Newsletter October 2023
News from the world of editorial cartooning
Hello!
As you might expect, this month’s newsletter is dominated by the war between Israel and Hamas; at the moment, it’s hard to find cartoons about anything else in our newsroom. But, apart from cartoons about Gaza, we also have some other news to share.
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Our thought on the sacking of Steve Bell
This month, Steve Bell, a long-time contributor of The Guardian, was told that his contract would not be renewed (and that the Guardian would not run any cartoon by him until his contract expires in March 2024). All because of the cartoon above, which the Guardian deemed to be antisemitic.
On our blog, you can find two editorials:
Italian cartoonist Emanuele Del Rosso argues this latest firing fits with a general tendency towards mediocrity (or ‘the golden middle way’, as he calls it) in cartoons, at least the ones newspapers want to run.
Thierry Vissol, Director of the Librexpression centre, sees a parallel with the decision of the New York Times in 2019 to stop publishing political cartoons because of a supposedly antisemitic cartoon. He argues that, if we lose the sharp visual voices of political cartoonists, we lose an essential component of democracy.
Humor and conflict in the digital age
Ghent University is organizing a two-day conference on satire on 29 and 30 November 2023 titled Humor and conflict in the digital age. The conference will feature a public-facing roundtable with humor practitioners, including stand-up comedian Shazia Mirza, writer and producer Annie Julia Wyman (co-creator of The Chair on Netflix and Welcome to Chippendales on Hulu), cartoonist Tjeerd Royaards, and Mike Gillis (head writer at The Onion).
Latest collections
As you probably expected, most of our recent collections focus on the violence in Gaza. Check out all our newest collections by clicking the red button below.
Other news
-We have welcomed a number of new cartoonists to Cartoon Movement this month, including Pakman from France, Marco from the Netherlands, Daniel Boris and Kirk Anderson from the United States and Gervasio Umpiérrez from Uruguay.
-Cartoon Movement will be at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, next week for our Cartoons in Court research project.
-Simon Nsaka, cartoonist from Zambia, has won the Huion Note. Last month, we announced we would give away our review model to the artists with the best motivation. We plan to share some of the work he will be doing with it on the blog in the near future.
Most popular this month
Take a look at the most popular cartoons from the last 30 days on our social media channels.
On Facebook: Biased platforms by Khalid Cherradi
On Instagram: Biden visits Israel by Thiago Lucas
On Twitter: Biden visits Israel by Osama Hajjaj
On Pinterest: Pain in Gaza by Mello
