Conventional Wisdom

President Marc Murphy addresses a sheaf of cartoonists; your humble scribbler, appropriately, at far left. Photo by Angelo Lopez

I mentioned yesterday last weekend's convention of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, where we voted to reconstitute the organization as the Association of Political Artists. 

From outgoing AAEC President Marc Murphy's letter to the membership:

Of course, the Big News is that the Membership (including those attending in person and via Zoom link) voted to approve the two proposals I described in my last message to you. I won’t speak for them but it’s fair to say, at the least, that the members voted not just to save our organization and take steps to inject it with new life, but also to reposition it to respond more directly to the threats our work and Free Speech itself face. So, as soon as appropriate and necessary bylaw, website, and other changes can be made the AAEC will become the Association of Political Artists (APA) and will become an affiliate member of the vaunted Society of Illustrators. 

The move has been a long time coming. Vulture capitalists have spent the current millennium ripping flesh off the bones of our nation's newspapers, and no profession dependent upon print journalism is going to be around long.

The median age of the AAEC membership is probably around 65; the youngest member at the convention was about 40. Two members who made it to the convention are recovering from strokes. KAL Kallaugher spoke to conventioneers from his hospital bed, where he's waiting for a new heart.

Kevin "KAL" Kallaugher and David Horsey 

Not that you should read anything into that regarding the fate of political cartooning today.

There is no lack of graphic political commentary out there, much of it created by persons in their 20's and 30's. They're just not creating it for newspaper editorial pages. Their work ranges from memes to long-form webcomics, in the cloud or on the walls, static or animated.

The AAEC-cum-APA is going to spend the next year trying to define what a political artist is, hopefully in such a way that we don't have to spend another year defining what it isn't.

But we're not about to welcome the Baltimore Sun editorial board.

Jack Ohman moderates a panel of Joel Pett, Ann Telnaes, and Steve Brodner on "Anger Management."

There were a lot of other presentations and panel discussions over the three days of the convention. Topics included protecting our work from being "scraped" for ai; recovering from being let go or suffering a stroke; and cartooning for a community under siege.

The AAEC's Ink Bottle Award went to a pair of longtime volunteers at our convention. The Rex Babin Award for local-issue cartooning went to Canadian editions Graeme Mackay. Another honor went to one of those cartoonists recovering from a stroke, Clay Jones. (By the way, I reported to Facebook some troll who posted a nasty comment about Clay on a photo I had posted there, and I will not approve any such comments here, either.)

I didn't buy any new books at this convention, so I have no new book reviews to offer. I did, however, get Jack Ohman to sign my copy of his latest book, Weird. Had I known that Steve Sack would make it to Sacramento, I'd have loved to get him to autograph my copy of The First and Only Book of Sack. I wouldn't expect him to fill a whole page, though.

Your humble scribbler next to a display panel that included one of his cartoons.

Speaking of making it to the convention, stormy weather in Chicago disrupted the travel arrangements of myself and several others. I had originally bought a plane trip on American Airlines involving a layover in the City of Broad Shoulders, starting from Milwaukee around 8:00 a.m. Thursday morning, I got American's message that the first flight would be delayed; but I was already packed and ready to leave the house at 6:00, so I left.

The agent at the check-in counter offered me the option of switching to a flight set to take off at 7:30, so I took it — only to see that flight get cancelled. The best I could get when I got to the front of the boarding counter was a noon-ish flight to Dallas connecting to a mid-afternoon plane to Sacramento that would arrive too late for me to make the first day's convention activities.

Not only did I get to watch my original plane take off without me; I had also wasted $80 checking my suitcase and upgrading my boarding group from 6 to 4. I ended up in boarding group 8 of all four planes to Sacramento and back; all four planes were completely full, and due to unavailable overhead bin space, they were begging group 8 passengers to check their bags for free.

Ah, well. Some other conventioneers from the East Coast didn't make it to Sacramento until midnight.

President Marc Murphy opens the Saturday night awards presentations at the Sacramento History Museum

Our next The APA's first convention will be in New York City at the home of the Society of Illustrators.

2015 in Review, Part 2

Here's my annual shot of headlines from the year just past:

You probably will need to click on the photo to embiggenificate enough to read most of the headlines; the Wall Street Journal and New York Times almost never print huge banner headlines, but their headlines more thoroughly explained events better than the other newspapers in my area.

What's with the WSJ printing election results so close to the fold, anyway?

As always, I have to exercise a lot of editorial judgment in putting this collage together. With so many gun-propelled mass murders in the U.S., I could have chosen San Bernardino over Charleston, or perhaps Waco or Roseburg, or the constant violence in Chicago; none is necessarily more representative than the others.

I ended up not including the magazine covers of Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders or Ben Carson in favor of a cover that featured eight other presidential candidates, two three of whom have already dropped out of the race. If  Time magazine had used Steve Brodner's caricature of Trump as a hot-air balloon on its cover, maybe I'd have used that instead.

Cartoons Across the Millennial Divide

It's Swingback Saturday again! A couple more things I wanted to mention about this month's AAEC Convention: Kevin "KAL" Kallaugher moderated a discussion with Michael Alexander Kahn and Richard Samuel West at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum on the cartoons of the political magazine Puck (1871-1918). Kahn and West have written a book of Puck's cartoons, chiefly by Joseph Keppler, Bernard Gillam and Fredrick Opper.

Chances are that if you've seen any colorized editorial cartoons from the period, they are from Puck (or its Republican rival, Judge). The most famous toons include "The Tattooed Man," in which Gillam satirized "Phryne Before the Tribunal" by depicting a disrobed James Blaine tattooed with various scandals, and Keppler's "Here I Am Again, What Are You Going to Do with Me," in which an enormous dragon labeled "Surplus" (with a tail labeled "Tariff Question") sits in the well of the Senate to the consternation of the legislators. (I should have bought the book, but I'm still reading the book about Jay N. "Ding" Darling we were offered when we arrived.)

One is impressed by the proportions of the cartoons, which could span two pages of the magazine, and by the process involved in making them: the cartoonist had to make separate prints for each of the colors that would go into the cartoon.

I was also impressed by a display among the Billy Ireland exhibit's of World War I cartoons of a Winsor McCay animation of the sinking of the Lusitania. The propaganda piece took months to complete and shows just about every second of the ocean liner's demise, with explosions, and victims tumbling off the wreck and bobbing in the ocean. The museum has it available to watch on a tablet if you have 20 minutes to spare. A very different experience from his "Gertie the Dinosaur" or his print comics.

Because of my interest, springing from the R.C. Bowman cartoons I've posted here, in the McKinley administration and the Spanish-American War, I also appreciated Steven Brodner's preview of his work for an upcoming book on American Presidents of the 20th Century. Brodner has an uncanny knack for pushing caricatures beyond what ought to work yet somehow rendering them instantly recognizable, and I'm definitely going to buy that book when it comes out.

But I don't have any pictures of those things, so here's a picture of a magazine in the Billy Ireland Library instead.

Last night, I went to the Kenosha Festival of Cartooning, where I was particularly interested in seeing Darrin Bell. Bell draws the cartoon strips "Candorville" and "Rudy Park"; he is also one of the very best editorial cartoonists in the biz today. I was going to say "young editorial cartoonists," but there really is no need to qualify that judgment with an age restriction, and Ethel Kennedy will back me up on that.

Tom Racine (above right) interviewed Bell on his career, and I was surprised to learn that Bell had actually given up on editorial cartooning for a while. It took the shooting of Trayvon Martin to renew his dedication to the editorial page (although it had occasionally shown up in "Candorville"), for which, I suppose, we must grudgingly thank George Zimmerman.