I am working with Pablo G. Callejo on a new graphic novel project we’re calling “The Stringer.” It’s about a washed-up war correspondent who goes rogue — a dark satire about the death of print journalism and how easily social networking can be manipulated.

Here’s three sample pages. What do you think? We’re probably going to try Kickstarter.

With today’s cartoon I bring an end to a short-lived, benighted experiment in self-censorship. In response to vicious so-called “social justice activists” on a certain Right-Wing-Democrat-Blog-That-Must-Not-Be-Named, last week I abandoned drawing President Obama the way that I draw everyone else, in my usual style. I tried drawing him just as a :-).

I hated it.

I hated the way it looked. I hated the potential for confusion. Most of all, I hated myself for giving in to censors by censoring myself. The only way that censors can win is if artists and writers kowtow to them.

I spent the last few weeks reading and listening to feedback in the form of thousands of emails and comments about the way I draw President Obama. Which is, of course, exactly the way I draw everyone else.

As many, many people pointed out.

It didn’t take long for me to see that 99% of the criticism was motivated not by genuine concern or the perception of racism, but by simple, cynical political posturing: frustrated by my critiques of Obama and his policies from the left, militant Democrats gearing up for the 2014 midterm elections are pulling out all the stops to silence their most effective critics. If there is no support from the liberal/progressive base of the Democratic Party, after all, the GOP will probably pick up a lot of seats next year. So these Obama Democrats, who by any objective political standard are right wing conservatives in favor of torture, Guantánamo, drone strikes, bailing out the banksters, selling out real healthcare reform in favor of insurance company profits, refusing to lift a finger to help the long-term unemployed, expanding and extending the wars against the people of Iraq and Afghanistan ad infinitum, failing to appoint a single liberal to his cabinet, refusing to investigate torture under the Bush administration, continuing the practice of extraordinary rendition, brutally authorizing and torturing Private Chelsea Manning, authorizing and running interference for the despicable invasions of privacy by the out-of-control and lawbreaking NSA. These scum will literally say or do anything to destroy people like me.

They will unleash the most loathsome smears of all, including accusing me of totally unfounded racism. They, and the journalistic outlets that gave them a voice, have truly crossed a line. One of these days, they are going to go too far. What they are doing could literally cost someone’s life. What if some fanatic took the crap that they are saying seriously?

So anyway, the point is, these are disingenuous, almost all, anonymous Dem hacks. In fact, I doxied some of the most strident voices on the Internet – supposedly angry black people – to sock puppets controlled by Democratic Party activists who were in fact…white. There was evidence that these people draw a paycheck from Democratic Party sources.

Why should I give a shit about what these conniving assholes think? (Almost all of whom, by the way, are white males.)

On the other hand, the people who know me and know my work have been almost unanimous in their conviction that I should refuse to be bullied and should carry on the way I always have, viciously skewering this terrible president the way that I criticized the previous terrible president and the terrible president before him. I conducted a poll that showed that two out of three of my readers wanted me to continue as is or to draw Obama uglier than I had been.

So that is what I will be doing. My job. As a political cartoonist and commentator. Which is not to be nice. It is to speak truth to power.

I recognize that there is a price to be paid for refusing to apologize or change or adapt to the demands of the political correctness police online. There are people who will, many years from now, refuse to hear or read anything that I have to say or do because they once read a headline that implied that I was a terrible person back in 2013. They won’t know the facts. They won’t know the background. They will remember the smear. That is how smears work. And it really sucks.

This new McCarthyism, however, will never end until people like me stand up to it. Obviously, I can’t do it alone. I need your support in every way: rhetorically, politically, strategically and if you can afford it, financially.

To the many people who have offered their support in all of these ways and more over the last couple of weeks, thank you so much.

I draw cartoons for The Los Angeles Times about issues related to California and the Southland (metro Los Angeles).

This week:

From a cartoonist’s standpoint, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department is the gift that keeps on giving. From corruption to inmate abuse, you have to wonder whether the really bad guys are the ones inside the cells or the ones guarding them.

Responding to numerous credible reports of dirty dealings by sheriff’s deputies, the FBI arrested a number of sheriff’s officials in connection with a wide-ranging probe of alleged improprieties by a department charged with — remember? — upholding the law and protecting the public. Which includes inmates.

If the charges hold up, this will turn out to be one of the biggest corruption scandals in L.A. history. If these guys are guilty, they’re guilty of some serious whoppers. “In one case, prosecutors say, an Austrian consul official trying to visit an Austrian inmate was arrested and handcuffed even though she had committed no crime and would have been immune from prosecution, the indictment said.”

A century ago, Austria would have declared war over that sort of thing.

Among the charges are that, after deputies discovered that one of their prisoners was sending evidence about their activities behind bars to the FBI — a cellphone with recent calls to the feds turned up during a search — they “disappeared” him into the byzantine L.A. jail system, both in order to find out what the feds knew about them and to prevent him from talking

My initial idea was of an Escheresque box-within-a-box where it’s hard to distinguish the prisoners from the informants from the jailers. But I thought that would be too high-concept to follow. Also, too many political cartoons do Escher analogy toons.

As my mom says, simply simplify simplify, so I boiled it down to the disappeared prisoner with his interrogator, both men trapped in their own Kafka-like hells of wondering what happens next and who will be prevail as right in the legal and public arenas.

It’s weird, and that’s what my cartoon is about, but what I hope readers will take away is what’s really weird — that the public doesn’t seem to care enough about what happens to their friends, neighbors, brothers and sisters…because, after all, that’s who winds up in jail. Fellow Angelenos, fellow Californians, fellow Americans.

Maybe you someday.

The first woman cartoonist win a Pulitzer Prize, Signe Wilkinson, defends me against trumped up censorship by Daily Kos. https://www.facebook.com/Signetoons?ref=hl

Just got an email from the editorial people Adbusters magazine about my post yesterday. The exchange is below. I will keep you updated if and when I hear back from them. As for the scoundrels who really are merchandising that poster, well, they should be chastised and forced to go away somewhere cold and unpleasant.

From: darren fleet

Message Body:
Hi Ted, this is Darren Fleet, senior editor here at Adbusters.

The email you received inviting you to purchase the Adbusters OWS poster did not come from Adbusters Media Foundation. Rather it came from the group calling itself the “Occupy Solidarity Network.” They run the occupywallst.org web site. Please do not confuse them with us, and also please correct your article accordingly.

Like you, we here at Adbusters were also shocked when we received the poster sales pitch from this group. We sent them the following message via email this morning:

“Priscilla, Justine, Micah,

Are you all seriously doing this? Selling the Adbusters OWS poster? Really? Do you understand how much this undermines the entire message of the movement? Think about all the people who put their asses on the line, risked jail and police brutality, gave their time, energy and reputations … and you’re selling the poster? You’re turning the movement into a parody of itself and proving all of the critics right.

Please stop selling this poster!

Kalle, Darren and all of us here at
Adbusters”

My reply:

Hi, that is good to hear. My apologies for the confusion and I will correct my blog entry.

The people selling the poster used exactly the same greetings that communiqués by Adbusters, and they seem to have used your mailing list as well, so naturally I thought it came from you guys. I’m really glad to hear that you guys aren’t trying to merchandise the Occupy Wall Street poster.

I would, however, also like to hear your take about asking for spec work from workers, namely the request for free writing about people’s experiences with psychiatric treatment and trauma. As you know, workers are under siege. Writers are workers. Workers should always be paid, especially if the people hiring them are drawing a salary.

It’s one thing if an operation is run completely by volunteers and its suppliers provide all of the material for free. Is that the case for Adbusters? I would be very surprised to hear that office space, telephones, printing, and so on are donated, but if that is the case I will happily correct myself on that as well. If you can pay for printers, you should pay for writers.

I look forward to hearing from them.

Very truly yours,
Ted

Updated at 1:48 EST Dec. 11, 2013:

I received the following reply from Darren:

Thanks Ted,

That specific group has poached our language and style a couple of times now, so the initial confusion is understandable. For us here at Adbusters, that OWS poster is sacred . . . it’s the one thing that nobody should ever sell. It belongs to everyone, not just one group, the Occupy Solidarity Network, who now claims to speak on behalf of the entire Occupy movement.

Regarding unpaid writers, we appreciate your concern and questions. Indeed, people are becoming more and more traumatized throughout the world. Financial capitalism is taking a heavy toll. Our intention is not to capitalize on anyone’s misgivings, but rather to give their suffering a voice. But sometimes that means accepting unpaid work. We run on a shoestring budget here at Adbusters. We’re a small not-for-profit organization with less than ten paid staff (that includes art, office, editorial and distribution worldwide), operating out of the basement of a house in Vancouver. We also have a dedicated core of volunteers, interns, subscribers, and the occasional benevolent donor, without whom we wouldn’t be able to operate at all.

When we can pay we do. Though for the specific call for submissions you received, the one for short incisive insights into mental breakdown and recovery, we did not create a budget. When it comes to this specific subject, often recognition, and the chance to at long last have your voice heard, is enough of a reward. Most of the people who send in their stories are not professional writers, they just want to get something off their chests. Also the call went out through our Culture Jammer network, folks who are long time friends of the magazine, and perhaps more inclined than others to volunteer a submission and to have their ideas be part of a larger collaboration. That said, you’re right, we should have been more sensitive and especially in reply to your initial query.

To which I replied:

Hi Darren,

I’ve blogged the correction and also pushed it out through the same social networks where the original post went out. (A pet peeve of mine is people who broadcast something mistaken and then correct it smaller and with less distribution.)

That Occupy Solidarity Network is contemptible. Anything I can do to help get the word out about those assholes, let me know.

I strongly urge you to reconsider your policy about unpaid writing. I understand and am aware of shoestring budgets, especially on the Left and especially in print publishing. However, popular opinion is now moving against, and away from, any kind of unpaid labor for writing, whether it be internships, or spec work, or writing subject to kill fees, or writing for exposure, etc. Work is work and work should be paid for.

Not being able to afford to pay writers is not an excuse. I would love to have an editorial assistant for marketing and other tasks in my studio, and I have been offered the opportunity to “hire” unpaid interns who would receive academic credit for their labor, but I have always turned them down because I can’t afford them. I hope to one day earn enough to hire an assistant at a living wage — ironically, I would be able to do so if magazines like yours were willing to hire more writers and cartoonists like me.

I can’t afford a new car so I don’t buy one. The same rules should govern writers — if you can’t afford writing, you can’t afford to put out a magazine.

Also, as I know you know, “non-profit” is merely a tax status. It is entirely legal for non-profits to pay high salaries to their staffers, and many of them do.

It is easy to do the right thing when times are good and cash flow is strong, but times like these require no less of us.

Sorry to be preachy; it’s something I feel really strongly about, and a lot of progressives agree with me.

Best,
Ted

My new smiley-face version of Obama is leaving me with a sick feeling in my stomach. I’ve never given into censorship before, and I wonder if I’m making a mistake, even though it does make Obama look ridiculous — which he deserves. So I’m turning to you, my readers, to help me decide what to do.