Our regular readers will remember Peter
Kuper, whose very tall "Topsy Turvy" strip ran
as a weekly feature in the New York Daily News. Regrettably,
Topsy Turvy is no longer around and we haven't seen much of Peter
on our site in recent months, although he has been quite busy,
doing "Spy vs. Spy" for Mad Magazine among other things.
Peter sent me a cool Flash animation
that you can see by clicking here.
The Richie Bush comic book cartoon, is kind of like a movie poster
for the video. We debated a bit before posting this, because
our site is rated "PG13" and Peter's video is ... well
... rated "R". But he doesn't use any words that we
haven't seen used elsewhere on Slate, so here goes. Come on!
Visit the cool video. Click
here to e-mail Peter.
YAHTZEE BITES DARYL
I usually do pretty well at avoiding Yahtzees, but not this week
when I drew the NBA logo. It is a safe bet that if a logo can
apply to a story in the news, that at least five cartoonists
will draw the logo and leave us all with a CBS black eye.
OK, I admit it. I'm lucky.
I work in an extremely topic-rich environment, drawing political
cartoons in Sacramento, the capital of California. And having,
literally, a comic book figure as governor has been a dream come
true.
During California's recall
election I found myself having a strange need to catch up on
old Terminator movies and draw cartoons with things blowing up
in them. Indeed, the Schwarzenegger administration has become
quite the muse for me. (Think about those two words together
for a second, Schwarzenegger administration. It still kills me!)
This remarkable situation
seemed to call for something special, and with much encouragement
(prodding) from my editor, "Caleeforneeya" was born.
Just like with a good news or editorial series, "Caleeforneeya"
would be ongoing feature, allowing me to establish a narrative
that could adapt as California politics evolved under this unique
administration. The best part was that I had this trove of material.
Movie metaphors, ordinarily so boring, seemed to fit in perfectly.
"Caleeforneeya"
is still a work in progress and the creative pressures associated
with producing this feature are different from the daily cartoon.
Crafting an episode, though, is like cross training different
brain muscles for me, and that alone could to be reason enough
to see where this whole thing goes.
ANDY SINGER'S SPITEFUL CARTOON
Andy Singer sent me this screed on his "spiteful" cartoon.
There is a current in American
culture that celebrates stupidity. We love Homer Simpson, Beevis
and Butthead, or any number of sitcom comedians who portray "loveable
but incompetent" characters. In a certain way, we hold them
up as ideals. This current in American Culture has always existed
(in shows like The Honeymooners or 3 stooges) but it appears
to be getting more pervasive. Intelligence, creativity or craftiness
(like Bugs Bunny, or Calvin and Hobbes) seems more scarce. In
serious "Drama" we worship gangsters (Sopranos, God
Father movies, Gangster Rap).
So stupidity and brute force
seem to be the growing ideals. By contrast, being "Smart"
in school, work or politics is often looked down upon by other
kids, coworkers or the public. People loved Clinton for his buffoonish
qualities as much as his intelligence (the fact that he guzzled
burgers at fast food joints, for example). In addition to religious
fundamentalism, I think the love of GW Bush is partially rooted
in this idea of celebrating stupidity or incompetency.
I find the strip "Pluggers"
to be about the same thing-celebrating overweight, TV-watching,
bone-headed Americanisms. As such, I find it painfully inane
and culturally destructive. It's immense popularity reinforces
this negative trend in our culture. While I realize it is meant
as a "Whimsical, audience participatory cartoon that pokes
gentle fun at our foibles", it is part of a larger trend
that often highlights and lionizes our worst qualities, rather
than our best. ...but I'll readily admit the cartoon is negative
and spiteful.
Mention a career in cartooning and visions of comic-strip artists
basking in studios in Carmel or Boca Raton come to mind. But
in the world of editorial cartooning mention an opening, and
a job-seeking cartoonist wonders if it might mean a move to Wichita,
Duluth or Mobile, maybe lasting decades.
It is a seldom-discussed downside to an interesting profession.
But geographic relocation is a major fact of life in editorial
cartooning, and with scarce opportunities one must often go where
the job opening is. And with such scarce opportunities, along
with heavy competition for any opening, one might be facing 10
years, or 20 or 30, in some location one might never choose if
not for the job. If you're from Virginia or North Carolina and
the opportunity is in Charlotte, that's not bad. But what if
the opening is in Scranton?
Dennis Draughon
has been dealing with that specific situation. "I came for
the Scranton Times job," he said. "It was hard on me
initially: no family, no friends, etc. I remember the first week
I moved up here I had no bed for my new apartment and the furnace
went out during a freak cold snap while the landlord was in Florida
for the week. At night I huddled in my bedroom in my sleeping
bag, on top of some padded moving blankets, with an electric
space heater nearby and my two cats laying on top of me for warmth.
Welcome to the Northeast!"
When asked, "At the end of the work week, you're still in
Scranton . . . Does that feel OK?" Draughon replied, "Yes,
for the most part. I have now lived here longer than I did in
Raleigh, I met my wife here, my kids were born here, etc. So
I guess you could say it feels like home. . . . I originally
thought that Scranton was way too parochial for me, but I have
learned to accept and enjoy its small-town charms."
But could he see himself in Scranton for decades, maybe the rest
of his career? "Call me crazy, but yes, I could see myself
here for decades given a couple of factors," Draughon said.
"With the lack of opportunities and a continually shrinking
market for our craft, I would consider myself lucky to be employed
anywhere doing editorial cartoons for the rest of my career.
Despite instances of censorship I experience, at least they value
the century-old tradition of having a full-time staff editorial
cartoonist at the Scranton Times, and that speaks volumes for
a paper of this size with a circulation around 60,000."
And the pangs for a faraway hometown? "Although my heart
will always belong to the Old Dominion and the Tar Heel state,
I have come to love this corner of the state of Pennsylvania
almost as much as a native could," he said.
Before he hit the big time, the
joke in Seattle was that Mike Luckovich of suburban Edmonds would
"hold a mirror to the nostrils" of then-Seattle Times
staff cartoonist Brian Bassett in hopes the job might suddenly
open up. Many years and a Pulitzer Prize later, Luckovich was
at the Atlanta Constitution when the Seattle Times job did open.
The Times favored Luckovich's work and ran it almost daily via
faxed copies during the interim the job was open. But when the
dust settled and a new hire was made, his name was Britt,
not Luckovich.
What happened? Well, the Atlanta Constitution loved Luckovich
and treated him very, very well. The Seattle Times was not willing
to match the Constitution's pay. And despite the obvious appeal
of "coming home," he chose to stay put. "I'm treated
well. My kids were born here, they're Atlanta natives. And this
is home now," Luckovich said shortly after he declined the
Times' offer.
Speaking of Chris
Britt, this is a cartoonist with a lot of mileage on his
U-Haul, having relocated again and again, from Sacramento to
Houston to Tacoma to Seattle to Springfield, Ill., where he is
currently staff editorial cartoonist with the State Journal-Register.
He bailed out of the Sacramento Union and the Houston Post shortly
before those papers died.
Has moving so many times been hard on him? "Not really,"
Britt said. "We put down roots easily and I make friends
at the newspapers quickly."
He did acknowledge the process was a bit harder on his wife,
whom he met in Sacramento. "She was the one staying behind
to deal with the movers. And she had some trouble [in the Midwest]
breaking into the circles or cliques people tend to be in, but
she's making friends now." He admits he misses the West
and its mountains, particularly around Tacoma. (During his ill-fated
short tenure with the Seattle Times, he commuted the 30-odd miles
from Tacoma.) "The Midwest is full of flat cornfields,"
Britt said, "and it took a while to appreciate the beauty
of the area. But it's kid-friendly." Speaking somewhat wistfully
yet pragmatically about the Pacific Northwest, he described it
as "a plane ride away."
Another editorial cartoonist with plenty of moves under his belt
is Scott
Stantis. A native Californian now in Alabama with the Birmingham
News, he has also drawn for the Orange County Register, Memphis
Commercial Appeal, Arizona Republic and Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Press, filling in the gaps with the comic strip The Buckets.
When asked if the quest for the full-time editorial cartooning
job was the only reason to have made so many moves, Stantis bluntly
said, "Yes."
Is it hard to pick up and relocate again and again? "It's
never 'easy' to get into the groove of any local politics,"
Stantis said. "There are subtle nuances in every locale.
But a staff cartoonist has an invaluable resource in the newspaper
staff of reporters. Particularly the older ones have an institutional
memory that is important to mine.
"My wife and I are both native Southern Californians,"
he added. "I would very much like to return to the Southland.
But not at any cost. I love it here at the Birmingham News. They
treat me well and my work has impact here. Surprisingly, I feel
very at home here."
Stantis can even see himself in Birmingham for decades, maybe
the rest of his career. "It's a great place to work and
live. I just put a pool in the backyard and built a ramada and
landscaped. I now live in a house that would go for $600,000
out West."
Steve Benson's
career moves, ironically, led to relocations for both Britt and
Stantis. A son of the West (California, Utah and Texas) and a
grandson of Mormon Church President Ezra Taft Benson, Steve was
well-ensconced at the Arizona Republic in Phoenix, an area with
a significant Mormon population. But his youngest son was suffering
from asthma, and they decided that perhaps a cooler and wetter
climate might be better for the boy.
The syndicated and talented Benson soon became the staff editorial
cartoonist at the Tacoma News Tribune, and the Republic eventually
filled its vacancy with Stantis.
"Unfortunately," Benson said, "my son became even
worse from the cold and damp!" Since Phoenix was apparently
better for his son and the Republic had been so supportive of
Benson, he let the paper know he had an interest in returning,
a very rare feat. In short order Stantis was let go and Benson
welcomed back. Tacoma eventually tapped Britt to replace Benson.
With a Pulitzer earned not long after his return, Benson could
pick and choose almost anywhere he might want to live. Would
he move? "I've had offers," he said, but acknowledged
that "some of those offers might not stand up anymore"
as his politics have shifted leftward in recent years. "Anyhow,
I'm comfortable here with the culture, and acclimated to the
West."
Not every cartoonist moves as widely as Britt and Stantis. In
my own case, I've deliberately limited my moves to the Pacific
Coast, including a move to Seattle but mostly within my native
California. I've had shots at dailies in Wisconsin, New York
and Colorado but decided that I had no real desire to spend decades
in some place thousands of miles from family and friends, freezing
in the winter (as a Los Angeles native, I don't freeze well)
and trying to care about the politics and history of some city
that would mean nothing to me, save for the job.
At the Seattle Post-Intelligencer I was deep in the shadows of
staffer David
Horsey, and my job entailed news graphics more than editorial
cartoons. Despite the great charms of the region, I found myself
missing family and always feeling homesick for warmer, sunnier
California, so in early 2000 I bailed out for the Golden State.
I chose the San Francisco Bay Area as a place I greatly liked
where I also had some family, and I used my graphics/cartooning
skills combo to land at the Marin Independent Journal, essentially
forcing a graphics opening there into a graphics-with-cartoons-on-the-side
job. After a couple years the editor stopped supporting the cartooning
and I decided to move back to Southern Cal for a graphics-with-lots-more-cartoons-on-the-side
job in Ventura, not far from my parents and sister, with the
desire to be near aging parents an important factor.
Could I have done better with my career had I moved further away
for a full-time cartooning position? Probably; it's frustrating
to subordinate the cartoons to graphics assignments. (My predecessor
here, John
Sherffius, left this job and the glorious Ventura County
weather for muggy St. Louis, which offered him a full-time editorial
cartooning job.) But am I better off, at least emotionally, being
in a place I like and nearer friends and family? Probably, in
my case.
Having a special niche can also dictate geographic decisions.
Lalo Lopez Alcaraz,
a contributor of Hispanic-flavored editorial cartoons to L.A.
Weekly, flatly said, "I am never moving from L.A. I've carved
out a niche in L.A. and nationally through syndication and my
Latino base." He added another observation: "Not that
some paper in Metropolis will offer me a job in their far-flung,
big-city paper."
He may not need to, anyway. Alcaraz recently solidified his ties
to L.A. by launching a new syndicated strip, La Cucaracha, which
is now in the Los Angeles Times, among other papers.
Can a cartoonist hit the big
time and still live where he wants? Well, sort of, if he's big
enough, which usually involves a Pulitzer. Bill Mauldin was with
the Chicago Sun-Times; one story has it he ran afoul of the cops
and the political machine there and was advised to stay out of
town for his own sake. A New Mexico native, Mauldin was homesick
anyway, so he now had an excuse to return home, sending facsimilies
of his cartoons to the newspaper (via the teletypes that handled
AP photos in the pre-computer days). His local colleague, multiple
Pulitzer Prize winner Jeff MacNelly with the Chicago Tribune,
never left the comfort of his home state of Virginia, save for
occasional visits to the Windy City to meet with Tribune editors.
Doug Marlette
didn't want to leave his home turf in North Carolina. He'd won
a Pulitzer for work with the Charlotte Observer and the Atlanta
Constitution, but Newsday in New York wanted him, and it was
a big, ambitious paper.
Atlanta was still the South, but Noo Yawk was too distant, too
cold, too loud and too uncomfortable for Marlette, and his Pulitzer
gave him the clout to live where he wanted: North Carolina. The
arrangement worked for several years, but eventually Newsday's
editors grew irritated with his failure to live near where he
worked, and they and Marlette finally called it quits by mutual
consent in late 2000.
In summer 2002, Marlette became the first-ever staff editorial
cartoonist for the Tallahassee Democrat (he had attended Florida
State University in Tallahassee) in a cushy arrangement where
he would contribute two cartoons a week while still living in
North Carolina and only occasionally visiting Tallahassee.
Sometimes geographic desire and opportunity do work out. David
Horsey has lived in Seattle since he was two years old and began
making a name for himself in town cartooning at the University
of Washington before he became the staff cartoonist for the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer. Even before he won the Pulitzer Prize in
1999-and especially after-he was seen as hometown-boy-made-good,
and it seemed that even the average Seattle citizen could reel
off the names of his wife and kids and recite which schools he
had attended.
"What's great about doing my work in the town I grew up
in is that I know the history, the style, the quirks of this
place really well," Horsey said. "There's also something
satisfying about having my work seen by people who've known me
all my life." He pointed out that he gets messages from
time to time from people who have followed his work since high
school and college.
Is there a drawback to working in one's hometown? "The only
downside is somewhat ephemeral," Horsey said. "It's
just those moments when I contemplate having missed the opportunity
to take on a bigger challenge in a bigger town." When the
Washington Post had its recent vacancy, Horsey applied. "Career-wise,
it would be impossible to turn down, but on a personal level-leaving
family, friends and all my ties to Seattle-I knew it could be
a big mistake. When word finally came that Tom Toles got the
job, my primary reaction was relief."
Horsey admits to occasionally wondering about any experiences
he's missed by spending his whole career in the same place, but
he added that every cartoonist hopes to work for a good newspaper
in a great city. "It has been my good fortune to find it
right here at home," he said.
And speaking of home and of Tom Toles, he represents another
local success story: the Buffalo boy who grew up there, made
his name there and put the Buffalo News (and earlier, the Buffalo
Courier-Express) on the map. Like Horsey, he could not resist
applying for the most important editorial cartooning position
in the country. And he got it.
"I'm not sure there is another opportunity that would have
gotten me to leave Buffalo," the lifelong Buffalo resident
told the Buffalo News. "As exciting as it will be to work
in the nation's capital, leaving Buffalo and the News will be
difficult."
Ah, but remember the power of the Pulitzer. Toles' agreement
with the Post allows him to work from Buffalo for "a substantial
part" of each summer. So sometimes the geographic equation
can be solved.
Hey Daryl, funny blog entry today.
That's one of the hazards of working at a daily on election night.
It was getting late, and my editor (who had to stay and chaperone
the editorial page through the wee hours) said I could go home
as long as I gave him a cartoon for each of the three election
scenarios. Problem is, he liked the choice, and just asked me
for three cartoons for tomorrow. One for if Arafat dies, one
for if he lives and one for if we don't know. Think I'll just
do a local cartoon instead.
November 3, 2004
PREDICTING THE ELECTION OUTCOME IN CARTOONS
Today we learned that George
W. Bush won the election and I had a collection of BUSH WINS
cartoons posted on the front page very quickly. The cartoonists
are fast! Some cartoonists were so fast, that they sent in their
BUSH WINS cartoons before the election. How did they do it? They
planned ahead and drew two cartoons, one to run if Kerry wins,
and one to run if Bush wins.
Cartoons showing Kerry winning
are not quite our equivalent of the headlines showing Dewey defeating
Truman because the cartoonists all knew that one cartoon would
be wrong, and would not run but I love this kind of cartoon
trivia and I thought I would show a selection here from some
of the cartoonists who drew cartoons for two outcomes.
If Kerry wins ...
If Bush Wins ...
Matt Davies,
The Journal News E-mail Matt.
Visit an archive of the
artist's most recent cartoons in the drop menu at the right.
Click on the cartoon to e-mail it to a friend. To request a reprint
of this comic go to www.tmsreprints.com
