Why Trump is Cartoonist’s Target-in-Chief
“You pick on Trump way more than you picked on Obama.”
I started wondering if these people were on to something. Trump officially marks the middle of his term Sunday, so I decided to go back and count the cartoons I’ve done on him over the past two years and compare that number to the cartoons I drew of Obama during his first two years.
Here’s what I found.
Obama: 72.
Trump: 121.Turns out my critics were right! But the numbers tell only part of the story.
Steve Breen gets introspective about why Trump is “such an inviting target.”
Emma Allen is Expanding The New Yorker’s Comic Universe
This new head honcho of humor is diversifying the formats and faces featured in the revered magazine.
Mark Knight, the Serena Williams cartoonist, feared for his life
‘They traced my wife and children through Facebook. Our son’s a pilot. There were messages that said, “I hope your son’s plane crashes into your house and kills you all”,’ Knight told The Australian.
‘They wished I was dead, there were threats, aggressive horrible stuff against the kids, like ‘We hope someone gets you, gets your family’. I was a ‘racist a**hole’. I work in the media, I know what to expect, but my family doesn’t and it hit them really hard.’
The Daily Mail talks to Mark Knight about the repercussions of an editorial cartoon.
It wasn’t just the public, but fellow cartoonists:
They bumped into Fairfax cartoonist Cathy Wilcox, one of a very few women in this game, who serves on the [Australian Cartoonists’ Association’s] committee.
She’d joined the Guardian’s Andrew Marlton in killing off a motion of support for Knight because of their reservations about the Serena cartoon. Her encounter with Knight grew testy …
The Decline and Fall of Illustration
At the end of every year the New York Times Magazine runs a special issue devoted to noteworthy lives that ended that year. In this year’s issue they included seven full page portraits by contemporary artists. I think they are, for the most part, astonishingly bad.
David Apatoff looks at the year end edition of a famed magazine. Spoiler: he isn’t impressed.
An interesting, and lengthy, comments section continues the assessment (while occasionally digressing to jazz and social justice).
Frank Miller 1925 – 1983
Frank Miller was a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for the Des Moines Register from 1953 to 1983.
An archive of Frank Miller editorial cartoons from the University of Iowa Digital Library.
Brought to mind because his widow Cathy Miller recently passed.
More History: Comics and Oil
During my stay at the Billy Ireland Library & Museum, I was mainly focused on the early history of oil and comics – it is the crux of the new book I am working on, tentatively titled “Oil Comics: Iconographies of Energy, Environment, and Motion.” In the project, I chart how comics and oil have a shared and multi-layered history. That history reaches down to the basic materials of comics – India Ink’s “carbon black,” commonly derived from petroleum since around the 11th century…
Dr. Daniel Worden gives us a sneak peek into his forthcoming book.