seemed to agree that, in the future, all political cartoons would be animated. The problem for cartoonists is much the same as the problem for other content creators: there is no market for animated political cartoons when Web sites don’t want to pay for content.

I run a popular Web site and I’m the cartoonist for MSNBC.com, but I still make my living selling cartoons that are printed in ink on paper from traditional clients who actually pay. I often get calls from political cartoonists who are starting to animate their cartoons, asking where they can sell their animations; my answer is, “nowhere.” Even the successful JibJab guys use their political cartoons for publicity and make their living doing animations for commercial clients. The editorial cartoonists seem to be charging ahead in their aimless endeavors, typically creating animated political cartoons on the side, for newspaper employers who pay them nothing extra for the extra hours, creating content that no one wants to buy in syndication.

At this summer’s Association of American Editorial Cartoonists conference, there will be two sponsored programs: “What Do You Mean You’re Not Animating Yet?” and “Blog or Die.”

The aimless charge to the internet extends to the Pulitzer Prizes. This is the second year the Pulitzers accepted entries that were not printed, but were posted on the Web sites of paid circulation, daily print newspapers. The winner and nominees this year were all employees of print newspapers who submitted portfolios of animated Web cartoons that could not be printed in their newspapers–a first for the Pulitzers. The editorial cartoonist community is in a tizzy. Cartoonists want to win prizes and keep their jobs, and according to the Pulitzer jury, the way to do that is to jump on an internet bandwagon that no one is steering.

Daryl Cagle won’t be animating his editorial cartoons anytime soon. He is a political cartoonist and blogger for MSNBC.com. Daryl is a past president of the National Cartoonists Society and his cartoons are syndicated to more than 800 newspapers, including the paper you are reading. He runs the most popular cartoon site on the Web at Cagle.msnbc.com. His books “The BIG Book of Bush Cartoons” and “The Best Political Cartoons of the Year, 2005, 2006 and 2007 Editions,” are available in bookstores now.

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Columns

Those Terrible Virginia Tech Cartoons

When a lunatic killed 32 people at Virginia Tech University earlier this week I knew what to expect from political cartoonists, who don’t react well to tragedy. Some of the cartoons seemed insensitive, as today’s generation of jokesters struggled to respond to a story with no lighter side.

I have some sympathy for the editorial cartoonists who have a daily deadline and must respond to the headline of the day. The first cartoons were predictable: Uncle Sam or the Virginia Tech mascot, with bowed heads and flags or the school pennant at half-mast. There were lots of riffs on the school logo (the letters “VT”), including one depicting the school logo in dead bodies. Some cartoonists launched immediately into gun control cartoons – “how terrible it is that guns are so widely available” and “what a shame it is that none of the victims were toting firearms to protect themselves.”

I run a syndicate that distributes editorial cartoons to newspapers, and our editors were not happy. The day after the tragedy one editor from Georgia wrote: “As a Cagle subscriber, I have to tell you the cartoons sent today about the Virginia Tech shootings showed a deplorable lack of sensitivity and taste. Can’t you find (someone) who isn’t so quick to try to be funny or cute at innocent people’s expense?”

As bad as this week was for cartoonists, it was worse for television. An army of aggressive TV reporters descended on little Blacksburg, Va., asking everyone they could find, “How do you feel?” and “Did you know him?” The television coverage reached new heights of ugliness when NBC released the killer’s “Multimedia Manifesto” and all we could see on cable news was 24 hours of “non-stop nut-case.” It took a day for the wallpaper killer coverage to devolve into finger pointing among the media about whether they were doing the right thing in publicizing the killer’s message.

When I first heard about the massacre, I wrote in my blog that I would not be drawing any cartoons about it. But after only two days the story had matured into something I wanted to draw cartoons about because there was something for me to criticize. I drew two cartoons bashing NBC; one showed the NBC peacock dressed up as the network of gun-brandishing Seung-Hui Cho. I drew another showing two kids dressed like Cho, because “He’s the only guy we see on TV now.” I drew another one generally bashing people who didn’t see that Cho was a psychopath, with Cho painting the giant words “STOP ME” on the ground while two oblivious college professors walk by saying, “How can we know something like this is going to happen?”

Political cartooning is a negative art form. Cartoonists and columnists work best when bashing hypocrites or speaking to issues where opinion is divided. I am fortunate to have no daily deadline. When I don’t want to draw on a subject, I don’t have to; that was a luxury for me with the Virginia Tech story. Unfortunately, the deadlines of the 24-hour news cycle demand that most cartoonists, reporters and commentators chime in right away.

Sometimes it pays to take a step back and hold your breath without writing, drawing or reporting anything for a couple of days – until there is something constructive to say.

Daryl Cagle is a political cartoonist and blogger for MSNBC.com. He is a past president of the National Cartoonists Society and his cartoons are syndicated to more than 800 newspapers, including the paper you are reading. His books “The BIG Book of Bush Cartoons” and “The Best Political Cartoons of the Year, 2005, 2006 and 2007 Editions,” are available in bookstores now.

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Cartoons

Stop Me VA Tech Shootings

Stop Me   VA Tech Shootings © Daryl Cagle,MSNBC.com,Virginia Tech, shooting, killer, college, school shooting, kids, children, television, TV, media, Cho Seung-Hui, Cho Seung Hui

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Cartoons

NBC and the VT Killer Tapes

NBC and the VT Killer Tapes Color © Daryl Cagle,MSNBC.com,Virginia Tech, shooting, killer, college, school shooting, kids, children, television, TV, media, Cho Seung-Hui, Cho Seung Hui,NBC,MSNBC, peacock

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Cartoons

Imus Hara kiri

Imus Hara-kiri COLOR © Daryl Cagle,MSNBC.com,Don Imus, Al Sharpton, Imus, Sharpton, Nappy Headed Hos, Nappy, headed, hos, hos, Rutgers, basketball, radio, MSNBC, CBS, radio, shock jock, japan, japanese

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Columns

Cartoonists Draw Blood

Like most people, cartoonists love to watch stars fall. This was the week to watch Don Imus fall, in a media frenzy that was tailor made for cartoonists. Imus looks like a cartoon character already; his ugly comment, calling the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy headed ho’s,” put Imus at the center of a media feeding frenzy, with characters on all sides who wanted to see him bleed.

Many cartoonists pointed out the hypocrisy of crucifying Imus for a comment that was no worse than what we hear in rap music, and no worse than other nasty comments by other, ugly media personalities. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson demanded that Imus be fired and used the media frenzy to put their faces in front of television cameras at every opportunity.

In the end, Imus was fired by both MSNBC and CBS, and he no longer has a place on radio or television. I don’t think this week’s Imus rumble will do much to make the media less coarse, and I won’t miss Imus, but I enjoyed the spectacle and it was great fun to draw the guy getting bashed and skewered by his own words.

Daryl Cagle is a political cartoonist and blogger for MSNBC.com. He is a past president of the National Cartoonists Society and his cartoons are syndicated to more than 800 newspapers, including the paper you are reading. His books “The BIG Book of Bush Cartoons” and “The Best Political Cartoons of the Year, 2005, 2006 and 2007 Editions,” are available in bookstores now.

Copyright 2007 Cagle Cartoons Inc. Please contact Sales at [email protected] for reproduction rights.