CSotD: Good news plus worthy reading
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Some very good news from Cartoon Movement, a major resource for those who want an international view of things: The site has been awarded funding from the Google Digital News Initiative and, while Tjeerd Royaards doesn't specify the details of the grant itself, he outlines some solid improvements to the site that it will permit.
I will confess that I don't specifically mention Cartoon Movement each time I feature something that I found there, but, if you follow my links back (as I hope you do), you already know they lead to this primary source not just for single-panel international commentary but for longer, more in-depth pieces by graphic journalists like Kenya's Victor Ndula and this brilliant look at Brazil's homeless just before the Rio Olympics and World Cup celebrations.
As he says in the above-linked announcement, Royaards is looking forward to a site redesign and overall freshening. I am very supportive of his plans to make it easier for newspapers to purchase rights to cartoons, but hopeful that the system of voting on which cartoons to advance to the front page will remain largely in the hands of the subscribing artists.
It would be a shame to come up with a more "democratic" system that would enable it to be hijacked by random partisans of one viewpoint or another, rather than left as a measure of the approbation from other cartoonists.
Backseat driving aside, however, this is terrific news, particularly from this part of the globe, in which cartoonists have lost their staff positions and too many editors are tone-deaf functionaries who nitpick over copy-editing rules while missing the less quantifiable aspects of journalism, and, specifically, too often choose cartoons less by their artistry and more by their price tag.
And let me dance around the Prime Directive by specifying a disastrous blow to the art form without specifying the source.
It came some two decades ago, when an aggregator emerged who aggressively undercut the major syndicates but now asks for donations because — guess what? — you can't market editorial cartoons by operating like a street hawker selling counterfeit watches and pirated videotapes.
This is not some abstract philosophical theory: When I was doing a weekly feature on editorial cartoons, the editorial page editor gave me a handful of printouts and noted that they were about 25% of what we paid King Features and Universal for cartoons.
Fortunately, I was working from my budget, not his, so was able to smile politely and continue to pay a reasonable amount for the better-quality work that I used.
So I'm thrilled that this valuable resource is getting some major backing, but I'm assuming Royaards will re-do the site and smooth the operations with whatever Google has provided, but will otherwise behave as if Cartoon Movement hadn't any support at all, keeping both the quality and price of content at sustainable levels, not mistaking "growth" or "traffic" for "success."
And that any of my faithful readers who are not also his — theirs — will take a look over there and see what they've been missing.
Speaking as an American, we have always been a bit self-centered and tone-deaf, but at this moment in our history, we desperately need to hear voices that are, in the words of Shirley Chisolm, "Unbought and Unbossed."
Elsewhere in the Art Form
Sarah Laing (the New Zealand based author, poet, cartoonist, but not the American tax adviser) picked up on Nomi Kane's piece about living with Type-1 diabetes and blogged about her own day-to-day life with the disease, of which this is only a snippet. Go read the rest.
She covers a lot of ground in a relatively short space, with her usual combination of compassion and insight, an appealing voice which makes her come across as a rare bird indeed: A good friend who is very passionate but who somehow stays within the limits of things she actually understands.
It's a rare combination and particularly valued this time around, because I've got a granddaughter who has T1 diabetes, as well as a good friend my own age who is currently fighting a bureaucratic decision to cut the support for the drugs and equipment that have allowed her to become my own age.
Laing manages to combine the daily annoyances of her kids raiding her necessary candy stash with fury over the idea that Syrian kids are cut off from their meds, and that American diabetics might lose their coverage to partisan power-tripping.
More health-based cartooning
Meanwhile, Brian Fies is just back from this year's Graphic Medicine Conference, where he picked up a copy of "Taking Turns: Stories from HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371," a graphic memoir of the early days of the AIDS/HIV crisis by MK Czerwiec, a nurse who was there.
He reviews it here and, while my first reaction was that I needed to get a copy and write about it, too, I quickly realized that Brian is not only equally eloquent in general but, as author of Mom's Cancer and someone deeply involved in the graphics-and-medicine movement, would most certainly do a better job.
Which doesn't mean I don't want to read Czerwiec's book, just that I don't intend to post a lesser attempt at what Brian has already done well. Go read his take.
If you're old enough to remember the days when nobody knew what the hell was going on, this will be a chilling reminder. If you're not that old, it will be a good anchor for understanding.
And given the advances in AIDS treatment, it's a nice companion piece to the works of Sarah Laing and Nomi Kane on the topic of T1 diabetes, because one of my hopes — really more of an expectation — is that my granddaughter, who is on the verge of 10, will benefit from substantial changes in how we deal with that disease, in her lifetime and I hope mine.
Here's to Health:
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