We'll start with a rare example of an artist beating the bureaucracy, with a hat tip to Bado for pointing out this WashPost article.
The Postal Service wanted to feature the Statue of Liberty on a stamp. They found a nice photo of her and purchased the rights from Getty Images for $1500, then ran off a mess of stamps and began selling them.
Problem was, it wasn't a picture of the Statue of Liberty. It was a picture of the version of the Statue of Liberty that Robert Davidson had made for a casino in Las Vegas, and, unlike the French statue, it had bangs and a few other touches. Which people began pointing out to the USPS. Who admitted they had messed up and kept selling the stamps.
Now, none of this has much to do with cartoons, but it's interesting to a lot of cartoonists because they're used to having their work pop up on Etsy sites and in Artist's Alleys being sold in one form or another by copyright pirates.
And, in most cases, it's a game of Whack-a-Mole trying to shut the thieves down, because they're not worth suing and they just pop up again under another name anyway.
But there's a difference between somebody putting your work on a dishtowel at Etsy and someone putting your work on five billion stamps.
That could be worth pursuing. And it was. Davidson was awarded a 5% commission on sales: $3,548,470.95, plus interest.
Meanwhile, this tip:
Until you hit that $3.5 million settlement, and particularly in case you never do, you might want to take care of yourself and avoid (A) medical bills and (B) screwing up the instrument by which you earn a living.
Over at Comics Worth Reading, Johanna Draper Carlson offers a review of this book, which provides tips and exercises to help avoid the physical pitfalls inherent in spending your time at the drawing board.
Respect the instrument.
It's easier to treat it right than to fix it once you've screwed it up.
Now on to politics
Non Sequitur features a specific gag about incarcerated kids, which means we've been abusing children long enough for the comic strips -- which generally have a longer lead time -- to catch up with the issue.
There are a few, like Candorville and La Cucaracha, that are more like editorial cartoons and come in on short notice, but it's notable when the basic strips start to not just pick up on a trend but assume it will continue long enough that it's safe for them to riff on it.
It's a sharp commentary -- I particularly like the guy with his kid in a carrier -- because it suggests that Homeland Security people think that keeping kids in cages is perfectly normal.
The only alternatives being that (A) they don't think little brown children are the same as their own kids or (B) they're being deliberately, purposely abusive.
Juxtaposition of the Day, Part One
Tomorrow, Dear Leader heads off for the NATO summit and his European trip, and neither of these cartoonists expects him to cover himself, or, by extension, his country, in glory.
I always get a kick out of David Rowe's bad-boy imagery, and he plays upon Trump's arrogance well with this cartoon, but I think I like Horsey's approach more, because, while he also cites arrogance, he manages to bring in the lack of an adult attention span as well as the questionable loyalties.
Rowe is quite right, of course: Trump has been metaphorically pissing on NATO throughout his time as a candidate and as president, so portraying him as doing it literally is not far off the mark.
But I think we should beware attributing to cold intent that which is caused by personal failings, and there's more of that in Horsey's cartoon.
I used to tell my boys that the key to understanding difficult teachers was to figure out who they were when they were students: The geek, the honor student, the jock, etc.
It's not a bad technique in general, because the child is father to the man.
The Bushes all went to prep school because that's what Bushes do. But Trump was the fourth of five kids in a family with no such tradition, and he was the only one sent away to school.
Moreover, it wasn't to Andover or Deerfield, but a military academy known for taking in unmanageable kids, as well as for an atmosphere of constant bullying which culminated in Trump's senior year with several sudden staff resignations.
As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.
Juxtaposition of the Day, Part Two
All of this bluster and swagger might not be so bad if Trump could accomplish things. Patton, after all, was a terrible military officer except for the fact that he kept winning, and, faced with complaints about Grant, Lincoln famously said, "I like him. He fights."
Well, despite his promises about all that winning, Trump hasn't delivered, and, while Horsey and Rowe commented on his arrogance, Kallaughter and Telnaes spotlight his incapacity, albeit in quite different ways
I doubt that Kim and Putin discuss it at all, much less laugh over it, but they are both making hay over the ease with which playing up to Trump's vanity -- the same technique his White House staff uses to keep him on the rails -- allows you to run roughshod over what should be his national interests.
And Telnaes almost makes you feel sorry for the incompetent, unloved little dork, until you realize how much of those national interests he's in a position to betray.
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