Your garden variety influenza kills hundreds if not thousands of people every year yet our mainstream media would have us think that 65 cases in the USA and 105 deaths in Mexico is cause to shut down the country.

The choices of the non-experts are valid and important – Millions of regular folks support cartoonists worldwide… It’s good to know what they consider worthwhile. It’s a perspective that working cartoonists would be wise to pay attention to…

I know state contests don’t have the glam of the National ones,
But whenever I was able to place in a State competition it meant something knowing I was going up against Masters like Jim Borgman and Mike Peters, and a syndicated cartoonist like Chip Bok. With Borgman retired -Peters cut back and Bok taking a buy-out that state award will now come close to being meaningless. What makes the award is who you’re up against and who you’re being Judged by. It would be interesting to see what a Judging panel of Oliphant and Ted Rall would select

It may be that one of the juries was influenced by the announcement that Steve had won one of the other awards.

More likely is the fact that the judges are the same kinds of people, and the same kinds of people tend to come to similar conclusions.

I judged one of the major awards this year (not one of these three), and I’m fairly certain that only a few other cartoonists would have reached the same decision as to the winner as I did. (I don’t think it’s been announced yet, so I won’t say anything more.)

Wanna control the outcome? Pick the judges. Consider the Pulitzers: year after year, stories come out of the Cartoon category about how the altie genre (which has been around since 1955 when Jules Feiffer invented it), is never given serious consideration. How could it be? By all accounts, the judges have never before *seen* a cartoon by Tom Tomorrow or Ruben Bolling. They’re sure not going to give one a Pulitzer. Pick a panel consisting of me, Tom and Ruben, on the other hand, and suddenly Jen Sorensen has a fighting chance.

I don’t begrudge judges their personal opinions and biases. They’re human; we all have them. But it’s absolutely insane to pick judges for any category that don’t come into it with a pre-existing, wide-ranging knowledge and deep familiarity with the work–all the work–going on in the field. A judge who doesn’t read Tom Tomorrow every week has no more business sitting on a Pulitzer panel than one who doesn’t read Steve Breen every week.

Sure, judging a cartoon is a subjective matter, I get that. But you argue that, “If you would have put another set of judges on that Pulitzer Committee, they would have found a different winner. It just so happens this group found Steve Breen to be the best.” Well, there was a different set of judges; they were judging the Overseas Press Club Award and the National Headliner Award.

But all three of these juries, independent from the other, came to the conclusion that Steve Breen’s work was the cream of the crop. That’s what I find odd. For one panel of judges to make a mistake, is expected. For three different juries to make a mistake is even understandable. But for three separate groups of judges to make the exact same mistake, to reach the same erroneous conclusion, is positively weird.

I do think Daryl Cagle had a great idea. If you’ve cut your editorial cartoonist position from your newspaper, you’re not qualified to judge editorial cartoons.
And if you’ve hired an editorial cartoonist to illustrate the editorial that appears in your newspaper, well … you’ve not yet mastered the definition of the role of an editorial cartoonist and you’re not fit to judge editorial cartoons in a contest. You might as well have asked a plumber to come judge the entries.
Judge the judges before they judge the cartoons.

Of course there are people who don’t enter, some people find awards not that important. Pulitzer Prize winners lose their jobs just like everyone else. A Pulitzer is not going to keep a beancounter from cutting your job. Ask Mike Ramirez.

This is one of those matters where transforming the AAEC into a trade guild might have a positive impact. No AAEC member should enter the Overseas Press Club’s contest until they reduce the entry fee to a level affordable by non-millionaires. Not only is the fee $175; the winner must travel to New York at his or her personal expense and pay to attend the OPC’s award banquet.

I can’t imagine how the people in charge of OPC can possibly live with themselves given the current economic climate for cartoonists and other journalists. They are despicable leeches.