We’re suffering from crazy heat in California now, from a worldwide high of 130ºF (43C) a couple of days ago, to 109º at my house. Today it was only 106º (41C) at my house. Dozens of major fires are popping up all over the state, sparked by lightening.
At the same time we have the most coronavirus cases and deaths, which have largely shut down the economy, threatening small businesses and newspapers, who have lost ads from suffering small businesses and cancelled events. So this is my cartoon.
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Updated August 24, 2020
Here’s my cartoon today in USA Today.
I draw lots of California flag cartoons. Our bear is a gift to cartoonists. Here are three more of my California fire bear cartoons. Tough times in California.
President Trump wants to stop any federal assistance to charred California, because the state should “rake more” leaves.
Our reader supported site, Cagle.com, still needs you! Journalism is threatened with the pandemic that has shuttered newspaper advertisers. Some pundits predict that a large percentage of newspapers won’t survive the pandemic economic slump, and as newspapers sink, so do editorial cartoonists who depend on newspapers, and along with them, our Cagle.com site, that our small, sinking syndicate largely supports, along with our fans.
Here are the ten most widely published cartoons of the week (June 6-13, 2020). It is interesting to note that no drawings of President Trump have been among the most reprinted cartoons since one appeared in March. This was another week when cartoonists drew passionate cartoons criticizing the president that were ignored by editors. What cartoonists want to draw most is not what editors want to print. It is also rare that editors choose to print cartoons about Joe Biden. The reprint curve is steep with the most popular cartoons dominating the reprints and with most cartoons getting little ink. The foreign cartoonists were ignored by our subscribing, American editors again this week.
Our Top Ten is a measure of how many editors choose to reprint each of our cartoons, from the 63 cartoonists in our syndication package. Just about half of America’s daily, paid circulation newspapers subscribe to CagleCartoons.com.
Congrats to Dave Whamond for drawing the most reprinted cartoon this week. Kudos to Rick McKee who benefitted from a tie for the #10 spot, squeaking in with an impressive three cartoons on the list (the Top Eleven this week, because of the tie). Jeff Koterba has two cartoons on the list and special congratulations go to Pat Bagley and Peter Kuper who make their first appearances in the Top Ten this week. Dave Granlund, Steve Sack and RJ Matson round out the list of most reprinted cartoons this week. Great work, gentlemen!
Our reader supported site, Cagle.com, still needs you! Journalism is threatened with the pandemic that has shuttered newspaper advertisers. Some pundits predict that a large percentage of newspapers won’t survive the pandemic economic slump, and as newspapers sink, so do editorial cartoonists who depend on newspapers, and along with them, our Cagle.com site, that our small, sinking syndicate largely supports, along with our fans.
The New Yorker’s and Mad Magazine’s “Spy vs Spy” cartoonist, Peter Kuper, takes 8th place.
#9
Pulitzer winner, Steve Sack, has the 9th most popular cartoon.
#10
Here’s Rick McKee’s third cartoon on the most reprinted list!
#10
Jeff Koterba is in a tie for the #10 spot with his second of two cartoons in the Top Ten (top eleven this week). Editors love Lincoln Memorial cartoons.
Originally from Australia, Oliver is a former journalist whose first assignment in Paris was to cover the Charlie Hebdo attack in 2015. He would eventually move to Paris and launch The Earful Tower, which was recently featured in The New York Times as one of the best podcasts to travel by ear.
For those Cagle cartoonists who have attended the annual humor salons in St. Just, and have hung out together in Paris, this event might scratch that itch to return to France. And even if you haven’t been to France, this event promises to be a fun time. Plus, hey, you’ll get to see our buddy Jeff on your computer screen!
Oh, and not to worry—it’ll be presented in English. Although there’s always a chance that Oliver will throw in a French phrase or two.
Sponsored by Alliance Française Omaha, this event is free and open to all anywhere in the world! You can also pre-order Oliver’s book, although it’s not necessary to buy one to attend the event, which will be presented via Zoom.
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Don’t miss our most popular cartoons of the week collections:
Here is part two of our BLAME CHINA cartoons! See part one with cartoons defending China pushing against criticism. Since we hear so much about China from the Trump administration, it is interesting that most of the China bashing cartoons come from the international cartoonists.
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Our newspaper clients are crashing now as Coronavirus is crushing their advertisers. We need your support for Cagle.com (and DarylCagle.com) now more than ever! 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!
Here are the 13 most popular and most reprinted CagleCartoons for the week of March 29th through April 4th. These are the cartoons that editors download the most, in high resolution, to be published in their newspapers. Enjoy!
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Don’t miss our most popular cartoons of the week collections:
During the second World War, British cartoonist David Low was despised by Hitler because he relentlessly refuted the lies broadcast by the Nazi propaganda machine with every stark cartoon. We’re a long way from the age in which internationally applauded cartoonists such as Sir David Low were knighted for their heroic defense of liberty.
When I opened my annual trade journal, The American Association of Editorial Cartoonists Notebook, the bell tolled for my profession, page by page, cartoonist by cartoonist. This year our annual AAEC convention will convene in Ottawa, Ontario, with our Canadian colleagues because our numbers are so small we could meet in an abandoned Fotomat kiosk.
Political cartoonist Bruce Plante called me from Oklahoma when his paper, the Tulsa World, had just been acquired by Lee Enterprises. Needing reassurance I told him, “Lee values cartoonists.” When we began our careers four decades ago there were hundreds of us. Today there are 25 newspaper editorial cartoonists left drawing truth to power in the United States.
A lot of giants have been kicked to the curb. After winning the Pulitzer, Mike Keefe was laid off from the Denver Post. Pulitzer winner Steve Benson was laid off last year from the Arizona Republic. The Houston Chronicle, Knoxville News Sentinel and Indianapolis Star summarily jettisoned their beloved veteran cartoonists Nick Anderson, Charlie Daniel and Gary Varvel.
Most troubling, Rob Rogers, the popular political cartoonist of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, was fired by a pro-Trump editor who replaced him with Steve Kelley, a cartoonist who once informed me the most oppressed group in America was white men. Rob relies on syndication and Patreon online subscription patrons to get by.
Scott Stantis has a pseudo-freelance arrangement with his Chicago Tribune. Pat Bagley’s Salt Lake Tribune miraculously survives because it’s owned by a nonprofit corporation. Jack Ohman’s Sacramento Bee is part of the McClatchy chain, which just filed for bankruptcy. My friend and Tucson resident, Chris Britt, formerly of the Illinois State Journal-Register and News Tribune of Tacoma, transitioned to creating children’s books to supplement his syndication earnings.
Syndication is no longer reliable career insurance. Luckily, I’m syndicated to over 700 sites worldwide by Cagle Cartoons. In my AAEC Notebook, Daryl Cagle notes that newspaper chains are consolidating their editorial staffs into one central staff that generates cookie-cutter editorials for the entire chain, adding, “Newspapers are shutting down editorial page staffs faster than they are dropping editorial pages.”
When I was a kid I didn’t listen when the Master Sergeant sarcastically encouraged me to consider a backup plan.
“Doing what?”
“Carving gargoyles. See all the cathedrals in the want ads — hiring stone masons? Your odds of finding work are just as bright, Sunshine.”
I’m glad I didn’t listen. I got lucky. I drew in the last century during the Golden Age of Print and my luck continued through this century’s turbulent transition to digital. These days when young cartoonists ask me for career advice I tell them, “Learn to carve gargoyles.”
It’s impossible for cartoonists to keep up with today’s relentless whirlwind of news. By the time we’ve inked, scanned and uploaded our cartoons our subject’s been eclipsed by 12 new scandals. By the time we upload our hand-rendered cartoon it’s been preceded online by a multitude of memes and YouTube rants; not to mention overshadowed by the comic observers of late night TV. We can see why the producer of “This American Life,” Ira Glass, derided editorial cartooning as “a 17th century medium.”
Ironically, practitioners of our dissed and slowly dying 17th century art form are still sufficiently feared by tyrants to get killed, imprisoned or banished in this darkening century. To the benefit of tyrannies too many regions have become news deserts.
Too many citizens are now completely dependent on the internet for their news, a treacherous cyberswamp teeming with toxic lies and divisive disinformation. The radical right’s war to sow mistrust of the critical mainstream media, which began in the ’70s, along with the rise of Limbaugh, and the billionaire-funded right-wing propaganda mills like Fox, coupled with algorithm-driven cybermanipulation, have all been effective at rendering our citizenry ill-informed and factionalized — two outcomes fatal to democratic republics.
Undaunted by these challenges this “fake news peddler” and “obscene excuse for a mudslinging hack” is proud to be in the honorable company of those persistent resisters labeled the “Enemy of the People” by fascist despots.
Legend has it that David Low had designs for an underground shelter behind his modest London home into which he had placed supplies, a drawing board and a printing press. If his beloved nation were to fall to Nazi occupation, Low had plans to smuggle his family out of the country while he would remain behind, in hiding, churning out anti-fascist cartoons and spreading sedition until his home land was free.
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I’d like to call attention to a new cartoonist who recently joined us –Canadian Guy Parsons.
Guy joined Cagle.com and our PoliticalCartoons.com store. He has a funky style that looks like he is drawing with pastels on a piece of orange paper. Guy’s cartoons appear in the Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald, and he has won a bunch of awards for his illustration work.
About 20 or 25 years ago I started working on a large linocut, just for myself, entitled “The Garden (of Earthly Delights)”. I’m still working on it and I’ll probably never finish it. Every few months, I pull it out and do a little more on it. It’s tucked away in a closet in my studio and I tend to forget about it. I guess I’ve lost interest. It started out as a grand idea. My “garden” doesn’t have any flowers, vegetables or weeds in it. It doesn’t have any caterpillars, dung beetles or worms. What it has are dozens and dozens of famous cartoon characters in it. My grand plan was to pay homage to all the old wonderful “delights” of the magical world of cartoons.
It’s a kind of street scene hustle bustle with a building behind with windows. The characters pass each other on the cobblestones going to and fro while Superman and Captain Marvel attempt to save Fritzi Ritz who is falling from the roof of the building.
My picture contains, so far, Dick Tracy, Li’l Abner, Krazy Kat, Superman, Captain Marvel, Secret Agent X9, the Gumps, Barney Google, Tillie the Toiler, Popeye, Olive Oyl, Prince Valiant, Alley Oop, Hagar the Horrible,
Captain America, Jiggs & Maggie, Ella Cinders, Li’l Orphan Annie, the Cap’n and the Kids, Smilin’ Jack, Beetle Bailey, Harold Teen, Skippy, Archie Andrews, Moon Mullins, Nancy, Felix the Cat, Happy Hooligan, Smokey Stover, The Little King, Ferd’nand, Fritzi Ritz, Mutt ‘n’ Jeff, Pogo, The Yellow Kid (with “Is dis da gardin?” lettered on his gown), Walt from Gasoline Alley and a few dozen others that I can’t even remember the names of. But, I have a lot of space left and many many more characters to include. I get worn out just thinking about it.
I’m cutting on an old, very hard piece of linoleum which is dark brown in color. They don’t even sell this stuff any more. It’s like engraving on a hard wood block. It holds the finest detail. I don’t know if I have the patience to continue on in the dense detailed style I set for this piece. The big 24X36 lino block is even starting to crack in places but I think I can work around that hazard. The formidable task of inking and printing it when it is finished presents another challenge. I don’t use a press. I print everything by hand so I’d probably have to ink and print it in sections and then paste ’em together or just keep lifting my paper and freshening the ink as I go along. I’d have to find a nice big sheet of fairly thin and absorbent paper to use. But, as I said before, I’ll most likely abandon this project before I finish it. My wife keeps urging me to go on with it, however, and she often gets her way. More than often.
A while back, meaning a few years ago, I decided to see how the work was proceeding and whether or not things were coming out as planned so I actually inked a few small sections and took some quick prints off of it hoping to encourage myself to continue. I’m showing some of them here in this article along with a couple of shots of the big brown block itself.
To make matters worse, I started another picture in 2011 that still isn’t finished. It seems to be going the way of “The Garden”. It’s named “The Conqueror Worm” after my favorite Poe poem. At least with this one I’ve started printing and pasting up. It got interrupted when I worked on my Mocha Dick book and I have never gotten back to it.
Well, if my “Garden” never fulfills its destiny… at least I got a story out of it.
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Martin “Shooty” Šútovec is a great CagleCartoonist who we don’t see frequently on Cagle.com because he is usually consumed with the crazy local politics in Slovakia. I thought I would show some pages from the most recent issue of the “Dennik N.” newspaper that is filled with Shooty’s work. “Dennik” means “Daily” and N stands for “Nezavisly” meaning “Independent.”
Shooty left his old newspaper, the “SME” five years ago with about 30 of his journalist colleagues to found the Dennik N., because a financial group called “Penta,” that Shooty tells me “was known for making dirty business deals with public healthcare” purchased a large share of the newspaper. At the Dennik N. newspaper, all of the editors are shareholders.
Shooty tells me that the Dennik N. paper is very successful and is financed by digital subscriptions, and powered by excellent investigative journalists who forced their Prime Minister Fico (the short, blonde haired guy in the cartoons) and the minister of the Interior to resign, after some big demonstrations.
Slovakia has recently been rocked by a a scandal that is nicknamed “Gorilla” after the codename of a secret agent who leaked secret documents and 39 hours of audio files showing a conspiracy involving the CEO of Penta corrupting select politicians. Shooty says the codename “Gorilla” is similar to the codename “Deep Throat” in the Watergate scandal. The scandal involves a famous mobster named Kocner who ordered the murder of an investigative journalist, Jan Kuciak.
Shooty writes, “Marian Kočner (the black haired guy in the cartoons) is involved in corrupting politicians (and) judges … He is finally in jail, but it was hard work; our newspaper is still publishing tons of his leaked messages … where he is making deals with murderers, members of parliament etc. it is not the same as (the) Gorilla cause, but everything is connected.”
The screenshots show a recent issue of the Dennik N, covering the Gorilla scandal, with Shooty’s cartoons dominating the coverage. This is the way to cover a scandal. Bravo, Shooty!
Shooty writes: “On the picture Im sending you is the wall in our office with wallpaper made from our covers, to show you how often we have cartoons on (the) covers.”
This is the first of three columns about my years as president of the National Cartoonists Society. Read part TWO here. Read part THREE here. –Daryl Cagle
This drawing by Jack Davis shows Snoopy with Sparky’s “Milton Caniff” Lifetime Achievement Award.
I’ve been a member of the National Cartoonists Society (NCS) for nearly 40 years. I was president of the NCS from June, 1999 to May, 2001, and I ran two “Reuben Awards” conventions. The first was held at the World Trade Center in Manhattan the year before the towers were destroyed, and the second in Florida at the Boca Raton Resort and Club. Much of the work of the NCS president is like being a wedding planner, with all the joys, stresses and horrors that implies, which left me with an odd perspective on our colorful profession. Here are my recollections …
Twenty years ago the membership of the NCS included nearly twice as many professional cartoonist members as it does now, and popular newspaper comic strips were the NCS’s strength. The group was rancorous and my years in the hot seat were toasty. We had a crisis at the start when our management company demanded that we triple their fees; they were doing a terrible job so I fired them and I went about finding a new firm, arguing with our board members who wanted to stay with the old management company and pay the higher fees. Finding a new management company for our unusual group was a big chore, because of the unusual nature of our group compared to more conventional professional organizations.
When the new company eventually took over, the old firm transferred our records and I was told that our files looked like someone climbed to the top of a nine foot ladder and randomly dropped the papers into the boxes. It turns out that we didn’t have records of past members’ dues payments – we didn’t know who was paid up and who wasn’t. It became clear why the old management company was doing a lousy job. It was a big mess to clean up the records and to make sense of the membership dues collections; I faced a challenging learning curve of getting myself and the new management company up to speed.
I had a “wedding” to deal with right away. In those days, the NCS had a big, annual Christmas party in Manhattan, often at the Century Club. We planned our biggest Christmas party ever, with the theme being that we would award a “Golden T-Square” to Mort Walker, who drew the Beetle Bailey comic strip. Mort was delighted. We had a nice sponsor in an internet company that was courting us at the time. The 1999 New York Christmas party would be even bigger than the previous year’s Reuben Awards convention in San Antonio.
THE 1999 CHRISTMAS PARTY
The “Century Club” in Manhattan, actually the “Century Association”.
The NCS had long depended on support from the syndicates, especially King Features. When I first started as NCS president, King’s comics editor told me that King was finished with their support for the NCS; he said King didn’t like that the NCS included non-newspaper cartoonist members and he didn’t see what King got out of their longtime support of the NCS. Later I got an angry call from King Features’ chairman who was furiously ranting that he wanted us to cancel the award for Mort because we were stepping on King’s toes; Mort was their guy. I don’t recall saying anything in that crazy phone call; I just listened.
This is Beetle Bailey, from the famous strip by Mort Walker.
On the other hand, Mort was flattered and pleased with the award/party idea, and it was Mort who carried the day. King Features changed their tone after some conversations with Mort and ended up as a second full sponsor for the Christmas party. The double sponsorship let us double the budget and made for quite an opulent evening. I remember that we had a raw bar with all the oysters we could eat, which was fun, and the open bar was freely flowing. Wedding planner glee.
Mort Walker in 2016
King asked to give their “Segar Award” at the Christmas party, an award that King management chooses to give to a King cartoonist; there was a tradition of giving the Segar Award at the King-sponsored-Christmas party, so I said “yes” to King and there were two awards that night. That was my second big issue as president, because many NCSers objected to King giving their own award at the NCS’s party and they aimed their ire at me, complaining that King had “bought” me. Somebody at the party punched somebody else and most people were talking about the punch. And the huge bill for the big party went entirely on Arnold Roth‘s personal tab at the Century Club, which made Arnie nervous when the NCS took too long to reimburse him. (Sorry about that, Arnie.)
But Mort was happy, and it was a great party.
I love Peanuts and Charles M. Schulz was my hero.
PLANNING MY FIRST CONVENTION
The first Reuben Awards convention that I ran as NCS president was in 2000, at the Marriott World Trade Center Hotel in lower Manhattan, but it was originally intended to take place in Santa Rosa, California. The convention was to be a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the comic strip, Peanuts. My predecessor as NCS president, George Breisacher, had been talking to Peanuts creator, Charles M. “Sparky” Schulz and the city of Santa Rosa about having the 2000 Reuben Awards banquet at Sparky’s ice skating rink. Sparky and Santa Rosa were both very generous in their offer to host the convention. George and I flew to Santa Rosa to have dinner with Sparky and his wife, Jeannie, to tour the ice rink and visit the proposed hotel. The hotel was a few miles from the rink, but the city of Santa Rosa offered to cover the cost of busses, and they even offered to have a parade. The ice rink was great fun, and Sparky told us how he had a wood floor that would be installed on top of the ice for the Reubens banquet. We had lovely meetings; Sparky was charming and more than generous, but the problem was the hotel, which would be under construction at that time. With no local hotel alternative that could fit the NCS, and difficult logistics, Santa Rosa didn’t happen. We figured the NCS would do Santa Rosa another year, when the construction at the hotel was completed. I was left scrambling to find a new venue for the 2000 convention. This was actually quite typical for new NCS presidents – planning ahead was not part of the culture for the NCS.
Instead of Santa Rosa, I decided to take the Reubens back to New York, and after a search and competitive bid process, I signed a big contract with the Marriott World Trade Center Hotel, still with the theme of celebrating the 50th anniversary of Peanuts.
Sponsorship for the 2000 Reuben Awards weekend was promised, including a big commitment from United Media, the syndicate that owned Peanuts. Sparky, was going to receive the NCS’s lifetime achievement award on Reuben night and political cartoonist Mike Luckovich had organized most of the newspaper comic strip cartoonists to draw a Peanuts 50th anniversary themed strip on the Saturday of our banquet – then in mid-February, three months before the convention in May, we got the news that Sparky had died.
Arrgh! So sad! And what was I going to do!?
——————————————–
Read more old stuff about my career as a cartoonist on DarylCagle.com
There is a new anti-semitic cartoon controversy, this time from The Guardian’s cartoonist Steve Bell. Buzzfeed’s media critic Mark Di Stefano first tweeted the cartoon and email that Bell sent to all of The Guardian’s staff journalists.
Bell’s cartoon depicting Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was killed, prompting Bell’s mass email. The cartoon depicts British Labour Party deputy secretary, Tom Watson as an “antisemite finder general” calling Netanyahu an “antisemitic trope.”
“Last June, (Bell) emailed all journalists to say he felt “unfairly traduced and censored” after the paper would not run his cartoon of Theresa May meeting Benjamin Netanyahu while Palestinian Razan al-Najjar, who had been shot and killed by an Israeli soldier, burned in the fireplace behind.”
‘He accused Guardian editor Kath Viner of not speaking to him because she “did not really have an argument” for spiking the cartoon.”
“I suspect the real cause is it contravenes some mysterious editorial line that has been drawn around the subject of antisemitism and the infernal subject of antisemitic tropes.”
“In some ways this is even more worrying than the specious charges of antisemitism. Does the Guardian no longer tolerate content that runs counter to its editorial line?”
“In November 2012, (Bell’s) cartoon that depicted Mr Netanyahu as a puppeteer prompted many complaints to the press regulator.”
Here is the complete text of the letter that Bell wrote to The Guardian’s “Head of Features” Kira Cochrane, and forwarded as a mass email to all of The Guardian’s staff journalists:
Dear Kira
After our bizarre telephone conversation yesterday, I feared you might not publish today’s strip, but still cannot understand why the attached should be more liable to legal challenge from Tom Watson than either of the previous two strips that you have already published. You said the ‘lawyers were concerned’, but what about? It’s not antisemitic, nor is it libellous, even though it includes a caricature of Binyamin Netanyahu. If Watson chose to object he would make himself look far sillier than he does in the cartoon.
I suspect that the real problem is that it contravenes some mysterious editorial line that has been drawn around the subject of antisemitism and the infernal subject of ‘antisemitic tropes’. In some ways this is even more worrying for me than specious charges of antisemitism. Does the Guardian no longer tolerate content that counters its editorial line?
Why in today’s paper has the Guardian published a highly partisan and personally insulting (to the leader of the Labour Party) advert on page 20 that uses the Labour Party logo, but is clearly not a Labour Party approved advert? I would have thought that there would be far more reason to expect a legal challenge on that than on my my cartoon. Or is it that you don’t want to offend poor Tom but are quite happy to offend poor Jeremy?
Why on earth did the Guardian publish, then unpublish, a letter in support of Chris Williamson signed by 100 persons identifying themselves as Jewish, including Noam Chomsky? Were they the wrong kind of Jews. The paper’s contortions on this subject do not do it any credit. If there is a reasoned position on this highly contentious issue, then I would dearly love to see it laid out clearly so we all know where we stand. Or are there some subjects that we just can’t touch?
Around 1964, I did my very first animation job. It was for CBS and I got to work for the legendary Lou Dorfsman who shaped every aspect of corporate design for CBS in his 40 years there. I was tasked with creating ten, 10 second “teaser” spots which would be used at station breaks on the network.
CBS had just created a break-through technology they called VPA (Vote Profile Analysis) which would hopefully predict the outcome of elections, shortly after voting had begun, with supposedly, a high degree of accuracy. It was top secret. They were going to reveal it when the time was right and the job I had been assigned was to tease the public and build up curiosity until then. We would throw out the letters V P A to the viewers and make everybody wonder what the hell it meant in ten second bits between programs. We also popped the words “Vote Profile Analysis” in small letters in the last few seconds at the bottom of the screen.
So, my first animation experience was to be the manipulation of three simple black type letters into 10 arresting filmic arrangements.
I zoomed a “V” from a tiny dot on the screen to full screenrevolving it upside down while it was joined by “P” which had slid in from the right side. The upside down “V” became an “A” with the addition of the crossbar while the “P” disappeared.
I panned a “V” onto the screen, in another spot, zoomed in to the blackness of the letter and zoomed right back out to reveal that it was now a “P”, then back in and out to reveal the “A”.
I continued on in this fashion, zooming, panning and twirling the letters around through ten variations avoiding the more obvious approach of actually just manipulating the forms into each letter. I kept the letters whole all the time, maintaining their dignity as type forms and not succumbing to “Walt Disney” anthropomorphic transformation or just melding from one letter form to the other.. I felt that it described the “style” of CBS to keep it simple, black and white, elegant movement and transformation.
As simple as it was, and maybe because it was so simple, it became, I think, the most creative endeavor of my short animation career. It’s so compelling to get caught up in the rhythm of a job like that where the ideas just start popping into your brain. It’s good to have a time constraint to work around that forces you to be basic, direct and clean. No time to get “junky” in 10 seconds.
For weeks and weeks before they revealed their proud program that was going to beat all the competition in vote projection, we watched my VPA’s dance around for 10 seconds at every station break.
I haven’t been to the CBS building in many years, so I don’t know what it’s like now, but when I used to go into the building in those days, it wasn’t like going into any other big corporate building; it was carefully designed by Dorfsman (I guess), in every detail. There was the “CBS” typeface that was used everywhere down to the elevator buttons. When you arrived at your floor, there was a spacious waiting area wherein a receptionist sat a plain, clean desk. the décor was of a black and white or subtle grey: floor, rugs, walls, ceiling, etc.. Radiating off this main area there were long corridors going off to the different offices. At the far end of each corridor was the shock of a big square very brightly colored abstract painting. That was the only color. All aspects of the offices were rigidly controlled. Receptionists told me that they couldn’t have even a stray paper clip on their desk. Everything had a place that was design controlled and policed.
When you stepped into that building, you weren’t stepping into a building, you were stepping into a huge, formal piece of graphic design –cool, clean, elegant, black and white.
Down the block sat the NBC building, my next network client, a virtual riot of peacock color.
President Trump announced that he would be imposing increasingly steep tariffs on all imports from Mexico to choke our neighbor’s economy and coerce them into stopping the flow of immigrants from Central America that travel through Mexico to get to the US border.
The Mexican flag features a wonderful eagle character that symbolizes Mexico. Editorial cartoonists draw the Mexican eagle all the time. Drawing the eagle got me in trouble once.
Here’s my new one with Trump choking Mexico …
Here’s my rough sketch, drawn on two pieces of letter sized paper. I traced the sketch on vellum for the final line art and colored it in Photoshop.
And, in case you forgot, here’s what the eagle on the Mexican flag looks like …
For a stroll down memory lane about how Mexican flag cartoons can irritate people, take a look at this old clip of me on CNN …
Stover, The Little King, Ferd’nand, Fritzi Ritz, Mutt ‘n’ Jeff, Pogo, The Yellow Kid (with “Is dis da gardin?” lettered on his gown), Walt from Gasoline Alley and a few dozen others that I can’t even remember the names of. But, I have a lot of space left and many many more characters to include. I get worn out just thinking about it.
freshening the ink as I go along. I’d have to find a nice big sheet of fairly thin and absorbent paper to use. But, as I said before, I’ll most likely abandon this project before I finish it. My wife keeps urging me to go on with it, however, and she often gets her way. More than often.
Well, if my “Garden” never fulfills its destiny… at least I got a story out of it.
Me and the GhostBusters
When the new company eventually took over, the old firm transferred our records and I was told that our files looked like someone climbed to the top of a nine foot ladder and randomly dropped the papers into the boxes. It turns out that we didn’t have records of past members’ dues payments – we didn’t know who was paid up and who wasn’t. It became clear why the old management company was doing a lousy job. It was a big mess to clean up the records and to make sense of the membership dues collections; I faced a challenging learning curve of getting myself and the new management company up to speed.
