Editorial Cartooning Editing No-No

 I ran across this while researching 100-year-old cartooning this week. 

"Will Such Stuff Calm Her Appetite" by William Morris, altered by Sapulpa (OK) Herald, Feb. 27, 1922

The editors of the Herald of Sapulpa, Oklahoma, have here taken an editorial cartoon that clearly showed German President Friedrich Ebert serving something unpleasant to French Marianne, and superimposed labels on it to force it to apply to a local issue.

This is a no-no.

At least they didn't edit out the signature, but it is unlikely that the editors of the Sapulpa Herald checked with cartoonist William C. Morris to see whether he had any opinions about the town's referendum whether to change to a manager-led civic government. The editors probably figured that Morris would probably never see their bowdlerization of his cartoon anyway.

With the easy availability of image editing software, this sort of thing happens way too often nowadays. A cartoonist slaves away at his or her drawing board or Wacom to produce an editorial masterpiece of biting satire, and some schmuck with Windows Paint slaps a couple of their own Comic Sans labels over it, making the completely opposite point or making it about some completely unrelated issue entirely. They then tweet it out or post it on Facebook, and their friends help it go viral.

Somewhere along the line, a cartoon about a woman confessing that she voted for Obama becomes instead a call to assassinate politicians, and gets published in a church newsletter. Really. Sometimes nobody knows who stole the cartoon. Sometimes the thief turns out to be the richest man in the world.

Now, you may have noticed that my Saturday retrospective a couple weeks ago included a cartoon of mine that copied a classic cartoon by Sir David Low. I'll have you know that I did not photocopy or trace that, or any other cartoon I've drawn that directly references another cartoon or cartoon character. I'm also fairly confident that Sir David would not have disagreed with my criticizing an American Nazi by comparing him to Hitler.

We cartoonists pay homage to the greats — Low, Darling, Nast, Daumier, Tenniel, Seuss — all the time. To make it clear that we are not being completely original, we credit the original artist: "With apologies to... " ... "After..." ... "Stealing brazenly from..."

If you need to figure out who The Greats are, I'd say that the first criterion is that they're dead. I'll go out on a limb here and stipulate that even though Pat Oliphant was a great cartoonist before he retired, he's still alive, so his cartoons are out of bounds.

Of course, referencing pop culture is fair game, which is a loophole big enough to drive a truck through. (Truck driving simile used with apologies to Shakespeare.) Some cartoonists are bound to draw  Batman cartoons this week if the latest movie does well, and they're not going to credit Bob Kane. 

Just be very careful about borrowing Disney characters. Disney can afford better lawyers than you can.

Unless you're the richest man in the world.

In which case, I was only kidding about calling you a thief.

I'm Just a Soul Whose Intentions Are Good

Earlier this month, I chimed in on a conversation about someone else's cartoon that was widely misunderstood. For that post, I redrew one of my own cartoons in a way that intentionally defeated its own point. For SayWhatBack Saturday, I dredge up a few of my own cartoons that, at least as far as some readers were concerned, missed the mark unintentionally.

I drew the above cartoon for the parody edition of the University of Wisconsin at Parkside student newspaper as a follow-up to an earlier cartoon that, I was told, many readers didn't understand.

UW-Parkside Ranger, January 17, 1985

The cartoon was about the New York "subway vigilante" Bernard Goetz, who had shot some African-American youths on the subway because he had felt threatened by them. There are many reasons, however, that this cartoon didn't work. The guns, for one thing, were terribly drawn and barely recognizable as such. Some cartoonists can get away with oversimplifying objects, but things still have to be drawn so that the reader can't mistake them for something else.

The composition of the cartoon risks confusing the reader as to whether there are two separate panels or four. 

Perhaps most importantly, the racist imagery in the thought balloons is likely to offend readers before they get around to seeing the men below them. While intended to be grossly exaggerated misconceptions of whatever the facts of the subway incident were, they could have left the false impression that I was advocating one or the other.

UW-Milwaukee Post, April 16, 1991

I remember worrying that this 1991 cartoon (I must have been still writing 1990 on my checks) featuring two Republican Congressmen from Wisconsin would be taken the wrong way, but I never did hear any feedback about it. When I went to the UW-M Post office with the the cartoon for the next issue, nobody could find the original of this one — the only cartoon original I never got back in several years drawing for the Post — so I guess somebody did take it, the wrong way, after all.

Manitou Messenger, Oct. 4, 1979

Way back in 1979, I drew a cartoon for my college newspaper about John Paul II's first visit to the United States as pope. In it, I likened his crowds to those surrounding the title character in Monty Python's Life of Brian― to which end I had people quoting lines from the film.

I thought that the film reference made the cartoon funny, but somebody wrote the paper the next week to accuse me of plagiarism. I suppose I should have written "Apologies to Monty Python" on the cartoon to explain that I was making a cultural reference. (And to Playboy for the reference to their 1976 Jimmy Carter interview.) 

 

Cartooning rules on plagiarism and cultural references are somewhat hazy. Perhaps I should also have added an apology to DC Comics or Todd Phillips or Joaquin Phoenix to this past week's cartoon just in case Brad Hendricks is still monitoring me for plagiarism.

Anyway, my response to Mr. Hendricks's letter included 17 reference footnotes and hardly a single original thought in it.

Just to be clear about one thing, I didn't remember Mr. Hendricks's name after all these years. I no longer have the original of this cartoon, so I had to hunt it up in the Messenger's on-line archives, and Hendricks's letter to the editor came up in the search first.

UW-Milwaukee Post, Dec. 8, 1994

We cartoonists don't mind people writing in to voice their disagreement with a cartoon ― we invite it. What really hurts is when someone tells us they didn't "get" the cartoon. Readers tend not to write "I don't get it" letters to the editor, though, probably for fear of appearing stupid in case everyone else thought the cartoon was hilarious.

I did hear from readers, however, including staffers at the Post, who didn't get this cartoon about House Speaker-elect Newt Gingrich claiming to have the names of drug users among Bill Clinton's White House staff.

UW-Milwaukee Post, Dec. 12, 1994

So I followed up in the next issue with this cartoon explaining the Gingrich cartoon point by tedious point.

Q Syndicate, April, 2009

Here's another example of bad execution. Acting New York Governor David Paterson took marriage equality advocates by surprise when he proposed legalizing same-sex marriage in his state. I wanted to point out how unprepared for this marriage equality advocates were; but by my featuring not them but Gov. Paterson in the cartoon, several readers were rightly outraged by an apparent joke knocking Paterson for being legally blind. I lost some newspapers over this one, and it was my bad.

Q Syndicate, December, 2012

Finally, returning to the topic of appropriating cultural references: please note that I was careful to include the proper apologies to all the original creators of the characters in this 2012 Christmastime cartoon. 

 

There used to be a weblog called "Editorial Explanations" whose author, Andrew Wheeler, called out confusing and snarkworthy editorial cartoons, and this was one of nearly a dozen of my cartoons that had him befuddled. Well, no wonder. Christmas and marriage equality have nothing to do with each other; but it was December, so I forced them into an unhappy marriage anyway. For that matter, all of the folks in the cartoon happen to be single, adding another layer of non-sequiturity.

There's a good chance of Hermey the Elf being gay, though.

By the way, even though I can recite just about any Monty Python routine verbatim, I have somehow still not actually seen Life of Brian. 

Funny Paper Caper: Denouement

I've spent much of this summer rehashing a 34-year-old parody I drew for the UW-Parkside Ranger, and today the time has finally come to post the final chapters. The plot is too far along to give a synopsis here; suffice it to say that our nameless police lieutenant is being held at gunpoint by the suspect in the murder investigation that has been underway, but has managed to slip a coded message to a co-worker.

What follows will be familiar to any fan of "Fearless Fosdick."

As Lt. No-name observed of Dick Thelma, very few of Dick Tracy's villains survived long enough to be tried for their crimes under Chester Gould's story-writing. It saved the cartoonist from having to spend long, tedious months watching Tracy fill out the paperwork and sending Tracy to testify in court. The drawback was that memorable characters such as the Brow and Flattop weren't available to become recurring characters — except on the rather silly Saturday morning TV cartoon version.

In a real continuity strip, this would have been the launch of a new story line, but that was never my intent. I doubt I could have gone thirty more episodes without somebody needing to call the Lieutenant by name.

Comic Caper: Back to School Edition

I was thinking of putting together a collection of back-to-school cartoons for today's Studentbacker Saturday, just so I could show off this cartoon by Chicago Daily News editorial cartoonist Vaughn Shoemaker, featuring my Dad:

"Education" by Vaughn Shoemaker for Chicago Daily News, September, 1935

Dad says he was actually five years old when this was drawn, not six. He has the autographed original framed and hanging in his office; the image above is from a photograph rather than a scan because removing the cartoon from the frame would probably ruin it. I've tweaked the photo considerably in Photoshop to minimize the effects from decades of yellowing.

But I haven't come across any inspiring vintage back-to-school cartoons yet, so a full blog post on that topic will have to wait for another day. Not that there aren't any old cartoons on education; I included one by Winsor McCay in a post for Labor Day weekend last year. But I do wonder whether the Katzenjammer Kids ever went to school at all. I read through their entire escapades for the month of September, 1917 without finding one mention of them attending classes — although they did go to the zoo once or twice a week.

🎒

So instead, here's more of my Funny Paper Caper series, drawn for the UW-Parkside Ranger in 1983-84 that I've been running here since July.

Looking back, the inconsistency in how much space my cartoon required from week to week must have really cheesed off the lay-out editor. This was the second time that an episode took up three rows of panels instead of one.

And here, ferschitzengiggels, is one more episode, standard length, for today.

Comic Caper: Installment VI

Here's an extra special Whaddayaknow Wednesday installment in our continuing retrospective of a comic strip I drew in 1983-84 for the UW-Parkside Ranger, "The Funny Paper Caper." I've usually presented four strips at a time, but now we have come to the episodes which ran in April. The end of the school year was just around the corner, and I needed several more than the usual three or four panels per week if I wanted to get to the end of the story before the Ranger suspended publication for the summer.

When we left off on Saturday, the Yellow Geezer had been shot just as he was about to tell our detective-cum-narrator what evil mastermind was looking for the Maltese Pelican, and who may have killed Rufus T. Pornapple in a foiled effort to get it.

Whenever the investigator goes out on a call without back-up, you know something bad is going to happen. It's a cliché, yes, but it's an essential climax to Act III in any police procedural.

Comic Caper: Kapitel Fire

In the interest of getting through this story, today is now Turnback Tuesday. This is the fourth batch of  comic strips that I drew in 1983 and 1984 for the UW-Parkside Ranger and have been rerunning here purely because I didn't have another topic handy for a Saturday retrospective back on July 29.

In case you're just joining the story, our nameless Lieutenant-cum-narrator is investigating the murder of Rufus T. Pornapple, whose son has just identified a burglary suspect, only to have the suspect's wife suddenly burst onto the scene. The month's worth of episodes presented here don't introduce any new characters, so suffice it to say our murder mystery's milieu is the comics page of your daily newspaper.

I promise that something is going to happen to nudge the plot forward very soon.

I really ought to have made that bird bigger.

Comic Caper: Part I

I usually like to have these Saturday posts planned out well enough in advance to have done the necessary research; but due to family matters, I've fallen a little behind schedule. Never fear, however. Serialback Saturday herewith begins the first of a series of my juvenalia.

Way back when I was drawing editorial cartoons for the UW-Parkside Ranger, I tried my hand at a continuity strip. It started with a murder almost foul.

Around the time of the bicentennial, the Racine paper ran a cartoon called Sgt. Stripes ... Forever!
Its central character looked nothing like this sergeant, but did favor ellipses.

The victim in this murder mystery was a not-particularly-well disguised character from a comic strip then running in the Racine newspaper, Brutus P. Thornapple. Brutus is the central character in The Born Loser, created by Art Sansom, and continued today by his son Chip. By the second episode, I began widening the story's reference material.

"The Funny Paper Caper" appeared every week in the UW-Parkside Ranger, a single strip until midway through the academic year I realized that I had paced the thing too slowly. Having such short episodes helped to get people to read the thing at first, and with any luck, get hooked on the story. Longer form cartoons would have run the risk of discouraging students with busy schedules from taking the time to engage from the beginning.

If I were drawing this same strip today, I'd probably try to mimic the comic noir style of the black-and-white Dick Tracy of the 1970's and '80's. The funnies of the time didn't use a lot of cross-hatching, save for those in which the syndicate would apply dot or hatching screens to areas indicated by the cartoonist. The serial strips, in the interest of appearing more realistic, relied less on that flat technique, although such as Captain Easy and Buz Sawyer were able to use mechanical shading while still maintaining the illusion of three dimensions. Color, of course, was for Sundays only.

Originally, Wilberforce Thornapple had a Little Lord Fauntleroy hairdo.

Well, there you have the episodes for the entire month of September. Tune in to some future installment as the plot, and the plagiarism, thickens.

Melania's Turn of Phrase

Somebody had better warn Rudy Giuliani that the calls are coming from inside the Quicken Loans Center!

This Week's Sneak Peek

This week's cartoon probably should have included a credit line somewhere to John Oliver's This Week Tonight program for borrowing its recurring "The Most Patient Man in the World" feature. After going off on "Wm. Charles" for making a career out of plagiarizing other people's artwork, I realize that someone might think I'm trying to claim the moniker as my own idea instead of sneaking a sly reference to him into a very small part of the cartoon.

Besides which, now that I've googled it, the feature is called "The Most Patient Man on Television," which I'd have caught in time if it had been on Oliver's show last night.

Apologies in advance for my oversights.

The Plagiarism Thing

Lack of talent and originality will out. Especially if you fancy yourself an editorial cartoonist lampooning local officials in the hometown newspaper.

A sorry hack submitting free editorial cartoons to the Montgomery (Maryland) Sentinel under the signature William Charles was exposed by council member Tom Moore as a serial plagiarist, stealing other cartoonists' work, expunging the signatures and repurposing the cartoons to address local issues. (Alan Gardner of the Daily Cartoonist notes that even the cartoonist's name might turn out to be stolen. Heck, even the signature!)

For example, this cartoon from last July, critical of the aforementioned Councilman Moore...

...was a badly labeled rip-off of this CartoonStock.com cartoon by someone named Kes:

Or, compare the "William Charles" cartoon on the left with the Andy Singer "No Exit" original on the right:

"William Charles" swiped the work of about a dozen different cartoonists, whose styles are so dissimilar, it boggles the mind how the Sentinel editors could possibly have mistaken Charles's so-called work as the product of any one individual. I've looked through a number of the cartoons Councilman Moore collected in a .zip file, and several cartoons clearly involve pasting together pieces of three or four different cartoonists' and clip artists' work.

Councilman Moore reports that "I informed the Sentinel’s editor, Brian Karem, in person several months ago that his newspaper is stealing art from all over the Internet and passing it off as its own; he seemed unconcerned and said he’d maybe mention something to 'William Charles' about it." Since Moore took the case public, Mr. Karem has suddenly taken notice:

“He is a third-party UNPAID contributor. We have about four or five of those. As I said, we’re a small family-owned newspaper. As for not noticing, yep, the buck stops here on this one. He sent us Jpegs and PDFs of his art that showed no tells of being manipulated. If there is a way to tell in the future, I’d appreciate a heads up on that. In fact any assistance you can provide in that area would be GREATLY appreciated. I first found out about it from Mike Shapiro [one of the plagiarized cartoonists] two days ago. We pulled all of the cartoons and I now have a copy editor going through them all to see how many are original.”

"No tells of being manipulated"? Seriously? Mr. Karem couldn't see that the piper and the children in this 'toon were not drawn by the same person? (I'd bet that the four or five nearest kids were drawn by Walt Handelsman.)

Given the discrepancy between Karem's responses a couple months ago and a couple days ago, I have to wonder whether this is just another example of a newspaper happily choosing free content, worth every penny. I've been disappointed in a weekly newspaper here in Wisconsin which breaks up its editorial page with its "Web Picks" -- images copied from whatever is trending on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

At least they don't make any pretensions that they are running original work. And the local TV news does the same thing when they present viral videos as news, so I guess that's where bottom line journalism has sunk.

Q Toon: The Christmas Court

It's customary among editorial cartoonists when stealing borrowing other cartoonists' creations to credit the other cartoonists with "apologies to..." or a similar note. We're not usually so assiduous about apologizing to film makers or 19th Century authors -- think of any of the myriad cartoons that use whatever current movie is out to draw some parallel to political or social events (my own from last week, for example). But it would have seemed discriminatory to have left Charles Dickens and Frank Capra out of this week's credits, so in they go.

Besides, I wasn't confident that everyone would recognize Mr. Potter.

Plagiar-Vu All Over Again

I just received my copy of The Best Editorial Cartoons, 2012 edition from the publisher the other night. Its founder, Chuck Brooks died shortly after the deadline for submissions, so one wonders how many more editions of the book there will be.

There are more on-line only cartoons in the book than ever before, and a few idiosyncratic choices -- there is only one Tom Toles cartoon, for example (aside from the one in the chapter for cartoons which won awards this year), but five by Chuck Asay. In my humble opinion, Toles is far and away the better cartoonist, but Asay's worldview is more in line with the late Mr. Brooks's.

I was struck by two cartoons: one by Jeff Stahler and another by Steve Breen. Mr. Stahler just lost his job at the Columbus Dispatch over charges of plagiarism -- charges which have relaunched a debate over what in fact constitutes plagiarism. Accusers pointed out cartoons which seemed to echo New Yorker cartoons, although some of the questionable cartoons involved ideas which easily could have occurred to multiple cartoonists independently (what Daryl Cagle calls "Yahtzees"). Cartoonists have also been debating where to draw the line between a plagiarized idea and a common meme.

The Stahler and Breen cartoons in BECY illustrate the murky of this delineation. Stahler's cartoon shows presidents from Nixon to Obama saying one word each of the sentence "We must reduce our dependency on Mideast Oil." To my mind, that recalls a Mike Peters cartoon about the Vietnam War, drawn for the Dayton Daily News and reprinted in Time magazine and other national outlets, in which presidents from Eisenhower to Ford said one word each of the sentence "Victory is just around the corner." (One of them must have had two words, but I don't remember which.) Other cartoonists besides Jeff Stahler have used the same gimmick since -- at least once on the topic of energy independence -- and it just seems to me to be lazy to swipe Mr. Peters's basic idea to rehash it as your own.

Steve Breen's cartoon is more disputable. He substitutes President Obama for the hapless boatman in Winslow Homer's painting "The Gulf Stream." Breen duly credits Homer, as he ought, but I was instantly reminded of the 1974 cartoon by the late Jeff MacNelly depicting President Nixon in the exact same painting.

Is that plagiarism? Just about every editorial cartoonist in the country, myself included, has drawn some parody of Grant Wood's "American Gothic" to comment on every topic from the weather to inflation to marriage equality. The same with several of Norman Rockwell's paintings, da Vinci's "Last Supper" and James McNeill Whistler's "Arrangement in Gray and Black: The Artist's Mother." But any first grader is bound to recognize those paintings to some degree or another, whereas many adults are not familiar with the works of Winslow Homer at all. Some cartoonist, forgotten to history, was the first to draw each of those parodies, and the rest of us have, let's face it, swiped those ideas.

Does the fact that an image is already well-known make it okay for a cartoonist to swipe it? Aside from paintings, many cartoonists have borrowed and re-borrowed many images from movies. I have no idea who the first cartoonist was to draw Toto pulling the curtain aside to reveal the humbug behind whatever politician is projected as the Great And Powerful Oz, but many have drawn that same cartoon since. (There's one in the new BECY about Newt Gingrich, who has also inspired a new round of Grinch Who Stole Christmas cartoons for anybody who missed them back when he was Speaker of the House.)

We cartoonists traffic in cultural images all the time, so it makes sense that we'd reuse images that everybody knows. The tricky part is reusing less well-known images that only Art History majors and other cartoonists will recognize.

Oh, and I have one cartoon in the book, by the way. Most of my favorite 2011 cartoons before the book's deadline were about flash-in-the-pan stories (does anybody remember the Craigslist Congressman any more?) which would have required a paragraph of explanation, so I'm not at all disappointed.

Q Toon: J. Edgar

And the winners in the expletive derby are "Gadzooks" and "Dang."

For all I know, J. Edgar Hoover was as foul-mouthed in private as Richard Nixon. Hoover came across as a hard-as-nails crime fighter, all business, who made it his business to know all the dirt on everyone in the country. That was before Susan Rosenstiel told Anthony Summers that Hoover got dressed up in drag to go out to Roy Cohn's private parties, where he was introduced to her as "Mary."

A little bit more back story to the cartooning here: I wanted to draw Hoover in drag in this cartoon, but after David Simpson's latest plagiarism scandal, I had to be careful not to copy Pat Oliphant's cartoon of J. Mary Hoover -- especially now that I gave This Land permission to cite me as having spotted three previously unnoticed examples of his down-to-the-crosshatch copying of other people's cartoons. (I would note that other cartoonists have spotted the same cartoons; The Oregonian's Jack Ohman also left a comment on This Land's previous article.)

To keep Hoover's garb contemporaneous with Hoover himself, the dress in the cartoon is patterned more after Marilyn Monroe's famous updraft dress or something out of the Folies Bergères. Not that it wouldn't have been fun to have shown him dressed like Snooki or Lady Gaga.

The David Simpson Plagiarism Scandal

Yet another case of plagiarism by fellow cartoonist David Simpson has been exposed. Simpson lost his job at the Tulsa World in 2005 after he was caught copying a 1981 cartoon by Bob Englehardt of the Hartford Courant. Lately, Simpson had been drawing for Urban Tulsa. A week or so ago, alert cartoonists recognized a cartoon about giving a jump start to a bomber in a junk yard as having been copied from a cartoon drawn by the late Jeff MacNelly during the Carter administration -- even the other junk in the cartoon was in exactly the same place. Rival publication This Land then unearthed three more copied cartoons. The resulting calumny has forced Simpson into early retirement.

Since the Urban Tulsa doesn't keep an on-line archive of its cartoons (and I guess Simpson is the only cartoonist in the world who doesn't post his stuff on the internet), This Land posted pictures of Simpson's UT cartoons requesting help spotting any more plagiarized work. I spotted three right away: #3 is straight out of an August, 1972 cartoon by Pat Oliphant; #12 rips off another Oliphant cartoon from December, 1975. #35 copies a Jim Borgman cartoon from August, 1985.

Then there's #16. It's not the entire cartoon that is copied from a September, 1975 Jeff MacNelly cartoon, it's just the garbage truck. I remember that garbage truck well.

Because I used it as a model for a garbage truck in a May, 1987 cartoon.

The garbage truck was the sole focus of the original MacNelly cartoon, which blamed New York City's sanitation workers for their contribution to the Big Apple's financial mess. The cartoon showed the Manhattan skyline inside the back of the truck.

Back in the Reagan administration, we didn't have the Google like the kids of today have. If I needed to draw a garbage truck in a cartoon, my options were a.) draw one from memory, b.) see if the dictionary has a picture of one, c.) drive around town until I found a parked garbage truck and draw it, or d.) Don't I have a cartoon of a garbage truck in my scrapbook somewhere?

So I'm reluctant to include Simpson cartoon #16 in the list of plagiarized cartoons, because it would mean I plagiarized, too. Besides MacNelly's garbage truck, I've referenced horses drawn by Pat Oliphant, whose drawings of horses in motion are some of the most alive and vibrant you will ever see in black and white. I certainly don't copy them, and I also reference Animals: 1419 Copyright-Free Illustrations of Mammals, Birds, Fish, Insects, etc., A Pictorial Archive from Nineteenth-Century Sources selected by Jim Harter (Dover Publications, Inc.You can probably find it in the art section of your local bookstore) .

We cartoonists copy images all the time. Just think of all the cartoons riffing on Shepard Fairey's poster of Barack Obama over the word "HOPE." (The poster image itself was swiped from an April, 2006 photograph by freelance photographer Mannie Garcia for the Associated Press.)

When Moammar Khadaffy was killed, several cartoonists whipped out cartoons showing the remnants of Pan Am flight 103 at Lockerbie, Scotland. Some didn't even bother to draw the image, but rather scanned the photograph and used that image as the basis of their cartoons.

(click here to view)

Bob Gorrell Creators Syndicate Inc. Oct 20, 2011 EditorialCartoonists.com

None of them credited the photograph or the photographer. Was that plagiarism, then? The copyright notice at Wikipedia would seem to say yes. The "Fair Use" doctrine gives us cartoonists the wiggle room to say no.

By the way, just to be clear: I do not in any way think there is any possibility that David Simpson ever saw my 1987 cartoon about Ronald Reagan and the Contras. I'm very certain that he referred to Jeff MacNelly's cartoon when drawing his garbage truck. But since I remember the 36-year-old cartoon I used as a model for a cartoon I drew 24 years ago, I find it utterly incredible that Mr. Simpson claims he can't remember where he found his sources.