Cartoon Crisis

To borrow liberally from a line once uttered by legendary newspaperman William Randolph Hearst, if readers had to choose between looking at a picture of a beautiful woman, a pretty baby, an adorable dog or a clever illustration or cartoon, the ’toon would win every time.

Why, then,  are editorial cartoons — which, political or otherwise, have so much appeal and contribute so much value to the overall product for all of $10 to $50 per offering — always the first thing to go when corporate bean-counters start cutting budgets?

For that matter, why are some editorial illustrators and cartoonists apparently no longer even welcome at a table that they’ve been largely responsible for setting for otherwise successful daily and weekly papers, a development that led Max Cannon, who draws “Red Meat,” to proclaim earlier this year that editorial cartooning as we know it is on the brink of “apocalypse?”

“It used to be that editors would lie and claim that they didn’t have room in their newspaper. That was kind of the standard rejection. Now it’s true,” says longtime nationally syndicated cartoonist and author Ted Rall, creator of “Left Coast,” appearing each week in this newspaper.

In either a reflection of economic conditions, or another sign that newspapers really are disappearing from the media landscape, or a combination of both, the Pasadena Weekly is presently the only newspaper — alternative or otherwise — in Southern California to carry Rall, “This Modern World,” by Tom Tomorrow (aka Dan Perkins), and “The Simpsons” creator Matt Groening, who for years penned “Life in Hell” (now called “Life is Swell”) for the LA Weekly, but no longer does.

Rall, Perkins and Groening were once the darlings of the alternative newspaper world, but no longer, apparently. Not since February, when Village Voice Media, owners of New York’s Village Voice, the LA Weekly and a dozen other weeklies in the industry’s top markets imposed a suspension on all cartoons.

“They really don’t have a lot of pages,” says Rall, past president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, speaking from his home in New York.

The number of papers carrying the politically left-leaning Rall’s work over the years — as many as 140 at one point nearly a decade ago — has dropped to just 72. “But they don’t have a lot of pages, because they don’t have enough advertising to support the pages. That’s what’s really going on,” Rall explains.

Veteran daily political cartoonist Steve Greenberg knows all too well that weeklies aren’t alone in squeezing out illustrators and cartoonists when
times get tough.

“The daily market is as bad as the alt market,” says Greenberg, who started out in 1978 with the Daily News of Los Angeles. From there, he went to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer for 14 years, then to the San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner before landing at the Ventura County Star, where he worked for six years before being laid off last November. Now that he’s been forced to shop his work, the freelance pickings are slim.

“The whole Village Voice conglomerate has just shut down as far as taking on cartooning,” Greenberg notes with genuine alarm. “They just aren’t doing it.”

‘The Worst Week Ever’

When it comes to dailies, as Greenberg pointed out in the VC Reporter after starting there in mid-January, the Internet has long been providing free news, and now craigslist and other bargain Web sites are siphoning off life-giving classified advertising revenue. “Mix in the recession, credit freeze and mortgage meltdown along with layoffs everywhere, and the revenue numbers for newspapers are worse than ever,” writes Greenberg.

He’s bounced back, now featured on LA Observed, the insider’s Web site for news on local journalism and politics, and VC Reporter, one of PW’s sister papers. His work is also appearing here in PW. But for most cartoonists, Greenberg says the future is pretty bleak.

Shortly after Election Day, he writes, “came a spurt that some have called the ‘Worst Week Ever,’ with the Seattle Times axing its six-year cartoonist … and two days earlier, the Kansas City Star axing its cartoonist of 27 years’ tenure … and two days earlier, the Ventura County Star axing, well … me.”

But they were far from alone. “[T]he grand field of editorial [or ‘political’] cartooning,” says Greenberg, “has been disappearing faster than a polar ice cap, with newspapers eliminating positions at a rate of more than one a month across the country in the last year. There were well over 200 staff cartoonists in the 1980s, and perhaps just 80 now; exact counts are tricky, but the numbers are clearly plunging. In 2008 alone, at least 16 newspaper positions disappeared.”

In the world of dailies, which have always had editorial illustrators and cartoonists on staff, Greenberg says one factor contributing to all this carnage has been the increasing use of inexpensive syndicated cartoons. “For a small fraction of a cartoonist’s salary, editors can get piles of cartoons each week,” he notes. Another problem is politics, with the inexperience of the freelancers melding well with management’s desire not to offend anyone.

“True, [syndicate offerings] might not be local, but that’s seen as a plus: Light topical gags fill the space, anything the least bit inflammatory goes in the trash bin, and there are no worries about offending a local councilman or advertiser who might be the publisher’s golfing buddy,” Greenberg writes.

David Wallis, founder of the FeatureWell.com news syndicate and author of “Killed Cartoons: Casualties from the War on Free Expression,” told PW Contributing Editor Joe Piasecki back in 2007 that editors and publishers of both alternative and daily papers scrap great work over fear of someone taking offense.

“Cartoonists are arguably the most incendiary journalists,” Wallis told Piasecki. “They’re the ones who hit us in a primitive place. … Part of their job brief is to offend, and that makes editors increasingly uncomfortable.”

That was nearly three years ago. Today, “At a time when news publications are in a desperate bid to attract younger readers, they are squandering an opportunity to reach those very readers by either firing [cartoonists] or minimizing the number of editorial cartoons they publish,” says Wallis.

“Every newspaper should have at least one graphic reporter who reports the news and does it in the language of the graphic novel, using the techniques they use in graphic novels to reach new readers. Each paper should have one.” That’s because “Cartoons,” says Wallis, “are often the most popular part of the newspaper. If anything, newspapers should be significantly increasing their visual content.”

While Village Voice Media papers are well known for maintaining a right-leaning Libertarian bent to their overall coverage, which is sometimes way out of place in the wacky world of Tom Tomorrow, Perkins said he didn’t perceive politics playing a role in his suspension in February. “Some papers are traditionally friendlier to my style than others, but I have absolutely no idea” whether politics played a part in the moratorium, which VVM officials maintain was called in order to save money. “I can’t read people’s minds. I can only take them at their word.”

Tony Ortega, editor of the Village Voice, declined to speak on the record about the chain’s economic condition, but did say it was done to save money. In fact, Ortega said, “We brought back Tom Tomorrow several weeks ago, and I’m hoping to bring back others as long as things continue to improve for us.”

No one cares

The hugely popular Perkins was ultimately reinstated in September, just before it was reported that he had drawn the nine-panel cover for Pearl Jam’s latest album, “Backspacer,” which debuted Sept. 20.

In addition to the Pearl Jam cover, Perkins has also written a children’s book. Still, “I did lose a dozen midsize cities,” the 48-year-old told PW in a phone interview last month. “As I say, there are still a lot of other papers and a lot of smaller markets as well.” But, he said, “There is such a changing landscape right now. In the Internet age, it hasn’t decimated me like it would have 15 years ago. Then again, in the Internet Age, newspapers are having trouble surviving. So it’s kind of a catch-22.”

While the Iowa City native has always been politically active, campaigning as a youngster for 1972 Democratic presidential contender George McGovern, then taking up the anti-nuclear cause as a teen, Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder tells The New York Times that the band connected with Perkins for mostly economic reasons, “since the Internet has wreaked the same havoc on newspapers as it has on the music industry,” as Vedder puts it. “It used to be real simple; Dan writes a strip, it gets in the paper, people read it, Dan gets paid. That’s how we felt too: make records, people buy them at a record store, we tour, there you go. It’s not that simple anymore.”

Whatever happens, Perkins, father of a 6-year-old boy and author of the children’s book “The Very Silly Mayor,” — the story of a town, according to the New Haven Advocate, where leaders make cops dress in clown suits and have fires fought with peanut butter — says he will survive.

“People should not feel sorry for me. I’ll be fine. I just love cartooning,” he tells the Weekly from his home in Connecticut. “I would just like to keep doing cartoons, but I am very resilient, and if my entire career collapses, I assure you, I will find something else to do.”

Rall attributes losing many of his customers to politics, specifically the climate of fear to offend that developed following Sept. 11.

The Twin Towers tragedy “created a very conservative atmosphere … it kind of made any liberal or left-wing or anti-government commentary seem out of touch with the political atmosphere at the time. Also, at that exact time the big dotcom advertising meltdown hit newspapers. So that fed in …and daily newspapers in particular started getting rid of their editorial cartoons,” Rall recalls.

Now, eight years later, editors seem to think that editorial cartoons don’t work because no one cares about them. “But the truth is no one cares about the editorial cartoons that they use. It would kind of be like putting a really old, fat woman on the cover of Maxim, and when that doesn’t work well, the editor saying people aren’t into women. No, they are into women, just not that woman.”

All-American art

Throughout the 1800s, political cartoons and editorial illustrations grew in popularity and political influence through the work of artists like Thomas Nast, who created the image of a well-fed Santa Claus we’ve become familiar with, as well as the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant. Dubbed “The Prince of Caricaturists,” Nast’s skewering of New York’s corrupt William “Boss” Tweed for Harper’s Weekly kept the pot boiling for the conviction of Tweed and his gang of cronies on corruption charges in the early 1870s.

Also around that time in St. Louis, another German immigrant, Joseph Keppler, was on his way to becoming the most successful political cartoonist of the Gilded Age. Keppler started three German-language illustrated magazines — among them Puck, which later became wildly popular after moving to New York and being translated into English.

In the last century, as Greenberg notes in his column for VC Reporter, Herb Block, aka Herblock, of the Washington Post infuriated Richard Nixon when he was a communist-hunting congressman, and later president. It’s been said that Herblock’s cartoons, especially those of Nixon during his fall from power in the early 1970s, were even more politically influential than those of Nast a century prior.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Paul Conrad also had a field day with Nixon for the LA Times before and after Watergate. Conrad also took on Ronald Reagan when Reagan was governor of California and later president. Before leaving the Times in 1993, Conrad won two Pulitzers (he had already won one while at the Denver Post in the 1950s) before being replaced by ultra-conservative Michael Ramirez.

Ramirez won the first of two Pulitzers in 1994, while with The Commercial Appeal newspaper in Memphis. After coming to the Times, the paper discontinued him in 2005, three years before he won another Pulitzer, this time while he was with Investor’s Daily Journal.

Today, Greenberg notes, the Times no longer has a political cartoonist.

“If you win a Pulitzer Prize, it no longer protects you from being fired,” observes Wallis.

Never better … or worse

The sad but simple fact is that print media in general is in big trouble. In the world of dailies, the LA Times has laid off scores of veteran staffers and suffered staggering circulation drops over the past few years. The Daily News of Los Angeles, owned by the same chain that runs the Pasadena Star-News, is also a shadow of what it was when Greenberg worked there.

Things are better in the alternative weekly category, but not by that much. Just over the past few years a number of publications — among them LA CityBeat, its companion monthly magazine New Angeles, and PW’s monthly Glendale magazine, Verdugo — have tanked.

When it comes to weekly newspapers in LA — particularly alternatives — it’s basically PW and the LA Weekly, which, at an anorexic 120 or fewer pages a week (tabloid-size alt papers measure general health by the number of pages in an issue, usually keeping to a 60/40 percent breakdown between advertising and editorial, respectively), is no longer the West Coast behemoth that was nearly twice that size every week just a few years back.

PW’s also taken some hits in the recession, reducing page counts in certain sections in order to balance budgets. But, thanks mainly to a strong and growing base of committed advertisers and devoted readers, the paper has managed to stay in the game. People enjoy reading the Weekly — and our award-winning cartoons and illustrations over the years (by the likes of Tony Gleeson, Phil Mendez, Donna Barstow, Callahan, Rey Bustos, Karl Frey, Jodi Barr, Eric Cyree, Agnes Carrera, Derek Carter, Ching Ching Cheng, Tim Furey, Linda Silvestri, Ted Uhrich, Glenda Chiu and others too many to mention here) are a big reason why they do.

But, as Megan Tady of Extra!, the magazine of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, notes, no one is immune from the ravages of these financial hard times. “Newspapers across the country are in crisis, and alt weeklies are no exception. With the rise of online content, a faltering economy that has gutted ad revenue, and decades of rampant media consolidation that have left companies debt-laden, print publications are shedding content [and quality] to try to save their sinking ships,” Tady writes.

Within the framework of that business paradigm, Matt Groening tells The Onion’s AV Club magazine, cartoonists are “at the bottom of the food chain.”

“We’re hoping that weekly newspapers don’t go the way of dime novels. It may be that the time has come and passed, but I don’t know. I hope not,” says Groening, who did not return calls for comment on this story.

Wallis says newspapers are their own worst enemies by projecting images of weakness. “When you put out a thin newspaper, one without editorial art, you start conveying the message to readers that what you are putting out is no longer important enough to pick up,” Wallis says. “There is a tipping point where customers decide whether this is something that they are not really going to miss anymore.”

Greenberg is cautiously optimistic, now that layoffs have slowed down. “In some cases, newspapers are still waiting to see what’s happening with their finances and circulation, but the pace of layoffs has slowed since I wrote that piece. Not that it’s a wonderful picture out there. But layoffs are not quite as bad as they had been,” Greenberg said.

Perkins’ forecast on the field is shaped by a couple of large clouds: “Political cartooning will exist in some form online, but it becomes a different animal online … there is so much competition for eyeballs right now.” When you combine that competition with the reality of anyone having access to those images, “and if no one is willing to pay for them online, which is often the case, you can guess that the future is not so bright.”

“I don’t want anyone to think this is anything other than a dismal picture,” says Rall, who just released “The Year of Loving Dangerously,” co-written by Pablo G. Callejo, an autobiographical tale of hard times in mid-’80s New York City.

“But I do think there is a side that isn’t reported much … Look, for instance, at the [Association of American Editorial Cartoonists]. It has more members than ever before — record-breaking numbers. And, really, the work has never been better; never been as smart or relevant,” Rall says. “But what we have is an economic problem and the work is not going to stay great if no one can figure out a way to get paid. All the good people are going to go and do other things.”