A brief speech I gave about editorial cartooning today...

...people still like us, and are willing to step up and help. That's the good news.

This is a slightly edited, elongated version of a speech I gave today in Sacramento to the Kinglsey Arts Foundation, a fine local arts group I was also delighted to join. They raise money for all sorts of artists, and they do important work. If you’re in the Sacramento area, please consider joining.

Thank you.

I don’t want to speak formally here for too long, because I enjoy doing questions and having actual interaction with you guys, but I thought I would take a few minutes to tell you where I think editorial cartooning is today.

I have just returned from the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists convention outside of Washington, DC.. I am a former two-time president of AAEC.

When I first started going in 1987, there were about 200 cartoonists attending. We held our meeting at the National Press Club. Mario Cuomo was our luncheon speaker. We were feted in the Rose Garden by a genial Republican president. Imagine that.

Last week 40 attended, and we were in a small room in a suburban Maryland convention center.

We did have electricity.

The internet was shaky.

All of the attendees were all hail and well-met, and we made the best of it. We always do, or mostly. We love what we do and we work hard to keep doing it. I’ve been doing this for 47 years, and sometimes I wish I had just transitioned over to working in a fly shop a few years ago.

Then my fly shop closed. Seriously.

I am trying hard to recall if any of us have work on a daily newspaper anymore. A few, I guess. But it says a lot that I’m trying to recall who they are. Matt Davies is one I can think of.

California alone used to have about a dozen full-time editorial cartoonists employed on daily newspapers. You may have heard of some of them: Conrad, Babin, Breen, Meyer, Frank, yours truly, and many other very talented folks.

Now there are none.

I am affiliated as a contributing columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, where I write one column per week and one cartoon for Sunday. I note that they are very supportive of the tensile strength I bring to their newspaper, and are extremely encouraging. I do one cartoon per week for Michael Smerconish. I draw three for Tribune Content Agency per week. I also have a Substack called You Betcha!, which I will mercilessly beg you for support.

Substack is sixty percent of my income.

Most of the aforementioned cartoonists are now also on Substack as well. This is probably our future.

This year’s meeting at the AAEC featured fear, but it also featured courage. We are fearful about government crackdowns on speech. We are fearful about being labeled as domestic terrorists. We are fearful about physical violence. We are fearful about the future of American journalism, and you should be too.

We have the courage to continue to do this work with your help, and we do need your help. An informed and vocal citizenry is our hope and our salvation, and that’s you.

We are not court jesters now--we are truth tellers in an increasingly intellectually dishonest and lie-filled political environment.

I do have a renewed sense of mission in this era. I am not too old for the revolution, if being a revolutionary is caring about the U.S. Constitution and ethics in government.

I come from a cornball patriotic family, where my dad won the Bronze Star in Korea, three of my uncles were in World War II. One won the Distinguished Flying Cross, one was at D-Day, and one was in the Aleutians. They would all be appalled by what has happened in the United States in the past decade.

One thing they would never ask is what’s in it for them, and that’s the determinate ethos of our current power structure.

Editorial cartoonists are not the canary in the coal mine now—they’re the coal dust. But from coal comes diamonds, and we are hopeful, still, anyway.

We are close to extinct, and that’s not any accident. When hedge funds eat up local dailies, chew them up, and spit them back in their readers faces and charge astronomical amounts of money, that’s not an accident. It’s an American tragedy.

I am old enough in this business to have known Herblock, Feiffer, and Conrad personally. One thing they didn’t do is quit. Herblock endured the McCarthy Era, which we are now currently experiencing again. The new McCarthyism Witch Hunter in Chief, Laura Loomer, tried to follow me on Substack. I blocked her, but I need you to know something: that wasn’t an accident on her part. They are making a list and checking it twice, friends, I can assure you of that.

The ones who have survived like me have found new outlets and new venues, but I told Fast Company magazine a few months ago that I found it surprising to be busking on a street corner with a Pulitzer Prize.

It happens. I had to learn how to sing. I did.

We all did.

I am very proud of my profession, and now it takes great stamina to remain in this business. There are a lot of supporters of what we do, and I know take strength from knowing that you are out there, showing up, sharing our work, and promoting what we do.

As several of my peers noted last week, editorial cartoons are still popular and powerful. People share them online, and refer to them constantly on social media. It’s many of the media outlets that seem to be afraid of them.

We are small, and shrinking, but people still want what we bring.

The question is, do the people who write the checks want what we bring?

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When I got home from giving this speech (where I mostly answered a lot of really good questions about what we do and how we do it), I felt like the audience really got what I was saying: democracy is threatened because we are threatened.

I was shocked to see Jimmy Kimmel was "suspended” or whatever the word was ABC and NexStar used to justify their cowardice. They had been lying in wait for Kimmel, Colbert, and everyone else. I now have to assume that I am at risk, along with my colleagues both in editorial cartooning and opinion in general.

Your support for me, and my colleagues, whether moral or financial, is the key to our future survival. I could not be more grateful to you all.

—J.