I'd like to see cartoonists measuring their work by higher standards than how many papers their strips are in and how much money they make.
There is too much illustrating of the news these days. I look at many editorial cartoons and I don't know what the cartoonists are saying or how they feel about a certain issue.
The cartoonist’s task is not so much to be balanced as to give balance, particularly in situations of disproportionate power relationships such as we see in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
We need more cartoonists to truly retire when they retire, and not run repeats.
I'm a better editorial cartoonist by default because so many editorial cartoonists out there are so awful.
Amazingly, much of the best cartoon work was done early on in the medium's history. The early cartoonists, with no path before them, produced work of such sophistication, wit, and beauty that it increasingly seems to me that cartoon evolution is working backward. Comic strips are moving toward a primordial goo rather than away from it. . . Not only can comics be more than we're getting today. but the comics already have been more than we're getting today.
Too often cartoonists just look at other cartoonists and, after a lot of inbreeding, everyone has the same funny look. The challenge of drawing is that there is no one right way to visually describe something. It's a good thing to confront your limitations and preconceptions every so often.
I suppose authoritarians don't like being made fun of because authoritarian rulers have a very inflated sense of themselves and don't like being deflated, which makes it all the more important to continue to deflate them. These are very courageous people around the world who poke fun from inside these societies. So, we now have to broaden the definition of what we mean by "writer" to include bloggers, cartoonists, song writers, visual artists - all these people are, in different ways, quite brave.
There's all kinds of theories among the cartoonists: start with funniest, end with funniest.
My drawing, like that of most cartoonists, is intended first of all to be functional: to create believable space, and communicate information. My strongest point in drawing has always been my ability to show characters' nonverbal communication through facial expression and posture.
Cartoonists are untrained artists, while illustrators are more trained.
Perspective was always important. There are some cartoonists who can stand at the foot of a building looking straight up and they'll capture it perfectly. And then there are those of us who do the same drawing and it's the goofiest-looking thing in the world. But after a while I guess you just learn what you're capable of and what you can and can't do.
When I look around and see how aged cartoonists continue to work on their manga and how movie directors create new movies all the time, I understand that they would never retire. And by the same token, I guess I will still be making games somehow. The only question is whether the younger people will be willing to work with me at that far point in the future.
I like the Internet as place to get instant gratification: posting a comic online is the quickest way to get attention for your art, but I have been talking to a lot of younger, aspiring cartoonists who very quickly get discouraged if they aren't getting a lot of attention immediately. This can also be aggravated by artists who appear to be really quickly Tumblr-famous, and get lots of notes on their work.
