Our First “CagleCast” – Inside the Top Ten Cartoons

Here is our first podcast –we hope to do these regularly.  The first one is about the Top Ten cartoons of last week, and I talk through them, read them and give background on the cartoonists and the political cartooning business. Perhaps I talked too much – below the video is a text transcript of my 17 minutes of talking about the cartoons, and I’m surprised I said so much.

We’re just getting started and I’ll get better at this. The next one will come soon.

Here’s the transcript:

Hi, I’m Daryl Cagle, and this is our first podcast, our first CagleCast. We’re going to talk about editorial cartoons and cartoonists, their art, their issues and stuff in the news. And I think it’s going to be great. We’re going to do it fairly often, and I hope that you’re quick to subscribe wherever you’re looking at this podcast.

Today, we’re going to talk through the top ten cartoons of the week.

This is the cartoon that is tied for number one. We run a small business that syndicates editorial cartoons to about 500 newspapers; and we keep very good statistics on what cartoons the editors choose to print. And that’s what this is. These are the cartoons that are most reprinted. They may not be the cartoons that you like best, or the cartoons that are best, but they’re the cartoons that editors wanted to put in their newspapers.

This first one is by Dave Whamond, who is just a brilliant cartoonist. He draws two comic strips. He does greeting cards and calendars, and he does four editorial cartoons with us every week that are always among the most reprinted cartoons. He is just great. And this one is tied for number one. I’m going to read through these because this is also an audio podcast, and if you’re not seeing the images, you need to go to my blog at darylcagle.com; you’ll be able to see the video podcast and the all of the images that we talk about during the podcast and soon we’ll have CagleCast.com up. But of course we’re just doing our first podcast right now and we don’t have it quite going yet, but it will be going soon and it will be going frequently.

So Dave’s cartoon has a family at the kitchen table and header reads: If we ran our household budgets like they run the government finances …” and mom says, “Oh my God, our credit card bill is through the ceiling.” And dad says, “No problem, I’ll just raise the ceiling, we’ll just print more money”. And the son who’s eating his breakfast cereal says, “the only catch is the printer ink is $7 billion, Dad”. And I think that’s funny.

This is the number two, but it is not really a number two, It’s tied for number one we just have it in the number two spot; by Jeff Koterba. Jeff Koterba had a fantastic week last week. He’s got three cartoons in the top ten. And that’s just unbelievable. Jeff drew for many years for the Omaha World-Herald and editors love his stuff here. He’s got Uncle Sam and the red ink ceiling is crushing down on him. Uncle Sam thinks as if it’s not bad enough We’re up against the debt ceiling and the politics saw is cutting a hole in the floor for him to fall through.

And the last cartoons are very indicative of what editors for newspapers want these days. They want cartoons that don’t portray a strong left or right point of view, but that are something that are kind of about the news. But nobody’s going to disagree with it. What the readers like are cartoons that reinforce their existing point of view.

Liberals want liberal cartoons. Conservatives want conservative cartoons, and they don’t want to see what they disagree with. So I can kind of see where the editors are coming from and how they have to find that place where nobody disagrees. But, you know, it’s not the kind of cartoon that cartoonists really want to draw. We want to bash people over the head with our our strong points of view.

And so editors are a constant source of frustration for us. We keep very good stats on all of the cartoons. And we know just what the editors are printing. And we we track what the most popular cartoons are. Here you can see the tie at the top between the two cartoons you just saw.

T next cartoon is by our conservative cartoonist, Gary McCoy, who has drawn a cartoon that is not conservative. So it shows up in the top ten. The lady is talking to her presumably husband who’s looking at a laptop showing Facebook seventies memories. And he says, I find it odd that so many people use the most high tech social media platform just to look longingly at photos of life before social media.

This is another one that newspaper editors are going to like because there’s no left and there’s no right, and grandma is going to like it because this is what she thinks about social media and it’s a good cartoon for newspapers. I see why it’s number three.

This one is number four. It’s Jeff Koterba, second of three in the top ten, which is again, is just so crazy impressive. You know, we do about 120 cartoons a week. We’ve got 60 cartoonists in our group. And to have one cartoonist claim three spots in the top ten, that’s just that’s just incredible. But you can see why this one did, because it criticizes both President Biden and ex-president Trump equally. They’re driving down the road to 2024 and they’re stopped by the FBI at a classified document check.

And both of them have their boxes of classified documents flying in the air. Trump has more. Trump is driving a golf cart, and Biden has got as many classified documents as fit on his bike. Anyway. But they’re criticized equally. “Pox on both their houses” kinds of cartoons are something the editors like.

This one is by R.J. Mattson, cartoonist who draws from Maine. He worked for many years for the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, just a brilliant cartoonist. He’s he’s drawn for everybody. He’s drawn for The New Yorker and drawn for Mad magazine. RJ is just great. This cartoon is kind of interesting because R.J. submitted it on the 22nd as we had the big shooting in Los Angeles. And then the next day there was another giant shooting also in California, and he had to draw a correction because he needed another blood spatter.

You know, that that’s pretty rare. Most of our corrections are due to misspellings rather than mass shootings. Anyway, this is a great cartoon. It it does fill up the month. Here is Jeff Koterba’s third cartoon in the top ten. Yeah. You’ve got mom and son son’s got classified documents in his hands poking out of his backpack. Mom says, “And you’re certain there’s no homework in your backpack?”

And son says, “I’m certain, but I did find these classified documents again”. No left and right. It’s about the news. But there’s nothing to disagree with. Lots of classified document problems here. We’re getting a whole lot of cartoons about how there’s lots and lots of classified documents that are poorly stored. So, of course, editors like this, Jeff had a Jeff had a great week.

This is by Guy Parsons. And like Dave, Guy Parsons is from Canada, but we put him on our site as being an American cartoonist because cartoons don’t travel well across borders and editors, if they see that it’s a Canadian cartoonist, the just cartoons are going to be invisible to them. So we call Guy American. Guy and Dave do a great impression of American cartoonists. You wouldn’t know that these guys are not American cartoonists. So, this one’s got things that editors love. It’s got the donkey and the elephant fighting each other rather equally, and it’s got a groundhog in it for Groundhog Day. And editors love holidays. They love Groundhog Day. And what are you not going to like about this cartoon from an editors perspective? We have a lot of cartoons that take positions on issues and they don’t get into the top ten. So this one was a successful one for Guy. This one is a cartoon that I drew nine years ago. And, you know, the news doesn’t change much at that time.

Nine years ago, they were still arguing in Congress about the debt ceiling. And and it was a it was a an off the cliff kind of issue like it is right now. This is a I’ve added a Republican elephant and a Democrat donkey to the famous painting Nighthawks by Edward Hopper that shows old an old coffee shop in an urban setting.

And it’s kind of bleak. And the elephant says, I refuse to pay for the hamburger I ordered and ate. And the Democrat says, Just put my hamburger on my tab. Things don’t really change. This is a kind of a metaphor that lots of editorial cartoonist like to use. Famous artwork, famous identifiable is that you twist with a transformative message to say what you want to say.

And that’s one of the great benefits of being an editorial cartoonist, is that we’re able to work from a palette of these metaphors. In France, they call them cliches. We can we could use this palette of cliche to make our our points much more clearly and effectively and get a mood like I am going for the mood in this kind of bleak, unproductive mood, urban, dark.

And I think that’s fun. So I, I took the the Edward Hopper painting as a mood for the point that I was trying to make. And in France they call cartoons like this borrowings. I don’t think we have a particular word for it here. It’s just lovely that editorial cartoonist can use copyrighted and trademarked images from others. If we follow the rules.

One of the rules is that you’re supposed to give an acknowledgment to the copyright or trademark holder you see in the lower left corner, it says Apologies to Edward Hopper. You’ve probably seen these little notes. Apologize to this and apologize to that in editorial cartoons elsewhere. And it’s just there to acknowledge the copyright or trademark holder. Of course, Edward Hopper is no longer alive for me to apologize to him, but it’s a required acknowledgment and that’s all for the good.

Could be. Thanks to Edward Hopper, It the acknowledgment is not that will be fine too. But it’s kind of grown to be. Apologies too. Anyway, I enjoyed this cartoon to perform very well nine years ago and also last week at number eight. Oops, sorry about that. This one is by Rivers. Rivers is an interesting cartoonist for us. Rivers draws anonymously.

We don’t tell anyone who Rivers is. And that’s around the world. There are anonymous cartoonists who crop up once in a while and around the world. I can I can see a good point to that because, you know, it can be dangerous to be an editorial cartoonist around the world. Cartoonists get murdered like the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists. They get harassed by their governments, thrown in jail, beaten up.

You know, the powers that be around the world don’t like editorial cartoonist. We’re lucky to live in America and have a safe environment for for editorial cartoonist. But I think that it would be good for editorial cartoonists around the world to have the option of drawing anonymously. And that would free people up who are under threat to to say what they think – or for any other reason they choose to be anonymous.

You know, the powers that be around the world don’t like editorial cartoonist. We’re lucky to live in America and have a safe environment for for editorial cartoonist. But I think that I think that it would be good for editorial cartoonist around the world to have the option of drawing anonymously. And that would you know, that would free people up who are under threat to to say what they think or for any other reason they choose to be anonymous.

I’m okay with it. And so we do that here and we’re in a unique situation, being a middleman between the cartoonists and the publishers to be able to do that. It is unusual here, though, and I was concerned a little bit at first when we took on Rivers with our editors would not like that he’s anonymous and we got a couple of complaints.

But by and large, it’s fine. And Rivers is very often in the top ten. His or her cartoons are are quite popular. And so we we’re happy with it. And I’m fine with anonymous cartoonists. So here’s a big nasty Viking holding two big axes and looking threatening. And he’s got a high on his tunic, artificial intelligence. And there are two little businessmen standing next to him.

And one of them says, “Relax, our technocratic overlords claim he’s here to make our jobs easier and that the axes are purely decorative. And that’s cute. I like that there’s no real left or right to be disturbed by in complaining about artificial intelligence, Rivers draws lots of cartoons that are very conservative. And, you know, the conservative newspapers and the liberal newspapers, they you would think that conservative newspapers would print more conservative cartoons, but they don’t they print the same cartoons.

They print the cartoons that nobody’s going to disagree with. And that’s kind of funny. At the top of our website, we post conservative cartoons because we were getting lots of complaints from conservative editors that most of the cartoonists or liberal and, you know, people notice the cartoons they disagree with much more than they appreciate the cartoons that they agree with.

And so these conservative editors were finding that the conservative cartoons were invisible to them. But the the liberal ones were really annoying, and we’d get angry responses and threats to quit and all kinds of stuff. So I put that special conservative cartoons at the top, and we pop conservative cartoons in there frequently, including lots of cartoons by Rivers.

And that has quieted the the angry conservative editors. Now the cartoons have suddenly become visible. Still, most of the cartoons are liberal, but at least now these are are visible. So and here’s the last one. This is by Chris Wyant, another absolutely great cartoonist. He’s a new Yorker cartoonist, and he tries to a week for us. One of them is also for The Boston Globe.

And this composition of this cartoon makes me laugh. I think it’s just it’s a funny composition. That’s Uncle Sam and he’s on the head of the elephant and the elephant front of the elephant looks like he’s about to fall off the edge of a cliff. And the elephant is holding a sign that says fiscal cliff. Watch your step.

And the elephant says, Don’t worry, I’ll make sure you lay about your entitlements. And I think I just and it just looks funny. The composition makes me laugh. So, hey, I think it’s I think that’s a great one. And now we’ve gone through all ten and I’m hoping that I did it in 10 minutes, but it looks more like I took 13 minutes.

So, hey, we’re going to be oops, we’re going to I’m going to get better at all these controls as we do more of these. And we should be doing a lot of them. So be sure to check in to darylcagle.com, check CagleCast.com when we’ve got that up and going and click to subscribe get our free newsletter at Cagle.com.com.

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