Cartoonists With Attitude

I spent all day coloring some Onion comics for the Dark Horse Myspace site to help sell my book. I'm signing at Powell's in about a week. I don't think there's been any promotion... I hope I won't suck at Powell's, stuck on stage with no one there.


I sent more comics... He said he'd seen the grim reaper comic before and didn't think I'd quite nailed the dog gag yet. It's frustrating but I'm so damn happy to be in a correspondence. The stuff I'm doing for the Onion and the stuff I'm sending the NYer is starting to get diverge stylistically on it's own. Where was the Reaper comic before? I hope it's a coincidence and not subconscious plagiarism.

In case you didn't know comics were supposed to be read from left to right, this cartoon has handy arrows for its three panels.

(click here to view)

Robert Unell Kansas City Star Aug 19, 2008 EditorialCartoonists.com

One thing really isn't clear: Why does "Beijing 2008" simply disappear in the second panel? Who took it? What happened in between those panels?!

*FOR EVERYONE WHO WAS WONDERING WHEN I'D BE TEACHING THAT CARTOONING SEMINAR AGAIN...

Cartoons Are Serious Business:
A Cartooning Workshop with Keith Knight,
Creator of the ?K¹ Chronicles, (th)ink and the Knight Life

Cartoon Art Museum Class: Sunday, September 21, 2008, 1:00 - 4:00pm
Cost per class: $100; $90 for CAM members


On Sunday, September 21, 2008, the Cartoon Art Museum is offering another
installment in its ongoing series of workshops for aspiring comic artists,
writers and fans of all ages. Each class is taught by a professional
cartoonist focusing on an area of his or her expertise, ranging from
character creation and story development to writing and drawing comic books
and strips.

Keith Knight, 2007 Harvey Award winner and creator of the syndicated comics
the 'K' Chronicles, the Knight Life and (th)ink, will conduct an intensive
three-hour workshop for aspiring cartoonists, entitled Cartoons Are Serious
Business. The cost of this class is $100 per student for the general
public, and $90 per student for members of the Cartoon Art Museum.

Mr. Knight will be drawing upon his 15 years as a self-syndicated cartoonist
for this intensive workshop, which is an advanced class for people looking
to make cartooning a viable money-making career. This workshop will focus
on the business side of comics, from marketing and promotions to dealing
with syndicates and negotiating publishing contracts. In the past decade,
Knight's work has appeared in self-published 'zines, major newspapers,
alternative newsweeklies, professional comic anthologies and major
nationally-distributed publications including ESPN: The Magazine and Mad,
he has promoted his work at more than 100 comic conventions and trade shows,
and he has delivered lectures on cartooning at colleges and universities
throughout the United States.

This is an encore presentation of a class Knight taught at the Cartoon Art
Museum in 2006. Since then, he has launched a daily comic strip with King
Features Syndicate, won numerous awards and signed a deal to produce a
200-page graphic novel. He has a lot more stuff to tell people.

Keith Knight is a Boston-born, Los Angeles-based cartoonist whose three
syndicated comics, the 'K 'Chronicles, the Knight Life and (th)ink, can be
found in newspapers, magazines and websites all across the country. He is
also a rapper with the semi-conscious hip-hop group, the Marginal Prophets.
For more information, please visit his website, www.kchronicles.com
<http://www.kchronicles.com>

Class size is limited, and each class is filled on a first-come,
first-served basis. Basic drawing materials will be provided, but students
are encouraged to purchase sketchbooks and their own drawing implements. To
register or for more information about the workshop, please contact Diane
Shapiro Sommerfield at (415) CAR-TOON, ext. 303, or via e-mail at
education@cartoonart.org.

]{[^]}[
Cartoon Art Museum ? 655 Mission Street ? San Francisco, CA 94105 ?
415-CAR-TOON ? www.cartoonart.org
Hours: Tues. - Sun. 11:00 - 5:00, Closed Monday
General Admission: $6.00 ? Student/Senior: $4.00 ? Children 6-12: $2.00 ?
Members & Children under 6: Free

The Cartoon Art Museum is a tax-exempt, non-profit, educational organization
dedicated to the collection,
preservation, study and exhibition of original cartoon art in all forms.

Over at Hit and Run, Nick Gillespie says “what, me worry?” to schools cutting programs and services in response to tightening budgets:

Jesus Christ, is this the worst of it? If so, please just stop. As someone who had kids in the Maryland’s Montgomery County schools for a couple of years, I can guarantee you that they could choose to cut something other than funds for “an award-winning” math team with ease. Indeed, the district seemed hellbent on calling three-day weekends whenever snow was forecast for a Friday morning. And where are the calls to make administrators ride their bikes or carpool to school?

Some of the cuts Nick do seem pretty trivial — switching from stop-at-every-home bus service to neighborhood bus stops, for instance. Others, however, are serious: Cutting school weeks from five days to four. Raising the costs of school lunches and charging parents for bus service (in one high school, they’ve cut out bus service altogether). Not being able to get up to date textbooks degrades the quality of education, and so — believe it or not — does cutting electives and math teams.

That Nick responds to these real problems with mockery — as if no reasonable person could possibly be concerned with cutting to a four-day school week, or updated textbooks — shows how irresponsible the idealogical anti-government tax-cutters are.

Meanwhile, Nick’s ideas on how to save money are ludicrous. Administrators typically use their own cars to get to work, so calls for biking or carpools for admins won’t save a cent. And snow days actually save money for school districts (as does any other method of cutting the number of school days).

Nick goes on:

Per-pupil spending is up over 300 percent in constant dollars since the early 1960s. You’d think somewhere in that increase, schools would figure out how to fund meaningful stuff and drop crap.

Of course, a lot of that increase has gone into special education, school breakfast and lunch programs, bilingual education, and computers. These expenses were all either low or nonexistent in the early 1960s — and yes, they are “meaningful stuff” and not “crap.”

The other thing to consider is that as long as we want students to have direct interaction with teachers, the costs of education will always go up, due to Baumol’s disease.

When Mozart composed his String Quintet in G Minor (K. 516), in 1787, you needed five people to perform it—two violinists, two violists, and a cellist. Today, you still need five people, and, unless they play really fast, they take about as long to perform it as musicians did two centuries ago. So much for progress.

An economist would say that the productivity of classical musicians has not improved over time, and in this regard the musicians aren’t alone. In a number of industries, workers produce about as much per hour as they did a decade or two ago. The average college professor can’t grade papers or give lectures any faster today than he did in the early nineties. It takes a waiter just as long to serve a meal, and a car-repair guy just as long to fix a radiator hose.

The rest of the American economy functions differently. In most businesses, workers are continually getting more productive and can produce a lot more per hour than they could ten or twenty years ago. […] Generally, productivity growth is a boon, but it creates problems for non-productive enterprises like classical music, education, and car repair: to keep luring talent, they have to increase wages, or else people eventually migrate to businesses that pay better. Instead of becoming nurses or mechanics, they become telecom engineers or machinists. That’s why teachers are getting paid a lot more than they were twenty years ago. (The average salary for an associate college professor has risen almost seventy per cent since the early eighties, and that’s if you adjust for inflation.) To pay those wages, schools and hospitals have to raise prices. The result is that in industries where productivity is flat costs and prices keep going up.

I have no idea if school districts really spend more (as a percentage of the total) on “crap” now than they did in the 1960s. But I’m skeptical, because Nick presents zero evidence to support his implication.

What I do know is that the amount of “meaningful stuff” schools are providing, and the legitimate costs of the “meaningful stuff,” have gone up significantly since the early 1960s. Too many libertarians, like Nick, act as if they believe in a free lunch; we can make HUGE cuts in education budgets and not suffer any pain at all, because there’s lots of unnamed “crap” to be cut! But it’s nonsense. Just saying “costs have gone up 300%” as if that alone proves there’s a huge amount of waste is economic illiteracy.

"Advancements in Psychopathology, Cont."...

Previous episode:

Anyone else think it would be wildly hilarious if Obama sent the phone/text message announcement of his running mate at 3:00 AM?

Anyone else think it would be wildly hilarious if Obama sent the phone/text message announcement of his running mate at 3:00 AM?

These presidential races are getting painfully predictable. The Democrat is slightly ahead, the GOP machine unleashes torrents of slime, the media spread said slime by discussing it as though it were legitimate, and idiocy carries the day. One hardly needs to bring up issues anymore -- just feminize and exoticize your opponent, and if he's black, sexualize him (but couch it in other messages just enough to give you plausible deniability). It's no happy accident that the McCain ad discussed in the cartoon echoes the ad against Harold Ford of Tennessee, which featured a white bimbo imploring Ford (who is black) to call her. I find this all very depressing, if not surprising.

McCain's eagerness to leap into a new Cold War with Russia gives me the willies. While Googling the McCain logo, I came across this image on Democratic Underground:



Simple but effective, methinks.

In the last panel of this cartoon, I wanted to take McCain's absurd message (delivered via some guy they found a newsclip of) that "hot chicks dig Obama" to its logical conclusion, but I came up against the problem of not wanting to sound like those mean-spirited "no fat chicks" t-shirts. So I tried to make my ugly chicks as goofy as possible, a la Basil Wolverton's famous Lena the Hyena (Wolverton specialized in drawing laughably hideous people of both sexes). I think it's pretty clear from the context that I'm mocking McCain's boorishness rather than picking on women with Neanderthal brows and both eyeballs on one side of their head.

PS-- Speaking of ugly, check out these finalists from the Sonoma-Marin World's Ugliest Dog Contest.