How cartoons get published

Plus: a useful standard for having a nice day…

So here’s the deal on cartoons: back when I worked for the Kansas City Star an editor had to approve a cartoon before I drew it and put it in the paper.

Being smarter than the average bear (which sounds like bragging until you get a look at the average bear’s SAT scores) I realized editors had an unfortunate tendency to edit whether a cartoon needed it or not and if I showed them just one sketch they were likely to suggest improvements to that sketch, like adding a horsey or an American flag or a snake saying “Don’t tread on me” and I’m not saying all their suggestions were bad, but right this second I can’t think of a good one.

So my solution was to show editors three sketches so they got to choose and that would give them something to edit so they’d feel like they’d done their job and to improve my odds of getting to draw the cartoon I wanted to draw, I developed the practice of first showing the editor something really, really obnoxious (I called these my “Fuck the Pope” cartoons) and then after seeing one of those, whatever an editor saw next would seem pretty tame.

Jim Scott (my first editor at the Star and way smarter than the average bear, assuming the bear in question is also a political cartoonist) caught on pretty quickly and would look at the first sketch and say:

“Now show me what you really want to draw.”

Jim would occasionally ask me to make him a Xerox of the obscene sketch so he could take it home and share it with friends and family because some of that unpublishable material was pretty damn funny.

For instance:

When Ronald Reagan had part of his colon removed, I drew a sketch that said he was no longer a complete asshole.

Jim Scott story alert

I may have told this story before, but it’s definitely worth telling again and it starts with the fact that (as I recall) Jim was a tank commander in WWII and as I understand it a tank commander is the guy whose head sticks up out of a tank and lets everyone else know there are Germans in the area by getting shot at.

Jim was also in the Battle of the Bulge which – for those of you who haven’t been paying attention to history – is not trying to get into those jeans you wore 20 years ago, it is instead a famous WWII battle fought in winter conditions and the Americans took 75,000 causalities during the battle so your chances of something bad happening were pretty good. 

Anyway…

I drew a cartoon that pissed people off and Jim was getting calls about what a jerk I was because those pissed off people didn’t have the balls and/or ovaries to call me directly, so I went to Jim’s office to say I was sorry. (I wasn’t at all sorry about drawing the cartoon; I was sorry Jim was taking criticism for something I did.)

Jim said I shouldn’t worry about it because:

“Once you’ve had Germans try to machine gun you, nothing else seems that bad.”

Which is a pretty awesome perspective and I think clearly indicates that journalism schools should have a class where Germans try to machine gun the students so surviving class members aren’t such picky pains-in-the-ass once they become editors.

Now that I think about it, maybe all college graduates should be required to take that Introduction to German Machine Gunning class and then we’d have a lot fewer people who complain about political cartoons or what their favorite NFL team did last weekend or not getting ketchup with their fries, because then they’d say:

“Well, it’s definitely not as bad as getting machine gunned by Germans.”

(And I cannot believe you have to ask for ketchup when you order fries at McDonald’s because according to statista.com, last year McDonald’s generated an income of $19.21 billion and apparently they did it by not giving out unrequested packets of ketchup. A sentiment that suggests I’d have a much better attitude if a German tried to shoot me, although I’d rather you didn’t take that as a request, assuming you’re a German who also owns a machine gun and I’m thinking that percentage of the population is higher than we think.)

BTW:

Over the course of my life I have read a lot of stuff I didn’t agree with and it never once occurred to me that I should call somebody or write an angry letter or leave a snotty comment, mainly because I don’t expect to sail through life without ever encountering somebody who has different opinions and if someone is batshit nuts enough to get pissed off because somebody else supports a Democrat or a Republican, that indicates maybe the pissed off person has an elevator that doesn’t go all the way to the top floor or a Christmas tree with a few lights out and definitely missed their calling when they didn’t become a political cartoonist.

I mean, why let all that misguided anger go to waste?

So where were we?

After Jim retired subsequent editors would sometimes look at that top sketch and say it was OK and we could publish it, which freaked me out because it definitely wasn’t OK and we shouldn’t publish it and they had clearly misunderstood whatever obnoxious thing I’d drawn, so I’d say:

“Maybe you want to give that first one a second look” which is a mild version of what I was actually thinking, which was:

“Are you fucking nuts? No way you should let me do what I just suggested we do because the suggestion was completely insincere and banked on the idea that one of us is an adult and you would realize I should not be allowed to draw a cartoon about the recently-deceased Colonel Sanders being cremated and the crematorium workers asking the Colonel’s family if they want him regular or crispy.”

When I worked at the San Diego Union I learned the hard way that having an editor’s OK didn’t mean anything at all because if the shit hit the fan, editors had the habit of stepping to the side and letting me get splattered and eventually I got fired for cartoons that three editors had approved.

You’d think all of us would get pink slips, but as you may have already noticed shit rolls downhill so maybe you want to avoid living in a valley. (And now that I think about it, my San Diego apartment was just down the street from Fashion Valley Mall, so I probably should have seen that shit rolling in my direction.)

These days I draw for King Features (a syndicate that distributes my work around the country) and nobody sees my cartoon ideas before I draw them, so I just draw what I want and send it in and then it’s up to King Features to decide whether they send it to client newspapers.

All of which comes up now because the Democrats can’t get their shit together and Republicans seem much more unified, but as the cartoon at the top of this post points out; they’re unified around some pretty bad ideas.

But I used the word “screw” in the cartoon and I have no idea whether the people at King Features will have a problem with that word and I have no idea because newspapers are not nearly as organized as outsiders tend to think and one editor will say, “You definitely cannot use that word” and another editor will say, “At least a German didn’t try to machine gun me.”  

I just went to the Kansas City Star website and searched for the use of the word “screw” and got 1,311 results so you’d think it’s OK, but I remember the time George Bush (the first one) debated Geraldine Ferrero and got caught saying he “kicked a little ass” and I responded with a cartoon that said Geraldine kicked a big one.

A cartoon that did not get published because I used the word “ass” and even though everybody else was using the same word – it appeared in a headline and a story and an editorial about Bush using profanity – somehow the word got much more obscene if it was used in a cartoon. 

“We can use the word ‘ass’ because we’re serious journalists, but you can’t use the word ‘ass’ because you’re a cartoonist and are using it to make people laugh and if there’s one thing we don’t want newspaper readers to have, it’s a good time; an attitude which will soon be reflected in our circulation numbers.”

So what have we learned today?

Newspapers are disorganized, an editor’s approval of a cartoon will not protect a cartoonist if the cartoon turns out to be controversial and if you’re a Republican and resent my characterization of what you believe, maybe you ought to chill out and say:

“Well, at least a German didn’t try to machine gun me.”

And now that you have a new standard to measure it by: have a nice day.

http://kingfeatures.com/comics/editorial-cartoons-a-z/