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.

Wing Man

 A commenter at Daily Cartoonist this week pointed out an editorial cartoon about editorial cartooning from 1901 in the St. Paul Globe, so I had to go look it up.

"Two of a Kind" by Frank Wing in St. Paul (MN) Globe, Sept. 18, 1901

The cartoon was drawn shortly after the death of President William McKinley, assassinated by anarchist Leon Czolgosz. It seems that one Rev. Earl Cranston, Bishop of the American Methodist Episcopal Church, sermonized that editorial cartoonists were as much to blame for McKinley's assassination as were the anarchists.

Looking up the Globe cartoonist, Frank Wing, I quickly found that Charles Schulz had referenced him in an episode of "Peanuts." The kid with the bag over his head is Charlie Brown:

"Peanuts" by Charles Schulz, June 28, 1973

Having studied cartooning with the man, Schulz was obviously very familiar with the cartoons of Frank Wing (1873-1956), moreso than a child Charlie Brown's age could reasonably be expected to be. 

This is the cartoon Charlie is talking about:

"Yesterdays" by Frank Wing, reprinted in Minneapolis Star-Journal, June 18, 1946

Wing drew a single-panel cartoon titled "Yesterdays" in the Minneapolis Journal starting around 1910. He moved to the Minneapolis Tribune in 1920.

Minneapolis Sunday Tribune, February 22, 1920

After disappearing from the Twin Cities newspaper stands in 1937, old "Yesterdays" were rerun in the Minneapolis Journal (by then bought out by the Star) in 1946.

in Minneapolis Star-Journal, March 8, 1946

It would have been around this time that Wing encouraged Schulz, then in his 20's, to cartoon professionally. Aside from some juvenalia, Schulz's first published cartoon was the single-panel "Li'l Folks" in the St. Paul Pioneer-Press from 1947 to January, 1950. "Peanuts" launched in October of that year.

In the "Peanuts" series excerpted above (and later adapted for a 1983 TV special), Charlie Brown, having gone to summer camp, has taken to wearing a sack on his head because of an embarrassing rash resembling the seams on a baseball. This makes him suddenly popular and, as "Mr. Sack," he is elected camp president by the other kids.

There is a saying in cartooning circles: Three Things Make A Blog Post. So here's the third:

Little did Sparky Schulz realize that he would be referencing not one, but two Twin Cities cartoonists on June 28, 1973.

by Steve Sack in Minneapolis Star-Tribune, February 1, 1984

New to My Comic Book Collection

Today's installment of Sketchback Saturday takes the form of a book report.

A few months ago, I pre-ordered Bill Sanders's forthcoming retrospective of his editorial cartooning career. I have both of the books published while he was the cartoonist for The Milwaukee Journal. Head for the Oval Room deals primarily the Nixon administration, some of which is also repeated in The Sanders Book. The latter book includes cartoons not only about the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations, but about Wisconsin and Milwaukee issues as well.

I'm looking forward to receiving the new book, which promises cartoons from his retiree years, but also examples of Sanders's early career with Stars and Stripes, The Greensboro Daily News, and The Kansas City Star. Given how different in style his Milwaukee cartoons are from his earlier work, it should be interesting to see how that evolution took place.

"How Much Are We Really Involved Here" by Bill Sanders in Greensboro Daily News, ca. March, 1962

When I pre-ordered Against the Grain, I browsed around amazon.com to see if there was anything else I'd be interested in, finding Jim Morin's 2016 collection from his 40+ years with The Miami Herald. I've long been fascinated by his distinctive cross-hatch style, which I'd describe as David Levine meets "Ding" Darling.

One of the more intriguing facets of Morin's book is how its date of publication influenced his choice of cartoons. In particular, there are a handful of cartoons about Donald Trump's brief campaign in 1999 for the presidential nomination of H. Ross Perot's Reform Party. Editorial cartoon books take up two and a half shelves of my bookcase, and although three or four of those books deal specifically with the year 1999, Jim Morin's World is the first book I've seen to devote any ink to Trump's short-lived flirtation with presidential politics that year.

I have to say that I barely took any notice of Candidate Trump at the time, myself; my editors at Q Syndicate, the Milwaukee Business Journal, and the Racine Journal Times probably wouldn't have been interested in cartoons about him anyway. Had Jim Morin published his book a year earlier, I suspect none of his Donald Trump cartoons would have made the cut for this book, so it's fortuitous that he had a chance to dig up his material about a nearly forgotten episode from when the current president first dipped his toes into political waters.

"Looks Like His Last Trip to Moscow Just Backfired" by Jim Morin in Miami Herald, June, 1985.

As another example of how the date of publication influences choice of material, the above cartoon is not in Morin's book. I'm not advocating for this particular cartoon, merely noting that it might have been included if this were a book about the Reagan years, since Nicaragua was a BFD in the 1980s. The Iran-Contra scandal, which hinged in part on a White House scheme to circumvent Congress to send arms to right-wing guerrillas in the Central American country, threatened to bring down the Reagan administration, but rates only two cartoons in this book. Nowadays, we only hear about Nicaragua when it gets hit by an earthquake or hurricane, so it's of less interest today.

Besides, there was so much else going on in the 1980s, even without a president tweeting all his brain farts every morning. If anyone is still publishing editorial cartoon memoirs thirty years from now, there will be an awful lot that seems of tremendous import today that will end up on the cutting room floor tomorrow.

Another cartooning memoir recent to my collection is The First and Only Book of Sack (only available from the Star Tribune and currently only on back order) by Steve Sack, featuring the best of his cartoons for the Minneapolis Star Tribune from 1981 to 2017. It's too bad that he didn't also include his older cartoons for The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, such as the one below. Mr. Sack is not a packrat, however, and it's extremely unlikely that foraging through his Indiana cartoons would have turned up any early drawings of Mike Pence, who, after all, was still in college at the time.

"Jump!" by Steve Sack in Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, August, 1980

From a cartoonist's standpoint, one of the joys of this book is to watch how Sack has adapted his style to evolving technologies. Sack has been an early adopter of computerized drawing techniques, ditching the extensive pen and ink crosshatching of his early work in favor of a succession of various media: charcoal, sharpie, watercolor, digital tablet, and iPad. Through it all remains a distinctive touch unlike that of anyone else in the biz.

Due to its publication date, Sack's book includes a handful of cartoons about Senator Al Franken (who also wrote the first of the book's four forewords) and one of Garrison Keillor, but none which reflect either man's #TimesUp fall from grace. The Keillor cartoon is especially unintentionally ironic, depicting the Prairie Home Companion host hiding out from a horde of sex-crazed women. The original context of the cartoon was that Keillor had been named one of Playgirl's Sexiest Men Alive in 1986. (Sack observes that one of the other men on that year's list was Donald Trump).

Such is the risk in any collection of topical writing; editorial cartoons almost always have an ephemeral quality to them. (Just check out any cartoon about Herbert Hoover before October, 1929.) I don't imagine that Sack's book is on back order because he's slipping in some hasty updates, because he'd just have to do it again in a matter of months.

We'll just have to wait until The First and Only Book's sequel.

Crazy Eyes Cryin' in the Rain

With Michele Bachmann's announcement yesterday that she would not run for reelection to Congress in 2014, America loses one of its most colorful and loony legislators. She announced her retirement on YouTube -- looking straight into the camera this time -- speaking over a looping recording of a simulated orchestra and choir.

Wouldn't you like to have a soundtrack to your life?

My only cartoons of Ms. Bachmann were drawn during her flash-in-the-pan run for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination. In the first (above right), I relied too heavily on the model set by Minneapolis Star Tribune cartoonist Steve Sack, who draws her with a tall, thin, figure-8 face. It works for him, but did not work for me. (See Sack's brilliant retrospective of Bachmann's career at the Strib's site, here.)

  

I was much more pleased with the cartoon at left, drawn a month or so later. In the first place, she appears larger and not crowded in by a row of other caricatures. Upon further review, I found her face more rectangular than Steve Sack does. By completely disregarding proportionality, I was able to convey her "Crazy Eyes" by drawing the irises so that they extend out beyond the confines of the rest of the eye.

I made sure to include this cartoon on my drawing board for my Facebook page cover photo.

My last Bachmann cartoon was prompted by her claim on the Today Show that someone told her that the vaccine against human papillomavirus causes mental retardation: "I had a mother last night come up to me here in Tampa, Florida, after the [previous night's Republican presidential] debate. She told me that her little daughter took that vaccine, that injection, and she suffered from mental retardation thereafter. It can have very dangerous side effects. … This is the very real concern, and people have to draw their own conclusions."

The medical and pharmaceutical community loudly protested that there was no connection between the HPV vaccine and mental retardation, so I suggested that Bachmann could find some other side effect closer to her heart.