I love cartoons and cartoonists. Perhaps because I always wanted to be one and the only thing I can do from my efforts as a kid is a half baked version of Woody Woodpecker (I tried Donald Duck but there was a rumbling sound which I am told was Walt Disney rolling over in his grave — or trying to get out of the freezer..). But I also walk the walk: I have been subscriber to Mad Magazine since the late 50s. And we run a lot of cartoons here at TMV.
But I have noted something: it’s harder for me to pick out cartoons from the rest of the world since occassionally some are more difficult to immediately understand. I have a few rules I use in choosing cartoons for TMV but the most basic (and this is not snark) is that I must understand them quickly. At times is a bit of a cultural gap. In running cartoons here over the past few years I’ve gotten some emails noting this as well. Daryl Cagle, in our Quote of the Day, notes this difference. Here’s the beginning of what he writes:
We syndicate editorial cartoonists from around the world and we get a constant flow of unsolicited submissions from international cartoonists who would like to be syndicated and would like to be included on our site. The most respected world cartoons are wordless; the cartoonists believe cartoons are a universal language, understandable by all. In fact, there is quite a wide culture gap – most world cartoons look strange to an American eye and we have a hard time finding world cartoonists to syndicate, whose work can be understood by our audience.
In much of the world, the cartooning profession is all about contests, festivals and juries. Cartoonists submit to a steady string of contests and tally up their wins on their “CV’s”. The cartoonists get to know each other by traveling to serve on juries, judging these competitions (and cartoonists are the best judges, since they keep up to date on who drew what, which cartoons are trite and which are plagiarized). The jurors get to know each other over the years and there is a nice comradery among the world cartoonists.
The American cartoonists’ idea of actually making a living from our work, and judging our success by the size of our audiences, or our wallets, seems strange to the obscure foreign cartoonists, who are busy building their CV’s and planning their travel schedules.
Go to the link and read the rest. There is a lot more — and some examples of the cartoons. (We will make a point of putting up some international cartoons from around the world throughout the day today).
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.