CSotD: Playing catch-up, or not
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I came to this morning assuming there wouldn't be many editorial cartoons with anything new to say about the Paris attacks and there weren't, mostly because there wasn't much to say in the first place, and I think I pretty much touched on the best commentaries yesterday.
And there were some good ones.
Yesterday.
Funny how often the best stuff is first out of the blocks. Like one of those photo sessions where you take 400 photos in a grueling day and then end up using one of the first three.
Or like the suddenly-iconic Paris/Peace symbol, which was bang-zoom-brilliant.
As a side note, I do wish that, when a cartoonist advocates military retaliation, there would be a little box in the corner indicating whether (A) that cartoonist has served in the armed forces and (B) how many military-aged children he or she currently has.
I'm not against taking action, but we've already seen what happens when 20th century thinking is applied to 21st century conflict.
Einstein didn't actually say that thing about repeating the same action and expecting different results, nor does there appear to be a verified source for the quote about generals always preparing to fight the last war, but that doesn't mean they don't apply.
Yeah, sure: Perhaps if we poke the bear one more time …
But let's stick with that first-one-out-of-the-blocks thing, because, in going through my various editorial-cartooning links this morning, I was struck by the divide between cartoonists who responded instantly and those who stuck to their regular schedule and hadn't updated.
It may be the cartoonists, it may be their papers, but somebody hasn't gotten the message.
Speaking of 20th vs 21st century strategies.
Even in the days of print-only, we managed to saddle up when something major happened.
Well, most of the time.
I worked at one paper where it struck me soon after I got there that I'd never seen a newsroom where the editor didn't have a TV in his office, turned on but muted. I'd also been in several where there was one in the newsroom itself, turned on but muted.
That paper finally got a TV after they published Diana's death below the fold, while everyone else bannered it across the top.
Had they seen the wall-to-wall coverage that night, they'd have recognized the public interest in — if not the cosmic importance of — the story.
Page-One-Above-The-Fold is how you get them into the tent.
Though buried coverage is better than none at all. I worked at another place where they were apparently more determined to avoid a late press start than they should have been, because when Katrina's devastation was splashed over every other Page One in the known universe, they led with a piece about how the potential damage from the coming storm might impact gas prices.
But no overtime, so that's good. Don't want to be piling up overtime, do we? No, we don't!
I suppose there's no real hurry to throw another "We're so sad" or "Oooooh, we're gonna give ISIS such a pinch!" cartoon out there, but you have to say something and you have to say it now, not next Wednesday when your normal turn comes up.
Speaking of print
King Features has made a special comics insert available to papers today, commemorating its 100th anniversary. Papers could carry the whole 16-page shebang today, or, at their option, carry it in parts over succeeding weekends this month.
They got some coverage in the NYTimes and on NPR, but only that it's happening, not where.
I tried to find a list of participating newspapers, but KFS was reluctant to share client information and a Google news search turned up very little.
That doesn't mean papers aren't doing it, but they're probably promoting it with in-house ads rather than news stories.
I've heard that the Albany (NY) Times-Union will have it today, and possibly the Hartford (CT) Courant, and the Casa Grande (AZ) Dispatch will have it in two parts, starting next weekend.
I could go off on another rant about how newspapers only seem to promote comics to their existing subscriber base rather than using them to lure in new customers, but I've been on that one for nearly 20 years and I don't seem to have made a lot of impact.
If you have a print subscription, look through the inserts this morning before you pitch them into the recycling bin. And if you don't, you might scan the racks to see if any of the papers in your region are carrying it.
And saying so above the fold.
When you find a paper that has it, please let us all know in the comments. Even when it's too late to find it on the racks, people can still drop by the paper's office and buy it as a back-copy.
Some of my own catching up:
And speaking of timeliness, I meant to feature this earlier, but here it is now:
You should go back and read a week's worth of Sheldon, as Dave Kellett and his movie-making partner Fred Schroeder brainstormed a series of strips speculating on what would have happened if Shakespeare had had an agent.
Start here and then next-button your way forward.
And if it makes you laff, check out Kellett's collection of lit-based strips.
I like dumb jokes, but I don't mind a little intelligent humor thrown my direction once in a while.
Now here's your obvious but delightful moment of zen
(And your more obscure but also delightful variant moment)
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