I would correct Mike (or, more accurately, the salesman Mike quoted) on my marital status. I am not married to Ann Telnaes (a fact for which Ann is quite grateful, I’m sure). I am, instead, the lucky husband of the beautiful and talented Cindy Procious- a former editorial cartoonist, now oil painter extraordinaire.

Clay

Exactly the point I was trying to get across. This is the essence of creativity, as opposed to perceived security homogenized work that permeates the profession. It’s this crutch of sameness that has helped lead to our own demise. Sorry if that upsets some folks here, but unless you face a problem, there’s no hope of resolving it. And this problem has the entire art form on it’s death bed, as far as traditional editorial cartooning goes.

But political satire will, and is, finding alternative outlets. The trick is to be able to make a living at it in the same vein as we had in the past with newspapers.

Clay Bennett’s cartoons are among the wickedest in the art form because he doesn’t go at his targets with an ax and he doesn’t mistake rudeness or crudeness for “honesty.”

Part of it is style — like Ann Telnaes, Bennett has a deceptively smooth style that doesn’t shriek “attitude,” though of course her approach is far more direct and confrontational. But in both cases, you tend to approach those simple, smooth lines as if you were walking into a kid’s cartoon.

(Incidentally, I was once at a national conference where a fellow selling educational material about political cartoons told me that Ann and Clay were married. This did not induce me to buy his product, but it certainly set me to dreaming about what their children would end up drawing.)

From my personal experience Mr. Wood is correct. I do live caricature for a living. Caricature is supposed to be an art form where you collect anatomical and personal details and create a drawing that summarizes these details. Instead nearly everyone thinks caricatures are supposed to be cute cartoony drawings with big toothy grins. You pick your battles and figure out how far you can take things. If you have any desire to preserve your artistic integrity you learn to be subversive. You learn to do drawings that look cute but still slip in some actual caricature. If you fail to give people the cute crap they want you’ll be financially hurting. Especially now.

Similarly editors want cute entertaining crap. Give them the crap they demand and slip things in. Subversion is fun and challenging. Once you get good at it you’ll be surprised how much you can slip in.

The reason I dislike a lot of these entertainment oriented cartoonists is because they don’t change. Sloppy artwork and similar jokes.

Mr. Rall I respect you, and over the past few months I’ve come to respect a lot of the cartoonists here. I’m politely posing this question to everyone, but specifically to Mr. Rall because of how he announced he should write Time magazine. Honest to god aside from other cartoonists who cares what any of us think? If enough people actually cared you wouldn’t be in this situation creatively or financially in the first place.

I think whatever message there is should be slyly carried under the entertainment. Engage, entertain, THEN spread the meme.

Similarly, many of the movies made under the Hays Code had to hide the sex talk in clever dialogue, and were better for it. The racehorse discussion in Double Endemnity being a classic example.

This also reminds me of an interview with the lyricist for AC/DC wherein he claimed that their lyrics were more clever at hiding the sex talk than other less talented bands. Sink the Pink?

This doesn’t work, because the online paradigm and the support of advertisers has not been worked out yet. The problem there is, the internet started out as an “everything is free” ideology. And while it looks certain that everything is in fact moving online, until the advertising dollars are there, it just won’t work.

Unless you want to work for free – which I, for one, am not prepared to do.

If you work for a newspaper, freelance or full-time staff, don’t kid yourself into believing that advertising dollars are not what pays you.

Newspapers are dying. Magazines are dying. Editorial cartooning is fine.

Discussions about style and quality are good — it keeps the art form fresh and relevant.

It’s either this or we all go to business school … (~shiver~)…

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