My alma mater is marking its 60th year, as is its student newspaper. Long Beach State, or more properly California State University Long Beach, was born in 1949 and was saddled with the school nickname of the Forty-Niners (the lame football mascot was a big-chinned character holding a gold-mining pan… yeah, real scary to opposing teams) and the campus paper became the Daily Forty-Niner.

Unfortunately, due to my still-recovering vision being too “iffy’ for a 128-mile round-trip drive, I had to skip the paper’s 60th anniversary commemoration and was unable to see some of my old friends and fellow campus newspaper staffers.

I arrived at CSULB in Fall 1974, or 25 years into the 60, a community college transfer student. And while I’m shocked to think of the passage of so much time, I have some vivid, and fond, memories of those student days.

At the community college I got quite interested in editorial cartooning — it was during the Watergate era, when there was great, powerful cartooning being done — and I tried my hand at it, but only for sketchbooks for my art classes. The campus paper told me I couldn’t get published unless I was on their staff, so I meekly gave up and waited for my transfer to Long Beach. I didn’t really quite know what I wanted to do in art… except maybe get some cartoons into the school newspaper.

I nervously approached the Daily Forty-Niner newsroom and showed my cartoons to the editor, the late Bob Judge, who passed me off to the Opinion editor, Jim Tortolano, who said he’d consider them. My first submission (on the just-resigned Richard Nixon) didn’t get in. But my second, a mediocre one on the new president, Gerald Ford, did get published. And suddenly, oh my gawd, I was a published editorial cartoonist!

Not wanting to give them a chance to forget me again (or run somebody else), I drew another cartoon for the next edition with an opinion page, two days later. And then I drew another cartoon for the next edition with an opinion page. And so on, for what became pretty much an unbroken series of cartoon with the editorials over the next three years.

On my first cartoons my signature was a hard-to-read little scribble. Starting out, I didn’t know if editorial cartoonists routinely got punched in the face or got death threats or such. As my confidence grew, so did my signature (a bit too much so at one point).

My early work was not terribly strong in either art or ideas — just somewhat better than average student work — but I thought I was doing pretty well. My initial cockiness was shattered when an older student mentioned that there had been “a couple of pretty good cartoonists” from just a couple years prior, and then I discovered the professional-caliber work that preceded me.

Dick Wright (there circa 1971-72) drew like Mad magazine’s Mort Drucker, and went on to work for dailies in San Diego, Columbus, Nashville and most notably Providence (R.I.). He left cartooning for ministry work a couple years ago. And Bill Schorr (there circa 1972-73), drew like the great Ron Cobb of the L.A. Free Press, and went on to work for the Kansas City Star, the defunct L.A. Herald Examiner and the New York Daily News.

Humbled, I realized I had to get a LOT better, and soon. I analyzed each cartoon I drew for mistakes and poor drawings (”Hmm, I can draw feet better than that.”), thought harder about my ideas, and saw my work improve dramatically from semester to semester. By 1976 I was feeling pretty good and won national and state student cartooning awards.

More importantly, I was gaining respect for the first time in my life. I was short, wore thick eyeglasses and was as nerdy as they came. Nobody cared what I said or thought all my life. My moment of revelation was one day during some discussion in the Forty-Niner newsroom when someone said, “I’d like to hear what Steve thinks.” That was when I realized my editorial cartooning was capable of transforming me, with my artistic efforts making me into more of a person than I’d previously been.

I got more involved in the newspaper than I was with my Art Department classes — the cartooning was more fun and less pressure - and to this day I keep up with far more Journalism alumni than Art Department ones. Some Forty-Niner grads went on to prominent newspapers (Cathleen Decker and Joel Sappell to the L.A. Times, Sara Terry to the Christian Science Monitor, Chris Woodyard to USA Today), some went into public relations, some bounced around. Within six months of graduating I landed a full-time job as the first staff cartoonist for the Valley News, later known as the Daily News of Los Angeles.

I seldom look at my college work (or my early professional work) as it makes me cringe at the relatively poor artwork and the ideas that could’ve been focused better.

But the days with my campus newspapers — yes, plural; I was one of a group of Forty-Niner rebels who started up a second, more freewheeling campus paper in 1977 — were among the most fun of my life. I hung out in the newsroom, slumped in soft chairs in side rooms in the student union to draw the cartoons, got involved a bit with the physical production. I eagerly picked up the daily newspapers, utterly amazed to see my work actually IN PRINT. And abandoned myself to fantasies about my career-to-be on real, big-time daily newspapers as a staff editorial cartoonist.

I’ve certainly had my ups and downs on that front, but I’ve achieved a lot that I never would have had it not been for the Daily Forty-Niner (or as it’s now called, the Daily 49er).

Happy Anniversary, folks.

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Be sure to see the huge archive of my work (organized by topic area) on my web site at http://www.greenberg-art.com

A new global forum for ideas as brought forth by editorial cartoonists and video journalists has made its debut, and I am delighted to be a part of it.

The Video Journalism Movement, at www.vjmovement.com, comes out of The Netherlands and like many good ideas, began in a bar.

Thomas Loudon was a Dutch video journalist covering the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq who realized that journalists were often hamstrung by the newsroom agendas of their employers from doing the stories they really wanted to do. Comparing notes with other foreign journalists, he learned that they felt the same constraints. He also realized that the different journalists tended to come up with utterly different stories despite being in the same place doing the same work, and began to formulate the concept of using a multitude of viewpoints online to shape a more complete picture of events.

Loudon contacted his web-savvy college buddy Arend Jan van den Beld, who shared his enthusiasm for the concept, and over drinks the VJ Movement was born. They decided to use two high-impact forms of visual communication, videos and editorial cartoons, as the means to distill the various points of view to the online audience, and compile collections from around the world to allow for a broad variety of opinions and viewpoints.

They recruited Tjeerd Royaards, a Dutch cartoonist in Amsterdam, to dig up cartoonists to become part of the project. Royaards happened upon my web site, liked my work, and asked me back in March to participate; I was the first American cartoonist to become involved.

There are about three dozen editorial cartoonists from around the world at the moment, all with very different styles; other American contributors include Karl Wimer in Denver, Douglas Potter in Austin and Tom Kerr in Omaha. There are about 80 video journalists at the moment, all professional freelancers, including Israelis and Palestinians, Indians and Pakistanis.

“There is more than one truth” is VJM’s slogan, and they consider themselves an alternative news model. All content is produced exclusively for the site; there are no repostings of syndicated cartoons here. The content is directed into eight broad “themes” such as Conflict, Superpowers, Human Interaction and Natural Resources, although those themes allow for quite a bit of latitude.

Another unique feature is that all content is chosen by the votes of fellow contributors and members of the public who register and join (for free). The initial content to start the site up was chosen by the VJM team, but once the site went beta the voting mode went into place.

Prospective cartoons are posted in the “Newsroom” and require a certain amount of votes (five, at least as of last month) to be approved. The tricky part for contributors is whether to spend the effort to produce a finished or near-finished cartoon that might well get shelved, or to post a rough sketch that won’t appeal as much to those voting; there’s also the concern of wordlessness versus captions, given the multi-cultural voters. Videos are proposed by summaries of the intended footage and may take the form of interviews, stories or explanations. Comments on all proposals are encouraged.

And unlike many an internet startup (or many established sites, Miss Huffington), they pay contributors (in Euros, but what the hell) and have thus far managed to secure funding from a mix of media foundations, government programs and miscellaneous contributions.

It’s an interesting experiment. It’s a a new global meeting place for news and views.

And for editorial cartooning, it’s a new forum. And our field can certainly use a little Movement in that direction.

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Be sure to see the huge archive of my work (organized by topic area) on my web site at http://www.greenberg-art.com

The past week has seen one big win for editorial cartooning jobs, and one big loss.

The big win was Drew Litton, who is the rarest of breeds, a sports editorial cartoonist. His job abruptly came to a halt when his newspaper, Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, shut down, throwing him (and his coworker Ed Stein) out of work after 26 years there.

But the Chicago Tribune has just hired him to do a weekly, large color editorial cartoon on area sports teams. The feature, called “The Main Event,” debuted on Oct. 31st and featured the Cubs. You can see his first effort at http://www.drewlitton.com/ (just scroll down a bit and look for the large word “Smack” on the Tribune page).

Just months ago, the Tribune had been the object of anger in the editorial cartooning world for having left their staff editorial cartoonist position vacant for nearly a decade following the death of Jeff MacNelly. But they hired Scott Stantis away from Birmingham — the best editorial cartooning news in a largely bad year — and now with taking on Litton’s work the Tribune has suddenly become the stellar example of support for the field of editorial cartooning… which is something they used to be, employing as many as three staff editoonists at a time.

In a great sports town, Litton should have plenty of material to work from… perhaps enough to convince the Trib to increase their use of him beyond one day a week.

But the week’s bad news: Dwane Powell is calling it quits at the News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, after 35 years there.

Sure, he’s 65, but this was not a standard retirement scenario. Powell had been coldly and abruptly demoted to part-time status at the N&O last year despite his enormous local popularity and impact. His folksy, yet wild-and-crazy cartoons and drawing style were a hit with Raleigh readers and with his professional colleagues, who considered him a cartoonists’ cartoonist.

The News & Observer had tried to keep the cut quiet, hoping readers wouldn’t notice a big drop-off in the cartoons, but word leaked out and a “shit storm” ensued, according to Powell. The paper realized it had likely made a mistake, but Powell decided, at age 64, to accept the three-times-a-week situation (and 40 percent pay cut) as a means of easing toward retirement with full benefits.

The editorial page editor of the N&O has said there were no immediate plans to replace Powell (who may or may not contribute occasionally back to the paper), so this most likely means another staff position is permanently lost. Since Drew Litton’s new situation is a weekly freelance gig, that’s one more net loss for the severely shrinking world of newspaper editorial cartooning staff jobs.

In 1981 there were eight editorial cartoonists working in North Carolina. With Powell gone that leaves just one, Kevin Siers at the Charlotte Observer.

North Carolina, with crazy characters to work with such as Jesse Helms, had been a cartooning playground. Now the lampooning is down to one cartoonist; Powell is considering remaining with Creators Syndicate, but that would preclude his doing local cartoons.

Drew and Dwane are friends of mine and great talents that took some tough hits over the past year. My best wishes to them both as their new paths take shape.

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Be sure to see the huge archive of my work (organized by topic area) on my web site at http://www.greenberg-art.com

The cartooning world, like most fields, has its own awards, and it just handed out one in L.A. to a man who wasn’t even in the room. Or was he?

On Saturday night at its annual banquet, the Los Angeles-based Comic Art Professional Society (CAPS) honored an ailing legend in the comic book industry, Gene Colan, and did a nifty handing of the award to him 3,000 miles away.

Gene was one of the big names in comic book illustration, mentioned along with such names as Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko for dynamism and innovation, although Gene could outdraw either of those two.

His style was influenced by motion pictures and involved masterful use of light and shadow, dramatic angles and unorthodox arrangements of comic book panels, breaking away from standard grids. He often employed photo-realism and was noted for his expressive faces and detailed backgrounds.

He started with Marvel Comics’ predecessor, Timely Comics, back in 1946, walking into their New York offices with his portfolio and being offered a job on the spot by the legendary editor, Stan Lee (who was also honored by CAPS a few years earlier).

Gene went on to work for National Comics, predecessor to DC Comics, and went on to work for Warren, Eclipse, DC and other publishers, but primarily for Marvel. Originally drawing war-stories books, he graduated into superheroes including Captain America, the Sub-Mariner, Dr. Strange and most notably, Daredevil. He also drew for Batman, Wonder Woman, The Tomb of Dracula and Howard the Duck, and recently took on a Simpsons comic book, rendering Bart, Homer and the gang in three-dimensional shadowed semi-realism.

But now, at age 83, he is in ill health, including hospitalization for liver problems. Colan has been the recipient of assistance from groups such as the Hero Initiative, organized to help comic book creators in their “golden age” years, and CAPS. He managed to travel to San Diego for this year’s ComicCon, but the trip there and back to Brooklyn exhausted him, and he was told by his doctor not to travel anymore.

This posed a problem for CAPS, which had already decided to award its annual trophy, the “Sergio” — named after Sergio Aragonés, a co-founder of CAPS and probably its best-known member — to Colan. Replacement recipients were briefly considered, as was canceling the banquet, but it was finally decided to go ahead and honor the man they wanted to honor, and see if it was possible to arrange some kind of video hook-up.

Thanks to the magic of Skype (allowing computer-to-computer “phone” calls), the built-in cameras in Mac laptops and a newly-purchased projector, a live video hook-up was arranged. As the tributes to Gene began around 8 pm PDT, he and his wife Adrienne were able to follow the entire presentation in Brooklyn (at three hours later time) and share their reactions.

The best moment of the evening came as CAPS President Pat McGreal held up the “Sergio” award, looked toward the laptop facing him and said, “Gene, I’d now like to hand you this trophy” as he thrust his hand, holding a duplicate statue, toward the laptop. At that moment in Brooklyn, Adrienne unveiled the real statue - previously shipped and hidden in the room — and continued the handoff to Gene.

He was visibly delighted, stunned and moved, reading the inscription and expressing his amazement and gratitude. And as the scheduled portion of the event in L.A. wrapped up, he stayed by the laptop, chatting one-on-one with anybody in the room who wanted to talk, including many comic book artists whom he’d inspired. As my wife and I left the banquet room, Gene was still animatedly chatting away, despite it being around 2 pm, New York time.

It felt nice to honor a major figure in comic books, which is the background of most CAPS members, to stick with our original choice for the honoree and using technology to make everything work together in real time despite a 3,000-mile distance.

I haven’t really followed the comic-book world through my adulthood, but am grateful to have been there to honor a man whose work livened up my teenage comic-book-fanatic years.

Here’s to you, Gene. And thanks to you too, Skype.

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Be sure to see the huge archive of my work (organized by topic area) on my web site at http://www.greenberg-art.com

While the layoffs and buyouts at daily newspapers have slowed lately (or at least until all the 3rd Quarter revenues are tallied), editorial cartooning still took a lot of hard hits in the past 18 months. The number of editorial cartoonists whose daily newspaper jobs ended since mid-2008 numbers in the dozens – at least three dozen by most counts. In some cases, those remaining have had other duties added to their old roles or have even been reduced to part-time.

It’s hard to even know how many editorial cartoonists are left — or should I say, left in the traditional, on-staff, specialized sense of things.

When “Baby Boomers” such as myself entered the field in the 1970s and early 1980s, editorial cartooning jobs were usually that: staff positions on daily newspapers, usually doing only those cartoons in the job duties. Most big cities had at least one position, and many cities still had competing newspapers. At Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC) conventions, we identified one another by city and newspaper, traded notes on job openings, and wondered about jumping from one paper to another.

What a contrast to today: Ted Rall, former president of the AAEC, counted 38 of those “traditional” positions out of a membership of about 300. My own count is around 60, and others guess it’s maybe 70 or so (there are many variables affecting the tally, such as if you count someone doing five cartoons and one Op-Ed illustration as doing full-time editorial cartooning), but in any case that’s still only a small minority of the editorial cartooning world now.

Younger editorial cartoonists often never got on a newspaper staff at all, and have little hope of doing so; they draw for web sites, alt-weeklies and such (but even alt-weeklies have slashed the spaces they once gave to freelancers). Many post-Boomers have no interest in print and have made their home online, working with color, animation and non-traditional formats. They’ll never have the full-time staff positions with benefits and the same local community impact that their older AAEC colleagues have – or used to have.

I am one of many in this profession who will go into the January journalism contest-entering season with a stark new reality: I no longer work for a daily newspaper, nor do I have tearsheets of my work in daily newspapers anymore (I haven’t since last November). Many in the AAEC never did at all, drawing for web sites or alt-weeklies or niche publications or self-syndication or multiple places, and often struggle to get tearsheets at all.

However, many of the contests involving editorial cartoonists are still oriented toward material produced only for a daily newspaper. The percentage of editorial cartoonists NOT with a daily newspaper now is a substantial, and clearly growing, number, particularly for the younger practitioners.

Hopefully, the AAEC will attempt to make the various journalism competitions aware that ever-fewer cartoonists qualify for “daily” requirements, and perhaps urge these competitions to consider material from non-daily and/or online sources so that the competition is not just made up of a shrinking pool of daily staffers.

Another point: with so many layoffs, newspaper expense cutbacks and those-never-on-a-newspaper, contest entry fees likewise may disenfranchise an ever-growing percentage of cartoonists. Many are $50, and going up as high as $150, and are often a form of fund-raising for the sponsoring organizations. I paid my own way this past January, and could not enter several competitions due to costs.

The old employment model is a minority. Freelancers and multi-taskers are the new majority. Some journalism organizations have learned this — and have realized that much of journalism is now online only — while others have yet to make changes to reflect life in 2009.

Otherwise, the nominations are going to look a lot like, “Luckovich, Ramirez, Toles, Luckovich, Ramirez and Toles” every time. They are fine talents… but most of editorial cartooning doesn’t look like their jobs anymore.

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Be sure to see the huge archive of my work (organized by topic area) on my web site at http://www.greenberg-art.com

Alas, when one is an editorial cartoonist, one is compelled to keep drawing, whether the body is ready to do so or not.

In light of Iran’s new and highly provocative long-range missile tests, right after Obama revealed to the world Iran’s previously undisclosed facility for enriching nuclear fuel for weapons, I came up with an idea for a cartoon on this I wanted to produce. Beyond wanting to simply draw, I also still have commitments to various publications to provide material.

As my previous blog post indicated, I am recovering from a detached retina in one eye. I haven’t had any real vision in the eye for two weeks, and can only see extremely blurry shapes from that eye right now — which is a vast improvement over seeing nothing from it a week ago, prior to reattachment surgery. As part of the healing process I’m required to keep my head down and to the right as much as possible, and only sleep on my right side.

So, how can I draw? Well, very slowly and awkwardly… and by “cheating” if I can.

By “cheating,” I mean using any shortcuts and tricks I can to create my finished images. These can include Photoshop tricks, substituting cartoon fonts for my own lettering, using different tools and reusing pieces of my old cartoons.

Back to the cartoon on Iran’s missile tests: Once I had my idea, I wanted to draw it in the least-taxing method I could, eye-wise. I realized that a missile is a very symmetrical object, and I could probably get away with drawing just one half of it (above), and flipping and duplicating it to create the other half. That would both save time and preserve the symmetry. Drawing the half-missile wasn’t a problem: I draw in a head-down position anyway (a hunched-over habit that normally I see as a bad thing… but in this case it was a good thing).


Then I added an Iranian flag and colored the missile in Photoshop. To have a second missile, I copied, pasted and reduced the first one. I should also mentioned that I transferred files from my usual iMac G5 computer to a laptop, and worked — head down — with the laptop in my, well, lap, using my Wacom tablet once I had downloaded the driver to be able to use that device on the laptop.

I decided I needed an image of Iran’s President Ahmadinejad; no problem, I’ve drawn him many times. I stole from myself a caricature of him from a previous cartoon for the head and posture, then stole from myself a second caricature of him for the arm position, and merged and tweaked these in Photoshop.

I added my type on the missiles in Adobe Illustrator, merged it in Photoshop, finished coloring the piece, and stole one of my signatures from a previous cartoon to finish, and voila, the finished cartoon as seen here:

I think this worked out pretty well. And would you have known how much I cheated if I hadn’t just told you?

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Be sure to see the huge archive of my work (organized by topic area) on my web site at http://www.greenberg-art.com

A cartoonist requires, at minimum, the following working tools: a mind, a hand and a couple of eyes. Right now I’m down one of these.

No, it isn’t the mind, although I know there are many out there who are convinced I long ago lost mine, based on political disagreements. The drawing hand is working OK, although I have ulnar nerve problems that can cause a sore wrist along with carpal-tunnel syndrome.

No, I’m trying to function, read, draw and write this blog with only one working eye. My left retina has become detached, and will be having surgery two days after I write this.

Wikipedia says the retina is a light sensitive tissue lining the inner surface of the eye. The optics of the eye create an image of the visual world on the retina, which serves much the same function as the film in a camera.

Medicinenet.com says a retinal detachment is a separation of the retina from its attachments to its underlying tissue within the eye. These retinal breaks may occur when the vitreous gel pulls loose or separates from its attachment to the retina… once the retina has torn, liquid from the vitreous gel can then pass through the tear and accumulate behind the retina. The build-up of fluid behind the retina is what separates (detaches) the retina from the back of the eye.

Last Wednesday I woke up as usual, although not having slept well, and found the vision in my left eye to be blurry. Well, my eyes were bleary from not enough sleep, so that didn’t seem too odd, except that it stayed that way all day. Thursday, the exact same thing. Friday, I began to wonder if I should contact my ophthalmologist but had a number of errands to run. After lunch, I noticed a darker circular shape obscuring the vision in the eye on the side toward the nose. As I drove home, it seemed to increase a bit.

When I called the ophthalmologist, I was hesitant to come in, needing to be 50 miles away in the opposite direction an hour later, but they told me it would really be better if I were seen then. My doctor suspected a retinal problem, and his exam confirmed that. It was already past 5 pm on a Friday — of course — and he called around a bit before finding a retina specialist still working. By the time I drove to see this specialist, I was driving while only able to use my right eye.

The retina specialist used a cryogenic probe to sort of weld the retina back in place (the probe doesn’t puncture the eyeball, but pushes on it from the outside) and an induced gas bubble is supposed to act like a bandage and hold the retina in position while it heals.

For the first day, it worked as planned. But on my second follow-up, the doctor was not pleased, with vitreous fluid getting behind the retina again. So, he’s ordered a more intensive surgical version of the same procedure. I can expect to functionally have no real vision in the left eye for a couple weeks, and maybe much longer.

There was no particular trauma or incident that set this off, as far as the doctor can tell. I just have had the risk factors all along — most notably, having been severely nearsighted (before Lasik surgery a decade ago), with the eye anatomy of that putting a strain on the retina from the get-go.

I’ve really started to notice the difference in not having binocular vision. Even though my left eye was less sharp than the right, binocular vision helps make more sense of what one sees, as well as provides far greater depth perception. In addition, using only one eye means it gets tired faster, with no partner to share the load. Plus, there’s the reality of not having a backup eye now in case, say, a gust of wind blows some grit into my right eye.

I’m still drawing, but slowly and with more difficulty. The only thing that keeps me from utterly freaking out is the statistical probability that my sight will return after surgery, though maybe not fully for a month and maybe not quite to what it was before. But I’ll take what I can get.

If you’re reading this blog post with two good eyes, take a moment to give thanks for that small blessing. Believe me, you’ll really miss your binocular vision if it goes away.

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Be sure to see the huge archive of my work (organized by topic area) on my web site at http://www.greenberg-art.com

The political volume has gotten way too loud lately.

The “Town Hall” forums on healthcare, with orchestrated protests arranged by talk show hosts and bloggers, turned into screaming matches instead of rational debates on a subject affecting every American. It wasn’t so much that people disagreed with Obama’s proposals, but the point of the turnouts seemed to be to scream and shout down any intelligent conversation.

This was a tactic employed by the Yippies and other radicals of the 1960s — some of it in the name of free speech — and it was an unsavory, undemocratic technique then, and it is now, coming from the opposite side of the political spectrum.

The incivility of the present time was perhaps best encapsulated last week on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, when Rep. Joe Wilson (R-South Carolina) blurted out “You lie!” in the midst of President Obama’s address to the nation on healthcare.

The entire House was shocked. Individual members of Congress may have flagrant improprieties involving campaign finances or sex, but nonetheless they expect Congress —as an institution — to be a place of some degree of tradition and decorum. In any event, you don’t insult the President of the United States there, especially when he’s your invited guest.

Wilson, who apologized once (and refuses to apologize further), may have been a target of condemnation by his colleagues on the floor, but also became a folk-hero to the Forces of Anger — angry about everything Obama says and does, with the flames fanned by conservative pundits in the media and the blogosphere — and found campaign funds immediately gushing in his direction.

We’ve also seen in this atmosphere of anger an embrace of conspiracy theories: Obama is not even an American, say the “Birthers,” who insist he was born in Africa and must be disqualified from office, or the spreading of dark hints of “death panels,” hysterically embraced by such politicians as Sarah Palin (burnishing her credentials for thoughtlessness) who scream “Don’t kill Grandma!”

And perhaps even more hysterical was the frenzy over Obama proposing to speak to the nation’s schoolkids. Never mind that many presidents have done so (Bush read to schoolkids from the book “My Pet Goat” even as the reports of the 9-11 attacks were given to him) with nobody being upset in the least. But this time, parents across the nation furiously — FURIOUSLY! — insisted on keeping their kids home that day for fear of Obama’s “socialist agenda” or “indoctrination” and led by such supposedly responsible people as governors. Of course, the actual speech was an utterly innocuous one, promoting the virtues of such universally praised things as studying hard and staying in school… which is exactly what the kids who were forced to miss the speech by staying home that day did NOT do. Sigh…

Anyhow, I have wanted to do a cartoon on the lack of civility and civil discourse for awhile, and came up with the cartoon posted here. Given the fact that I’m an editorial cartoonist — not known as the most genteel of professions — you can see the noise had to have gotten pretty loud to turn off someone who does this for a living. It’s a bit like if Howard Stern told you you were being vulgar, you’d have to assume that you were being WAY vulgar.
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Be sure to see the huge archive of my work (organized by topic area) on my web site at http://www.greenberg-art.com

Not many people remember Virginia Davis. Her main career work began 86 years ago. But she was the first Disney star, and it was she — not Mickey Mouse — who launched the Walt Disney empire.

Walt Disney was in Kansas City, not Hollywood, and his Laugh-O-gram Films was turning out silent animated cartoon shorts, which found some local popularity. He conceived the idea in 1923 of combining a live-action little girl with animated animals — a technically challenging feat for the era — in a comedy called “Alice’s Wonderland” (incidentally, this was not the first live action/ animation hybrid; Windsor McCay did it with his “Gertie the Dinosaur” several years earlier).

Disney needed a little girl of about four years of age, and spotted a young girl with a sweet face and blond ringlets, Virginia Davis, in an advertisement on screen at a local theater.

Davis was hired to make the comedy short, “Alice’s Wonderland,” and on the basis of this film Disney was able to secure distribution for many more silent “Alice Comedies,” despite his Laugh-O-gram Films going bust. Disney, Davis and a few others relocated to Hollywood and started up business again in the Disney Brothers Studios. The “Alice” movies were Disney’s first commercial successes.

Virginia Davis would star in the first 13 “Alice Comedies,” but her mother got into a dispute with the Disney brothers over compensation for Virginia’s further films, and Disney replaced her with other child actresses to play the role of Alice in dozens of additional shorts.

The “Alice” series ended in 1927. The following May, Disney launched a new animated character in a silent film called “Plane Crazy”: Mickey Mouse. In November 1928, Mickey appeared in the first animated cartoon with sound, “Steamboat Willie,” and the rest of the Disney story is history.

But a part of that history long forgotten by the public was Virginia Davis and the “Alice Comedies.” Davis, who died last week at the age of 90, went on to play other child-actress roles, work for the Disney Studios out of high school in their ink-and-paint department, marry naval aviator Robert McGhee, have kids and become an interior designer, a magazine editor and a real estate agent.

But as Roy E. Disney, Walt’s nephew and Director Emeritus with the Walt Disney Company said, “She liked to remind everyone that it all started with Alice, not Mickey Mouse.”

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Be sure to see the huge archive of my work (organized by topic area) on my web site at http://www.greenberg-art.com

For a change, some good news in the world of editorial cartooning: a long-vacant position is being filled. And not just any position, but the Chicago Tribune, one of the nation’s most prominent newspapers.

The position has been vacant for nearly a decade, ever since Jeff MacNelly, winner of three Pulitzer prizes, died of cancer in June 2000. Filling the post beginning Sept. 1st will be Scott Stantis, currently with the Birmingham News in Alabama.

The vacancy of this prominent editorial cartooning position has been a sore point ever since MacNelly’s death. The Tribune had long been one of the most cartoonist-friendly papers in America, having as many as three staff editorial cartoonists at a time. In the 1980s it simultaneously employed MacNelly, Dick Locher and Wayne Stayskal, and in the early 1960s simultaneously employed Daniel Holland, Carey Orr and Joseph Parrish. It also counts Pulitzer winner John T, McCutcheon among its former cartoonists, as well as Chester Gould of “Dick Tracy” fame. To go from all this to nearly ten years of vacancy has been almost unbelievable.

The Tribune announced the hire with these words: “Bucking a trend in newspapers in which editorial cartoonists have become something of an endangered species..” which is highly ironic since they helped to create this trend in the first place.

Dick Locher’s position with the Tribune is a sort of gray area. He semi-retired from there long ago, and still contributes editorial cartoons to the paper with the Tribune’s name on them, but lives and works well outside of Chicago (he also currently does the comic strip “Dick Tracy”) and the Tribune has not considered itself to have an actual staff editorial cartoonist since MacNelly, except for when it’s been convenient to consider Locher their man, such as during national political conventions.

Stantis has had a long and bouncing career, working for the Orange County Register, Memphis Commercial Appeal, Arizona Republic and Grand Rapid (Mich.) Press prior to Birmingham, as well as creating the comic strip “The Buckets” and currently working on the strip “Prickly City.”

He’d been trying for the Tribune job for many years and had apparently come close before. He’s done freelance cartoons for the paper for a long time. But they wouldn’t actually break down and create a job for him until now.

At the Tribune, Stantis “will focus primarily on news and issues of special relevance to Chicago and Illinois and give a new dimension to our role as watchdog over the community’s interests,” says the newspaper.

FOR CRYING OUT LOUD, it’s taken this long for a paper like the Tribune to understand the value of local commentary you can’t get elsewhere?!? Cartoonists across the country — myself included — have been cranking out local cartoons forever to add value to their newspapers, and this output has been met in recent years with scores of layoffs. Newspapers had said, in effect, we don’t care about trying to cover the local topics… especially since we can buy piles of nationally syndicated cartoons for a song. But in the wake of high-visibility local newsmakers such as Rod Blagojevich and Roland Burris, the Tribune has finally understood that, hey, maybe there IS some value to covering the local stuff that their readers have been talking about. What a concept!

Anyhow, it’s very good to see the position filled, and best wishes to Stantis and to the Tribune. May it be a happy marriage.

Oh, and more good news: the Birmingham News says that it intends to fill the vacancy being left by Stantis.

A hire and an eventual rehire. Could it be the start of a trend? It’s probably too much to hope for, but it’s a lovely thought.