Unlike a lot of my fellow editorial cartoonists, I did not have a Jimmy Carter memorial cartoon in the can, so I was drawing mine last night.
Well, I could have just reissued this one from almost two years ago, but I wouldn't.
I know of at least one other cartoonist who drew his Carter memorial cartoon yesterday. Clay Jones dislikes memorial cartoons, but came up with a good one; he wrote in his Substack of another cartoonist who confided to him of having three Carter memorial cartoons waiting to go. (Since that cartoonist posted all three of them on Facebook yesterday, is there any point in keeping him anonymous?)
Editorial cartoonists have a love-hate relationship with our memorial cartoons. Our editors and readers love them, but we hate having to draw nice things about people. We also hate it when someone else draws the cartoon of a tear drop on a logo, symbol, statue, building, Uncle Sam, or whatever that we were going to draw.
On the other hand, there is usually awfully little to draw about in the week between Christmas and New Year's. Print and broadcast media have fallen back on reprinting/rebroadcasting favorite stories from the previous year, providing little news for us. Many cartoonists just take the week off as well, or crank out cartoons of people in line taking Politician X in a box to the returns desk at the store — which is kind of the same thing as taking the week off, when you come right down to it.
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