23 minute read
Back to the Drawing Board
Political cartooning is a dying profession, but there are more cartoons with politics than ever.
COMICS
Back to the Drawing Board
AUTHOR Matt Bors I n 2007, at the age of twenty-four, I went to the Mayflower Hotel, in Washington, DC, to attend the fiftieth annual gathering of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. It was my first time there; I’d been invited as part of a cohort of about ten young people, an outreach by old-timers to the next generation. Newspapers were declining, and the AAEC was interested in how our profession could make money on the internet. A panel posed the question, “What is the future of editorial cartoons?”
At the time, the answer was me. I’d been cartooning professionally for four years, and I’d recently signed a syndication deal with United Media—home of Garfield and Nancy—that made me the youngest syndicated cartoonist in the country. I had nearly full-time employment drawing three editorial cartoons a week, and I filled every other waking hour with freelance illustration and work on a graphic novel. Roaming through the convention, feeling awkward in a borrowed blazer amid the chandeliers and Pulitzer winners, I felt that perhaps I had chosen something of a real profession—one that could garner respect, or enough of a living that I could toast myself and my colleagues in a ballroom once a year.
MATT BORS In a 2003 comic for syndication (left), I worried that the global war on terror would become a “forever war.” My prediction was correct; sixteen years later, I found myself drawing a version of the same cartoon for The Nib (below).
Later, I would come to see that convention and its open bar as a last hurrah. The event was a financial disaster for the AAEC, leaving it mired in debt. Over the next decade-plus, the organization’s venues became smaller and humbler, and the number of attendees dwindled and aged. I watched my peers move into other careers like graphic design and animation, which came with higher and steadier paychecks. Meanwhile, my promising start in syndication never paid me more than twenty thousand dollars a year. It turned out I wasn’t the future of editorial cartoons; I was one of the last people making a go at it.
Ask a political cartoonist when the profession began, and you’re likely to hear that it all started with cave drawings—an answer that casts us as a fundamental part of society. In fact, Benjamin Franklin is credited with one of the first official political cartoons—“Join, or Die,” a commentary on the disunity of the colonies—in 1754 for his newspaper the Pennsylvania Gazette. In Great Britain, around the same time, William Hogarth, an artist and social critic, drew satirical illustrations. But the field didn’t coalesce into something with a name until 1841, with the arrival of a British humor magazine, Punch, which would soon coin the term “cartoon.”
Political cartoons took off in popularity in tandem with the explosion in newspaper publishing facilitated by mass printing technology; illustrations were a convenient means to break up text-heavy pages. The godfather of the field, Thomas Nast, popularized such figures as the Democratic donkey and Uncle Sam. Cartooning in the second half of the nineteenth century for Harper’s Weekly, Nast devised intricate ink drawings that were painstakingly etched into engraving plates by assistants; his claim to fame was helping usher in the downfall of William “Boss” Tweed, a corrupt New York City politician convicted of stealing millions of dollars. Those were the glory years, when printed matter ruled the cultural conversation and political cartoons often appeared on newspapers’ front pages.
According to the Herb Block Foundation— a nonprofit established in 2001 by the bequest of Block, who had been a Washington Post cartoonist—by the start of the twentieth century there were an estimated two thousand editorial cartoonists employed by American newspapers. With the advent of radio, television, and other media, newspapers began a long, slow decline—and with them went the cartoonists. In 1957, the year the AAEC was formed, the association counted two hundred seventy-five staff cartoonists. Today, fewer than thirty political cartoonists are employed full-time, and every year the survivors are winnowed further by buyouts, layoffs, and age. In 2020, Pulitzer Prize winners Signe Wilkinson and Tom Toles retired from the Philadelphia Daily News and Washington Post, respectively; their jobs were not filled.
Even as the cartooning profession faded, the art of political cartooning grew sharper. Starting in the seventies, cartoonists experimented with new styles and modes of storytelling in the alt-weekly press. Jules Feiffer’s comics in the Village Voice, for which he eventually earned an annual salary of seventyfive thousand dollars, filled full pages with dialogue-heavy panels that reflected the rhythms of everyday life; in 1986, he became the first and only “alternative” cartoonist to win a Pulitzer. Matt Groening’s “Life in Hell,” which first appeared regularly in the Los Angeles Reader in 1980, wasn’t exactly a political cartoon, but when he took shots at Reaganomics, his work had more teeth than what was appearing in the daily papers. In the nineties, artists such as Derf and Tom Tomorrow infused political cartoons with more idiosyncratic artwork and cutting jokes.
I discovered these nineties cartoonists in the run-up to the Iraq War, when I was nineteen, after having spent my childhood reading superhero fare. Suddenly my interests were political, and I found myself drawing editorial cartoons. My peers—people like David Rees, whose “Get Your War On” strip in Rolling Stone was thrilling and deceivingly simple, nothing more than clip art of office workers cursing about the war on terror— challenged the presumption that cartoonists needed to be trained artists to make political points. I started my career just in time to catch the tail end of the alt-weekly era, landing work in the Boston Phoenix and Seattle’s The Stranger. Cartooning in the Bush era felt important; wars without end and abuses of civil liberties were rolling out with high public
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN This cartoon, first published in 1754 in the Pennsylvania Gazette, accompanied an editorial in which Franklin called for the American colonies to band together for protection against Native Americans and the French.
PUNCH An 1889 cartoon in Punch, a satirical magazine, warns cyclists about the penny-farthing. THOMAS NAST In this Harper’s Weekly cartoon from 1900, Nast lampoons the corrupt New York administration led by “Boss” Tweed and the Tammany Society.
JULES FEIFFER In 1986, when Feiffer was a staff cartoonist for the Village Voice, he was recognized with a Pulitzer in Editorial Cartooning.
TOM TOMORROW I was inspired to draw political comics when I discovered artists like Tomorrow in the alt-weeklies of the Nineties. He and others of that era would become regulars at The Nib.
GEMMA CORRELL The early days of The Nib were exciting, though ultimately the publication was short-lived. I wanted to publish political and nonfiction comics by new artists. Correll was one of our first contributors and remains one of the most popular.
approval, and reporters seemed to have abandoned their role as critics. More than a hundred years after Nast, the political cartoonists of this era made a strong argument for the field’s relevance by being right about the most consequential issues of the day.
But it was during the same period that altweeklies got swallowed by chains and revenues tanked across the newspaper industry. The idea that every newsroom should employ a cartoonist quickly dissolved. Without stable jobs, we met our audiences directly, on social media; many of my cartoons took off with tens of thousands of shares and millions of views. There was no money in posting online, but we learned to turn follower counts into merch sales and commercial gigs; eventually, some of us signed up for Patreon and Substack.
Along with the fire hose of social media attention came corporate capital. In 2013, I got my first staff job, as a cartoonist and editor at Medium. The role was vague and in constant flux, but the company was willing to experiment on an idea for an all-comics publication: The Nib. I’d edit it, Medium would fund it, and we’d make a new online home for political cartoons and nonfiction comics of all kinds.
The Nib was popular, reaching millions of readers every month. But Medium was not there to serve cartooning; cartooning was there to serve it. Not quite two years after it started, almost all the editorial staff was laid off. I took a buyout and retained The Nib. For a few years, I took The Nib to First Look Media—and then was laid off again.
Some online media companies are figuring out the future better than others. It’s become clear by now, though, that political cartoons won’t be along for the ride. They never really were. From the beginning, digital outlets rarely made space for political cartoonists as staffers or even as freelance contributors— and so the move away from print has permanently decoupled political cartoons from news journalism. Cartoonists often blame editors for their lack of interest and visual illiteracy—“words people,” we call them. I have often marveled that The Nib was ever able to exist at all. Surely, I thought, my top talent would be poached by media companies with deeper pockets. But it never happened.
In April, I quit political cartooning. I was thirty-seven, and I’d drawn about sixteen hundred cartoons over eighteen years. Deep burnout had set in over the course of the pandemic, and I decided to devote time
WHIT TAYLOR Excerpt from “America Isn’t Ready for a Pandemic,” 2018
NICCOLO PIZARRO “Family Portrait,” 2021
KENDRA WELLS Opposite page: “More Benefits of Climate Change,” 2020
to other kinds of work—genre comics, nonfiction graphic novels. It was mostly a creative decision, but there was also a financial incentive: while the market for political cartoons is shrinking, graphic novels are booming. Last year, graphic novels and comic books accounted for $1.28 billion in sales in North America. (The revenue from political cartooning, meanwhile, must be the combined income of the last thirty people doing it.)
I am still running The Nib—an awkward perch for a retired political cartoonist. The magazine is small and completely independent, funded by subscribers. Many of the comics we publish aren’t political cartoons in the traditional sense, as many cartoonists have in recent years gravitated more toward memoir and essay, freeing them from reacting to the news of the day and giving them more space to make an argument. (Kendra Wells, a thirty-year-old Nib contributor, told me they view political cartoons as “stuffy old guys whose one-panel strips get into newspapers or Time magazine.”)
Yet the comics scene as a whole is more fiercely political than ever—far more than when I started drawing. Navel-gazing indie comics, once dominated by white men, have given way to nonfiction work by artists such as Niccolo Pizarro, Ben Passmore, Mattie Lubchansky, and Whit Taylor, who employ a variety of styles to comment on the state of the world. A perusal of my Instagram feed in May showed comic essays on queer identity, illustrations in support of Palestine, and an instructional comic from NPR on how bystanders can intervene in racist attacks on Asians. These comics are political—they just aren’t what we would call political cartoons.
In June, many of us in the field were dismayed to find that, for the first time since 1973—and in one of the most politically tumultuous years of our lifetimes—the Pulitzer Prize board declined to issue an award for editorial cartooning. The AAEC issued a fiery statement to “urge radical structural reform of the award to evaluate modern opinion cartoons by 21st century standards.” As far as I was concerned, the decision confirmed that the stewards of old media just aren’t that into us anymore. I had left at the right moment.
I might dip into political cartoons again someday. Maybe I’m done for good. Maybe The Nib will collapse. Maybe my stressinduced chest pains will kill me. All I know is that, even if political cartoons are disappearing, comics with politics in them are everywhere. I’ve stopped caring what people call them. cjr
BEN PASSMORE Excerpt from “A Good Old-Fashioned Screaming Match,” 2020
MATTIE LUBCHANSKY Excerpt from The Antifa SuperSoldier Cookbook, published in 2021 by Silver Sprocket
STREET SALES Above: Trinity Holabach with copies of Real Change.
Right: Zackary Tutwiler is a vendor in Seattle.
Opposite: Candy Bland, also a vendor, scopes out her spot.
A Seattle newspaper models how to cover unhoused people—and puts money in their pockets
LOCAL JOURNALISM
Retail Politics
Bitter Lake, in northwest Seattle, derives its name from the acidic residue of a long since demolished sawmill. Small and oblong, it now hosts noisy, profusely defecatory gaggles of Canadian geese and sits beside houses, apartments, and the Broadview Thomson elementary and middle school. In the spring of 2020, camping tents began to pop up along the wooded southern edge of the lake, adjacent to Broadview Thomson’s ball field. A few dozen people in need of housing moved onto the land, which is owned by the local school district.
One afternoon this past May, Samira George, the features reporter for Real Change, a weekly newspaper attached to a nonprofit of the same name, arrived at Bitter Lake to interview residents of the encampment. George, who is twenty-six, was first sent there on a tip: a woman who lived in a house nearby had gotten to know the newcomers and felt disturbed by how they were portrayed on KOMO-TV, a local station owned by the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group. The coverage she’d seen drew on demeaning tropes of homelessness: allegations of “violence,” “drug use,” “property crimes,” a “half naked” “sex worker”; there were panning shots of tents and shopping carts and interviews with angry parents and business owners. The woman reached out to Real Change and connected George to the residents, hoping to get a more humane story before the public.
Reporting from the camp, George spotted a couple of men talking and asked if “Tony” was around. Anthony Pieper and his partner, Shelly Vaughn, were living in a large tent beneath a stand of trees. George had met Pieper once before, on an earlier visit to Bitter Lake, and he gamely answered her questions— about when he and Vaughn had arrived, interactions with activists and reporters, access to bathrooms and garbage cans. Vaughn kept a journal, which she showed to George, reading aloud from a response she’d written to an especially hurtful KOMO segment.
“Making Bitter Lake home” appeared as a full-color centerfold in the June 2 issue of Real Change. The article was both a profile of Vaughn and Pieper and a critique of TV news as brokered by a self-proclaimed homeless-rights activist who “will pop up at their encampment, walk around for roughly 30 minutes, take photos or videos and offer to pick up trash, which the campers are OK doing themselves,” George wrote. The story sidestepped any concern for orthodox notions of balance: Pieper and Vaughn were presented in their voice, but there was no quote from the activist, nor from the KOMO reporter who had filed so many sensationalized stories about the camp, nor from a mayoral candidate whom Pieper accused of scapegoating homeless people.
A week before the story came out, I’d sat in on an editorial meeting with George and the other two members of the Real Change
newsroom, held over Zoom. “Nobody’s actually talking to people living in the encampment,” George said. That bothered her especially because her brother was homeless, living out of his car in Northern California. She discussed the framing of her piece with Lee Nacozy, the managing editor, and Henry Behrens, the arts editor and designer. If, for instance, someone in a tent were doing drugs, would it be appropriate to portray that? To publish a photo of used needles? “What is accurate yet fair in advocacy journalism?” Nacozy wondered.
Real Change has always done advocacy journalism, which Nacozy—a forty-yearold former staffer of the Austin AmericanStatesman—said she is still getting used to. Real Change, the umbrella organization, has a three-part structure: newspaper, vendor program, and advocacy department. Homeless and low-income people can sign up with Real Change, the nonprofit, to sell Real Change, the newspaper; vendors buy the paper at sixty cents per copy and sell it for two dollars plus tips. “The newspaper has two bottom lines,” Shelley Dooley, the managing director, told me. “It’s one of the last weekly papers and provides information from the participant perspective. The other is, the newspaper is a widget for vendor income.” To keep the newsroom independent, Real Change maintains an institutional firewall; if the advocacy team is presenting at a city council hearing, the Real Change reporter covering the story sits on the other side of the room. (That has at times caused the paper to lose out to other outlets: “The most embarrassing thing was when the Seattle Times scooped us on a story our advocacy department was involved in,” Ashley Archibald, a former Real Change writer, said. “I had no clue.”)
Still, as one of about a hundred “street papers” around the world that fuse journalism, employment, and activism, Real Change tends to support the nonprofit’s overall mission. “A special vantage point for a Real Change reporter is when we’re asking about homelessness,” Nacozy told me. “We’re really clear. We advocate for these people in particular.” But if, at its founding, in 1994, the newspaper had a unique grasp of the housing crisis, most media have since been forced to confront the problem. “Homelessness”—by which people usually mean the eyesore of tent dwellers rather than mass displacement accelerated by the spread of Amazon and other tech giants—is now the central political concern in Seattle. Every newsroom in the city has made the subject a daily focus—often following Real Change’s lead while crowding its niche.
In the spring of 2021, when George was reporting on Bitter Lake, three-quarters of adult Seattleites were receiving coronavirus vaccines, and Real Change was attempting to reopen its office and newsroom, just across the street from a Christian charity. The pandemic had meant a dramatic loss in circulation, vendors, and staff; the next few months would be critical, for both the publication and the city. Residents were busy fighting over “Compassion Seattle,” an amendment to the city charter that promised to keep the streets “open and clear of encampments.” Kshama Sawant, a socialist council member and Real Change ally known for her “tax Amazon” campaign, was expected to face a recall. And Seattle was looking toward November, when it would elect several council members and a new mayor to replace Jenny Durkan—whose policies have been criticized frequently in the pages of Real Change. (“Homeless sweeps under Mayor Durkan have mostly increased the stress on unsheltered people and made them less likely to accept help,” a piece read.) Real Change planned to cover these stories with earned empathy—and to set an example for other newsrooms.
Real Change is a Seattle institution, but it was conceived in the late eighties by Tim Harris, a young Marxist convert in Boston. In those days, Harris was struggling with a basic contradiction. As he recruited homeless people to stage sit-ins at the state capitol and to join tent-city protests, “what I saw was that social-justice, economicjustice organizing has a very long timeline and is very uncertain,” he recalled. “Yet, at the same time, people’s needs were very immediate and dire.” He wondered if there might be a way to mix politics and service.
In New York City, in 1989, Hutchinson Persons, a rock musician with an activist streak, began to publish Street News, a paper sold by unhoused and low-income people.
A similar tabloid called Street Sheet started up in San Francisco. Harris had founded an anarchist monthly in college and was intrigued by the vocational sales model of these emerging papers. He decided to establish one in Boston, which he called Spare Change and declared to be “Alinskyist” in form (after Saul Alinsky, the Chicago radical), meaning that “homeless people needed to make all the decisions.” Eventually, he joked, the proletariat kicked him out. He looked for a new place that would benefit from a similar outfit.
He chose Seattle but decided, this time, to operate “along more cross-class lines,” appointing himself founding director and installing a traditional infrastructure of staff and board. Then, as now, Seattle had a visible homelessness crisis. Activists were taking over empty properties; a group called share (the Seattle Housing and Resource Effort) was building protest encampments; wheel (the Women’s Housing and Equality Enhancement League) was founded to advocate for unhoused women; homeless artists were running the Street Life art gallery. One day, an artist named Wes Browning was at Street Life when Harris walked in to solicit paintings and illustrations for his new paper. As Browning recalled, Harris was wearing a suit. “I thought he was the FBI,” Browning said. (Harris denied that he wore a suit but said that he did have an uncharacteristically “straight haircut.”)
Harris persuaded Browning to contribute to Real Change. Browning’s cover design for the first issue, in August 1994, was an abstract geometric face rendered in bands of black and white, an octopus tentacle swirling around the chin and cheek. In the years since, Browning and his wife, Anitra Freeman, whom he also met at the gallery, have played every imaginable role at Real Change, while living housed and unhoused. Browning has provided artwork and written a regular humor column; he’s now employed at Real Change part-time, managing the paper’s circulation. Freeman has organized political actions, taught writing workshops, and contributed poetry and essays; she currently sits on the board. In 1997, with Harris, they attended the first conference of a regional street paper organization.
Israel Bayer, who runs what is now the International Network of Street Papers (INSP) North America, is an alumnus of Real Change, Portland’s Street Roots, and Colorado’s Denver Voice; he has also lived through poverty and addiction. When he moved to the Pacific Northwest from Illinois, in 1999, “the antiglobalization movement was rockin’,” he recalled. “There was something in the air that made it feel like something was happening around movements and social change.” Street papers in cities like Seattle and Portland were initially more about community organizing than journalism, he said, but they have since “evolved to be a more polished platform.” The INSP counts more than a hundred street papers around the world, in thirty-five countries and twenty-five languages. Most are monthlies, glossy in style, often with deceptively banal cover stories: on Dolly Parton, Taylor Swift, the Dalai Lama. “Part of that is trying to attract apolitical people to the paper, to a harder-hitting investigative piece on public housing or marijuana or foster care or child homelessness in the schools,” Bayer said. “We’re trying to bring people in.”
In its early years, Real Change had the feel of a newsletter. Issue One began with an essay, “Musings of the Fortunate,” by George Woodring, who’d been nomadic and homeless for many years before getting an apartment through the federal government. “For those readers who have not experienced the dilemma of homelessness,” he wrote, “I ask you for a moment to visualize this: You leave your job after a tiring day, and return to find an empty lot, overgrown with weeds, where your lovely house once stood.” A few years later, as protesters prepared to disrupt the Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization in November of 1999, the cover of Real Change read “WTO in Seattle: No Day at the Beach”; the paper offered a guide to the proceedings. Many issues featured wellknown artists: the author Sherman Alexie, the singer Pete Seeger, the actor and writer Sandra Tsing Loh; all included national and global news briefs, editorials on social services, and updates on local housing policy. In time, dozens of vendors made their living by selling Real Change, and the organization became a political force for poor and unhoused Seattleites. The budget now exceeds a million dollars per year, funded through newspaper sales, foundation grants, and individual donations.
As it grew, Real Change aspired to become a significant community news outlet. In 2004, Harris hired two veteran journalists, Rosette Royale and Cydney Gillis, and within a few years they were publishing stories with remarkable impact. In 2007, after Gillis wrote at length about an economic development plan that threatened to use eminent domain to displace a historically Black and Southeast Asian neighborhood, residents fought back, and the plan was canceled. After the Great Recession, and during Occupy Wall Street, Real Change ran pieces on the foreclosure economy, student debt, and racism in Occupy organizing. And even as Real Change evolved from a subcultural “homeless newspaper” to a professional newsroom, it stayed attuned to the lives of the poor. Anne Jaworski, a volunteer with Real Change, told me that she reads the paper because of its “focus on cuts to social services programs—things that wouldn’t be covered elsewhere.”
Today, Real Change publishes a twelvepage weekly in print and online. Though it lacks the resources to compete with major news outlets, it draws on the INSP’s wire service (which sources from street papers around the world), makes use of grants for the occasional investigative series, and collaborates with partners—from the South Seattle Emerald, which covers Black and other communities of color in hot spots of gentrification; from the Asian-American International Examiner; and from Publicola, Erica C. Barnett’s alt-weekly-style blog. (Real Change pays freelancers, but not much; it has an “equity fund” for writers and artists of color.) Like other street papers, Real Change is constantly reevaluating its place in local media. “We don’t have the structure for breaking news,” Joanne Zuhl, the outgoing editor of Street Roots, in Portland, explained. “So we’d rather look at an issue and talk to the people it will actually impact, the people on the receiving end of this policy.”
“There’s the old axiom that journalism is meant to speak truth to power,” Marcus Green, the editor of the South Seattle Emerald, told me. “That’s true, but it’s also meant to remind people who’ve been told they’re powerless that they’re not.” The readers of community news, he said, want to know “how you are able to survive and hold on in a city that no longer appears to be accommodating you.”
The stakes of homelessness policy became apparent to Seattleites in 2015, when Ed Murray, who was then the mayor, declared a state of emergency over housing, following the example of Portland, Los Angeles, and Hawai‘i. A few months later, after fatal shootings at “The Jungle,” a tent city along Interstate 5, Murray ordered the site to be cleared, displacing dozens of people. Around the same time, Amazon planted a thicket of steel high-rises downtown and brought on tens of thousands of tech workers. Soon,
