Daryl Cagle, creator of Cagle Cartoons and MSN editorial cartoonist writes a rebuttal to a piece published in the Huffington Post about “Ten Features That Are Dying with your Newspaper” which includes, according to the author, editorial cartooning.
Editorial cartoons have never been more popular. With the Web in addition to newspapers, political cartoonists now have the largest audience they have ever had. Political cartoons are featured on state mandated testing in high schools in every state and teachers teach to the tests, creating new fans of our art form every year. The work being done by editorial cartoonists now is better than ever before.
Does Cagle really believe that? A mid-size newspaper will bring an editorial cartoonist a potential audience of 50,000 readers. One would be hard pressed to find editorial cartoonists who have that kind of online readership.
Even if by some stretch of the imagination Cagle is right that more people than ever before read editorial cartoons, cartoonists’ pocketbooks aren’t seeing anything from it. Cagle has done a good job at bringing more editorial cartoonists online, but that and the penny ante syndication that’s come with it have only helped to reduce the value of editorial cartoonists.
Only Daryl can speak for Daryl, but you have to understand where he’s coming from. As the creator of his own online web syndicate he has a vested interest in defending the art of editorial cartooning and doing what he can to promote and sustain editorial cartooning on the web, and I don’t think he’s wrong.
“Cagle has done a good job at bringing more editorial cartoonists online, but that and the penny ante syndication thatâ??s come with it have only helped to reduce the value of editorial cartoonists.”
If you are trying to say that Daryl’s syndicate has some how single handedly reduced the value of cartoons you are terrible misinformed. Daryl did not lower the value of cartoons, newspaper editors and the other syndicates did.
Daryl’s syndicate is less than 10 years old and the prices and structure of packaging were set long ago by the other older established syndicates like United, Universal, Creators and Copley. Daryl simply followed what the others had set. Where Daryl had a selling advantage was he began to e-mail the cartoons to clients when the others were still snail mailing them.
Newspaper editors are the problem and always have been. Simply put, editors don’t care about comic strips or editorial cartoons. They want to pay the least amount for them as they possibly can. They look at them as nothing more than space filler. If you think you work is viewed by editors as more than that then you are delusional.
Plus it’s easy to take issue with the huffpost on almost any issue … it’s like the National Enquirer of the blogasphere.
Popular doesn’t mean paid. There are still a lot of political cartoonist losing jobs because of declining newspapers. It’ll be hard to keep the dedicated – quality cartoonist with no paychecks.
Daryl has helped reduce the value of editorial cartooning. He’s not doing it single handily, he’s getting a lot of help. I’m guilty of reducing the value of editorial cartooning. If your work is out there for free, or cheap, you’re reducing the value of the art form.