A Bit of This, A Little of That (Catching Up)
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Featuring the cartooning talents of Jason Yungbluth, Michael de Adder, Mike Beckom, Ralph Steadman, Kyle Bravo, Kate Lacour, Walt Handelsman, and Michael Tisserand.
Cartoonists cut up at New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University
It was standing room only at The New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University’s “Louisiana: The Cartoonist’s Paradise” panel discussion on March 15. The conversation regularly bubbled with laughter, but mixed with the mirth were insights into the craft of combining words and pictures into punchy political commentary, broadly satisfying comedy, or incisive self-examination.
Comics historian Michael Tisserand (Krazy: George Herriman) moderated a panel with New Orleans Times-Picayune editorial cartoonist Walt Handelsman, New Yorker cartoonist Kyle Bravo, and indie cartoonist/illustrator Kate Lacour discussing the craft of cartooning. The Times-Picayune/NOLA.com’s Doug MacCash gives a brief review.
The New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University has the 44 minute session on “tape.”
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Ralph Steadman Exhibition Returns Bigger and Better Than Ever
and (eventually) coming to a museum near you.
… thrilled to be back in the USA with a brand new Ralph Steadman exhibition. A casualty of COVID, the last exhibition, Ralph Steadman: A Retrospective was returned to the UK before the tour could be completed. Now with an amazing sponsorship from United Therapeutics a brand new exhibition, Ralph Steadman: And Another Thing will be touring venues across the USA [emphasis added]. The first venue sees us returning to the American University Museum at the Katzen Art Center in Washington DC from 7th September until 8th December 2024.
Details can be found at Ralph Steadman‘s home site.
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Everyone Has the Right To Be Stupid
Despite the congressional hearings and public backlash against Ivy League universities about their acceptance of antisemitism on campus, the leaders of these institutions don’t appear to have learned their lesson.
The University of Pennsylvania recently announced that a political cartoonist named Dwayne Booth would be allowed to return to the university to teach a class on political humor. The course, titled “Sick and Satired: The Insanity of Humor and How it Keeps Us Sane,” is set to run from August to December 2024.
Editorial cartoonists taking on politicians, news personalities, and celebrities is expected, attacking a fellow cartoonist is rare. So Mike Beckom‘s recent editoon featuring Mr. Fish stood out. On Mike’s posting to the SECNCS’s Facebook page he linked to the conservative Red State story about the news which is where the opening sentences above come from.
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How >Not< To Get Cancelled in 2024
In the 2024 Kesterton Lecture with Michael de Adder, at the Carleton School of Journalism and Communications, he discusses his time with the Post. This is the first time I’ve heard a reason for him leaving the WaPo, and he chalks it up to the editorial page editor’s death.
Comics DC transcribes the part of Michael de Adder‘s lecture that involves his parting from The Washington Post:
… So when Tom Toles decided to retire … I told my manager that I wanted to show interest in getting that job. I didn’t expect to get it, and I got it, and it was great at first. I think I started off a little slow.
Fred Hiatt, the guy that hired me, in 2022 at Thanksgiving he had a heart attack and died. It was a massive heart attack and I think he died something like within two weeks.I always felt like I only had one person on my side at the [Post]. I probably had 10 people on my side at the Washington Post but I really only felt like I had one person. Now it happened to be the main person so he’s the person you want to have on your side, but when he died, I knew that it’s possible that my career with them was going to end…
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Enemy of the County!
From the Jewish Telegraphic Agency:
(JTA) – Officials in Rochester, New York, this week condemned a cartoon depicting the head of the local Jewish federation and the Jewish majority leader of the county legislature in crude antisemitic caricatures that was sent out in a mass mailer.
The cartoon appeared to object to an Israeli flag that has flown outside a county government office since shortly after the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack…
… The text of the mailer accompanying the cartoon, most of which argued for the Israeli flag’s removal, also included language that appeared to justify the Oct. 7 attack. “The October 7th attack was despicable… but also well-earned thanks to Israel’s decision to solve the ‘Palestinian Question’ with state terror and apartheid,” it reads.
The letter goes on to say that flying the Israeli flag for a week or a month after Oct. 7 was “entirely comprehensible,” but to continue flying it six months later “is simply to engage in propaganda on behalf of our nation’s most conspicuous vassal state.”
Cartoonist Jason Yungbluth had his reasons as he explained on his website:
Folks, I may not be long for this world. Any moment now, the IDF may launch a Hellfire missile through my studio window… that is, if I don’t “accidentally” jump off a roof while a man who looks suspiciously like Anthony Blinken in a trench coat flees the scene. You see, I have become… an Enemy of the County!
As readers of my work know, there is only one group of people that I believe deserve to be genocided out of existence: mods. Forum moderators are the scum of the earth, and also, I believe, the secret rulers of America and the people who killed Kennedy. So when Israel began their onslaught against the Palestinian people last year, I naturally asked myself, “What can be the justification for this? It’s not like Hamas kicked Netanyahu off of Reddit for defending JK Rowling! THIS MUST NOT STAND!”
This, I began my activism to do my small part as an American to help end the Gaza Genocide, which ultimately led to my engagement with political activists in Rochester, NY who are trying to get our county government to take down the Israeli flag from in front of the County Office Building, where it flies proudly as a symbol of our local government’s support for mass murder…
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