The two artists organizations I'm active in, the National Cartoonists Society and the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, and dozens of other trade organizations, are urging their members to write to their congressmen at this hour, because there is a risk that the House will pass the Senate version of the bill, again without debate and without a vote, by adding it to a larger budget or bailout bill at the end of the current session, in the next few hours.

The Orphan Works bill is being pushed by Google, which plans to catalogue millions of images and doesn't want to deal with the rights of copyright holders. The bill will make it easy for anyone to reprint copyrighted work, without the permission of the copyright holder, and artists will find that it is difficult or impossible to control where their work is reprinted. The bill also imposes new costs and procedures on artists, all to benefit Google.

I'd like to ask everyone who reads my blog, or subscribes to my newsletter, to do the cartoonists a favor by emailing their congressman and asking him or her to oppose the Orphan Works Bill now, by visiting this web site, which helps you to send an automatic email to your congressman. It is quick and easy to send this email, and it would be much appreciated by the desperate cartoonists.

To learn more about the Orphan Works Bill, visit here.

I've never asked my readers for help before. I'd really appreciate your help now.

Many thanks,
Daryl

One of our good foreign customers wrote to me, and to a batch of top international cartoonists asking them what they thought the future of editorial cartooning would be. Here is my response:

I disagree with most of my cartoonist colleagues on this - most cartoonists view the future creatively, arguing that there will be more animation in cartoons and more cartoons created to take advantage of the interactivity of the internet. I disagree, because I also run a syndicate and I see no trend for web customers to be willing to pay for interactive or animated cartoons. This is just cartoonists describing what they hope will happen.

The big change I see happening is the decline of big newspapers, and an increase in small clients, free weekly newspapers and non-traditional clients who would not buy cartoons before, because the process was too difficult or expensive. As the big publishers die off and cut back, we pick up new small web sites, newsletters, weeklies and foreign publications, which wouldn't have found us before, if not for the internet.

The future is not a change in the nature of cartoons, which remain popular in their current, static form, it is a change in distribution of cartoons to more clients, smaller clients, and more obscure clients in more faraway places, as publications become smaller and more numerous, as more people become easier to reach and as more people around the world have interests in the same issues.

You say you update the cartoons "every day" but I see lots of the same cartoons are up now that were there yesterday. What's up with that?

The fact that we update the cartoons everyday doesn't mean that each cartoonist draws a new cartoon every day. Most editorial cartoonists draw between three and five cartoons per week, some draw once a week. Some draw six times a week. Some draw local cartoons some days, that they don't send to us. Some take vacations. On the busiest days of the week we update the site with 100 new cartoons per day ­ there are 175 cartoonist slots on the site.

Why can't you set up your site so that I don't have to look at those same cartoons that I saw yesterday? I want to see only the new cartoons.

Look at our RSS feeds which feature only the newly updated cartoons at the top of each page.

Where are your RSS feeds?

Go to our daily updating cartoons pages and click on the orange button to the left of any cartoonist's name, or scroll to the bottom to click on the RSS feeds for batches of artists. We can't include all of the cartoons in one RSS feed because the pages are too long with 100 new cartoons on busy days.

Why don't you make the cartoons in your RSS feeds full sized? I have to click on each cartoon to be able to read it.

That's so that you have to look at an ad and we don't go broke.

I have a great idea for a cartoon! Want to hear it?

No.

I have lots of great ideas for cartoons, but I can't draw. Can you tell me which editorial cartoonist I should contact to draw my cartoons?

I don't know any editorial cartoonists who work with gag writers.

I would like to have a cartoon logo drawn for my business and I like your style. Could you do that for me? I can't afford to pay any more than $50.

No.

I have to write a paper about an editorial cartoon and I picked yours. Can you tell me what it means? Please tell me right away because my paper is due tomorrow.

Sorry, I get too many requests like this. I have to let the cartoons speak for themselves. Besides, you're supposed to be following the news and the meaning of the cartoon should be obvious to you ­ if it is not, then it wasn't a good cartoon.

Would you like to: Enlarge your penis? Get cheap drugs? Refinance? Help us move millions of dollars from a foreign dignitary's bank account?

No. No. No. No.

May I run your cartoon in my blog?

If you are on Myspace.com, yes, go to any cartoon on caglepost.com's cartoon ticker page, click on the thumbnail image for any cartoon, then click on the Myspace.com link to put the cartoon on Myspace.com. If you are not on Myspace.com, you can post any of our caglecartoons.com cartoons on your blog for a nominal fee, just visit Politicalcartoons.com. We may do a Facebook application in the future.

May I use your cartoon for my class at school?

Yes. In fact, "in-classroom" use is one of the "Fair Use" exceptions to the copyright law. You can use any copyrighted materials you want in the classroom without asking.

May I post your cartoon on my high school class web site? Or in my school newspaper? Or on posters at school?

No, unless you want to pay the nominal fee on politicalcartoons.com ($3 for school use). These school uses are not "in-classroom."

Why don't you let us use your cartoons for free in schools?

We tried that, but we found that letting people download free, high-resolution cartoons on Politicalcartoons.com was a bandwidth hole. Suddenly everybody was saying they wanted cartoons for schools and our bandwidth went through the roof. When we put a $3 fee up for schools the bandwidth bleeding stopped.

I have to write a paper on the career I want to go into and I chose cartooning. Please tell me:
1) How much money do you make?
2) How much education was required for you to get your job?
3) How much time does it take you to draw a cartoon?
4) How did you get into this business?

1) Cartoonists make anything between $0 per year and $50,000,000 per year ­ just like actors, musicians and basketball players. And, like actors, musicians and basketball players, most cartoonists make closer to $0 than $50,000,000.

2) No education is required, only quality of work and some business acumen ­ but that is true of most careers. Education is very important and it is unusual for anyone to be successful without a good education.

3) All my life. Some cartoonists brag about drawing quickly; I think this diminishes the value of their work in the eyes of their editors and readers. Good cartoonists think about their work all the time and spend a lit of time working to improve.

4) I started as a general illustrator, and then worked as a cartoon illustrator, then I worked as a toy inventor, I did a syndicated cartoon, then editorial cartoons. I drew other people's characters in other people's styles, working on projects for others before my career got to the point that I could draw as I wanted.

Why don't you have any conservative cartoonists on your site?

We have a lot, but conservatives, like you conservatives notice the cartoons you disagree with more than the others. It is an optical illusion for you.

When are you going to stop bashing President Bush?

Be patient. It won't be long.

I can't cancel my newsletter subscription! What do I do to make it stop?

Most people who can't cancel are replying to the email with a note asking to cancel ­ we don't get these replies. To cancel you have to click on the unsubscribe link in the newsletter, or go to our newsletter subscriptions page and follow the instructions. Another problem is with people who have the newsletter forwarded from another email address ­ there is no way for us to know that, and clicking on the unsubscribe link won't make any change to a different email address. If you are flummoxed, email us.

I tried to subscribe to your newsletters, but I don't get anything! What's wrong?

You probably have an email account with a company like Earthlink, which does "whitelisting" ­ that is, these providers send an email reply to us, asking us to confirm that we are a real person who wants to send an email. This is a method of preventing spam. We don't respond to the "whitelisting" replies. Your only solution is to try subscribing from another free email service, like Yahoo, Google or Hotmail, which doesn't do "whitelisting."

You might have a spam filter - take a look at your blocked emails and approve us as a sender.

I was getting your newsletters, but they suddenly stopped. What's wrong?

If we get the email bounced back from your email address a couple of times, your subscription is automatically cancelled. You may have had technical problems with your email, or you may have had a full mailbox. You need to go to our newsletter subscription page and resubscribe.

Another problem is spam filters. You might have a new spam filter, or a new setting on your spam filter - take a look at your blocked emails and approve us as a sender.

I was getting your newsletters fine for a while, and now I don't see the images in the newsletter ­ they are all broken image links? What's wrong?

Some email services, like Hotmail, will occasionally ask you to approve images from senders and will block the images in an email from displaying until you approve the images from us, or any other sender. This is to prevent users from accidentally seeing pornography in a spam email. Just approve us for image display in your email program.

I want you to syndicate my cartoons. Will you look at my samples?

No, sorry. We get too many requests from aspiring cartoonists and just don't have the resources to deal with unsolicited submissions. Also, we have had bad experiences with angry amateur cartoonists who won't take "no" for an answer and now we are skittish.

Your site is slow!

No it's not! The problem is on your end, or in between you and our server ­ Microsoft serves the Cagle.MSNBC.com site ­ it is like getting electricity from the utility. We can blast as much bandwidth as all of MSNBC.com. Our cartoons are bandwidth heavy compared to other sites that are mostly text, so our pages will naturally take longer to load.

But, if you're complaining about Polticalcartoons.com or Caglepost.com, we serve those sites outside of MSNBC.com, and yes, sometimes we have too much traffic. We're upgrading from two servers to four and we should be speedy all the time with our new load balancing. We're working on it and we apologize for any hassles.

I get occasional requests from readers to explain the nuts and bolts of how I draw my cartoons, and to show my rough sketches. Here are three examples.

First I do a rough sketch in hard pencil on 11" by 17" paper. I like the extra hard pencils because they encourge me not to spend too much time on the rough - the hard pencil keeps me from rendering, which I tend to want to do. If I don't like how a sketch is going, I'll throw it out and start a new one, rather than trying to repair the sketch. These are pretty fast.

Then I draw the finished line art by tracing over the rough. I use Duralene paper, which is a plastic drafting vellum that has a way of gripping the pencil that I find pleasing. I do my finished line art with either a hard #5 pencil if I'm feeling too loose, or a yellow #2 office pencil if I'm feeling too stiff.

Most newspapers run the black and white artwork. I usually don't like the look of tone in my cartoons, so I'll do cross hatching and blacks to give the lines some substance on the page. This drawing is the same 11" by 17" size.

Here's another rough. It is the same thing, hard pencil on tabloid size paper.

Then I trace it in pencil on drafting vellum, adding cross hatching tones and blacks.

And I'll usually color the cartoon in Photoshop, depending on how much time I have. Only a few newspapers run color on their Op-Ed pages, but color is nice on the web site.

Here's another one. I'm including this one because the rough is a little messier.

This one is about as complex as I like to get in a cartoon. I think cartoons are stronger with only one or two big characters filling the space. Cartoons are better with fewer words too, and this cartoon is a little weak, but it made a point that I haven't seen made in other cartoons so I went with it. Here it is below, in pencil on the drafting vellum, with some hatching for tone to give it some substance on the page, as most readers will see it.

And here it is with some quick Photoshop color.

I usually try to use light, pastel colors, because that is what editors ask for. The light pastels look best in lousy newspaper printing where colors tend to muddy up and darken. Earth tones are always a gamble in newspapers; there is no way of knowing if a brown will lean to red or to blue. Unfortunately, the light, pastel, compromise newspaper colors tend to look a bit unsophiscated on the web - I regret that, but I don't have a good solution for it.

My buddy, Angel Boligan of the El Universal newspaper in Mexico City, just won a big international cartoon contest with the cartoon at the right. The contest had the theme of "World Languages." Congratulations, Angel!

My buddy, Jonathan "Zapiro" Shapiro is having a bit of a cartoon controversy down in South Africa with the Zuma rape cartoon (right). Here are some excerpts from a Los Angeles Times article about the cartoon:

The cartoon shows Zuma preparing to rape the justice system, portrayed as a blindfolded woman pinned down by his political allies in the ANC, the Communist Party, unions and the ANC Youth League.

Published in the Sunday Times of Johannesburg, the cartoon lampoons a campaign by Zuma's supporters to throw out charges of corruption, fraud and racketeering that he faces so he can seek South Africa's presidency. In a country with one of the world's highest rates of rape -- and one deeply divided between supporters and opponents of Zuma, who was acquitted of rape charges in 2006 -- the drawing has been explosive.

The nation's high court is due to rule today on Zuma's bid to have the charges against him dismissed ...

As he has done since the 2006 rape trial, Zapiro drew Zuma as having a shower sprouting from his head -- a reference to the party leader's testimony that to avoid AIDS he showered after having unprotected sex with an HIV-positive woman. Zuma has thrice sued the cartoonist for libel. Two suits were withdrawn; the third is pending.

Quotes from Jonathan:

The central message is that Jacob Zuma is about to violate and rape the justice system with the help of his political allies. Justice is an allegorical figure but she does have a certain amount of humanity in the way I've drawn her, which added to the shock value. It's [Zuma's] own rape trial, for which he was acquitted, that makes it more explosive.

It wasn't my being worried about Zuma's rape trial that made me think twice, three times, four times, five times before doing this drawing. It was women's feelings I was more worried about. I sent the cartoon around to some very trusted female friends. The initial shock at seeing the drawing almost made people draw breath. You gasp when you see it. But within a brief amount of time they considered the drawing and said it's valid both in terms of what it's saying about Zuma's violation of our justice system and our constitutional tenets but also in terms of the very violent and patriarchal society that we have ...

There were plenty of people who were offended by it, but what I found fascinating is that on some of the talk shows where I have taken some flak, the proportion of flak-givers is much higher from men than women. There was one call that came from a gang-rape victim, who said that she was shocked by it and felt very uncomfortable, but then she proceeded to support it.

---

My McCain lipstick cartoon (right) has been getting some attention lately ...

... my cartoon was inspired by this lovely David Fitzsimmons cartoon of McCain as the Joker ...

... which looks like it inspired this RJ Matson cartoon too. Don't miss our Lipstick on a Pig cartoon collection! We're still getting more pig/lipstick cartoons in.

Here, the editor of the Hattiesburg American explains their newspaper's decision to run my "mean spirited" Palin cartoon (even though the cartoon is just awful) in the face of angry reader reaction.

I'm constantly being asked why there are so few women that are editorial cartoonists. I don't have a good answer for that. One of the few female cartoonists on our site, altie cartoonist Jen Sorensen, wrote an excellent column on the topic for Campus Progress and has graciously allowed us to reprint it here.

Wanted: Female Cartoonist
By Jen Sorensen

Why are there so few female political cartoonists? I've been asked that question many times over the years. It's OK, I don't mind. We're something of a rare breed. Exact statistics are difficult to find-even the national group Association of American Editorial Cartoonists can only estimate the national number of political cartoonists, let alone break them down by gender, ethnicity, or class. But to give you a rough idea, of the association's 185 current regular members, only 15 are women. I'm one of them.

My short (and admittedly Zen-like) explanation is that there are so few female political cartoonists largely because there are so few female political cartoonists. Drawing cartoons and comics has traditionally been a guy thing-a somewhat nerdy guy thing, but a guy thing nonetheless. Without role models who look like you, or friends with similar interests, any activity becomes less inviting. It might not even cross your mind as a possibility.

But when did political cartooning first become the province of dudes? Patriot dude Ben Franklin is widely credited with the first American political cartoon: The famous "Join or Die" drawing of the chopped-up snake representing the 13 original colonies. In the 1870s, a dude named Thomas Nast became the first major editorial page cartoonist, followed by 20th-century dudely doodlers such as Bill Mauldin and Herbert "Herblock" Block. In 1915, Edwina Dumm became the first American non-dude to work full-time as an editorial cartoonist, a remarkable feat considering women didn't win the right to vote until 1920. Given that women were deemed irrational, not expected to hold intellectual jobs, and certainly not supposed to have political opinions, the skewed demographics of the profession don't seem all that mysterious.

A more contemporary problem comes in the form of profitable and supposedly progressive web publications like The Huffington Post that make it a policy not to pay for content. This business model presumes contributors have other sources of income; paying in "exposure" instead. If this setup becomes the industry standard, those without ample resources, especially women and minorities, will simply not be able to afford to survive as political cartoonists.

The challenges faced by female cartoonists parallel those of female op-ed writers. Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus recently suggested that the dearth of female op-ed writers in newspapers is largely due to the imposition of "our own glass ceiling" as opposed to editors' sexism. Women need to show more chutzpah, she argues. We must close the "cockiness gap" between ourselves and the great hordes of brashly bloviating males.

As Katha Pollitt has rightly noted, however, there's an abundance of highly qualified and willing female writers whose numbers are not reflected on the commentary pages of major newspapers. The op-ed pages of the Post feature two women and 23 men, despite the fact that plenty of women write about politics and current events.

Clearly, forces beyond "our own glass ceilings" are at work. In the case of political cartoonists, however, there aren't quite so many women waiting in the wings.

This is not to cut Marcus any slack. Her argument fails to address the often subtle ways in which gender inequality works. If there is a cockiness gap, it might have something to do with ye olde double standard that ambitious women are perceived as you-know-whats. To be fair, Marcus does facetiously refer to "a certain unbecoming arrogance" required of outspoken women, but she paradoxically blames women for not displaying it.

Media coverage of cartoonists works the same way. The Columbia Journalism Review recently interviewed political cartoonists and editors about their opinion of the controversial New Yorker cover; they spoke with nine men and zero women.

So how did I buck the trend? It's hard to say. I do know I recognized the unfairness of gender roles from a very early age, even though nobody slipped a copy of The Feminine Mystique into my playpen. My parents did indulge my tomboyish tendencies, though, buying me reams of comics and copies of MAD Magazine. As teachers, they also valued education and creativity, and were fully supportive of my round-the-clock cartooning habit. There wasn't much else to do where we lived; as far as I was concerned, drawing comics was how I entertained myself.

While in college in the mid-1990s, I was invited to submit to an all-female comic anthology called Action Girl. This was my professional debut. Thanks in part to Action Girl, I was motivated to publish my own comic book after graduating. The result: Slowpoke Comix #1, a collection of short stories that were precursors to my weekly strip. One marked the debut of my character Drooly Julie, a randy femme with a penchant for stubbly metalheads. It was only after the 2000 election that my work took a sharp political turn, as did that of many other cartoonists. As I crossed this threshold, I wasn't thinking much about breaking gender barriers. I was just freaked out by the country's sudden takeover by wackadoos.

Over the years, my work appeared in more and more places, often alternative newsweeklies. These papers tended to be more progressive-minded than mainstream media, and I never got the sense that I was going up against a wall of chauvinism. I do get the sense, however, that some progressive publications don't try as hard as they could to diversify their mastheads. As Women In Media and News founder Jennifer Pozner puts it, one of the biggest obstacles appears to be time: It can take longer and require more effort to look beyond the familiar or entrenched stables of male cartoonists and editorial writers.

Despite these occasional frustrations, the past decade suggests that the situation is improving. If my favorite comic convention, the Small Press Expo in Maryland, is any indication, there are more women than ever on both sides of the exhibitor tables. To invoke the flip side of my Zen koan: The more female cartoonists there are, the more there will be.

Jen Sorensen draws Slowpoke Comics. She recently released Slowpoke: One Nation, Oh My God! It is great! Click here to buy it. C'mon.

We just added three new cartoonists to the site. Actually, they are three old cartoonists who are coming back after some time away.

The first is Brian Duffy of the Des Moines Register. Brian is one of only two cartoonists whose color cartoons appear every day on the front page of a large metropolitcan daily newspaper (the other is Corky Trinidad of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin). Welcome back, Brian! Click to see more of Brian's work.

Next is Jonathan Shapiro, the mega award-winning cartoonist from South Africa who draws under the name "Zapiro." Jonathan was the winner of the Cartoonists Rights Network's courage in Editorial Cartoonists Award for drawing in the face of threats to his safety. Click to see more of Zapiro's work.

And next is Sepideh Amjarooz, a rare woman editorial cartoonist from Iran (where our web site is blocked by the government). Sepideh has a charming style which is very different that what our Western eyes expect. She didn't update her cartoons for a while, and we dropped her slot, then she wrote to say, "put me back up!" and that's what we're doing. Click to see more of Sepideh's work.