I know, I know.
Daily Kos has added just about every leftie cartoon in America except me and Stephanie McMillan. Lots of you have written to me asking me about this, and it’s gotten to the point that it’s probably easier for me to just post here.
Here’s the skinny:
Q: Is it some permission thing?
A: No. I’d be happy to have my work appear on Kos or any other website that wants me. Unfortunately, they’re not interested in my work. I’ve asked. My friend and colleague Tom Tomorrow is the editor over there. He pitched me but Markos (who runs Daily Kos) doesn’t like my work.
Q: Why doesn’t Markos like your cartoons?
A: Dunno. Never met the guy. I assume it’s politics. The only two major leftie cartoonists he excludes are me and Stephanie, neither of whom conform to his support of President Obama and the Democratic Party. But then, some of his cartoonists have criticized Obama (though not as much). I’m guessing here.
Q: How about running on some other liberal blog?
A: At this date there are no other liberal blogs that pay to run comics. Which is insane when you think about it. It’s the Web. This is a visual medium. Comics are popular with readers. I assume it’s only a matter of time.
At this point your energies would be better spent trying to get me and other cartoonists into sites like Firedog Lake than Kos. Even though Kos’ reader survey overwhelmingly called for me to be added, Markos ignored it. But a well-placed email and/or post to Firedog Lake, Real Clear Politics, etc. might be worthwhile.
3 Comments.
I would have to think it’s your politics. Your work is well-respected throughout the real left, but DK is a partisan Democratic site, though no doubt many of its frequenters think it’s a left/lib/prog site.
It wasn’t Kos’ survey. It was an unscientific poll by a Kossack that happened to appear on Kos’ site. Small, yet crucially imkportant difference.
Ted,
DK, as has been stated on their site, over and over, is a site designed to elect progressive Democrats. Here’s where the problem comes up though. It goes like this:
Obama says he’s a progressive. He continues to kill American citizens, leaves Gitmo open, lets Bush, Cheney, et al. skate on war crimes, advances a health care plan that isn’t even close to a single-payer plan, has still not had a single perp walk for the criminals on Wall Street, etc. When someone points out that Obama isn’t progressive at all, the histrionics activate immediately. The responses are usually by rote: We didn’t elect a king, he has to work within the system, he’s the best we’ve got, he’s playing the long game, so you’ll vote the other guy in and completely ruin the country, no one could be progressive enough for you, etc. None of these arguments address the actual issue under discussion, but that’s explained next.
Having read DK for a long time now, I have come to a conclusion about DK’s followers. I think a significant proportion — NOT ALL — of them are victims of abuse, whether that abuse was/is physical, emotional, mental or something else. For that subset, the site forms a sort of therapy.(*) They can’t challenge the substrate upon which the site is founded. The site — and by extension, whatever Leader Markos says — must not be challenged or evaluated critically. DK supports Obama, and anyone who disagrees is a threat to the subset’s efforts to rebuild their abuse-free lives. Some of the continued Obama supporters are, of course, not victims of abuse, they’re just unable or unwilling to accept that they got sold a bill of goods.
(*) Yes, yes, just to head it off, yes, I am a very angry person. I get angry about how we have a prison-industrial complex that is not even remotely about rehabilitating criminals. I get angry about the millions of children going hungry (but not, of course, Obama’s children, who are, of course, the only two children that matter to him). I get angry about Exxon paying not a dollar in taxes on billions in profits. I get angry about still having student loans to pay off. I get angry about how my whole industry sank into oblivion while everyone goes around trying to explain to me that theft-by-copying doesn’t harm anyone because the person who created the work still has the work they created (read Richard Clarke’s op-ed in yesterday’s Times. Some company had a one-billion-dollar, ten-year research project’s results copied, and thus stolen, by hackers in one night). I get angry about a lot of things. My anger isn’t the issue. Everyone else’s mindless complacency is. Obama has been a massive disappointment. Stop defending him until he starts defending you. And that travesty of a health plan isn’t a defense. Demanding that we all get Cheney-level health care? Now THAT would be a defense.