Ted Rall: Political Cartooning: From Dead Trees to Live Wire: A Session at SXSW Interactive 2013

Political cartooning has been around since ancient Rome and is more popular with readers than ever before. Now that print media is being replaced with online distribution channels, however, they’re being left behind—and content-based websites are missing the chance to exploit this powerful mix of words and pictures. Cartoonist, author, ex-newspaper syndicate executive and occasional comix war correspondent Ted Rall explains how cartoons—not just political cartoons—can bring more eyeballs to your website and can be directly monetized.

Intro – About Me

I have been living and breathing cartooning my entire life. I started out with political cartoons, and that’s still my main gig, but I’m also a graphic novelist, illustrator, comics editor, commentator on the field of comics, and long-form comics journalist.

I have watched my world change.

I turned 50 years old this year, and when I was a kid, comics were everywhere. They were a huge business. The typical newspaper ran many pages of comics, which took off in newspapers 100 years ago under the sponsorship of the papers owned by William Randolph Hearst. Hearst knew comics brought in lots of readers. As a result, cartoonists became staggeringly rich. Milton Caniff, Al Capp and Charles Schulz were multi-millionaires. In fact, Charles Schulz is the nation’s second-richest dead person; his estate still brings in $28 million annually. To be admitted into the National Cartoonists Society during the 1950s, to be considered a professional, you had to be syndicated in at least 750 newspapers. Today, that’s the rough equivalent of netting $4 million per year – and that didn’t include merchandise or books. Now it’s unusual for any cartoonist to have more than 30 papers – net income about $20,000. By the year 2000, the average paper carried 26 daily comic strips and 5 gag panels (one panels, like The Far Side). Now it’s closer to 10 strips and 1 panel. The best cartoonists and potential cartoonists are quitting, or never going into cartooning in the first place.

Cartoons were, according to carefully-guarded internal surveys, often the first and in some cases the only thing that got read in the paper. Every newspaper employed a full-time staff editorial cartoonist, sometimes two or three. As of the late 1940s, mainstream papers like the New York Times had four full-time staff political cartoonists. Cartoons often appeared on the front page. Magazines like the Saturday Evening Post – long before my time – made a lot of money running cartoons. Collections of newspaper comics were often number-one bestsellers – this was mainly because comics were sold at the front of the store by the cash register. They were impulse purchases. Today you can’t even find them because they’re in the so-called “humor ghetto” in the back of the store on the second floor by the men’s room. Spine out.

During my life I have seen newspaper comics savaged by the death spiral of print media, comic books go from mass-market products that were sold in every gas station in America to a niche item sold in comic shops frequented by the pathetic and the fascinatingly obese. Political cartoons have been virtually eliminated to the point that today there are fewer than 10 truly viable full-time editorial cartoonists in the United States with a discernible future. (There were at least 600 when I was a kid.)

There have never been as many cartoons online, or as many readers – but the quality level is very low. Many are basically just memes. Memes are basically cartoons – really shitty ones. Professionalism is all but gone. So we’ve forgotten how good – and how powerful – comics can be.

Background

Cartoons go back, well, pretty much forever. The cave paintings at Lascaux were cartoons. There are obscene depictions of Roman officials – early political cartoons – on the walls at Pompeii. Print journalism is not going to die, but it is suffering a serious economic downturn due to the disruptive effect of the Internet, analogous to the way that radio suffered during the advent of TV – but remember, radio came back and is bigger than ever today. Similarly, print will never go away because it offers something that the Internet can’t. You can’t watch TV while you drive down the street, but you can listen to the radio; you can’t read your Kindle while the plane is taking off or about to land, but you can read anything you want on dead trees.

Not to mention, there is a big difference in reading retention. Studies have shown that we remember more of what we see and what we read in print than we do on a screen. But even if print were to go away – and there is no way that it will – comics would thrive online. Even today, barely 14 years into web 2.0, we see an emerging market in webcomics.

We have to define webcomics. Webcomics are not any different from newspaper comics. Webcomics are more of a sensibility than a medium. All comics are online, all comics attempt to sell merchandise, all comics attempt to engage directly with readers. “Webcomics” tend to be more of a slapdash affair than other comics, with lower standards of professionalism, zero barrier to entry, and tend to focus on niche markets of readers – videogame fans, sci-fi fans, in short, dork culture.

Which is fine. But brings me to¬—

The Death of Political Cartooning

Professional – i.e., high quality – editorial cartoonists haven’t been able to make the leap to the brave new world of online media. There are several reasons for this. First, we don’t have cute merchandisable recurring characters like Snoopy and Garfield.

Second, most political cartoonists have been stuck in the 1950s and 1960s, pretty much as lame as the political cartoon parodies in The Onion make them out to be. So they can’t relate to younger readers, i.e., those under 60. No one understands the old-fashioned metaphors: the Democrats as donkeys? Republicans as elephants? Uncle Sam? So cheesy. And what’s with those stupid labels?

Third, the culture of online gatekeepers – the editors and producers of websites like Salon, Slate, Atlantic Online and so on – is different from that of newspapers, magazines and other print media. Many online editors come out of coding and design culture, and/or the worlds of words, usually blogging. Sites like Huffington Post are designed as SEO bait: enticing headlines and carefully chosen keyword searches. For them, content isn’t king, but something that you have to put up with in order to get as many hits as possible in order to monetize them.

Now this is not a pity party. NPR has that market cornered. I’m not going to try to sell you on why graphic political satire is good for democracy, why it’s important to keep a uniquely American artistic tradition going, etc. Guilt is irrelevant. Money is relevant. Online magazines and blogs are leaving money on the table by excluding political cartoons from their mix.

To which you might ask –

How do you know?

First and foremost, we know that lots of other people – everyone but web magazines, blogs and apps – are making bank from comics. In 2012 the U.S. comic book industry made $330 million. Thanks to the 25 million e-comic books that were downloaded, the transition to digital was successful. Graphic novels generated $385 million. The five major comics syndication companies are private, so we don’t know their profits, but even with the current disruptions in the marketplace it’s a fair back-of-the-envelope guess to say that comics syndication generates about $50 million per year in revenues.

I know comics have unrealized potential because I’ve seen the internal data. I was editor of acquisitions and development at United Media, one of the big five syndicates that sells content to newspapers and magazines, between 2006 to 2009. When I was there, we ran extensive surveys comparing all the different types of content that that appeared at United’s website, comics.com. There were columns, feature articles, puzzles, comic strips, gag cartoons, serial cartoons, old cartoons, excerpts from books, animated cartoons, you name it. If it involved humor and/or prose, we had it and we compared it. We had content by big names, little names and everything in between.

And we found out some interesting things.

First, we learned that edgy content always has a higher chance of going viral and tracked higher and gained more reader loyalty than bland content. You could see right there why print media was in trouble, and it didn’t have anything to do with the Internet. (After all, circulation has been declining since the 1960s.) Some of the biggest names in comics, features with over 1000 clients, didn’t have any traction or audience online. People just didn’t care about them. Their audiences were wide but shallow. On the other hand, some of the wildest and craziest comic strips, things that editors of newspapers thought were too hip or too trendy to run, were consistently drawing huge numbers. Brooke McEldowney, did two strips, 9 Chickweed Lane and Pibgorn, that barely made a dent into papers. But they were weird and kind of dirty in a dirty-old-man kinda way, and his dirty old man readers would follow him anywhere.

Another really interesting take-away from my time at United was that political content tracked very high. This surprised us. Traditionally, political cartoons have always been the ugly stepsisters of the newspaper business. Comic strips were where the money was. In fact, a lot of editorial cartoonists, starting with Jeff MacNelly and Shoe, started drawing comic strips on the side in order to pay their bills.

But on the Internet it’s very different. We’ve seen memes go viral. But that’s just the beginning. The sweet spot, it turns out, is a political cartoon by a professional cartoonist, one whose brand/personality becomes known and thus part of the product, that responds to current events and does so quickly and using aggressive, edgy humor. Not only that, this kind of humor lends itself spectacularly well to mobile devices. Think about it: a big news story breaks right now. Within hours a funny, simple, trenchant cartoon about the event is shot out over social networks and other distribution channels. It’s easy to imagine everybody forwarding it to their friends.

Now before we go on, I need to explain the different types of cartoons. All of which can make you money.

Types

Political cartoons comment about politicians, political trends, social commentary, etc. If it’s on CNN or MSNBC or FoxNews, it’s something that a political cartoon might be interested in.

Graphic novels include both fiction and nonfiction, biography and autobiography, serious and inane. It’s a fancy term for really really big, usually perfect-bound, comic books. Often drawn by someone little bit more intelligent and a little hipper than the usual superhero comics.

Comics journalism is a new form. It’s where the cartoonist covers a story just like any other reporter word, but instead of just writing about it, he or she draws cartoons about it. Joe Sacco pioneered the form with books like Palestine and Safe Area Goradzne. My best-known book of comics journalism is called To Afghanistan and Back, the result of my 2001 trip to Afghanistan. I’ve got another one coming out this fall.

Newspaper comics include both strips and panels, although there are a lot more strips.

Webcomics are basically in the same format as newspaper comics, but make no attempt to appear in print and tend to be directed toward a different, more niche audience. Format is usually a strip rather than a panel, and they are as likely to be in serial continuity format – in other words, a continuing story – than a stand-alone piece.

Gag cartoons are single panel cartoons of the type that appear in the New Yorker.

Animated cartoons are cartoons that move. There are a lot of these on the web, although they haven’t really taken off for political cartoonists because of the reasons that we talked about before – editors and producers haven’t given them a chance.

Now me tell you about the money.

When blogs and other websites give cartoons good placement – when they give good cartoons good placement – they tend to do very well. Unfortunately, a lot of websites don’t know what they’re doing.

For example, I used to edit a cartoon roundup – a selection of the so-called best political cartoons of the week – for the Daily Beast, Tina Brown’s online magazine. When she ran it on Fridays above the so-called invisible fold – the bottom of the screen, not requiring anyone to scroll down – readership kept going up. Tina was so happy with the cartoon round-up that she came up with a stupid idea – using it to draw readers to places and times where they didn’t normally go. Her reasoning was that they would supposedly draw new readers, that readers would follow them. But that’s not how the Internet works. She moved them to Saturday, the slowest day of the week online, and then moved them below the invisible fold. It got to the point where they were so hard to find that I had to search for them myself. Then the numbers tumbled. She canceled the feature.

The liberal political blog Daily Kos, on the other hand, knows what it’s doing. They have a similar feature, and they play it up on their front page. And the numbers are great. They make so much money that they are even able to pay the cartoonists a respectable wage out of it. Which gives them a lot of credibility in the Democratic community.

So how do you make money with cartoons?

You can buy the right to use syndicated material for a song. In other words, you find cartoonists who are already producing cartoons, and pay them for the right to use those cartoons on your site.

Or you can commission original work. Obviously this is more expensive. However, you can see the advantage. If you have a website dedicated to a niche audience, you can enthrall them with comics they won’t find anywhere else about the stuff that they care about most. This is no different than what you would do with plain old words, except that people notice words less than they notice cartoons. Pictures attract readers. You can sell more ads. But that’s only the beginning.

If you have a personal relationship with a cartoonist, in other words, you are commissioning original work from a professional, high-quality cartoonist whose work is so engaging that it brings a lot of readers, you can sell merchandise, such as book collections of their work, through your site and share the proceeds. You can sponsor public presentations with the cartoonist – people love to watch cartoonists talk about and show their work – and sell tickets to see them. I have had as many as 1000 people pay $20 each to come and see me. Okay, that’s unusual, but it’s not at all unreasonable to have 200 people willing to pay that kind of money. And I’m not a superstar.

If you’re really ambitious, you can hire a cartoonist to produce “work for hire” – cartoons and characters that you either own in part or in whole. To get a good cartoonist to do this kind of thing – I do it for MAD Magazine – you have to pay well, maybe hire them full-time and include benefits. Why not? You hire writers, and they can’t possibly generate as much revenue as a cartoonist. Anyway, if you go the work-for-hire route, you can make millions by selling the movie rights. Hollywood is way crazy for the rights to graphic novels.

You can also use cartoons to draw attention to your existing features that might be performing OK but could do better. For example, if you have a columnist who is great but not generating enough page views, you could add a cartoon to the same page that will bring people to the column. Hopefully the content will be related so that the cartoon will be sticky in terms of bringing support to the writer. It’s all interrelated.

All we are talking about here is reinventing the old-fashioned profitable newspaper model of the mid-20th century. It was typical back then, when newspapers knew what they were doing because they were run by intelligent people, to run illustrations including caricatures and cartoons of all kinds – by the way, they do this in India today and they make lots of money doing it – to pair up words and drawings so that one draws attention to the other – no pun intended. In the Times of India, the biggest mass circulation English-language newspaper on earth, they hire cartoonists to illustrate news stories. How did the van accident happen? Let’s draw the screams of the dying motorists! The Taiwanese studio Next Media Animation has made a splash with animations about events like Tiger Woods’ spat with his angry wife. They’re only scratching the surface.

Finally, we need something invented. I don’t understand why it doesn’t exist yet. Surely someone here can put together a hackathon?

What we need is an ad-supported package for forwarding content around the Internet via email and SMS. Think about what happens now. Let’s say you read an article at NYTimes.com you think is interesting. Even if you are an online subscriber, that’s where the income to the New York Times begins and ends – $35 per month. A buck a day. For coverage that their reporters literally get kidnapped and killed over. Pathetic.

If you forward that article to 10 friends, and they each send it out to 10 friends and those send them out to 10 friends and so on and so on, the piece goes out to millions of people. Millions! But the New York Times never sees a single penny beyond that dollar a day.

That’s because their stuff goes out as a simple email. That’s insane! Those emails should be individually monetized.

By the way, we are talking about any kind of intellectual property that you want to see go viral. Not just newspapers. What we’re talking about is a frame with advertising embedded that is verifiable and auditable by advertisers. We should be able to determine how many people received that embeddable framed content, how many people saw it as it was repeatedly forwarded. And obviously how many people clicked on the accompanying ads. The Onion gets 7.5 million uniques a month. They can monetize that. But what about the millions of people who get the forwarded emails?

I understand why this isn’t standard.

Now imagine adding a cartoon, a political cartoon or something else, to your web magazine, blog, app, whatever. Someone likes it, forwards it, and it goes viral. You can sell those 20 million views, the ones that you never would’ve been able to monetize otherwise.

Let me leave you with a big fucking “Duh.”

The Web is a visual medium. Words plus pictures. You already know graphic interface is important. You wouldn’t create a website without photos. Well, then, why wouldn’t you have cartoons too?