“After a year of appearing daily in a large American newspaper,” Griffith said, “I thought that was as weird as things were going to get for me. Little did I know they were going to get even stranger. Priaulx came out. I remember going to the meeting with a little list of things that I would require in order to work for them. And I had thought of the list as a way of not working for them: I was certain that they would never agree to these things. I said I have to keep my copyright. And I have to keep the larger format. I draw the strip out of proportion: it’s taller than any other strip. It’s not just that I want it to appear bigger proportionally: it’s drawn so that it has more headroom [for dialogue]. And I said, I can’t change that.”

“You can’t censor it,” Griffith continued, recalling his list of requirements. “You can’t edit it. You have to guarantee me a certain amount of money weekly because I’d be giving up my exclusive deal with the Examiner. I gave them a long list. I felt like I was taking hostages. And this guy sat across from me and said ‘Yes’ instantly to everything.”

As announced last week, Brian McFadden was tapped to be the featured regular cartoonist for the rework of the New York Times’ Week in Review. His first comic was entitled “The State of Unemployment” and appeared yesterday.

Michael Cavna interviewed Brian about the new arrangement:

“I’ve been given a lot of leeway,” says McFadden, whose online comics can be spiced with saltier language . “I was told what ‘Big Fat Whale’ comics the editors liked, and asked to do more stuff like that, but without swearing and keeping a wider, family audience in mind. In fact, this week’s comic went through the editing process without any changes.”

Because of that editing process, McFadden says he has to get script approval by midweek. “But that’s where weekly comics excel,” he says. “What they lack in immediacy, they make up for in exploring ideas in a deeper way, which I think is the goal of the Sunday Review.”

Stephanie McMillan’s work in the Sun-Sentinel/LA Times took the editorial cartooning in a newspaper with 100k+ circulation category.

Dwayne Booth (AKA Mr. Fish) took the category for 50k-100k circulation.

Mike Lester of the Rome News Tribune was the only non-altie (unless you define ‘altie’ by not having a Jeff MacNelly drawing style) who took the 1-50k circulation category.

And for the non-daily publication, the prize goes to Ruben Bolling for his feature Tom the Dancing Bug.

You can see samples of their work on the SPJ website.

This week’s edition of The Village Voice is their “The Comics Issue” containing 30 contributing artists to supplement the entire issue with comic frames, graphics and unique images. The issue focuses on the current state of cartooning.

Ward Sutton did the cover and Roy Edroso writes the article “If Cartoons Are So Big, Why Don’t They Pay?“

Why are you ending “Troubletown” now, after 22 years?
I have changed over 22 years, and the thrill is gone. Having to read so much news and opinion to stay on top of events is a grind that I would like to be free of.
It has nothing to do with the state of the industry though. I’ve been satisfied with my relationships with my newspapers and thrilled that I’ve had the readership I’ve had.

I’ve been quietly agitating for something like this for quite a while. These are difficult times for cartoonists, particularly those of us working in the subgenre of altweekly cartooning. The papers are still vital to my survival, and I’m grateful beyond measure to the many editors who continue to run my work in print each week – but the larger trend over the past few years has not exactly been encouraging. Too many papers have decided that they no longer have any use for this art form which grew in their stead, adapting itself entirely to their rhythms, and as that market contracts, there’s been no simultaneous expansion online. The niche that editorial cartoons filled in newspapers is almost entirely occupied by Daily Show clips online. Why do so few political sites feature political cartoons? Why did the Huffington Post, with verticals devoted to almost any topic you can imagine, never launch a comics section?

I’ve got a chance to help counter that trend, in some small way, at a site I’ve been reading since 2002. (I believe I actually sent Markos some of his earliest traffic, back-as absurd as it sounds now-when my little vanity site had the higher readership.) It’s an experiment for both of us, I think, but an exciting one. My cartoon will start running there next Monday. Over the next few months we’ll be adding others, and, I hope, building up a go-to destination for progressive cartoon commentary.

This is a rare creative animal who has thrived in roles both creative and corporate, even if he met the latter challenge kicking and screaming all the way home each day.

Kitchen-and his company, Kitchen Sink Press-were present at the birth of the underground comix movement in the 1960s and ’70s. He is responsibly for boosting the careers of talents as extremely different as Robert Crumb and Will Eisner-and everyone in-between.

Over the last year, Kitchen has been more productive than he has been in decades, co-authoring a retrospective of Harvey Kurtzman, the first editor of Mad magazine, called The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics, with Paul Buhle; a history of underground comix called Underground Classics: The Transformation of Comics into Comix, with James Danky; and producing a look back at his own career, The Oddly Compelling Art of Denis Kitchen, with text by Charles Brownstein.

And just yesterday, I saw a press release for an even newer collection of his work, Denis Kitchen’s Chipboard Sketchbook.

Or listen

Boing Boing is a popular aggregator of news and entertainment the describes itself as, “Media Culture Brainwash for Now People”

The Aronson award honors “journalism that measures business, governmental and social affairs against clear ideals of the common good.”