I had lunch last week with Mr. Fish (Dwayne Booth) and we talked about why his cartoons don’t sell very well to general circulation newspapers ““ it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see why. Mr. Fish’s saucy cartoons appear in the L.A. Weekly and Village Voice. In fact, Fish was the last cartoonist left after the Village Voice bloodbath where they dropped every other cartoonist.

I did a speaking tour of China last year and wherever I spoke the audience asked about censorship in America ““ they were convinced that censorship for us was no different than in China. I explained that cartoonists in America often complain about editors killing their cartoons, but that is different from China because in China it is the government that kills the cartoons ““ well, not exactly, the editors and cartoonists in China know where the limits are and choose not to cross those limits. The Chinese audience would ask, “isn’t it the same in America?” I’d explain that, yes, we know what the limits are, but American cartoonists are limited by good taste rather than point of view, and if we’re too offensive we know our cartoons won’t get printed. The Chinese would respond, “same here.” I was surprised that I was always explaining what seemed to my audience to be petty differences and the hypocrisy of an American “free press.”

Which brings me back to Mr. Fish, who doesn’t censor himself for taste at all. It works for the Village Voice and L.A. Weekly, but keeps Mr. Fish’s work from being seen by a general circulation audience. I appreciate Fish’s unwillingness to compromise, so I thought I would post a selection of some of my favorite, offensive Mr. Fish cartoons that I would never have drawn myself.

Keith Knight amuses me. We recently chatted in the bar at the National Cartoonists Society (NCS) convention that Keith was crashing. As something of an NCS historian, I thought I would respond to Keith’s suggestions in cartoon form below.

Hold the convention in a smaller town.
We’ve had some odd convention locations in the past. The convention in Asheville, NC wasn’t very well attended but was one of my favorites. I think my favorite one of all time was the one in Cancun, Mexico, where I never would have otherwise gone and the attendance was the lowest I can remember. The problem with odd locales for the convention is that attendance drops. In fact, I could make an argument for always having the convention in California or near New York City every year.

Aggressively court web and indie cartoonists.
The NCS should be doing that. They haven’t really been “courting” anybody.

Have certain convention events open to the public.
That’s a suggestion that has spawned some heated debate. In the past, when the NCS has had public events, we either had a bad experience or a poor turnout. An exception was a fairly successful book signing/public event at the convention in San Antonio ten years ago.

The one us old-timers remember is the debacle in San Francisco about 18 years ago, where the cartoonists and the public were invited to a reception/signing at a book store and the public mobbed Jim Davis (Garfield) and Charles Schulz (Peanuts), rudely driving them away and ignoring the other cartoonists. It was pretty unpleasant.

I remember in the bar at the St. Francis Hotel that night, the cartoonists were joking about how they could all draw Garfield and should all just say they were Jim Davis. The hotel staff gave the cartoonists white plates and sharpie markers to draw on the plates ““ in exchange for a drawing on a plate, the cartoonist could have a free drink. The hotel ended up with a huge stack of worthless drawings of Garfield on plates, signed by faux Jim Davises. I heard the NCS, Ohio State or somebody got a call from the hotel years later, asking what to do with “all your plates.” I believe they ended up on the trash heap of history.

Keith’s suggestion about “cartoonist vs. cartoonist action + beer” misses the point.  The cartoonist vs. cartoonist action IS the beer.

I haven’t gotten many comments here, but I’ve been getting some nice e-mails about my Muppets post and I thought I’d put up a little more.

Most of my old Muppet work was pretty obscure; people remember the McDonalds glasses and, if they wore my Keds shoes or Timex watches, they remember those.  Two more that people seem to remember are: Post Croonchy Stars, the Swedish Chef cereal.  I did the puzzles and games that updated each month on the backs of the cereal boxes; kids read these as they ate their morning sugar.  I still have some boxes of Post Croonchy Stars in the garage, and I think they are still as fresh and edible as the day they hit supermarkets.

When little Muppet fans’ baby teeth rotted from all that sugar, we were ready with my Muppet Oral B toothbrushes; these seemed to stay in the stores for about 20 years.

Oh, those were the days.

I was amused and flattered to see a site, toplessrobot.com, that thinks my old McDonald’s Great Muppet Caper Glasses were the second best fast food premium glasses ever.  Its amazing that they knew I drew them. Looking at the commercial makes me feel young again – I was fresh out of college when I was churning out Muppet art in the early 1980’s.  Jim Henson really made a career for me; the Muppets were my grad school.  (They pick Star Wars glasses as #1 … oh well.)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrrS8zH6-bE&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

Here’s a game box I did in 1981 for Milton Bradley, also tied into The Great Muppet Caper movie.

I searched myself on Muppet Wikia.  It is a trip down memory lane (not unlike a trip into the bowels of my garage, which is filled with this stuff).