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Steve Sack's Haunted House
is the most popular thing we've ever had on our site. We first
put it up back in 2000 and it crashed our servers as users racked
up page views hopping from room to room in the spooky house.
Click
on the front door to start your quest. The daily editorial cartoonist for MSNBC.com, Daryl Cagle, will discuss with words and artwork the sometimes seemingly irreverent and provocative role of editorial cartoonists in capturing and dissecting issues and events in politics. Mr. Cagle's recently published Big Book of Campaign 2008 Cartoons will be available for sale at the event and he will sign books following his presentation. The event is free and open to the public, but advance registration is required. Drawing Politics is part of the University of Virginia Center for Politics National Symposium Series of 2008, titled Not Taboo at Our Table! Race, Religion and Gender in American Politics. The Center for Politics launched the National Symposium Series in 1999 to explore current and relevant issues in American politics. For questions, contact Megan Davis at megandavis@virginia.edu or 434-243-3539. This event is co-sponsored by the University
of Virginia Center for Politics
and the University
of Virginia Miller Center of Public Affairs. We've got the best of the campaign from start to almost-finish, with Obama, McCain, Sarah Palin, the convention, Hillary Clinton and all those wonderful memories, like 3:00am phone calls, super-delegates and crazy preachers! We even have a chapter on John Edwards' affair! This book is a must have for every political
wonk! And you must have it now, while we're still obsessed with
the campaign! I have to thank our editor, Laura Norman, at Que Publishing, division of Pearson, for being so fast getting the book published and shipped to stores. We closed the book after we had a whole lot of cartoons for a chapter on Sarah Pain and her pregnant daughter, and we have the book in stores a month later, which is amazing for book distribution. Still, everyone is better off ordering from Amazon.com, where it is cheaper. You can even search inside the book on Amazon.com, which is pretty cool. Right now we're busy working on our regular, annual Best Political Cartoons of the Year book, which is due at the printer on the day after election day, and should be in stores the first week of December. These deadlines are why I'm not drawing as many cartoons as I should be right now. Sorry about that.
September 27, 2008 I'm asking for your help I'd like to ask our readers to help our cartoonists with an urgent problem. We are asking you to send an email on behalf of the cartoonists. The Senate just passed the "Orphan Works Bill," quickly, behind closed doors and without a vote, through a controversial practice known as "hotlining." The bill rewrites the copyright law in ways that are devastating to cartoonists, artists, writers, photographers and songwriters. The two artists organizations I'm active in, the National Cartoonists Society and the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, and dozens of other trade organizations, are urging their members to write to their congressmen at this hour, because there is a risk that the House will pass the Senate version of the bill, again without debate and without a vote, by adding it to a larger budget or bailout bill at the end of the current session, in the next few hours. The Orphan Works bill is being pushed by Google, which plans to catalogue millions of images and doesn't want to deal with the rights of copyright holders. The bill will make it easy for anyone to reprint copyrighted work, without the permission of the copyright holder, and artists will find that it is difficult or impossible to control where their work is reprinted. The bill also imposes new costs and procedures on artists, all to benefit Google. I'd like to ask everyone who reads my blog, or subscribes to my newsletter, to do the cartoonists a favor by emailing their congressman and asking him or her to oppose the Orphan Works Bill now, by visiting this web site, which helps you to send an automatic email to your congressman. It is quick and easy to send this email, and it would be much appreciated by the desperate cartoonists. To learn more about the Orphan Works Bill, visit here. I've never asked my readers for help before. I'd really appreciate your help now. Many thanks,
One of our good foreign customers wrote to me, and to a batch of top international cartoonists asking them what they thought the future of editorial cartooning would be. Here is my response: I disagree with most of my cartoonist colleagues on this - most cartoonists view the future creatively, arguing that there will be more animation in cartoons and more cartoons created to take advantage of the interactivity of the internet. I disagree, because I also run a syndicate and I see no trend for web customers to be willing to pay for interactive or animated cartoons. This is just cartoonists describing what they hope will happen. The big change I see happening is the decline of big newspapers, and an increase in small clients, free weekly newspapers and non-traditional clients who would not buy cartoons before, because the process was too difficult or expensive. As the big publishers die off and cut back, we pick up new small web sites, newsletters, weeklies and foreign publications, which wouldn't have found us before, if not for the internet. The future is not a change in the nature of cartoons, which remain popular in their current, static form, it is a change in distribution of cartoons to more clients, smaller clients, and more obscure clients in more faraway places, as publications become smaller and more numerous, as more people become easier to reach and as more people around the world have interests in the same issues.
You say you update the cartoons "every day" but I see lots of the same cartoons are up now that were there yesterday. What's up with that? The fact that we update the cartoons everyday doesn't mean that each cartoonist draws a new cartoon every day. Most editorial cartoonists draw between three and five cartoons per week, some draw once a week. Some draw six times a week. Some draw local cartoons some days, that they don't send to us. Some take vacations. On the busiest days of the week we update the site with 100 new cartoons per day there are 175 cartoonist slots on the site. Why can't you set up your site so that I don't have to look at those same cartoons that I saw yesterday? I want to see only the new cartoons. Look at our RSS feeds which feature only the newly updated cartoons at the top of each page. Where are your RSS feeds? Go to our daily updating cartoons pages and click on the orange button to the left of any cartoonist's name, or scroll to the bottom to click on the RSS feeds for batches of artists. We can't include all of the cartoons in one RSS feed because the pages are too long with 100 new cartoons on busy days. Why don't you make the cartoons in your RSS feeds full sized? I have to click on each cartoon to be able to read it. That's so that you have to look at an ad and we don't go broke. I have a great idea for a cartoon! Want to hear it? No. I have lots of great ideas for cartoons, but I can't draw. Can you tell me which editorial cartoonist I should contact to draw my cartoons? I don't know any editorial cartoonists who work with gag writers. I would like to have a cartoon logo drawn for my business and I like your style. Could you do that for me? I can't afford to pay any more than $50. No. I have to write a paper about an editorial cartoon and I picked yours. Can you tell me what it means? Please tell me right away because my paper is due tomorrow. Sorry, I get too many requests like this. I have to let the cartoons speak for themselves. Besides, you're supposed to be following the news and the meaning of the cartoon should be obvious to you if it is not, then it wasn't a good cartoon. Would you like to: Enlarge your penis? Get cheap drugs? Refinance? Help us move millions of dollars from a foreign dignitary's bank account? No. No. No. No. May I run your cartoon in my blog? If you are on Myspace.com, yes, go to any cartoon on caglepost.com's cartoon ticker page, click on the thumbnail image for any cartoon, then click on the Myspace.com link to put the cartoon on Myspace.com. If you are not on Myspace.com, you can post any of our caglecartoons.com cartoons on your blog for a nominal fee, just visit Politicalcartoons.com. We may do a Facebook application in the future. May I use your cartoon for my class at school? Yes. In fact, "in-classroom" use is one of the "Fair Use" exceptions to the copyright law. You can use any copyrighted materials you want in the classroom without asking. May I post your cartoon on my high school class web site? Or in my school newspaper? Or on posters at school? No, unless you want to pay the nominal fee on politicalcartoons.com ($3 for school use). These school uses are not "in-classroom." Why don't you let us use your cartoons for free in schools? We tried that, but we found that letting people download free, high-resolution cartoons on Politicalcartoons.com was a bandwidth hole. Suddenly everybody was saying they wanted cartoons for schools and our bandwidth went through the roof. When we put a $3 fee up for schools the bandwidth bleeding stopped. I have to write a paper on the career
I want to go into and I chose cartooning. Please tell me: 1) Cartoonists make anything between $0 per year and $50,000,000 per year just like actors, musicians and basketball players. And, like actors, musicians and basketball players, most cartoonists make closer to $0 than $50,000,000. 2) No education is required, only quality of work and some business acumen but that is true of most careers. Education is very important and it is unusual for anyone to be successful without a good education. 3) All my life. Some cartoonists brag about drawing quickly; I think this diminishes the value of their work in the eyes of their editors and readers. Good cartoonists think about their work all the time and spend a lit of time working to improve. 4) I started as a general illustrator, and then worked as a cartoon illustrator, then I worked as a toy inventor, I did a syndicated cartoon, then editorial cartoons. I drew other people's characters in other people's styles, working on projects for others before my career got to the point that I could draw as I wanted. Why don't you have any conservative cartoonists on your site? We have a lot, but conservatives, like you conservatives notice the cartoons you disagree with more than the others. It is an optical illusion for you. When are you going to stop bashing President Bush? Be patient. It won't be long. I can't cancel my newsletter subscription! What do I do to make it stop? Most people who can't cancel are replying to the email with a note asking to cancel we don't get these replies. To cancel you have to click on the unsubscribe link in the newsletter, or go to our newsletter subscriptions page and follow the instructions. Another problem is with people who have the newsletter forwarded from another email address there is no way for us to know that, and clicking on the unsubscribe link won't make any change to a different email address. If you are flummoxed, email us. I tried to subscribe to your newsletters, but I don't get anything! What's wrong? You probably have an email account with a company like Earthlink, which does "whitelisting" that is, these providers send an email reply to us, asking us to confirm that we are a real person who wants to send an email. This is a method of preventing spam. We don't respond to the "whitelisting" replies. Your only solution is to try subscribing from another free email service, like Yahoo, Google or Hotmail, which doesn't do "whitelisting." You might have a spam filter - take a look at your blocked emails and approve us as a sender. I was getting your newsletters, but they suddenly stopped. What's wrong? If we get the email bounced back from your email address a couple of times, your subscription is automatically cancelled. You may have had technical problems with your email, or you may have had a full mailbox. You need to go to our newsletter subscription page and resubscribe. Another problem is spam filters. You might have a new spam filter, or a new setting on your spam filter - take a look at your blocked emails and approve us as a sender. I was getting your newsletters fine for a while, and now I don't see the images in the newsletter they are all broken image links? What's wrong? Some email services, like Hotmail, will occasionally ask you to approve images from senders and will block the images in an email from displaying until you approve the images from us, or any other sender. This is to prevent users from accidentally seeing pornography in a spam email. Just approve us for image display in your email program. I want you to syndicate my cartoons. Will you look at my samples? No, sorry. We get too many requests from aspiring cartoonists and just don't have the resources to deal with unsolicited submissions. Also, we have had bad experiences with angry amateur cartoonists who won't take "no" for an answer and now we are skittish. Your site is slow! No it's not! The problem is on your end, or in between you and our server Microsoft serves the Cagle.MSNBC.com site it is like getting electricity from the utility. We can blast as much bandwidth as all of MSNBC.com. Our cartoons are bandwidth heavy compared to other sites that are mostly text, so our pages will naturally take longer to load. But, if you're complaining about Polticalcartoons.com or Caglepost.com, we serve those sites outside of MSNBC.com, and yes, sometimes we have too much traffic. We're upgrading from two servers to four and we should be speedy all the time with our new load balancing. We're working on it and we apologize for any hassles.
I get occasional requests from readers to explain the nuts and bolts of how I draw my cartoons, and to show my rough sketches. Here are three examples. First I do a rough sketch in hard pencil on 11" by 17" paper. I like the extra hard pencils because they encourge me not to spend too much time on the rough - the hard pencil keeps me from rendering, which I tend to want to do. If I don't like how a sketch is going, I'll throw it out and start a new one, rather than trying to repair the sketch. These are pretty fast.
Then I draw the finished line art by tracing over the rough. I use Duralene paper, which is a plastic drafting vellum that has a way of gripping the pencil that I find pleasing. I do my finished line art with either a hard #5 pencil if I'm feeling too loose, or a yellow #2 office pencil if I'm feeling too stiff.
Most newspapers run the black and white artwork. I usually don't like the look of tone in my cartoons, so I'll do cross hatching and blacks to give the lines some substance on the page. This drawing is the same 11" by 17" size. Here's another rough. It is the same thing, hard pencil on tabloid size paper.
Then I trace it in pencil on drafting vellum, adding cross hatching tones and blacks.
And I'll usually color the cartoon in Photoshop, depending on how much time I have. Only a few newspapers run color on their Op-Ed pages, but color is nice on the web site.
Here's another one. I'm including this one because the rough is a little messier.
This one is about as complex as I like to get in a cartoon. I think cartoons are stronger with only one or two big characters filling the space. Cartoons are better with fewer words too, and this cartoon is a little weak, but it made a point that I haven't seen made in other cartoons so I went with it. Here it is below, in pencil on the drafting vellum, with some hatching for tone to give it some substance on the page, as most readers will see it.
And here it is with some quick Photoshop color.
I usually try to use light, pastel colors, because that is what editors ask for. The light pastels look best in lousy newspaper printing where colors tend to muddy up and darken. Earth tones are always a gamble in newspapers; there is no way of knowing if a brown will lean to red or to blue. Unfortunately, the light, pastel, compromise newspaper colors tend to look a bit unsophiscated on the web - I regret that, but I don't have a good solution for it.
September 12, 2008 Zapiro Rape Cartoon Controversy
Quotes from Jonathan:
September 9, 2008 I am "mean spirited" Here, the editor of the
Hattiesburg American explains
their newspaper's decision to run my "mean spirited"
Palin cartoon (even though the cartoon is
just awful) in the face of angry reader reaction. I'm constantly being asked why there are so few women that are editorial cartoonists. I don't have a good answer for that. One of the few female cartoonists on our site, altie cartoonist Jen Sorensen, wrote an excellent column on the topic for Campus Progress and has graciously allowed us to reprint it here.
We just added three new cartoonists to the site. Actually, they are three old cartoonists who are coming back after some time away. The first is Brian Duffy of the Des
Moines Register. Brian is one of only two cartoonists whose color
cartoons appear every day on the front page of a large metropolitcan
daily newspaper (the other is Corky Trinidad of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin).
Welcome back, Brian! Click to see more of Brian's work. Next is Jonathan Shapiro, the mega award-winning
cartoonist from South Africa who draws under the name "Zapiro."
Jonathan was the winner of the Cartoonists Rights Network's courage
in Editorial Cartoonists Award for drawing in the face of threats
to his safety. Click to see more of Zapiro's work.
But it wasn't long ago when we started
the primary season, and the media went from blanket coverage
of the Iowa Caucuses to the New Hampshire Primary. Then there was the time that the heat was on Karl Rove over his role in outing Valerie Plame, and Rove was saved from media attention by President Bush announcing a Supreme Court nominee, and then everyone lost interest in Rove. Yes, the same fickle media.
The fickle media never changes over
the years - but they sure are easy to draw. My book publisher (Que/Pearson Education)
liked it too, and it will also be the cover of our upcoming BIG
Book of Campaign 2008 Cartoons, which is slated to be in stores
in a month. Today, my loyal assistant, Stacey, and I did an urgent,
last minute edit to fit more Palin cartoons into the book. Republicans operatives are screaming
that Sarah Palin's family is off limits and the media should
lay off; even Barack Obama agrees. What they don't seem to realize
is that by saying that, they are only encouraging the cartoonists
to draw more. We just put up a Palin's pregnant daughter collection; we'll
keep updating it as new cartoons flood in. Here are some of my
favorites, by Peter Nicholson, Nate Beeler, Mr. Fish and Pat Bagley.
Borgman Retiring The editorial cartoonist community is buzzing with the news that Jim Borgman will be retiring from editorial cartooning at the end of the month. Borgman draws the comic strip "Zits" with Jerry Scott; it looks like a lot of work to hold down both jobs, so the decision doesn't seem surprising. Borgman took a buyout from the shrinking Enquirer and will draw a new, local weekly cartoon for the newspaper as a freelancer. We have comments in the blog now and quite a spirited discussion on my pregnant Bristol Palin cartoon below. It is fascinating to see the outrage from the conservatives over my choice to depict the pregnant teen in a cartoon. I would remind the righties that it was Sarah Palin who chose to put her family in front of the camera and who has been so vocal in her opposition to birth control and sex education in schools; the abstinence-only sex education that she supports doesn't work, and the pregnant teenage daughter she chose to have stand behind her on stage illustrates the point.
SARAH PALIN'S PREGNANT DAUGHTER I've been getting an interesting response from editors to my cartoon that features Sarah Palin's pregnant daughter. Conservative editors write to me in disgust, saying that I was "over the line" by drawing the girl; liberal editors are writing to me to say "right on!" and "finally! Great cartoon!" I can't remember getting a response like this from editors before, so I thought I would post the cartoon here for comment. Click here to comment on the cartoon. Of-course, the cartoon isn't about the daughter, it is about the Palin's opposition to birth control and sex education in schools, and her "abstinence only" stance. Social conservatives like to make the point that "abstinence" as birth control "always works," but realists can see that "abstinence-only" sex education works only as well as it did with Palin's daughter.
NEW CAGLE CARTOONIST! I'm pleased to announce that we have added a new cartoonist to our newspaper syndication package, David Fitzsimmons of the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson. I've been a fan of David's work for a long time on our site. He draws the gag cartoons that editors prefer (David is a stand-up comedian) and his cartoons have a real, toothy bite! Some samples are below. See David's archive on our site here.
CLICK
HERE TO GO TO THE May through August 2008, CAGLE WEB LOG
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My buddy,
My buddy,
Wanted: Female Cartoonist
And next is
Sepideh Amjarooz, a rare woman editorial cartoonist from Iran
(where our web site is blocked by the government). Sepideh has
a charming style which is very different that what our Western
eyes expect. She didn't update her cartoons for a while, and
we dropped her slot, then she wrote to say, "put me back
up!" and that's what we're doing. 
The first
presidential debate is going to be held at the University of
Mississippi, which hired me to do an illustration for the event
- here it is on their current "Ole Miss" magazine cover.
They will be using it for other stuff associated with the debate
too, probably the programs or a poster or something. It would
be fun if they would blow it up big as a backdrop (somehow I
doubt that they'll do that, but thanks, Ole Miss!)
