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Thursday, September 2, 2010
Young Justice
The Mikhaela Reid and Masheka Wood Q-and-A
Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Doug Marlette once wrote about his chosen medium of expression: “[A cartoon] is a frontal assault, a slam dunk, a cluster bomb… cartoons use unfairness, subjectivity, and the distortion of facts to get at truths that are greater than the sum of the facts.” Continuing in that tradition of iconoclasm and provocativeness are two bright lights of the new generation of cartoon journalism – Mikhaela Reid and Masheka Wood, a romantically involved pair of artists who have slowly built a rep with their respective works. Over lunch in a Brooklyn diner last month, about a week after the MOCCA Art Festival, I spoke with the duo about their relationship, their art, the industry in general, and the current state of world affairs.
Rich Watson: So how did you two meet?
Mikhaela Reid: Well, we met online, which is very modern. I was on Onion.com, browsing the personals. I had been on a lot of really bad dates – crazy people, clingy people who think you’re in love on the first date and then won’t leave you alone afterwards. A lot of guys, because I was a cartoonist – my old screen name was “cartoonistgirl” or something – apparently guys really like the whole cartoonist girl with glasses thing. So other guys who were really bad cartoonists would then [say] “I’m a cartoonist too!” and they’d send me their link and it was stick figures or clip art and they thought it was really funny –
Masheka Wood: The cartoonist in glasses; there’s a big glasses fetish.
MR: Right, the naughty librarian look or something. So I was just getting sick of it; I was ready to throw in the towel… and on a whim, I was scrolling through and I saw this profile that hadn’t been active in awhile that I was really digging… The headline was just “qwerty” or something, but the picture was really cute.
MW: I was trying to be clever… I figured since everyone would see it, that everyone would always see it on the [computer] keyboard. But it worked!
MR: It only worked because I was really really digging. But anyway [laughs], I noticed immediately that his profile was really funny! He had this whole spiel, what was it, about how when you were little –
MW: Oh, I had wanted to be a superhero, specifically the Hulk because I had Hulk Underoos. I had made up this story about how I had tried to get superpowers like the Hulk by getting gamma rays from my microwave and expanding my genitals to some grotesque size. Apparently that won her over!
MR: Giant green genitals, that was definitely a plus! [laughs] It was just really, finally right – and that’s the other thing about most guys on Onion: you’d think that the Onion and Salon and all those sites would have a high percentage of really good writers and intellectuals, but they can’t even spell their own names, these people! They have no imagination. It’s like, “Where would you like to be right now?” “I dunno…here!” “On a beach!” Whereas Masheka, obviously, just showed his creativity and good writing, and I saw he listed that he’s a cartoonist! I’m like man, this guy’s hot, he’s funny, and he’s a cartoonist (hopefully a good one)! So I wrote to him. I don’t even remember what I said to you. And then he noticed I was from Massachusetts too –
MW: Yeah, we had a lot in common. Besides our names being alike, we’re both from Massachusetts –
MR: We’re both cartoonists –
MW: We are?
MR: Oh yeah! And also, the important thing though was, when he sent me his cartoons, I’m like, oh man, he’s really good! He can draw! He can really draw!
MW: Of course, at that point, I was mainly a temporary cartoonist – not temporary, but occasional cartoonist, because at the time I was working as an accountant for a jewelry company. I was doing my cartooning every once in awhile… I was in a bad place, doing really boring accounting work, wearing a suit and tie, which is not really my thing.
MR: You look good in it though.
MW: Aw, thanks… So it was good to meet another cartoonist in that way. I have friends who are cartoonists, from college or in New York, but eventually there was someone I could date as a cartoonist. There’s a lot of stuff in common already from that, so…
MR: And also we have very similar tastes in music and movies and books and we became each other’s mutual lending library, like “You have to read this comic book!” and he’d be like, “You have to read this!…”
RW: Now, Masheka, about your college experiences – I was looking through the comics again, the stuff you did in college. What school did you go to?
MW: Syracuse University.
RW: What was your whole college experience like? I kinda got the impression you had the stereotypical party atmosphere in college.
MW: Oh, it was great! I kinda had the college experience before – well, at least the living away from home experience. I went to boarding school in high school…
In my comic strips, I loved writing around the borders, and I just noticed, looking at some of my old collections, that I went to a lot of parties and threw a lot of parties for my friends, so there was that party atmosphere due to the fact that it used to be known as a party school. The winters there are brutal and they last a long time, so that tends to be where the parties stem from.
MR: Plus you guys lived in a huge former funeral home and had “Satan Rules” written in the basement.
MW: We used to live in this huge funeral home that had stained glass windows. It had about sixteen rooms, but it was just for five guys. It was cheap; $300 a month for each of us. And someone, whoever had lived there before, had spray-painted “Satin Rules!” They were trying to spell “Satan Rules” but it [came out] s-a-t-i-n…
In terms of doing comics at Syracuse, it was great. We’d gotten a lot of comic artists from doing the daily paper. Neil Swaab, who does Rehabilitating Mr. Wiggles, is from Syracuse. He drew for the paper. Nicholas Gurewitch, who does Perry Bible Fellowship – and we all worked for the paper at some point… It was a good community to do comics in. There was relatively little censorship – well, actually, I got censored twice…
MR: You had a talking ass in your strip and you didn’t get censored that much!
MW: People loved the talking ass! [laughs]
RW: I like the talking ass!
MR: Your mom even liked it!
MW: My mother liked it! [laughs]
RW: So at what point did you want to switch gears from all these funny characters into doing more personal and political stuff?
MW: Most of it is fairly recently, when Mikhaela and I first met. Like I can’t completely get rid of the gross, immature part of me –
MR: [laughs] I wouldn’t want you to.
MW: But I can always incorporate it into my social/political stuff. When I met with Mikhaela, I started looking at her old strips, not to mention what was going on in New York and the world, with the way the government was going. I just had to talk about that. I just wish I did it earlier, beforehand. Like I was here during 9/11 and I kinda kept that stuff bottled in, and I wish I drew it out more… but I had to sort through my feelings about 9/11, what was going on in terms of the administration. Where I was working wasn’t conducive to actually delving into it in an artistic way.
MR: Accounting is not the most artistic field.
MW: Oh, no, no. I tried to think of some artistic way – maybe a PowerPoint presentation or something, or a spreadsheet, but it didn’t work out. But Mikhaela was big on getting me more into the political –
MR: We were both into it. When I met Masheka, I was kinda doing more “think” humor; not deep, but even though I was in alternative papers and alternative weeklies… I think I always had this internal censor that was saying, “Well, my grandparents and my parents are gonna read this, and I don’t know, what if my dad wanted to show this to the kids he teaches,” because my dad’s a teacher. And so I never did anything that was really out there in terms of anything with language or sexual stuff or just gross-out humor. I realized that a lot of the alt-comics people that I really admired weren’t afraid to do that. Like Alison Bechdel – in Dykes to Watch Out For, [she] draws her characters in the nude, in the bedroom – it’s not weird and obscene, it’s just part of their daily lives. And some of my friends like Ted Rall and Matt Bors and other people, they’ll do whatever it takes. And Ward Sutton… one of his best cartoons, I thought it was so horrific to look at. It was called “Laura Bush Urges You to Read to a Dead Iraqi Child!” and it’s like Laura Bush holding a tiny, charred body, and it’s so horrific. And I’m like, you know what – I need to be tougher.
And Masheka’s cartoons, he’s got cartoons about vomit, and talking asses, and all kinds of gross stuff. One of the things Masheka’s really good at is language. He’s really good at playing with language and words, and occasionally our stuff even creeps into each other’s comics. Like I did this cartoon called “Let Them Eat Toxic Sludge,” and I had this cartoon worked out, and I was still trying to figure out what the hell to call this toxic sludge. And Masheka’s like, “Well, obviously it’s Freedom Gravy!” Y’know, just stuff like that, where we influence each other, ‘cause we’re both sitting there drawing together. I’m sure I’ve done similar stuff with your comics –
MW: That’s why my comics take so long, because I’m a very bad perfectionist… Sometimes I have an idea that comes right out, like [the] “Duh” and “Doy” [strip] I didn’t really know about until –
MR: Yeah! Same thing!
RW: That one cracks me up every time I see it!
MW: Oh, thanks. I like it because, it’s not haiku, but I like the nice simple words…
MR: He’s become more political because he can’t help it – because I sit around reading the newspaper all day and I’ll be like, “Masheka, did you hear about this? Omigod, I’m so mad!” And then he sits and he’s like, “Mikhaela, look at this weird commercial on TV,” or “Did you hear this song?” He’s a lot more tuned into music and entertainment news than I am, so we kinda feed off each other. And I think, although of course I’m still a very hyper-political person, I’d like to start doing some stuff that’s not political necessarily; that’s just humor and character-based. And I think Masheka has been talking about doing more stuff with characters as well. So we’re both gonna branch out…
After MOCCA, a bunch of friends and I – they’re sort of this crew that we hang out with at SPX and MOCCA: Ted Rall, Jen Sorensen, Keith Knight, Matt Bors, Brian McFadden, Stephanie McMillan, Scott Bateman, and me and Masheka – and we’re kind of like a crew. Wherever we go, we hang out together. And at the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, there’s also Mark Fiore and Steve Notley, who does Bob the Angry Flower, and occasionally other people will show up, like sometimes Ruben Bolling, or like last year Tom Tomorrow was hanging out with us – so this time at MOCCA we realized that we were all scattered around the room, kind of doing our own thing, sitting at random tables, even though we’re really kindred spirits.
So we all had some drinks, as cartoonists are want to do [laughs], and some burgers and drinks and fries, and we came up with an idea to form a sort of subversive, sometimes political (but not always) cartoonists collective. A lot of the groups like the Dumbrella guys always sit at the same table, so we’re thinking – and we’re gonna debut it at SPX, but we’re gonna have some kind of projects we do together, and something a little more organized; collaboration stuff. Not necessarily collaborating but doing projects together and getting our stuff out there. The name for the group right now is CWA – Cartoonists With Attitude. We’re gonna have a website and all kinds of stuff soon! And like I said, we’ll have a table at SPX. But that should be really fun, because there’s nothing awesome-er about being a cartoonist than getting to hang out with other cartoonists!
RW: Okay, so let’s get into the political aspect of your work. Let’s start with 2004 – tell me your thoughts during the election season.
MW: [pause] Was I drawing anything by then?
MR: Well, whether you were or not, I’m sure you had some thoughts. [laughs] You first, I was just talking my mouth off.
MW: Um… 2004 was just… [pause] I don’t know if “frustrating” was a strong enough word for it. [laughs]
MR: Banging your head against the wall, basically… [laughs]
MW: I think I was still working – yeah, I was doing accounting by then, and I had to deal with a lot of people in the accounting world who were voting for Bush for the wrong reasons.
MR: Gay Republicans; that was the best! I love the Gay Republicans!
MW: Yeah, the Log Cabin Republicans… It was a frustrating time…
MR: …We were really pissed off. Really scared too. Masheka and I were like, “Man, it’s too bad we don’t have any citizenships anywhere else!” That’s another thing we forget – leading up into the election we were really hopeful. We really thought Kerry had a chance!
RW: That was my next question.
MR: I’m not a fan of Kerry, and I did some cartoons where I’m like, “What a wimp, totally flip-flopping,” and he was a flip-flopper, even though Bush is just as much of a flip-flopper. So I had that cartoon where all the people with the Kerry T-shirts were like, “Man, I don’t like his stance on gay marriage, but I’ll vote for Kerry!” It was really anyone but Bush. But I really thought anyone but Bush had a chance!
MW: The first time I met Ted Rall was during the debates. It was obvious that Kerry won that debate, but from that, people still didn’t see –
MR: Now they see it ‘cause they see all the shit that they were standing knee deep in!… Look at [Bush’s] approval ratings now; why didn’t these people get smarter quicker? You know? It’s like, he’s had approval ratings as low as 29%, 30%?
RW: The possibility of another terror strike seemed imminent for a lot of people at the time.
MW: Well, they kept bringing that up with their stupid color-coded terrorist alerts.
MR: It was deliberate. They want you to be scared, and they were hoping that fear would carry them. And it did carry them through the election, but now people have gotten to the point where they realize that bombing the crap out of other people for no reason creates more terrorists than it would stop. The whole idea of “We’re gonna fight our battles abroad so we don’t have to fight them here” is crazy! Because the more you fight battles abroad, the more people are gonna want to bring it here and get you back –
RW: Especially when you’re thinking short term, like Bush has.
MR: Exactly! And that’s the thing – this administration does not think in the long term. Like the environment. He doesn’t care that his environmental policies and his total bullshit “Oh, well the science isn’t in on global warming” – okay, well say there’s a thousand scientists who say global warming exists, and maybe you’ve found one crackpot guy that you dug up out of your backyard who’s like “Gosh, I dunno!”
MW: And they’re still trying to discredit Al Gore, when the evidence is looking them right in the face.
MR: But they don’t care about the long term. To them, all that matters is their current best interests… I was really disappointed, and we were both really angry –
MW: I was frustrated and angry because people – I mean, his approval rating went down with the war and people getting killed in Iraq, but a lot of people just disapproved of him because they had to pay more for gas!
MR: It should’ve gone down for the war, for Katrina, for a lot of things, and a lot of it really seemed to happen after the gas crisis thing, and that’s kind of sad. I mean, when you’re a political cartoonist, like what both of us do, we don’t expect to convert people who are totally against us from the get-go. Someone who’s a hard-core Republican is not gonna care what Masheka and I have to say, and anyway they’ll just be like, “Oh, more liberal propaganda.” I get that kind of hate mail. Masheka hasn’t had too much hate mail yet, but I get a lot of hate mail.
MW: I wish I got hate mail! [laughs] …They know you’ve touched a nerve. That’s why I like it. I hate when people say bad things about you, but when I get it, it’s like, I prefer some sort of response. I don’t like ambivalent responses.
MR: Or no response at all. That’s the worst… At least [with hate mail] you know you’re getting someone pissed off, which is the point. It’s also to “rally the troops,” as it were. People are like, “Aren’t you just preaching to the choir?” But we’re not, because it’s about getting people energized, letting them know about issues that are important, and really making them realize why we need to fight back against the craziness that has taken over this country, and the attacks on our civil liberties, and the environment, and civil rights and women’s rights and gay rights…
RW: So how should the next president approach Iraq?
MR: [pause] … We shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Not being a strategist, I don’t have my own step-by-step, well-thought-out plan, but some things take [people] really getting together and thinking smarter. I don’t like Hilary Clinton at all because she’s been pro-war from the get-go. She’s ridiculous. Hopefully she won’t be the president. I don’t know who will –
MW: Is she pro-war because she believes in the war or –
MR: No, she’s pro-war because she’s just trying to get votes. She’s ridiculous…
The insurgents want us out. Troops in Iraq are not making Iraq any safer, and certainly the troops aren’t safe. It’s making it worse. The more Americans are there, the more it’s a visible sign of an occupation. It’s an occupation! You can’t win an occupation-based war by staying there longer! You gotta get out! I think a lot of the apologists talked about having NATO troops or just some kind of neutral, peace-keeping force there, but you can’t have the US there because that’s the whole reason there are insurgents in the first place… Ted Rall and I were talking about this, and he’s like, “Didn’t these people watch The Battle of Algiers?”… It’s not like you’re going after a beehive and you kill the queen bee. There’s always a second-in-command because it’s an insurgency… Your village gets bombed, are you like “Hooray USA”? You’re like, no, I’m gonna go fight. The more violence there is, the more violence gets created and we just need to stop and find some smarter way. But we need to get out of there ASAP…
MW: I’m always angered by the amount of money we spend on offense. I can’t even really call it defense… I teach kids in Brownsville, Brooklyn. The program I teach in, it’s always dealing with lack of money and funds. And to hear that our surplus is now gone, because it’s been spent on the military, is frustrating, because we should be focusing on education, not producing a whole new crop of terrorists.
MR: So Masheka’s trying to raise a crop of young black cartoonists in Brownsville!
MW: That’ll be my army. My cartooning army!
RW: Okay, let’s switch tracks a little bit. Mikhaela, I want to talk to you about the gay civil rights movement, because I know that’s something very close to your heart.
MR: Very important to me, yes.
RW: Now in your bio on your website, it says you headed up a club in high school devoted to bringing together gays and straights, is that right?
MR: Mm hmm. It was the Gay/Straight Alliance, and it was founded by one of my best friends in high school, and he was one of the only openly gay students in school. I had a lot of friends who were dealing with harassment on a daily basis. In high school I was a punk rock girl and you know, I would wear my punk rock clothes. It’s the whole thing – the punk rock kids versus the jocks, as we called them. At my high school there was this culture of, like, athletics is better than everything, and so anyone who was a nerdy kid or an arty kid or a gay kid or a punk rock kid is an immediate target. I would get chased home from school, y’know, and then there are the intelligent people who called me faggot, which is always fun. That makes a lot of sense. And so we had this club and it was really awesome. In fact, I think that was some of the most important political work I’ve ever done, and I was only 17 at the time! These are the kids who are on the front lines.
Massachusetts has this great program called the Safe Schools program, and it was actually started by, of all things, a Republican governor, William Weld, who was very pro-gay and pro-choice. I hated his views on the economy, but he was really good on gay issues. The whole idea is that gay kids don’t even want to go to school because being a gay kid, especially one who’s either physically gay [looking], or somehow people know, or is out, you’re just like a human punching bag. People will throw you against your locker, they chase you home, you get beat up. We had some transgender kids in our high school as well. There was this girl, a young Asian-American woman who, when she transitioned, started out her freshman year as a boy. Then she went through the transition and she couldn’t even get to the bathroom because people would scream at her. She couldn’t go into the men’s room, obviously, ‘cause she’d get beat up, and in the women’s room she’d get screamed at. It was just horrible.
So we had this really great club, and we’d meet once a week and we had events. We’d go to the Youth Pride march, and it was so great for these kids. This was, like a whole little community for them. They could go there, they could be themselves, they could talk about crushes they had, like normal high school kids! Who they want to take to the prom – just actually have some kind of semblance of a high school life that they were denied in the general high school. We had a lot of teachers who were really supportive. Our principal was supportive; it was great. We did have one school community member who was crazy. He’d been on the school committee for 40 years… and he would come into our school screaming about fags and the “fag flag” – I mean, he tore down the rainbow flag. This guy was a jerk. He assaulted some AIDS education workers and got arrested for that. This guy was in his 60’s too! He was just horrible, and he was like the most popular school committee member for a long time, and then after this “fag flag” incident he finally got voted out. But the thing is, we were in Massachusetts, so of course we were lucky compared to a lot of other places, but it was great. It was one of the most amazing things I think I’ve ever really done, seeing these kids go from being terrified and scared of even going to school to starting to feel confident about themselves. We did a lot of creative projects, of course. We did a little comic book zine, people wrote poems and essays; it was really awesome. That was such an important moment for me to really get inspired about politics…
One of the things that I cartoon about a lot, since I cartoon for a gay paper in Massachusetts, is marriage, and of course gay marriage and same-sex marriage. We have a horrible governor in Massachusetts named Mitt Romney, who’s Republican as well, but he’s like one of the horrible, anti-gay – he’s like, my favorite punching bag. The guy is awful. He’s been attacking same-sex marriage because he wants to run for president. He’s a Mormon from Utah, so that could hurt his chances, but he’s just horrible. He actually tried to disband the whole Safe Schools program, which is horrible.
But this leads me to the topic of marriage, and let me just say that Masheka and I are getting married!
RW: Really? When’s the big day?
MW: Next September. Labor Day Weekend.
RW: Awesome. Congratulations.
MR: I’m really excited! So we’re gonna have a little reading about gay marriage as part of our ceremony. To us it’s particularly something that’s big because we have a lot of gay friends, and [in] a lot of religious weddings lately it often seems like priests and conservative clergy will actually include things about traditional marriage in their ceremony. We want to be the opposite of that [laughs], and we’re gonna have our gay friends there. And also, it’s kinda cool because 30 or 40 years ago, Masheka’s and my marriage would’ve been illegal in a lot of states. So thanks to Loving v. Virginia… [laughs]
RW: That actually kinda leads a little bit into my next question. What do you say to people who are opposed to homosexuality strictly on religious grounds? Because that’s a tough hurdle to get over.
MR: It is. It’s really tough…
RW: Especially if they’re elected officials.
MW: Yeah, their religious views shouldn’t come into play when they’re making laws…
MR: [gesturing] Church over here, state over here! And never the twain shall meet in my opinion.
MW: That’s another thing – I mean, I was raised Catholic but we’re kinda agnostic now. My whole family, we sorta lapsed at the same time. But I was never against gay marriage… People who oppose gay marriage, they think that it somehow affects the heterosexual marriage… They haven’t had any credible explanation on why it would affect their sanctity of marriage.
MR: It’s love. Love is love. I think love in all forms should be celebrated. I mean, it’s gonna be great for us; we’re just so excited to have our families come together and see us celebrate our love for each other. It’s gonna be of course a cartoon theme. Tentatively, Ted Rall is gonna officiate our wedding! He’s gonna be the guy who says “Do you, so-and-so, take so-and-so…” That’ll be fun. And hopefully we’ll have some of our cartoonist friends there, and of course our invitation will be a cartoon.
But to get back to your question, my answer is similar. My parents are an inter-faith couple; my dad’s Jewish and my mother’s Episcopalian, and they were both very active in the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War. My parents are both teachers, and they both are very involved. When I was growing up they always talked to me about the civil rights movement and feminism and gay rights and all these things, and they just taught me about love and acceptance for everyone. And then, of course, you come to the point where it’s like okay, we want to accept all religions, but then of course a lot of religious people are very opposed [to gay marriage]. My mother’s from the south, and she’s from a background where a lot of her family are Baptists and very anti-gay; that whole Focus on the Family kind of thing. But my grandmother, who’s from that background, was always very pro-gay and very liberal in a lot of ways…
I studied psychology in college, and we had to look at a lot of things that might seem repugnant to us but to other people it’s strongly held beliefs, like for example, beliefs about women having to be veiled in Islam, or female genital mutilation in Africa. And so you always come up against this thing – okay, you wanna support people’s culture and beliefs, but then those cultures and beliefs conflict with women’s rights or gay rights or civil rights. And so when it comes down to it, those people are entitled to have their beliefs, personally, but they’re not entitled to write them into law for this country. This country is founded on the separation of church and state. We have a secular constitution and we have rights, and they are welcome to practice some things… but they are not allowed to impose them on other people… This country is about civil rights and people fighting for their right to be themselves. I’m just rambling. But I’m very angered. [laughs]
MW: We both have different interviewing styles.
MR: You’re more laid-back than I am.
RW: That’s okay. As long as I get it from both of you, that’s fine. So just to get off the political track completely – how do you view the comic book industry versus the comic strip industry?
MW: There’s a lot more creative freedom and license, I think, when you do a strip.
MR: I dunno. If you do a syndicated strip, not necessarily. Unless you’re Aaron McGruder… There’s definitely a real difference in the kind of talk at these different conventions. Like when I go to the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists convention, our main talk is about staff jobs in the cartooning industry, [how] comics are declining and newspapers and their shrinking circulation –
RW: That was gonna be my next question.
MR: Newspaper cartoonists are in trouble! Even in alt-weeklies, because what happened [was], at first it was the daily papers that were in trouble because their readers were aging, younger people weren’t really reading newspapers, the Internet was kicking their ass, people were reading papers fully online and reading other news sources and blogs, and circulation was down. Ad sales were down. And so they get more and more into cost-cutting, and often times they’re like, “Do we really need these pictures?” and so they’ll buy the cheap syndicated cartoons and they’ll get rid of their local staff cartoonists. Kirk Anderson, I think, is doing the best editorial cartoons there is. I think he’s been in the St. Paul Pioneer Press for years. They canned him because they wanted to buy an expensive plant watering system. It was between him and the expensive plant watering system and they kept the plant watering system. I am not kidding. So they canned him, and he’s like one of the best editorial cartoonists there is!
There are still some who have great staff jobs – Tom Toles of theWashington Post, he has Herb Block’s old office, and that’s great. He’s an amazing cartoonist. Signe Wilkinson at the Philadelphia Inquirer – I just went hiking with her at the editorial cartoonists’ convention. She is great! And she’s, of course, the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning…
But more and more staff jobs are being cut. More and more it’s in danger. And then of course, for awhile the “alties” were doing great. They were running on free advertising, everyone was reading them, and then came Craig’s List. And people go to Craig’s List for classifieds now, they don’t buy classifieds in the Village Voice like they used to. And so more and more papers have even been cutting the number of pages. I was just cut from the Boston Phoenix for space, which was really depressing because I love that paper and I’ve been in the Boston Phoenix for years and they were my first major client. But they just didn’t have any room anymore. They had to redesign, and their political section went from two pages to one and they didn’t have room for a cartoon anymore. It’s really a dangerous thing. And of course, it’s really hard to break in. As much as Masheka encourages his students in his cartooning class, I think a lot of them might end up in animation or the Cartoon Network –
MW: It’s still good.
MR: Which is great, I mean we love animation. But we gotta have changing models, and a lot of us have been getting together at the AAEC and other places and talking about what’s next. What do we do? And some people have found other ways… Mark Fiore does amazing animated political cartoons; they’re fantastic!
MW: I’ve been trying to get into that, the Flash [computer program], because I studied animation and film in college, and it’s a quick way to get the message out there. A lot of these papers here want freelancers who don’t have a really strong opinion, because they don’t want to offend their readership.
MR: Like the Muhammad cartoon thing has made a lot of editors more skittish. It’s a shame. It’s supposed to be the hard-hitting profession and it’s not getting the support…
The thing with cartoonists – and every cartoonist knows this – most of the profession is based on sitting by yourself in a little corner with your drawing table and your light and drawing, and that’s very isolating. It’s not like… when you go into an office and you’re surrounded by people and you’re chatting, or an ad agency, where you’re always collaborating. Cartooning is mostly a solo process, and so it’s so important to have that interaction with other cartoonists… there’s just nothing more fun. I don’t know why; it’s just like this high when you’re surrounded by other like-minded cartoonists. We have the best conversations and the best ideas and it’s like, you’re all on the same wavelength even though you’ve got your own different style.
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April 22, 2008:
February 4, 2008:
November 20, 2006:
A Comic-Con without the Captain
