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Chinese Hackers! Ouch!

On Thursday night, last week, we suffered an unusually effective series of attacks from Chinese hackers against our database server that have brought our database and our CagleCartoons.com download site down, along with our PoliticalCartoons.com store site.

Chinese hackers, looking over my shoulder.

On Friday, my valiant editors Brian and Stacey Fairrington, answered over 250 calls and emails from editors to give them the new, emergency, interim Google Drive cartoon download location where we set up a temporary download site for the recent cartoons. Our new columns are available on Cagle.com, see them on the front page at the right. (If you’re a client who needs access to the interim Google Drive site to download the recent cartoons, email [email protected] and we’ll give you the link.)

Our cartoonists should email new cartoons to us at [email protected], which goes to all of us; we will manually add your cartoons to the Google Drive interim download site and we will be sending new cartoons out to the editors who take email delivery through MailChimp until we have a new CagleCartoons.com back up with a new database and server. We’re updating Cagle.com manually for now, so it may be slow to display new cartoons. Payments to the cartoonists who get paid quarterly went out a couple of weeks ago, and the royalty checks for the monthly cartoonists went out this weekend, for January. Don’t worry, the cartoonists have all been paid!

The Chinese hackers, who leave lots of Chinese language files and malware on our database server every time they break in, have been watching as we repair the server and they come back each time repairs are made to tear the server down again. We’ve tried but we can’t keep them out of our outdated system. The hackers win this round. We had to give up on the old server and we’re scrambling to re-write our management system to work with a current SQL server.

Regular readers know how we’ve had continuing problems with hackers attacking Cagle.com, mostly with DDos/denial of service attacks. Thanks to the generosity of Cloudflare, we’re fending off the DDos attacks.  The current problem is that we were using an older database and server for our CagleCartoons.com syndicate site and PoliticalCartoons.com store site, which left us vulnerable. We were too complacent, since the attacks were all against Cagle.com in the past. Our old database system worked so well that I hated the prospect of the cost and hassle of recreating it with newer, more defensible code.  I procrastinated too long.

We don’t keep confidential information online. No credit card information was stolen.

The editors have all been lovely about this and we haven’t gotten any complaints – at least not so far. It has been nice to see the support and goodwill from our subscription clients at a time when they could justifiably be grouchy.

I also appreciate the heroic efforts of our staff, Theo, Brian, Stacey and Rob, who have really stepped up this weekend to make things work through our database crisis.

I hate inconveniencing everyone. Thanks for your patience with this mess! We hope to have new versions of the CagleCartoons.com and PoliticalCartoons.com sites up soon.

Perhaps I’ve been drawing too many cartoons of Xi Jinping as Winnie the Pooh.

 

 

 

 

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Randy and the National Lampoon

Here’s another memory from our cartoonist Randy Enos …

New Magazine in Town

One day in the 70’s, I was trudging along Madison Avenue, doing my rounds, lugging my big black portfolio, when I bumped into the cartoonist Stan Mack. After I helped him to his feet, he told me about a new magazine that had come to town from Harvard, The National Lampoon.

Stan said, “Get over there and show ’em your stuff, everybody’s working for them!” So, I went down the street to 59th and went up to the offices they shared with Weight Watchers to meet the art director Michael Gross. After looking through my portfolio, he gave me an assignment and for the next 15 years, I worked for the humor magazine (long after the founders Henry Beard and Doug Kenney and even Mike Gross had left).

I became very close friends with Mike and his family until his wife and finally, he, died just a few years ago. I worked with him through his stints at Esquire, Mobil Oil, his own design firm, an avant garde, sophisticated porno site and his Hollywood career, producing films like Ghost Busters.

Shortly after I had joined the Lampoon family, I was asked to contribute a comic strip to their new Funny Pages. My strip Chicken Gutz went on for many years. Occasionally I would throw in additional comic strips like my As The Tears Jerk which was a kind of soap opera strip and Specks-the smallest cartoon characters in the world which was a tiny strip consisting of tiny spots which talked to each other.

The work I did illustration-wise for the magazine was different than my regular lino-cut stuff I did for Time, The New York Times, N.B.C., Playboy, etc. in that I didn’t use my own style. Because of the nature of the material, I was required to assume other styles in parody. So, I did Picasso, Robert Crumb, Heinz Edelman (Yellow Submarine), Rube Goldberg etc..

I worked a lot on features written by Michael O’Donoghue, Sean Kelly, Doug Kenney and others. BUT… along with this, I was sometimes asked to pose in photo shoot parodies. One such shoot occurred on a day on which I had delivered a job to them and was on my out the door. I was getting very sick with the flu or something and I wanted to rush home. Mike Gross stopped me and pleaded with me to do this photo shoot. He said, “I know what a ham you are and you’re perfect for this. So … I did it. It was the poster for The National Lampoon Show which Ivan Reitman was producing. It starred Belushi and Radner and others (before Saturday Night Live).

The poster (below) consisted of a large title at the top and then four panels showing a back view of me in a trench coat trying to get a pretty model to laugh.

Panel one: I’m giving myself a hotfoot.

Panel two: I’m tipping my top hat. There’s a rubber chicken draped across my noggin.

Panel three: I’m slamming an ice cream cone into my head (remember, I’m getting very sick at this point). We went through a huge box of ice cream cones (Hagen Dazs, no less) for take after take after take. All through my futile antics, the model is just bored… UNTIL in …

Panel four: I open my trench coat and she dies laughing. These posters were all over New York. Everywhere I went I saw the poster and the creative work done by grafitti thugs who portrayed graphically what the model was looking at.

At that time, my wife was doing a lot of acting in New York and one day she was stepping off a subway train with one of the actors that was in the play with her at the time. He had never met me. As they stepped off, guess what was right in front of them.

Without missing a beat, my wife said, “Oh, by the way, this is my husband.”

–Randy Enos

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Dik Browne: Hot Golfer

Continue reading “Dik Browne: Hot Golfer”
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The Best of Roger Stone

News that comes out on Fridays push editorial cartoons into the next week as cartoonists and editors have already planned ahead for the weekend –that’s how it is with the indictment of Roger Stone last Friday. I’m sure we’ll see more Roger Stone cartoons trickle in this week. Here’s my Stone toon and some of my Roger Stone favorites …

 

I love this Taylor Jones cartoon –and so does Roger Stone, who licensed it from us to run in his recent book.

 

This Stone keystone is by my buddy, Rick McKee of the Augusta Chronicle …

 

Here are a couple from our new, photo-realist cartoonist, Bart van Leeuwen …

 

This one is from John Cole …

This is from Adam Zyglis …

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Trump Knocked Out!

President Trump backed down and the partial government shutdown ended last Friday. Conservative and liberals both see this as Trump “caving” and House Speak Pelosi winning the confrontation. Here’s my cartoon from Saturday and the first Trump defeat/Pelosi victory cartoons that have come in over the weekend (there will be more next week when the cartoonists go back to work).

This one is by Ed Wexler …

This one is by Stephane Peray, our French cartoonist from Thailand …

This one is by Adam Zyglis, our Pulitzer-winning cartoonist from the Buffalo News …

This one is by our brilliant, new Canadian cartoonist, Dave Whamond …

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Randy’s Only Great Idea!

Here’s another remembrance from our cartoonist, Randall Enos.

The Only Great Idea I’ve Ever Had

In the 1960’s I worked at at Pablo Ferro Films on a commercial for Orange, Lemon and Lime Rock, three colorful beverages that Schenley Whiskey was promoting in an effort to capture young urban drinkers. It was an interesting job for me because, not only did I get a chance to act in the commercial, but I drew several cartoon animation segments for it.

One problem arose when it came time to show the client a finished “answer” print of the commercial. We generally would have the clients come to a screening room and show our work to them on a large screen. This time, when we viewed the print in our office, it was pretty poor in quality. The orange beverage was looking like brownish mud and the other two weren’t much better.

We sent the print back to the lab. When we got a second print, the orange color was okay but it had forced the lemon and lime colors to be way off. And so it went, with our deadline fast approaching, we couldn’t seem to get all the product colors to show up correctly. What to do? The client was chafing at the bit demanding to see a finished print of the commercial immediately. Now, remember that this was back in the 60’s when the technology wasn’t the way it is now. TV sets were problematic and viewers had to fiddle around with color control knobs to adjust, as best they could, the color on their set. Color programs were pretty poor in quality which set me thinking about the fact that here we were suffering through all these weak answer prints when, in the long run, the viewers were going to see a poor quality picture on their home tvs anyway. Then a light bulb went off in my head.

I said to Pablo and Jose, “Why don’t we show the client, the ad on a large tv set instead of in a screening room ? We’ll tell them that we want them to see it the way the folks at home will. That would allow us to have a technician tweak the color on the tv set, which wouldn’t be perfect but the client would accept it because everyone automatically allowed a certain amount of imperfection in a tv image.”

We did it… and it worked, allowing us a little more time to fight with the lab over a good quality print.

That’s it… the only great idea I have ever had.

–Randall Enos

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Teacher Strike Ending

I expect that the Los Angeles teacher strike will be ending this afternoon. My teacher/wife just went to her school to vote on the settlement. Here’s my cartoon anticipating a deal.

 

In case everyone forgot, here’s my teacher strike cartoon from last weekend!

I think the strike left teachers with a better sense of camaraderie, and even more disgust for superintendent Austin Beutner and the school board.

Hey, sometime I have to draw local cartoons.

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Enos, Love and Westport


The Saturday Evening Post or How I Got Married
By Randy Enos

When I was a tadpole, my family subscribed to The Saturday Evening Post. Each week when it arrived at our house, I would have my little sister take it, before I could see it, and stand across the room from me and turn the pages slowly as I named off each illustrator and cartoonist recognizing them by their styles. As I grew older and read more and more about these artists in books and magazines, I found a common thread. An awful lot of them lived in Westport, Connecticut. Curious!

Later on, after I graduated from high school, I went to art school in Boston which was not far from my hometown of New Bedford. In my second year there, a beautiful girl showed up in the classes. I asked her name and where she was from. She said Westport, Connecticut!

I said, “That’s where all the illustrators live.”

She said, “Yes, I know them all!”

Randy’s lovely, un-named wife.

I said, “What do you mean you know them all?”

She said, “My mother is a painter and she and my father own a frame shop and they frame all the artists’ work and my mother and the illustrators get a model and draw and paint from them every week. I go to the life classes and sit there with them and draw right next to Steven Dohanos and Harold von Schmidt and Robert Fawcett and…”

So, I married her immediately.

And I went to live in Westport and got to not only meet all my heroes, but become close friends with many of them.

–Randall Enos
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Tit for Tat

The tit for tat between President Trump and Speaker Pelosi looks like a lot of middle school nonsense, and inspired my cartoon yesterday. I decided to give them a lot of spittle, because the whole thing is a bit slimy.

This is a “pox on both their houses” cartoon, which tend to make everyone mad. Cartoons, like this one, that bash both sides equally, tend to get more reprints from “even handed” editors.

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Randy Remembers the NCS

My cartoonist buddy, Randy Enos, will be writing some short remembrances here in the blog; he has had a long career with many stories that he needs to tell. Randy has had a fantastic career, drawing for all the top publications; he was a regular in the old National Lampoon with his Chicken Gutz comic. Randy was working with all the top cartoonists and illustrators in the New York scene since the year I was born (1956). Randy draws his editorial cartoons with a knife, cutting into linoleum block, backwards. Check out his archive.

 

An Evening at the Society

In the late 50’s into the early 60’s, I often attended the meetings of The National Cartoonists Society as a guest of my friend and co-worker Pete Wells (once a Katzenjammer Kids cartoonist). The meetings were held in New York at the old Lamb’s Club which was really a club for actors, playwrights and the like. I would often see some very familiar faces of old timey actors there because they all enjoyed honorary membership in the Society as exchange for loaning us their home for our meetings.

On this one night, I was employed drinking at the bar, half listening to the two guys standing next to me discussing their work, but mostly I was paying attention to the antics of the Smokey Stover cartoonist, Bill Holman, who was gleefully glad-handing every one who approached and chortling like a little kid when they were “shocked” by the buzzer he had concealed in his right hand.

One of the two next to me was the great DC comics artist Jerry Robinson. I don’t remember who the other guy was. As I listened to them, I became aware of a small man with a large head who had approached and was in rapt attention to the speakers, darting his enormous noggin back and forth between them as though watching a tennis match. Every now and then he would attempt to interject something to no avail. He would say, “Hey… hey, fellas”. This went on for a time and then, through utter frustration, he finally exploded, “Hey, you guys. You never talk to me!” It was then that I recognized one of the founders of the Society, Otto Soglow, former political cartoonist who was now famous for “The Little King”.

“You realistic guys never want to talk to me” he went on, “I draw realistic too… I do. I draw realistic . I can’t help it… that’s the way people look to me!”

Well the evening went on to include a near fist fight between a very drunk Walt Kelly and the evening’s guest speaker, my favorite radio guy Jean Shepherd (A Christmas Story) who was dressed in a gamy tux with holes in his socks.

It was just another typical evening at the Cartoonists Society.

–Randall Enos

PS from Randy:
Daryl, In case you’re wondering what the fight between Shepherd and Kelly was all about, here’s what transpired:

Shepherd’s talk that evening was about freedom and bucking the system and speaking out. He was admonishing a lot of the cartoonists for being very tame and not pushing the boundaries etc.. At that time in his career he was without a sponsor. There were brief periods when he did have a sponsor but he was so irreverent to them that it never worked out very well. He was fired at one point and then re-instated when his listening audience rose up and demanded his return. so, I tell you this because Kelly’s point was that Shepherd could play Mr. High & Mighty because he didn’t have sponsors to deal with and answer to while the cartoonists worked for papers that had editors and ads to contend with and didn’t have that freedom. Kelly was very drunk at that point in the evening and started shouting from the floor, openly arguing nastily with Shepherd. It got so fierce that I honestly thought they were going to come to blows but finally Kelly staggered off and left the building.

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Teacher Strike!

Teachers in Los Angeles go on strike on Monday. My wife teaches math in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and tells me that her colleagues are all charged up. The teachers have chosen to wear red as their strike color, so the picket lines and demonstrations will have coordinated look.

The teachers are unified in their disdain for the district superintendent, Austin Beutner, a billionaire known for being pals with local power brokers; he did a stint as publisher of the Los Angeles Times; he was a failed candidate for mayor, and he is a tireless promotor of privatizing schools. Teachers love to deride Beutner for having no experience in education, although he created a lovely charity for giving eyeglasses to poor children and he’s a bigwig behind Cal Arts, the excellent, Disney-created art college. Beutner is seen as a union-busting oligarch and a bad guy in teachers’ circles.

We see red-clad groups of protesting teachers all over town this weekend and we’ll see lots more next week. I rarely draw local cartoons, but there’s good reason for this one. The local newspapers oppose the teachers so my cartoon may not get much press, but my wife will carry it on her sign.