Saw this link over at the Toon Talk forums. It’s called Rightwing cartoon watch from an openly-liberal blog called BlueHerald.

Now before you go thinking this is just the left-wing equivalent of how Rush Limbaugh makes up funny names and voices for politicians he doesn’t like, it’s hardly without any kind of intellectual merit. Here’s the blog on itself:

Comedians, artists and certainly political cartoonists tend to possess an anti-authoritarian, skeptical, irreverent streak. This makes the staunchly conservative cartoonist an especially odd bird.

Rightwing Cartoon Watch seeks to highlight far right cartoons, but also document the broader range of opinion from conservative cartoonists on the hot issues of a given week. While a primary goal is to challenge GOP talking points and fallacies, we also seek to celebrate the fine American tradition of editorial cartooning — and have a little fun in the process.

Which cartoonists dare to criticize their own party? Who seems to literally illustrate GOP talking points? Who are their favorite targets? Who mocks liberals — and who seems to truly hate them? Who’s funny? Who’s independently minded and who’s a hack? Read, and decide, for yourself!

Wow…although I disagree with a lot of cartoon-syndicate man Daryl Cagle’s decisions, I agreed with his recent analysis of the front page of the LA Times. While I didn’t care to take the time to see if his font count is correct, I agreed that the front page looked like a mess, or as I’d like to put it, like a font book threw up on some newsprint.

Today, Cagle linked to a blogger’s dissection of his LA Times analysis (actually, Cagle claims he linked to it on March 20, even though what he’s linking to wasn’t even written until the evening of March 21). The blogger concluded that, while he agrees with the spirit of Cagle’s argument, Cagle was just flat-out using some incorrect information to make his case. And quite significantly, the blogger says

Given the snarky, nit-picky nature of the original critique, I feel it’s not out of line to examine these supposed 22 different fonts with the same diligence.

Well guess how the classy ambassador of his syndicate responded to that.

I’ve gotten reaction to my “Ransom Note” piece on the LA Times (below) from some of our more anal readers (my emphasis) who are graphic artists; they point out that some of the fonts that I have counted are not actually different fonts, but are different members of font families, such as: italic, extra bold, or condensed siblings with the same font surname. Here’s a link to some guy who thinks this is a very important distinction. I say, tell it to the pastor’s sister-in-law with the new Macintosh.

That’s right – in Cagle’s world, depending on things like facts means you’re anal. Pointing out that he’s wrong makes you anal.

I love that he called him anal. Because, you know, Cagle’s not. It’s not like he scanned in a front page, labeled 22 points on that page, wrote a couple hundred words about it and posted it. What the blogger did was so completely different and anal compared to what Cagle did.

And as the blogger so beautifully points out, maybe a guy who’s going to claim that the LA Times is a visual mess resembling a random note…

…shouldn’t run a site that looks like this.

Sometimes it’s just better to admit when you’re wrong.

Regular visitors to the site will notice that it looks quite a bit different around here. I switched to WordPress for management of this site, and the move is not nearly complete. As a result, only about the 60 most recent cartoons are available, which leaves about 400 entries that need to be tidied up.

Sadly, the comments from the old site weren’t able to come along for the ride, but I will make an effort to manually transfer as many as possible once the other transitional work is done.

In the meantime, please enjoy poking around the new site and thanks for your patience.

From editorial cartoonist Andy Singer, posted at the Cagle Web Log:

Q: What’s the difference between a professional cartoonist and a large pizza?
A: A large pizza can feed a family of four.

I think maybe the Omaha World-Herald should be concerned about their editorial cartoonist, Jeff Koterba. Either he’s suffering from some kind of amnesia or lack of creative ideas, or they’re getting ripped off while paying him for rehashing unimaginative excuses for cartoons.

Take a look at today’s cartoon.

Jeff made me take his cartoons down, so this used to be a cartoon of snow blowing, kid says it was great getting a snow day, other kid says it gave him a chance to finish his global warming report.

What’s the basic idea here? It’s cold and snowy, which is ironic, because scientists claim the earth is falling prey to global warming. Okay. It’s a bit naive and simplistic, but it’s at least drawn well.

Well let’s take a look at his cartoon from January 15th of this year – not quite a month ago.

Guy standing in snowstorm with a sign saying “Bush: Stop global warming.”

Oh hey! I recognize that point!

This isn’t an isolated incident. Koterba’s been known to display these symptoms before. Continue reading →

Usually when I make a comment about the cartoonists on the Cagle.com cartoonists syndicate it’s to make some point about how the cartoonists are creating work that lacks any sort of insight, debatable point, or relevance.

Today is no different, but there’s an added bit of bite to the usual criticism of these smug thugs. If you check out the compilation of cartoons on the JonBenet Ramsey killing and John Mark Karr confession, you may note a handful of cartoons with a similar message:

Now that the “real” killer has stood up, the media’s unfair treatment of the Ramsey family is in full view.

The obvious irony here is that, in their haste to chastise those nasty reporters who’ve picked the Ramsey bones dry (I’m borrowing from several of their visual metaphors), they similarly rush in their conviction of a man who quite clearly was not the killer.

Way to go, guys.

In fairness, if you look through those seven pages of cartoons, there are two that actually attempt to make a point beyond the obvious rah-rah “The media sure is nasty!” point that everyone’s going to agree with. One was especially bold to the point where I’m surprised a paper ran it.

I posted a few weeks ago about a story I was interviewed for regarding the big international cartoon controversy. I couldn’t find it online then, but now here it is.

Well I was just a call-in guest on John Baylor’s show on KFOR in response to this cartoon. I was teased as “throwing a flamethrower bomb” in yesterday’s cartoon with “a blatant attack on the Republican party.” With that kind of an intro, I thought I was in for a tough time on the air.

But I thought it went really well. Mr. Baylor essentially wanted to know what I meant, and he gave me plenty of time to explain myself. I brought up the recent news with Sen Mike Foley, Right to Life’s contradictory logic on their Heineman endorsement and Tom Swartley as examples of people invoking the name of the Lord and the work of God who behave dishonestly. He asked me good questions forcing me to better explain myself, and other than talking about a mile a minute, I think I did okay. I can’t think of anything I regret saying.

He also asked which cartoon has gotten the most response, either positive or negative, and I mentioned that Paul McCartney cartoon from October, which has blown away every other cartoon in terms of response. He also brought up the infamous Danny Nee cartoon from early 2000, so he knows his stuff. 🙂

I was interviewed for this week’s Redweek, the UNL College of Journalism & Mass Communications’ weekly newspaper, on the Danish cartoon controversy.

I’ve been interviewed for various reasons in the past (see: 1996 Auburn Yearbook Crisis; 2003’s Puppeteer Geek story) and finally – finally – I felt like I was represented accurately! I’ve been on the other side of enough stories that I know how easy it is to present people’s quotes completely as stated in the context they were given, yet people still feel like they were misrepresented, so I am not saying that to put any blame on previous reporters. But either I’m finally getting better at saying what I mean, or Tiffany Lee did a heck of a job (the second is actually more likely, but it might be a mixture of both).

I don’t know if Redweek is posted online anywhere, but it’s actually a really good story about the many angles of the situation. There’s a UNL student who had lived in Iran, a law professor with 1st Amendment expertise, the Christian perspective, and a cartoonist’s perspective.

I was singled out not because I cared to defend the Danish cartoonists (because I don’t), but because I have depicted Jesus in quite a few cartoons over the years.

I did have one quote that I can’t believe I said (I’m not disputing I said it, I just can’t believe my internal censors didn’t stop it) but I don’t think I dishonored the world of professional editorial cartoonists any more than those bland losers do to themselves on a daily basis.