A Quick Note On Sean Kleefeld’s Long List Of “Lost” Editorial Cartoonists



Sean Kleefeld's list of editorial cartoonists being fired/being bought out/leaving is depressing all on its own, because it's so long and every single line represents someone whose life has changed and whose market is now worse for their absence. I'd argue there are factors that make it worse upon reconsideration.

One, this is a surprisingly lengthy list given these are cartoonists being asked to leave a specific type of professional ranks that was already lean from a couple of decades of slowly bleeding to death. It's not like you could point at editorial cartoonists back in January 2008 and think "Wow, they're everywhere! I bet they could lose a dozen or more of their best practitioners and no one would notice." Two, as Kleefeld notes, there are at least three cartoonists that could join this group in the next 60 days. Three, the list itself doesn't quite communicate the power from considering some of the individual names involved. In general, this isn't an NBA team cutting a back-up guard from Auburn you've never heard of. It's the Lakers, Spurs and Rockets parting ways with Kobe, Tim Duncan and Yao Ming. If David Horsey joins this group, Sean's list would have three of the five cartoonists (Horsey, Bok, Borgman, Toles, Oliphant) that I would have bet $10,000 two years ago would never be fired or let go or bought out or allowed to walk. That's astonishing.

Bok
 
posted 7:15 am PST | Permalink
 

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