AAEC: Do Awards Smatter?

The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists convened in Columbus, Ohio, last week, and I was there for all the hullaballoo and excitement. (I had to be. I'm on the board.) We gathered at watering hole Village Idiot to mourn the passing of the Pulitzer Prize Award for Editorial Cartooning, unceremoniously dropped by the Pulitzer People last year rather than selecting among the three fine finalists they were offered.

So naturally, one of the big questions asked at the convention was: Do Awards Matter? — the topic of a panel discussion with cartoonists Lalo Alcaraz (one of those fine finalists), Signe Wilkinson (a past awards judge), Clay Jones (this year's RFK Awardee), and moderator Kevin "KAL" Kallaugher.

Whether awards matter or not didn't stop us from handing each other awards at the taco-truck-catered banquet on Saturday night.

Since the coronivirus had forced the AAEC to cancel our Toronto convention in 2020 and to hold our 2021 convention on Zoom, we had a backlog of awards to hand out. Rob Rogers, who had refused to knuckle under to management demands at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to toe the Trump l'Oeil-ty line and lost his job for it, finally received his 2020 Rex Babin Award.

That's Rogers on the left, with AAEC President-elect Jack Ohman, Jape Trostle, and current President Kevin Necessary.

The Babin, named in memory of Albany Times-Union and Sacramento Bee editorial cartoonist lost to cancer in 2012, honors local-issue cartooning. Since getting axed at the Post-Gazette, Rogers has been commenting on Pittsburgh topics in his comic strip "Brewed on Grant," appearing in Pittsburgh Current.

Steve Stegelin was given the 2022 Rex Babin award for his cartoons at the Charleston City Paper.

And no, Jack Ohman is not a pretender to the Iron Throne.

Russian emigrée Masha Zhdanova won this year's John Locher Memorial Award, given to young cartoonists. I bought one of her books, Uneaten By Sharks, at the convention; I'm only a few pages into her autobiographical account of a trip to Europe that starts off with coming out as lesbian to her mother and includes time spent with family in St. Petersburg.

We think you will be hearing more from her.

The AAEC's Ink Bottle award went to Steve Sack, who was unable to attend. So Ward Sutton (whom some of you know better as "Stan Kelly") led us in leaving Steve a voice mail.

One take-away from the panel discussion of awards on Friday was that whatever one thinks about the intrinsic value of awards in the first place, one ought to enter them more often. As the traditional outlets for the profession dwindle away, the value of some of these awards is diminished by going to the same cartoonists over and over again.

Which is no excuse for the Pulitzer board. None of the three final finalists had ever received a Pulitzer before.

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I took many more photographs than I can put in a blog like this, but once in a while, I was sitting in the direction someone else was pointing a camera. Like this one David Brown took during the annual business meeting.

Proving that even updating organizational by-laws can be fun.

One way-off-to-the-side note I should make about this convention is that I took the opportunity to donate the book my Aunt Barbara Jensen had left me, The Minneapolis Tribune Cartoon Book for 1901: Being a Collection of Over One Hundred Cartoons by R.C. Bowman, to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum.

Rowland C. Bowman cartoon on page 28

I've featured cartoons from the book in this blog several times (During Filipino-American History Month, I always see a spike in views of the post with his cartoons about U.S. occupation of the Philippines), and I'm sorry to say that this 121-year-old book is worse for wear than when my aunt left it to me in 1989. It no longer has a spine, and the back cover split in half a few years ago. For the sake of what remains of the front cover and the pages inside, the book belongs in the climate-controlled safety of the Ireland's vault, not the bookshelf in my basement.

Bowman, who died in 1903 at the age of 32, never won any national awards. But at least his book is in hallowed company now.