SELL THE HOUSE: TOP TEN CARTOONS OF THE WEEK
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Freedom of Expression
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Charlie Hebdo TV Pundits
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The Media and Red Lines
I woke up this morning to the news of the terrorist attack on the Charlie Hebdo Magazine office in Paris. Twelve people were killed and eleven wounded, including two of my French cartoonist friends, Tignous and Wolinski. Cartoonists around the world are grieving.
Americans treat editorial cartoons as a trivial daily joke in the newspaper – in France, editorial cartoons and loved and respected. The Louvre has a branch museum devoted to cartoons; imagine if the Smithsonian had a cartoon museum, that’s the way cartoons are revered in France.
“Charlie Hebdo” is a silly name; it is a weekly magazine filled with editorial cartoons, easily found on news stands everywhere in France. “Hebdo” means “weekly” in French, and “Charlie” comes from France’s love for the comic strip “Peanuts” and Charlie Brown – therefore “Charlie Hebdo.” The top cartoonists in France vie to be on the pages of Charlie Hebdo.
There are cartoon festivals all over France – the best one for political cartoonists is in the small town of St Just le Martel; I’ve been attending for years, along with other cartoonists I syndicate. The townspeople pitch in to throw a festival for the editorial cartoonists every year; villagers put cartoonists up in their homes, and they award a live cow to the “Humor Vache” cartoonist of the year. One greatly respected winner of the cow was Georges Wolinski, a brilliant cartoonist with a masterful loose, swishy, wordy style, highly respected by the French. We were fellow cow winners, having a beer together last October; it is hard to imagine that he is gone.
The Charlie Hebdo cartoonists are a diverse group of charming characters; they are the heart of the French cartooning community. There are not a lot of editorial cartoonists. We get to know each other; the murders are a blow that strikes close to all of us.
The Charlie Hebdo artists were energized and incensed by the Danish Muhammad cartoon fracas a few years ago. French cartoonists have a macho attitude, seeing themselves on the front lines of a free speech debate. One Charlie Hebdo issue, touted as “edited by the Profit Muhammad” had all blank pages. One Charlie Hebdo cover featured a drawing, by French cartoonist “Luz” of the magazine’s publisher/cartoonist “Charb” having a sloppy kiss with a Muslim Man, under the headline “L’Amour plus for que la haine” or “love is stronger than hate.” Charb was among those killed in the terror attack.
Terrorists have no sense of humor. Cartoons loom large in the Arab world, typically on the front pages of Arab language newspapers. It is no wonder that our cartoons seem to bother the terrorists more than our words. Sitting behind a beer with Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, the talk often turns to Islamic extremeists and their assaults on press freedoms. No one can doubt that editorial cartoonists are leading the fight for press freedoms now.
Today we are are grieving, but as we move forward, I hope that our cartoons won’t be chilled by these murders and that the cartooning community will step up to this challenge with even more brilliant and insightful work – I’m sure the French cartoonists will do that; they are my heroes.
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Bill Cosby
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Cartoonist-Crazy China
I just got back from spending a week at the AYACC conference in Guiyang, China – a tiny backwater, by Chinese standards, of only four million population, just a two hour plane ride from Hong Kong. I had never been to Hong Kong before, and I took a couple of sightseeing tours – my Chinese tourguides had never heard of tiny Guiyang before. Bigger than the city of Los Angeles, twice the size of Houston, five times the size of San Francisco, and it’s a tiny backwater – China is a different world.
Here’s the AYACC cartoon jury, in the back row, left to right is Marlene Pohle (Argentina/Germany), Hideo Takeda (Japan), and me. In the front row, left to right are Xia De Chuan (China), Xu Pong Fei (China), Zheng Xin Ying (China) and Zhou Ming Jian (China).
If I was plopped down into the middle of Guiyang, not knowing where I was, and someone told me I was in the biggest city in the world, I would have believed them. Guiyang seems colossal, booming and sprawling, with skyscrapers and new construction everywhere.
The AYACC cartooning festival is huge, and doesn’t seem to have a good web site. Here is a page on the AYACC contest where I served as a judge. I did a drawing of my jury-mates (right) and there’s a photo of them below. (I see that when I draw myself, I always draw myself with my hair going backwards, because I usually only see myself in a mirror).
Oh, the two fingers “peace” gesture is something I see a lot in China, I’m not sure what it means, but it seems to be positive and their equivalent of “saying cheese.” When I draw the two fingers/peace sign gesture, it makes the Chinese happy. (Maybe someone else can explain it better.) I think it is their hand sign for the number eight, which is lucky – maybe that’s all it is.
Here is a video (below) of a French cartoonist, on AYACC award night, on stage doing a live caricature of the two emcees, to the delight of the crowd, and to the beat of thumping music – not what I’m used to from a cartooning awards show.
The winning cartoons that we chose in the jury a day earlier boomed onto the big screen as the music pounded. I’m told that the AYACC show in recent years was broadcast on national television. This year they were a bit scaled back, but it seemed plenty big to me. It looked like there were 600 or 700 people in a University audience, whooping and hollering. They played exciting music as they gave awards to cartoonist students, interspersed through the evening, which was nice.
The Chinese government has decided that cartooning is important and they have given a lot of support to cartoon animators and illustrators (although they may have overlooked political cartoonists) the quality of work there was very impressive.
I gave a talk to a university crowd of about 500 art students a couple of days later, and the college folks took me and some other cartoonists out to a impressive lunch banquet where the locals, in costume, sang to us. I pulled out my phone to record the scene below. (That’s my lovely translator Wenwen making the iPhone movie next to me, German/Argentine cartoonist, Marlene Pohle to her right. To my immediate left is retired, but very active, Temple University cartooning professor, John Lent, who was the chairman of the awards juries and Scottish gag cartoonist Russ Thompson to John’s left.
At one point in my speech, when I was showing a bunch of Obama bashing cartoons, I mentioned that I don’t like Obama, and the crowd erupted in cheers and applause. For the rest of the speech they sat stony-faced, staring at me with no expression.
I showed the students my Xi Jinping/l’il Kim cartoon above, and they didn’t get it. Chinese cartoonists aren’t allowed to draw their own president so I’m sure the students had never seen anything like this, even though the cartoon is pretty tame – still, the students seemed more confused than surprised (as did my charming translator, Wenwen). Oh well.
I’ll be a special guest at the “Red Man” cartoon festival and competition in Guiyang, China, from the 20th through 25th of November – in a couple of weeks. If you’ll be in Southern China, stop by. I’ll give a speech and be on their contest jury. Also there as special guests and jury members are my cartoonist buddies, Ross Thompson from Britain and Marlene Pohle from Germany.
Sorry to be so slow about posting my new cartoons – I’ll catch up now. The newest one is this cartoon about the Nazi stolen art treasure that was found last week in Germany. Given the subject matter, it may be better in grayscale. What do you think?
After I finished this and sent it out, I had second thoughts about the color, and I did this revised version, starting with a nasty sepia-tone and moving up the saturation to the last panel. I think it is better, so I sent out a revised version. It makes the older panels seem older, and nastier.
I heard some pundit describe Obamacare as a “heavy lift” for the president, which got me thinking about this caduseus cartoon …
I’m trying to go lighter with my colors, and have a little bit of texture in everything. Bad printing darkens everything up so much, many cartoonists are shocked to see how muddy their cartoons look in print.
I did two versions of this next “X-Ray Specs” cartoon about President Obama and his intrusive spying, which made Germany’s Angela Merkel angry when she learned that the NSA had been tapping her cell phone for years. It should make most Americans angry too, at lack of deference shown to our privacy rights by our paranoid, overeaching government – so I drew the Statue of Liberty as the victim of the X-Ray Specs too. Perhaps our young readers are too young to know, but there was a time when there was an ad for “X-Ray Specs” in every comic book – and we all read comic books because there were no video games. And no cell phones. And we had manual typewriters. I’m so old. OOooh.
Here are the X-ray Specs in SPANISH!
The troubles with Obamacare’s roll out, and lousy web site, have been great fun for the Republicans – so I drew them dancing on Obamacare’s and Secretary Sebelius’ graves, a bit early.
The recent election didn’t go too well for Tea Party candidates and moderates stole the day.
I was interested to see how the liberal cartoonists all turned so quickly on Obama when the Web site was bad. Here’s my bad Website cartoon.
This is one I missed from way back when we had the government shut-down. It seems so long ago now – Republicans have had some good days with Obamacare’s troubles since then. Times change fast.
When I was at the festival in St. Just, France I had the opportunity to interview Doaa el Adl. She is a rare female cartoonist in Egypt, and she has been persecuted by by the Morsi regime for drawing a cartoon that featured Adam and Eve, an opportunity for the Muslim Brotherhood to chill her speech. Editorial cartoonists are very important voices in Egypt, with their cartoons routinely running on the front pages of the many, vibrant newspapers in a culture that still reveres newspapers.
I think Doaa is a hero, for standing up to the regime, speaking truth to power, and putting herself at risk in doing so.
Interestingly, Doaa had some strong objections to my own cartoons. Here are a couple of my cartoons that she disliked the most …
Doaa says “Yes, Obama does that – but you draw him as an angel – he is no angel! He meddles in everything! He wants to control everything!”
To this one Doaa says, “Obama is not like that! He is in there fighting with everyone, making trouble, trying to run everything!”
Obama has managed to make all sides in the Middle East see him as the bad guy.
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Daryl Has a Cow
Here I am with my cow, Josette. I’m holding the St. Just porcelain statue depicting their logo that they give to grand prix winners.
I just got back from the grand editorial cartooning festival in St. Just le Martel, France where I won the grand prix, the “Prix de l’humor Vache” award, which was an actual cow, named Josette.
The “Salon de St. Just, ” in its 32nd year, draws cartoonists from around the world to a tiny town near Limoges. The townspeople have adopted the cartoonists and hold a party that stretches over two weekends, in a grand cartoon museum they built in the middle of cow country. Most of the cartoonists stay in the homes of volunteer villagers – the entire event is put together by townpeople Cartoonists usually come for only one weekend of the festival, splitting the crowd between what becomes two different weekend groups of roughly 120 cartoonists each.
This was my second “Salon,” last year I went with our knuckle-dragging, conservative, “Tea Party” cartoonist, Eric Allie, who was a strange beast to the French. This year I went with three liberal cartoonists, Pat Bagley of the Salt Lake Tribune, Steve Sack of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and Bob Englehart of the Hartford Courant for three days of open bar and schmoozing with our international colleagues.
Here I am with my Cagle Cartoons colleagues, dubbed “Cagle Cowboys”, from left, Josette, Pat Bagley, Me, Bob Englehart and Steve Sack below.
My festival friends tell me that a cow is usually a placid animal, but sometimes the cow will get annoyed and give a swift, painful kick as a surprise to an unlucky bystander; this contributes to the idea that the cow is a little sneaky, nasty and unpredictable. The “Prix de l’humor Vache,” the grand prize they gave me, is described as an award for “caustic humor.” “Humor Vache” (funny cow) rhymes with “Amour Vache” (love cow, or more accurately “rough love”) a French idiom for a love affair that is nasty, consisting of harsh words and arguments. In France, to refer to someone as a “vache” (cow) is a little bit nasty. In contrast, on the first Saturday of the Salon, they give out the “Humor Tendre” (Tender Humor) award, which is a sheep, given to a sweet cartoonist such as a children’s book illustrator.
The Limoges area is proud of their cows, which are raised for beef and are all a warm brown color. The cow is the symbol and mascot of the Salon. Every year, the “Prix de l’humor Vache” cow is named “Josette” and is actually given to the winning cartoonist. At the ceremony, the mayor of St. Just, Gerard Vandenbroucke, awarded Limoges porcelain cows to my three American compatriots, dubbing them “Cagle’s cowboys.” Bob, Pat and Steve, who can also claim to have won cows (although, not real cows) took their little cows around to all the other cartoonists at the Salon to sign; it was charming.
Typically, the winning cartoonist is expected to take a cash award (I still don’t know how much) in lieu of actually taking delivery of the real Josette, who would be difficult to check on a plane and would likely be an unpleasant roommate in my tiny, Nashville apartment. But, they make it clear that the cartoonist really won a cow and could actually take the cow if he or she chooses to, and there are stories of cartoonists in past years choosing to take the cow. I’m told that are some amusing movies of a past winner taking his cow to Paris, trying to bring the cow on the Metro, and taking the cow up the Eiffel Tower. If anyone can find these movies online, I’d love to take a look.
Part of winning the grand prize cow is the obligation to do the art for the poster for the next Salon. The poster this year featured a lovely Degas-like ballerina cow. The festival people then dress a cow sculpture, in the entry to the museum, to match the cow on the poster. My plan is to give the cow on next year’s poster a very elaborate costume that will be a unique challenge for a St. Just volunteer to create for the cow statue. Right now, I’m thinking of doing the poster cow as Marie Antoinette with a huge, elaborate, flowing gown.
Here’s Bob Englehart with the cow statue at the entrance to the exhibition. The cow is dressed to match the poster which is a ballerina this year. Next year I’ll be doing the poster and I plan to put the cow in a very elaborate costume that will be a challenge for St. Just’s volunteer seamstresses.
The whole event in St. Just is a lovely boost for our beleaguered editorial cartooning profession which is suffering in France as it is here and around the world with newspapers declining everywhere. I’d love to see some of the great French attitude about the value of editorial cartooning rub off on other parts of the world, like America, which treats cartooning as a second class art form. I can’t imagine a whole town in the USA choosing to build a municipal cartoon museum, opening their homes, and pitching together to cook dinner for hundreds of editorial cartoonists – and, of-course, a nine day open bar would be unthinkable in America.
From left to right, Bob Englehart, Stave Sack, St. Just’s Mayor Gerard Vandenbroucke in the red shirt, me holding my “Prix de l’humor Vache” porcelain statue, Josette, and Pat Bagley in the lower right corner.
Below is a scan of the Limoges newspaper front page and interior story from the day after I had a cow.
I am saddened to write that Cartoonists Rights Network reports that Syrian cartoonist Akram Raslan has been executed by the Syrian regime after a sham trial.
Click on the photo to see a larger view. That’s me sitting on the stage at the lower right. Such sad news for the cartooning community.
Just last week, at the Humor Salon in St Just, I joined a nice assembly and demonstration by world cartoonists in support of Akram – at the time we all thought Akram was imprisoned, but he had already been murdered. Akram’s crime was to make people laugh at the Syrian dictator, Bashar Assad in his cartoons.
Truly tragic news. From the Cartoonists Rights Network report:
We’ve learned that on July 26, Akram Raslan and other prisoners of conscience including journalists, artists, singers and other intellectuals were secretly put on trial with no witnesses, no defense attorneys, no appeal, and no hope for justice. From unconfirmed and sketchy reports we learned that they were all condemned to life imprisonment.
Somehow, along the way to prison young 28-year-old Akram Raslan (and possibly others) was peeled off, taken out and executed. He is reported to be in a mass grave somewhere near Damascus. Our reliable but for obvious reasons anonymous sources further allege that the murder of Akram and other condemned prisoners was carried out by Mohammad Nassif Kheir Bek, currently the Deputy Vice President for Security Affairs in Syria. He has already been sanctioned by the European Union for the use of violence against protesters and the Syrian civil war.Akram Raslan was the winner of the Cartoonists Rights Network International, Award for Courage in Editorial Cartooning for 2013. Past award winners have hailed from Malaysia, South Africa, Turkey, Palestine, Iran, and India, including last year’s winner, Ali Ferzat, also from Syria.Here in the United States we are experts in the knowledge that editorial cartooning is a dying art. In other areas of the world, however, it is an art that people die for.CRNI has been monitoring and assisting political cartoonists in trouble for the last 20 years. They are often victims of failing regimes stamping out criticism, drug cartels squashing investigations, corporate interest protecting money and political manipulation, and religious zealots stamping out thinking.About nine months ago young Akram Raslan was abducted from the offices of his newspaper and “disappeared” into the Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad’s prisons for the next six months. Readers might remember the case of Syrian cartoonist Ali Ferzat who in 2011 had his hands broken by the Syrian regime’s thugs. As they finished the job they told Ali that his broken hands would prevent him from disrespecting their master through his cartoons. Ali Ferzat was lucky. He survived the beating and eventually found safe haven in another Middle Eastern country. His revenge was to live to draw again.The hue and cry over this attack that grew from the world’s journalists and cartoonists must have made an impression on Bashir al-Assad. This time, a beating wasn’t enough. This time he decided to “disappear” the cartoonist permanently.
Here are a couple of Akram Raslan cartoons that likely angered his murderers, from the Cartoonists Movement site …
