Attending a Political Cartoonist Convention in Portland Part 2

From June 16 to June 19, I went to Portland to attend a conference of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. It was a fun time to meet cartoonists from all over the country and to learn more about the state of the political cartoonist trade in the U.S. During the 4 days, I attended many informative panels where various speakers talked about the local cartooning scene, and political cartooning in the web, political cartoons from across the world. We also got to hear from two legendary political cartoonists.

One interesting panel consisted of Mike Keefe, Ted Rall, Tjeerd Royaards, and Caroline Dijckmeester and they discussed possible new business models for editorial cartoonists. This is of special interests to editorial cartoonists, as recent years have seen many cartoonists lose their jobs as part of a larger trend of newspapers folding in the face of declining subscriptions and ad revenue. With the decline in newspapers, political cartoonists have been exploring other avenues to expose their work and earn some revenue. Mike Keefe talked about the website Sardonika as being a possible place to submit cartoons. Sardonika is a fictitious island off the coast of the United States that looks upon the U.S. sardonically and spoofs many of the late breaking news of the country. The Sardonika website is a bit like The Onion or Mad Magazine. I checked it out and found quite a few funny articles, although I couldn’t figure out if there was a place that was just for the cartoons.

Ted Rall talked about using Kickstarter as possible way for cartoonists to raise funds for cartoon projects that they desire to work on. Ted thought this would work best for those cartoonist with a passionate base of fans. Ted Rall used Kickstarter to raise funds for a return trip to Afganistan to investigate areas of the country that news reporters have not gone to and to see for himself the war situation. In November 2001, The Village Voice and KFI Radio in Los Angeles sent Ted Rall to Afghanistan to cover the U.S. invasion. His cartoons and reporting of Afganistan earned praise from The Nation and The Washington Post called Ted’s work “the best journalism from Afghanistan by an American reporter.” Through Kickstarter, Ted was able to raise $26,000 for a return trip to Afganistan.

Tjeerd Royaards, and Caroline Dijckmeester gave a talk on the Video Journalism Movement or VJ Movement for short. The VJ Movement is a network of over 150 professional video journalists and editorial cartoonists from around the world that brings stories that are not covered by the regular media. Journalist Thomas Loudon came up with the idea while covering the conflicts in Afghanistan and teamed up with web veteran Arend Jan van den Beld, who turned Loudon’s concept into the VJ Movement website.

Matt Bors hosted a panel on local Portland cartoonists Shannon Wheeler, Meredith Gran, and Jeff Parker. I don’t know much about the Portland cartooning scene, but I found out from the panel that it seems to be a thriving scene. Jeff Parker is part of a studio of cartoonists, layout artists and fine artists called Periscope Studios. Meredith Gran is the creator of the web comic Octopus Pie, and she described how she gets profits from booksales, t-shirts and stickers. Gran’s information was especially helpful to me, as I do a political web comic about my cat Jasper in my spare time and was thinking of ways to make some profit out of that cat. Shannon Wheeler is the creator of Too Much Coffee Man, a comic that appears in various newspapers and alternative press weeklies. I was fascinated to hear that his comic was made into an opera, which I’ve never heard was done to another comic. I looked up wikipedia on more information on the opera and found out that Wheeler collaborated with composer David Stevens Craft and their opera debuted at Brunish Hall at Portland, Oregon’s Center for Performing Arts on Sept. 22, 2006. The opera proved a great success.

Two cartoonist legends gave talks at the convention. Jeff Danziger gave a presentation of some of his cartoons and talked briefly about his life. Jeff served in the Vietnam war as a translator, and later taught journalism in a school in Vermont. One of his students was comic book writer/artist Frank Miller. Danziger was the regular cartoonist for the Christian Science Monitor from 1987 to 1997, and since then, has been a freelance syndicated cartoonist. His great influences are Walt Kelly, the great New Yorker cartoonists, Thomas Nast, David Lowe, Paul Conrad, and Pat Oliphant. Jeff Danziger gave a very funny and casual talk. He said that he frequently worked on doing a great drawing to cover up a bad idea, which cracked me up because I frequently do the same thing. He observed that people do the right thing when we’ve tried everything else.

I had actually met Jeff the day before his talk without realizing it. I was at the hotel lobby talking to a group of cartoonists when a genial man came up to join us in conversation. He was sharing stories with Ann Ganz about the people in Martha’s Vineyard, and we were all amused by their stories. When we got around to introducing ourselves, he mentioned his name and the other cartoonists gave a collective jolt. After he left, one of the cartoonists sitting next to me said, “Oh my God! I was talking to Jeff Danziger!” After he did his talk in the convention, I happened to be sitting around the Smith Memorial Student Union lobby and he and a few companions joined me and they began an extended conversation on “Til Death Do Us Part”, the comedy that “All In The Family” was based on. They are big fans of British comedy and Jeff began imitating some Monty Python characters with a hilarious British accent.

The other cartoonist legend is Dick Locher, a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist as well as the artist for the comic strip “Dick Tracy” since 1983. He first worked on Dick Tracy as the assistant of Dick Tracy’s creator Chestor Gould from 1957 to 1961, and he related some funny pranks that Gould pulled on his naive assistant. Dick shared his latest activity, bronze sculpturing, which has garnered him many prestigious commissions. One of his most prestigious commissions is the bronze trophy The Land Of Lincoln Trophy that he created for the winner of the annual college football game between Illinois rivals Northwestern University. I didn’t get much of a chance to talk to Dick Locher, but in the few occassions that I got to say hi to him, he was always gracious and had a funny quip to say.

Another panel discussion that I enjoyed listening to was one with cartoonists Matt Bors, Alan Gardner, and J.P. Trostle on the importance of editorial cartoons and the First Amendment. From the time of Thomas Nast and his campaign to expose the corruption of Boss Tweed in the nineteenth century, political cartoons have been keeping those in power accountable. The great political cartoonists have played an important part in protecting people’s rights through the First Amendment. In order to maintain that role, though, political cartoonists need a platform like the newspaper to show their work and exert some influence in their community.

It was good to hear these words coming out of this panel. With a lot of the talk in convention focused on the decline of subscriptions and the loss of jobs, it was good to be reminded why political cartoons are important in the first place. We don’t just make funny gags of current events for people to laugh at. Political cartoons have provided a needed avenue of dissent during the history of this nation. Whether it’s Thomas Nast’s fight against Tammany Hall corruption, or the cartoons of Art Young and Boardman Robinson railing against World War I, or Herbert Block and Walt Kelly’s Pogo attacking McCarthyism in the 1950s, frequently political cartoons have been the only consistent voice of dissent in a newspaper in times when a conformity of thought is forced upon our nation.

This point was brought home when a panel of Arab cartoonists spoke on the third day of the convention. Many of these political cartoonists have faced harassment and threats on their lives when they drew cartoons that criticized the government or fundamentalist groups. Amr Okasha, an Egyptian cartoonist, has had to field threats due to his political cartoons criticizing the Egyptian government and Islamic fundamentalists. Okasha related a story of a colleague who was abducted after work, was roughed up, then left in the middle of the desert. Mohammed Subaaneh is a Palestinian cartoonist based in the West Bank and his cartoons are critical of Israel and American foreign policy in that region.

Aayed Mahdi is an Iraqi cartoonist who related to the problems of power outages in Iraqi, especially during the hottest times of the year. Mahdi was asked about the war and he felt that the Iraqi War was bad but that the regime change away from Sadaam Hussein was good. Husham Al Dhuhaibani and Ala’a Kadhum Abed are cartoonists who have used cartoons and animation to urge Iraqis to take part in the election process. During the first Iraqi elections after the fall of Sadaam, a significant portion of the Iraqi population did not take part in the election due to sectarian concerns, and the cartoonists are trying to change the perceptions of the elections for Iraqis.

That night the The Cartoonists Rights Network International hosted a dinner to honor two political cartoonists for their courage in taking on controversial issues in their communities. Mana Neyestani is an Iranian cartoonist who drew the ire of the Iranian government for drawing a cartoon depicting a cockroach speaking in the Turkish Azeri slang. This cartoon sparked clashes between the Iranian Azeris and the Iranian government, in which at least five people were killed. Mana Neyestani was jailed for over two months. Through the aid of the Cartoonists Rights Network, Mana and his wife Mansoureh were able to journey through Kuwait and Turkey and eventually settle in Malaysia.

The other cartoonist being honored is Prageeth Eknaligoda, a Sri Lanka cartoonist and political commentator who has been missing since January 24, 2010. Prageeth Eknaligoda has been involved throughout his life in using his cartoons and writings to publicize issues of injustice, exploitation, and discrimination to the Sri Lanka people. His cartoons and writings bear the influence on his knowleadge of ancient Indian and Buddhist texts, as well as his leftist politics, and he is well connected with social justice groups and trade unions in his area. Prageeth disappeared a day before the Presidential elections in Sri Lanka, and he was a supporter of the political opposition.

For that night, Prageeth’s wife Sandhya, accepted the honors that the Cartoonists Rights Network International bestowed on her husband. Since Prageeth’s disappearance, Sandhya Eknaligoda has been meeting with political leaders and members of Parliament to force the police into a stronger investigation of Prageeth’s disappearance. The Prageeth Eknaligoda Foundation has been set up to support Sandhya and their two sons and to keep Prageeth’s disappearance in the public eye. At one point in the night, I saw Sandhya sitting alone. So I went to her table and attempted to tell her of my admiration for her courage and the courage of her husband. Sandhya doesn’t speak much English, however, and her translator wasn’t around, so all I could do were some simple hand gestures. I was able to get Sandhya’s photograph, however. I felt honored to have been in her presence, as well as the presence of those Arab cartoonists who were risking their lives to create cartoons that keep those in power accountable.

Overall, my time in the Association of American Editorial Cartoonist convention in Portland was great. I had a chance to meet fellow cartoonists and to talk. I was inspired by their knowledge of the political scene and their appreciation for the First Amendment and the freedoms that it gives us. My appreciation of the First Amendment was reinforced from listening to the experiences of the visiting Arab cartoonists, as well as learning of the stories of Mana Neyestani and Prageeth Eknaligoda. I wish I had more time to spend talking to the Arab cartoonists. I wanted to ask what artists or cartoonists inspired them. I wanted to know if they were inspired by the work and the life of artists like Daumier, who spent time in prison for his cartoons against the French king, or Thomas Nast, who criticized the corruption of New York City politics in spite of threats to his life. All political cartoonists who are inspired to try to move their communities through their art are building upon the legacy of Daumier, Nast, Goya, Jose Guadalupe Posado, Kathe Kollowitz, and other great satirists of the past.

I looked up Youtube and found these videos of political cartoons. Included is an interview Daryl Cagle did this year with Nate Beeler

A youtube video of Jeff Danziger

A youtube video of Chip Bok

A youtube video of Mexican political cartoonist Gonzalo Rocha

A youtube video of Canadian cartoonist Bruce Mackinnon

A youtube video of Doug MacGregor

A youtube video of Kevin Kallaugher

A youtube video of Prageeth Eknaligoda

My Time in the Alternative Press Expo 2009

I’ve always loved comics. As a kid, I’d drive my mom nuts drawing Charlie Brown and Snoopy on any scrap of paper that I could find. Those old Peanuts comics gave me a lifetime love of cartoons of all types, and it instilled a desire to be a cartoonist. Two weeks ago, a friend and fellow cartoonist Greg Beda gave me a last minute invitation to visit the Alternative Press Expo 2009, which was taking place this year in the Concourse in San Francisco. I had already been invited by some friends for Saturdays sessions, but had to work that day. I was planning to do the laundry and nap on Sunday, but since Greg had an exhibit at APE 2009, I decided to attend. It was the first time I had met so many cartoonists and it was a great experience.

The Alternative Press Expo was in a huge hallway, with cartoonists sitting behind a table, with their comics and self-promo materials available for people to look at. The different range of cartoonists included superhero comics, autobiographical comics, satirical comics and social commentary comics. I think one of the things that surprised me was the large contingent of lesbian comic artists in the expo.

Some of the comics were slick and were professionally produced. Other comics were more rough, with a raw drawing style and produced by photocopies and handstaples. I loved looking at all the different styles of comics, and the rawer comics were especially daring and experimental. Being around these cartoonists made me feel more underground.

I tried to talk to each cartoonist and ask them questions about their art and the influences on their style. Some cartoonists were chatty and loved to talk about their art. Some were more shy. They all seemed grateful when someone takes the time to look at their comics and read the comics for a couple of minutes.

The first cartoonist that I met was in the expo was Stephen Notley , the creator of the comic Bob the Angry Flower. He was a very friendly man, even if he looked odd with a flower on his head. Bob the Angry Flower is featured in the cartoonist collection by Ted Rall called Attitude 2: The New Subversive Alternative Cartoonists . Bob the Angry Flower started up in 1992 in Stephen Notley’s university days when he did a weekly comic strip called The Germ. Notley’s subjects range from political subjects to stories about love and relationships. During the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, Bob the Angry Flower was especially scathing of the Bush administration. When asked in Attitude 2 about his politics, Notley replied:

“I guess I’m a libertarian-socialist-technocrat. I have a mess of seemingly contradictory political beliefs that I’m always struggling to resolve. On the one hand I’m a giant believer in freedom, as much freedom as possible in the political and social spheres. But economically I operate from the assumption that we all get more out of society than we put whether you’re a beggar on the street or Bill Gates, and it behooves us to take notice of how much of our wealth we owe to other people, and that further more, we can all get better results and do things more efficiently if we recognize that there is a common good and muster up the responsibility to pay for it through taxes.”

Alexander Shen was another cool cartoonist that I met. He does a comic called Robot in the City , which is about a robot named Ritz and his adventures in a vast city. In his website, the comic is described as such:

“Ritz the Robot doesn’t know how he wound up in this city. All he knows is that his heart is pure, his imagination is wild and humans think he looks like Abraham Lincoln (that’s how he landed that job as a barista afterall). He befriends a local art student, Elite, and they begin to learn that the vastness of the big city can be close if you have the right friends with you.”

Alexander was a nice person to talk to. He was very eager to get me to read his comics and we talked briefly about his comic. He’s been doing comics and illustrations since 2005, working with Flying Bears Inc., Play Jam Inc., Comcast Spotlight, Renkoo, VooDoo Baby and Indelible Graphics and Design. His work has also been featured in such publications as The Heuristic Squelched and Hyphen Magazine. For his art, Alexander uses pen and paper, Adobe Photoshop and CorelDraw.

I had a long conversation with Vernon Smith, the co-creator with his wife Karen Chen of the comic Dexter Breakfast. Dexter is this fury wombat cowboy, similar in looks to Walt Kelly’s Pogo. We spent most of our time talking about the APE 2009. I mentioned that this was my first time in an expo with so many cartoonists, and Vernon talked about his experiences with these sort of cartoonist gatherings. He had come from New Orleans and had been working on Dexter Breakfast since 2005.

Ted Washington isn’t a cartoonist, but a poet and a wonderful pen and ink artist. He started publishing his poems and illustrations and found it so enjoyable, he began Puna Press to publish other artists and poets that he liked. I looked at his artwork and thought his pen and ink portraits were wonderful and very moody and reflective. He is from San Diego, and he talked about the vital poetry scene in that area. He frequently takes part in events where he speaks his poetry out loud. It sounds like a fun event. He was a very friendly person and was very generous with his time with talking to me and to other people about his poetry and art.

Keith Knight is another friendly person and one of the cartoonists I most wanted to meet in the expo. He is the creator of two wonderful cartoons, The K Chronicles and (Th)ink and he is the subject of a segment of SPARK , a Bay Area Public Television show dedicated to artists in the San Francisco Bay Area. I first learned about him in Ted Rall’s book Attitude 2 and emailed him once for advice on cartooning. He emailed me back and gave me some good advice on cartooning. While I was there, we talked about the cartooning field and he suggested various political cartoonists who were attending APE 2009 that I should talk to. I came back to his table later in the afternoon to buy his The Complete K Chronicles but he had left his table, I’m guessing for lunch, so I’ll have to get his book at a local bookstore.

Though many have a stereotype that most cartoonists are guys, there were a lot of women cartoonists in the expo. Walking through the convention I met a woman who created a comic called Le Menagerie. I didn’t catch her name, but she was a very good cartoonist. She was busy painting quick pictures in watercolor to sell to passerby people, and they were very good sketches of characters from her Le Menagerie comic. Right next to her was Elenore Tocyznski and her comic Brain Crease. Elenore was busy inking a comic page while people looked over her comic. I looked over and loved her sketchy thin line pen and ink style. I didn’t have as many long conversations with the women cartoonists as with the male cartoonists, but their work was just as good. Many of their works seem more autobiographical and they delved more into social commentary.

One of the comics that I bought at the convention was Susie Cagle’s comic Nine Gallons. “Nine Gallons” chronicles Cagle’s experience working in a food kitchen for Food Not Bombs, an organization founded in 1988 that used otherwise wasted food to make vegan and vegetarian food for the homeless. There are more than 400 chapters of Food Not Bombs serving vegetarian food in 1,000 cities around the world and they also protest war, poverty and the destruction of the environment. Cagle’s comic is an honest portrayal of her interactions with her homeless friends and the various people who help in the kitchen to make meals for Food Not Bombs. Reading the comic, I got a sense of the sadness and outrage that Cagle feels for the plight of the homeless and the growing numbers of people who need the food that Food Not Bombs serves.

Another comic that I bought that I enjoyed is Mr. Moritz and the Machine by Nick St. John. I didn’t get any chance to talk to the cartoonist, but his cartoon was a very sweet and melancholy little comic. It is about a lonely inventor who mysteriously lost his wife and son and was working on an invention to bring his loved ones back.
It looked like the kind of comic that one photocopied and stapled on one’s own, but it was also an elegant cartoon. I wish I had a chance to talk to the cartoonist.

The reason that I was at the expo was a last minute invitation of my friend, cartoonist Greg Beda. We met in college as cartoonists for the school newspaper in the 1980s and we’ve kept in touch since then. Greg has gone to many of these cartoonist gatherings over the years, selling his comic books “Zeke and Goulash” and “Postmodern Anxst”. His comics are these wonderfully individualistic comics that deals with psychology, philosophy and personal relationships. He’s built up a small but loyal following and is well known among the many cartoonists that I’ve met. We didn’t talk much that day, but I thank Greg for giving me that email invitation on Saturday.

One of the funnest conversations that I had was with Tom Manning, the cartoonist who created the comic Runoff. Runoff has a beautiful graphic black and white artwork and it about the mysterious goings on in this town where a group of people get killed. Tom Manning’s comic has gained a cult following among filmmakers like Guillermo Del Toro and Nick Nunziato, who admire the eery atmosphere and strong story telling. Guillermo Del Toro wrote of Runoff:

“Tom Manning has created a world that is as bizarre as it is recognizable. As scary as it is moving.”

I asked Tom about his influences and he mentioned Dave Sim’s comic Cerebus. I had seen Cerebus when I was a kid in the comic stores, and deeply admired the crosshatched artwork, but I didn’t pay much attention to the stories. Manning deeply admired the storytelling of Cerebus, explaining how Dave Sim interweaved philosophical and religious concepts into the plots of his stories. I recommended that he read Matt Wagner’s comic Grendel. I mentioned that I was a comic collector in the 1980s, but had to quit during my college years as the price of comics started to rise and I had to spend my money on supplies for my art classes. Part of the reason for my talking to cartoonists was to catch up what I missed in the comic book scene during the 1990s and 2000s.

The biggest excitement for me was to meet two great political cartoonists, Ted Rall and Stephanie McMillan. I learned about these two cartoonists a few years ago when I was in Powells Bookstore in Portland and I bought Ted Rall’s 3 books on alternative cartoonists called Attitude: The New Subversive Political Cartoonists. It was when I started doing political cartoons for the Tri-City Voice and loved the edgy satire of the new cartoonists. When I finally met the two, though, I really got nervous and tongue tied, and I smacked myself in the head when I thought of the conversations with the two later on. I managed to ask some simple questions about the political cartooning field and they both were very patient and nice in answering (even if they seemed a bit confused about what I was trying to ask.

Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for the Universal Press Syndicate and has cartoons in such alternative weekly newspapers as the Village Voice, the Washington City Paper and the San Diego Reader. Rall was inspired to become a cartoonist after meeting pop artist Keith Haring in a New York subway in 1986. Rall’s cartoons try to live up to the tradition of 19th century cartoonist Thomas Nast, who viewed political cartoons as a vehicle for change. He traveled to Afganistan to cover the war in that country, and the Nation magazine felt that his writings were among the best war reporting on the Afganistan war.

Stephanie McMillan is the cartoonist/activist who created the radical comic stripMinimum Security. I admire her as a cartoonist who has taken part in direct activism, demonstrating and getting arrested for anti-war, abortion rights and immigrant rights issues. McMillan named her comic strip “Minimum Security” reading about a man who had been released from prison who remarked, “I’m still not free; I’m just in minimum security.” Her radical politics inspires in McMillan a desire to use her cartoons as an agent for social change. In the book Attitude: The New Subversive Political Cartoonists, Stephanie McMillan said about the purpose of her political cartoons:

“Everyone has a point of view that is the foundation of what they write or say even if it isn’t expressed overtly. The corporate agenda underlies mainstream news. One of the great things about political cartoons is that we don’t have to hide what we really think. Informed by our basic outlook, we try to expose truths as we see them. At least we’re able to be honest about that, unlike many mainstream journalists who’d be fired if they tried.

As for people whose art or writing is their main form of political activity, what’s wrong with that? It’s taking a stand and a whole lot better than doing nothing. Making a pointed statement or exposing injustice or helping people laugh at forces they’re afraid of- this is a very valuable service that challenges people to take a deeper look at what’s going on. There are a million ways to fight the system. People do need to be out in the streets, but they also need commentators and artists who cheer them on and inspire them.”

This quote is especially gratifying to me, as I have similar aspirations for my own cartoons. I admire Stephanie McMillan’s ability to combine her art and her activism, and it follows a long tradition of political artists from Diego Rivera to John Sloan to Jules Feiffer. In the March 2009 issue of Z Magazine, talks about the roots of her grassroots activism:

“All of the political work I’ve done during my life, which has included working against police brutality and imperialist war, for immigrant rights, and protecting abortion clinics, has been with the underlying awareness that one system- structured to increase the wealth of a very few- is oppressing all the rest of us in countless different ways. I worked on issues that I thought revealed this reality and could potentially connect with other struggles to form an all-encompassing revolutionary movement. To eliminate this oppressive system, we need to attack it from every angle, and at the same time understand that we, in different struggles, have a common enemy.”

Though I consider myself more a reformer than a revolutionary, I too want my comics to reflect my left wing views and to be an agent for change. From the APE 2009, I got out of it a sense of the integrity and perserverance of the many cartoonists who are doing what they love to do. I hope people do not mind my shameless self-promotion of my own cartoons, but I am grateful to be in Everyday Citizen and that they allow me to show my longer cartoons here. I created a comic based on my pet cat Jasper, that I use to try to explore longer political issues. Here are some links to some of the longer cartoons that I have done for Everyday Citizen.

Jasper’s Day
Jasper Tackles Health Care
Jasper Protests the War
Jasper and the Economy
Jasper Sings a Protest Song
Jasper Meets a Poet
A Cartoon about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
A Cartoon about My Experience in an Evangelical Church
A Cartoon about Political Debate
A Cartoon On Gay Marriage

Z Magazine

I have always been a liberal Democrat.  Over the past few years I’ve grown more curious to learn about the various trains of thought that make up today’s progressive movement.  And as an illustrator, I am always looking for places that will publish my work.  A coworker, who is more knowledgeable about these matters and seems a more committed leftist, recommended that I try reading and submitting my cartoons to Z Magazine, a progressive magazine that is based in Boston.  Ever since the first issue arrived at my mailbox, I’ve been a fan of this magazine.   It covers the efforts of activists around the world to press for a more radical progressive vision to resolve the problems of the environment, the problems of poverty and the exploitation of marginalized groups, of the need to reign in corporations and the need for a more just economic system. 

Z Magazine was founded in 1987 by two of the founding members of South End Press (http://www.zmag.org/zmag/zmagabout.htm).  It was inspired by the movie Z, by Costa-Gavras, that tells the story of repression and resistance in Greece.  At the end of the movie, instead of listing the cast and crew, Costa-Gavras list the things banned by the Greek junta in the movie.  They include: peace movements, labor unions, long hair on men, Sophocles, Tolstoy, Aeschylus, strikes, Socrates, Ionesco, Sartre, the Beatles, Chekhov, Mark Twain, the bar association, sociology, Becket, the International Encyclopedia, the free press, modern and popular music, the new math, and the letter Z, which in the movie symbolized “the spirit of resistance lives.”   In the spirit of the movie, Z Magazine is dedicated.  In each issue, Z Magazine begins with this statement: 

“Z is an independent monthly magazine of critical thinking on political, cultural, social, and economic lie in the U.S. It sees the racial, gender, class, and political dimensions of personal life as fundamental to understanding and improving contemporary circumstances; and it aims to assist activist efforts for a better future.”

Z Magazine highlights writers as diverse as Lydia Sargent (co-founder of Z Magazine), Noam Chomsky, Harvey Wasserman, Margaret Kimberly, and various activists and freelance writers.   I am a big fan of the various cartoonists who regularly populate the Z pages.  Ted Rall (http://www.rall.com/ ), Keith Tucker (http://www.whatnowtoons.com/) , Carol Simpson , Tom Tomorrow (http://www.thismodernworld.com/) and various other cartoonists create scathing political satire that is difficult to find in more mainstream magazines.  Two cartoonists are especially influential to me. Matt Wuerker works in a traditional crosshatch style that harkens back to the great political cartoonist of the late 19th and early 20th century like John Tenniel, Thomas Nast, and Frederick Opper.  Andy Singer (http://www.andysinger.com/)  works in a similar crosshatch style, and I think his funny and succinct cartoons are some of the best observations of consumer culture today.

 During the past year, I have several favorite articles.  One article, in the April 2008 issue by Zoltan Grossman, chronicles the history of social movements during the 1980s.  As a teen and young adult during that time, I enjoyed reading about the anti-apartheid movement, the Central American solidarity, the nuclear freeze and the anti-nuclear protests, Act Up, and the defense of abortion clinics.  Zoltan does a good job of putting these movements in the context of the Reagan year, and in pointing out the successes and failures of these movements.  He points out that the movements of the 1980s had trouble integrating class and anti-imperial politics with racial and ethnic politics and identity politics, except for a brief period when Jesse Jackson created his Rainbow Coalition in his 1988 Presidential run. 

In the September 2008 issue by Lydia Sargent points out the contradictions in criticizing China for muzzling dissent in the Olympics while the U.S. media plays down anti-Iraq war demonstrations that draw hundreds of thousands.   Sargent reminds the reader that the Olympics has always been a reflection of the dominant idealogies and values of the societies, whether it be the Nazi attempts to display their Aryan superiority, a venue for Cold War rivalry, and a venue for the corruption, commercialism and politics of the host cities.  She then looks at the background behind the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico City: the massacre of hundreds of students in Ttateloco Square who were protesting for greater political freedoms in Mexico;  and the reasons behind the potests of Tommie Smith and Juan Carlos.  They were a part of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, founded by sociologist Harry Edwards, which had 3 demands:  restoration of Muhammad Ali’s boxing title;  the removal of Avery Brundage as head of the U.S. Olympic committee because he was a white supremacist;  and to boycott South Africa and Rhodesia from the Olympics because of their apartheid policies.  The two Olympians protested specifically to cast a light on the troubles the African American community were facing in the U.S. at the time.

The July/August 2008 issue featured an article by Alice Leuchtag about Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s attempt to be represented in the 1964 Democratic Convention.  Hamer was a leader of the civil rights movement in Mississippi who believed that the only way to fight the segregated Mississippi political system was to establish a racially integrated Democratic Party.  They founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and during the Freedom Summer of 1964, volunteers went into homes, churches and cotton fields to sign up 60,000 members.  They selected 64 black and 4 white delegates to go to the Democratic Convention and to challenge the regular Democratic Party’s all white Mississippi delegation and to be seated in their place as Mississippi’s rightful delegation.  LBJ didn’t want to show any disunity in his election fight against  Goldwater, so he did what he could to quietly shunt the integrated delegation to the side.  The protests of Hamer and the integrated delegation during the 1964 convention opened up other Southern states to greater African American political participation.

My favorite article is an obituary about Utah Phillips by John Pietro in the July/August 2008 issue.  He was a veteran of the Korean War, a drifter who entered a Catholic Worker home and was influenced by Ammon Hennacy, an anarchist and an associate of Dorothy Day.  From there, he added the influence of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, the Borscht Belt comedians and various country musicians.  Phillips joined the Industrial Workers of the World, and became a lifelong member and global labor activist. 

In the July/August 2008 issue, the Z Magazine staff made an appeal to the readers to encourage others to subscribe to the magazine.  I make this post because I think Z Magazine is a wonderful magazine that exposes ideas and points of view that you won’t find anywhere else.  Our country needs to hear from a diversity of opinions, and I personally have gained much knowledge and have had things to ponder about.   I may not always agree with what is written, by I have benefitted from being challenged and from seeing the work of activists from around the world.  To learn more, go to http://www.zmag.org/zmag.