Just think of the children.

No, I am not doing this because I think Jeff is right about fair use — although, I have to admit, I don’t mind getting sued when my paper foots the bill. As for this site, I’m still wondering if I made the right idea when I spent $10 for the domain. FYI, he’s not right and I love that he gets so worked up about it. I think I might google his name and see how many 13 year-old gun nuts have his work and their myspace pages. We could make a huge list and forward to Jeff so that he can spend his time tracking down all those nasty criminals misusing his work.

The real reason I’m doing it because I am a lazy too (it’s part of the job description) and I really don’t want to get into a pissing match when I guess I can see where he is coming from.

So, sucky cartooning has won this battle, but the war still wages on! Be vigilant, brave reader, victory will be ours!

Ok, I think it’s time we talk about something else now.

Unfortunately, most folks don’t realize that lifting artwork for use on a blog is actually copyright infringement. As much as I get a kick out of your blog, I don’t recall giving permission for you to use my work. If I’m mistaken, I apologize. But I’ll need you to provide documentation that you have permission, or you’ll have to remove my work from your site immediately. If you would like to use my work in the future, I will be happy to consider it on a case-by-case basis.

Many thanks,

Jeff Koterba

And my response.

Jeff,

According to the Fair Use doctrine of United States Copyright law (the same doctrine that covers your butt when you use Mickey Mouse or Mickey-d’s in a cartoon) copyrighted works can be reused without permission of the copyright holder for uses such as: scholarship, review, and parody.

For more info, just google ‘fair use’. It might be useful to you in your profession.

Nice try though.

Bad Cartoonist

I’m not so sure I deserved such a darn nice email but, whatever. I felt so warm and fuzzy after reading it that I couldn’t even bring myself to call him names in my response.

I am very surprised that cartoonists are not more aware of copyright law. Heck, we rip off copyrights all the time but, heaven forbid, someone posts a sub-par cartoon and makes some comments concerning one’s ability to draw or execute a decent joke and they want to call out the cavalry. This might be news to some of you but parody isn’t ours alone.

I think we’re all just a little sensitive. Sure, it’s ok to rip people to shreds day-in and day-out from behind our comfortable drawing desks. But as soon as someone else does it to us, we have to get our pantaloons in a bunch.

The fact of the matter is that there are too many cartoonists who are either uncreative, unable or just not trying hard enough. Instead of being oh-so-proud of ourselves for offending people I think we ought to be doing a better job at what we do. For all of those of you who have been sending me your cartoons asking me to critique you, let’s just look at another of Jeff’s recent work and learn a few more things that you can do to avoid ending up being the sludge on the bottom tier of a dying profession.

I hate to say it, but I think he traced it.  You be the judge.

Take one ping-pong ball.  Cut it in half.  Draw little black circles on each half.  Stick them on your face.  Congratulations, you’re now a Ken Catalino caricature.

Things only get worse when you look at more of his recent work.  Aside from his glass-fisted punch lines, it also appears if he has had a recent case of the lazies.  I hear it’s been going around.  Pay attention to his caricature of Obama (the jittery photoshop effects are there just to distract you). 

Now imagine that you’ve spent an exhausting fifteen minutes thinking up an idea and you’re just about ready to call it a day but you still have to do that pesky thing I like to call drawing.  The easiest way to get around this is to just open up photoshop and copy what you did the day before.  Add a hand over his face (Ken, are you trying to hide something?), a photoshop filter, three or four garish colors, and you’re almost there!

Hey, if it works, go with it.

Nice newspaper in this one.  It’s a subliminal message that marketing came up with.  They thought that if readers saw more people actually reading newspapers then circulation would increase.  They didn’t realize that it also INSTANTLY makes the reader an idiot.

Here are the three faces for comparison.  Yup, he didn’t even bother to take the extra 10 minutes to draw Barak’s face again.  Not only are these kinds of jokes one of the true plagues of our profession but a cartoonist who doesn’t have the time of day to actually DRAW a major political figure deserves public mocking and a severe finger-wagging. 

Save for the hand, added so that Obama would be showing some kind of emotion (note to self- putting a hand over someones mouth is a good way of showing that someone is overcome with laughter) they are the same.

 Here they are overlaid, just to show that he took a mini-vacation from his job for a couple of days.

 You’re a cartoonist.  That means you should draw.  Now you know.  And knowing is half the battle.

 This weeks “Look Ma, I did it all by myself” award goes to Scott Stantis for this series of cartoons.

AUGH! My eyes!  Scott, just because the press prints in CMYK doesn’t mean that those are the only colors you can use.  Try something a little more subtle like, oh I don’t know, sky-blue?  You know, the color that you actually see when you look up.  What you have there is a serious abuse of the gradient tool.  Watch out or you might get your photoshop rights revoked.    The mail, on the other hand, is spot on.  Everything I get in my mailb0x is banana yellow.  My text bubbles are always urine-colored too.

 I feel like Scott’s patriotism is spilling over into his job.  His insatiable need to label everything lead him to show that both the hat and the mailbox are true Americans.

By the way, the press-room called.  They ran out of cyan before they got half-way through with your cartoon.

 Snore…… Oh, sorry, where was I?  Oh looky, cyan and yellow!  That, by the way, is a very original idea.  Two people watching TV.  I’ll have to try that someday.

Ug.  Cartoonists need to stop crying about their jobs when all they can come up with is a weeping logo.  I know he’s busy doing two other garishly self-righteous cartoons but, come on, he traced a logo, drew a tear-drop and put his signature on it.  Whoop-dee.  His readers dropped 10 IQ points just by looking at this cartoon.  And, if you look hard enough, I think it has cyan in it and today I really hate cyan.

 Let’s look at some other cartoons.  Chip Bok gets the ‘Coloring is hard work’ award.

I know that cross-hatching is time consuming but we should be used to the repetitive motion from patting ourselves on the back all day.  Apparently, Chip wanted to do a color cartoon but only got half-way through when he found out that there was a world-wide shortage of cyan.  Thanks a lot, Scott.  Now poor Chip looks like he was just lazy.

Just wanted to point something out. Steve Greenberg did exactly zero drawing in this cartoon.  It’s all type, Benjamins and a bad gradient.  He get’s the ‘photoshop can fix anything’ award for this one.  When I first saw this I thought, “Huh.  Is that supposed to be a black hole?”  Luckily, Steve was kind enough to spell it out for us because his cartoon wasn’t able to do so.  See where it says ‘black hole’?  That means one of two things:

Option A: The cartoonist assumes that the reader is too stupid to understand.

Option B: The cartoonist knows that no one will get this stupid cartoon.

This cartoon died in photoshop when the cartoonist realised he didn’t have the ability to convey his idea visually.  His photohop kung-fu was just not strong enough.  Mike Thompson, the Ivan Drago of CS2, has one answer for such weakness.

Yup, a brick wall. 

At least he didn’t use cyan.

“..and that’s when Hillary understood that she shouldn’t have eaten all of Bill’s onion-rings.”

 And, is the towel named Hillary too?  Must we always put their name somewhere?  It’s a good caricature, you don’t have to spell it out.  In Jimmy’s defense it was probably his editor’s idea to put the name there, you know, so regular folks will get it too.

Yesterday we learned how you can rip off Hollywood or Cnn when realise you don’t have a creative bone in your body.  For those of you who are so insipid that you can’t even make a cartoon out of a movie poster we have the following technique.  We’re going to call it the ‘Stahler’ because he does it more than anybody else but, keep in mind, every cartoonist on the planet does this, repeatedly.  And they all hate it with a passion.

 The idea is simple.  If you can’t come up with an idea about a news story, just draw a cartoon of people reacting to the news.  Most often this cartoon will be of two people, husband and wife, sipping coffee at the breakfast table reacting the newspaper in their hands.  The cartoonist must draw the newspaper.  No one knows for sure why, but it is a rule that is followed religiously.  Subtle variations include:  two people at a cafe; two people in front of the TV (in this instance the cartoonist must draw the remote control.  Don’t ask why, just do it.  It’s a rule.);  two people reading a sign and so forth. 

 This approach forgoes any deep thinking that one would have to do to come up with something creative like, oh I don’t know, an actual metaphor.  All one has to do is recreate his breakfast and call it a day!

All of these cartoons were done by Jeff Stahler within the past month.  Our first cartoon is a perfect example of the ‘Stahler’.  Take note of the easy to read headline for the reader who is, presumably, totally ignorant of recent news.  Also note the coffee mug and the striking resemblance that the male figure bears to the cartoonist.  He was so lazy that day he didn’t even bother to make up a stranger; he just drew himself.

Subtle variations on the ‘Stahler’ are below.  There’s little thinking going on, just two people making a funny.  There is no remote control in this cartoon but the man is holding a bowl of popcorn which is a substitution that is allowed as long as it is not a repeat offender.

There he is again!  That’s the cartoonist in his own cartoon reacting to the show he watched with his wife the night before.  Something tells me that SHE is the one who came up with the idea.

He’s really mixing it up in this one.  We have both a TV and a newspaper.  This newspaper serves the purpose of telling the reader what the joke is about because the cartoonist hasn’t thought of another way to do it.  Soon cartoonist will resort to small captions that explain the purpose and punchline of a joke so that no thought is required on the part of the reader.  Oh, wait.

Bigger TV, same cartoon.

This last one is a doozy.  If you think this is a familiar cartoon, intrepid reader, you just might be right.  It bears a striking resemblance to the first cartoon in this post.  That’s right if you get desperate enough, you can do a ‘Stahler’ and plagiarise yourself.

I’ve overlaid the two cartoons so we can have a comparison (the red lines are the first cartoon, blue lines are the second).  It appears that most of the cartoon was simply redrawn, so at least he didn’t trace himself, but the lines on his wife look suspicious.  In either case, he was so short on ideas he took a cartoon that he did LESS THAN A MONTH AGO, changed the text and clocked in for a full days work.  What?  Has drawing yourself become too time consuming that you have to borrow a cartoon from yourself?  Most cartoonists wait at least a quarter before they start to rehash their old ideas, but one month is pushing it.  At least he remembered the mug

Well, dear reader, I hope this has been informative.  For those of you who can’t draw, just focus on practicing a few things.  Draw yourself, a mug, a newspaper, a TV and your significant other and you too can be a successful cartoonist!

As for my identity…

I’m just an overweight, out of work hairdresser that channeled Jeff MacNelly through a back room seance in a circle of hair dryers.  Jeff gave me a message for all the political cartoonists who are listening.  It’s this:

Stop drawing like me.

That is all.

 Lesson one:  The scrambled egg.

Not a creative person?  Can’t think up any new ideas?  Don’t worry that never held Jeff Koterba back!  Here’s how you too can make a cartoon out of nothing.

 Step one:  Go to Cnn.com and see what the biggest story of the day is- but it can’t have anything to do with politics. 

 Take that story and mix it up, don’t hold back now.  You can add a politician or even a country.  You don’t need an opinion just use this tired formula like these cartoonists:

Funny, Aislin but not too original.  This one was used by several other cartoonists but I’m too lazy to find them now.

 John Trever might have been the only cartoonist to do a satellite cartoon that didn’t have anything to do with John McCain.  It still doesn’t count as being creative though.

Steve Benson, on the other hand, is the only person in the country who thinks that there was any meat behind the New York Times story.

If you’re so ignorant of the news that you can’t come up with something from Cnn you can always rely on Hollywood to do the creative work for you.  Just take any movie poster and put a politician in it.  See, now you’re a cartoonist!

R.J. Matson has this down pat.  He usually beats everybody to the punch.  Get it?  John McCain- old men?  Just wait till May.  Every stinkin’ cartoonist in the country will be doing Ironman cartoons.  But R.J. will probably be the first.

Jeff Darcy used this trick too.  But his old men were Cuban.  Very original.   And the ‘passing the cigar’ is such a brilliant idea I think only half of the cartoonists in the country did that 5 days ago.  See, he took a bunch of other peoples ideas, jumbled them together, and WHAM!  We call it exercising our first amendment rights.

If you live in Boston you can’t make fun of socialists so Hobert when for McCain.  Oh yea, he’s old.

David Horsey thinks John McCain is old too.  Very original.

Poor, old Sandy.  He is so out of touch with what’s on the zeitgest that he had to use a movie that was made TWO YEARS AGO.  If you are going to use a tired formula you should at least try to keep it current.  And what’s with the thought bubbles trailing off the left…. is this a dream?  Did Ralph Nader dream hiself a snake winning an Oscar for an outdated reference to pop-culture?  That’s deep, Sandy, really deep.

Sigh.  It must have been a very bleak day for Mike Ramirez to have to reach all the way back to Titanic to come up with this cartoon.  Just so you know, nobody cares about Dicaprio anymore.  I know you would like to focus on a time when you were actually relevant in the cartooning world but but it’s time to let to turn off Celine Dion and try something new.

Let’s look at some recent attempts.

Adam Zyglis does caricatures better than 80% of the cartoonists who have worked decades longer than he has. I’ve seen him do a good Hillary capturing her snide superiority but this has just a bit too much zombie.

Since most of Glen McCoy’s cartoons look like he drew them with his butt-cheeks I can’t say this is his worst work. But it does illustrate how most cartoonists cannot draw women; they hardly ever have to unless the Editorial Page Editor is on a kick about mainstreaming.

Steve Benson’s Hillary is so bad she made Martin Luther King cry. Usually his work only causes weeping for the disenfranchised atheists but this one stoops to an all-time low in regards to emotional appeals. Also, I’m all for using a little spittle now and then but he’s really got the water works going in this cartoon.

Gary Markstein… what can I say? She looks so manly he even forgot to give her breasts; just one really big shoulder. This is one instance when he SHOULD have copied someone else.

Lalo started with her eyebrows and screwed those up so badly that he decided to hide the rest of her behind a sign.

J.D. Crowe screws up both Hillary and Giuliani in one cartoon. Was he trying to make her look like a transvestite? I’m not sure, but I am suspicious. The only way he could have made them worse was by merging them into one hideous monstrosity.

Shoot. This travesty by M.E. Cohen makes me question how on earth he makes a living as a freelance cartoonist. And we all wonder why circulation numbers are down? It’s because crap like this keeps killing off the readers. Oh yea, is this supposed to be funny because, if it is, I sure missed it. There is a lesson to be learned in this. Never use your initials instead of your name like M.E. Cohen and J.D. Crowe. You’ll be a sucky cartoonist with a stupid name if you do.

Bob Engelhart was born to draw Little Orphan Annie and nothing else.

Eric Devericks idea of an original idea is a bad caricature against a white background with stink marks all around them. He does this same thing every. single. day. How about trying to do a brick wall now and then? It works for Mike Thompson.

Chip Bok has got to be the most pathetic cartoonist in all of these United States. I hear he was funny about two decades ago when America was yukking it up to Mork and Mindy. His drawing style is a mix of Glen McCoy arse-drawing and some MacNelly cross-hatching thrown in around the text bubble for the sake of originality because, you know, NOBODY tries to draw like Jeff MacNelly. I’ve seen kitty litter that looked more like Hillary than Chip crapped out below.