419. Charlie Hebdo Anniversary, Lucien Sketchbook, Congestion Aggression & More!
+ The Chess Pigeon of Washington Square Park & Morris settles in.
Guess what? I’m switching back to bringing you these on a…
Welcome to issue #419 of New York Cartoons from my new, very old studio in Hell's Kitchen.
Somewhere under this cardboard metropolis of packing boxes is a desk where I'm attempting to type while regaining feeling in my fingers. At this point, I'm pretty sure my blood has turned to maple syrup. The ‘feels like’ temperature outside hit -15C, which is the kind of cold where you watch dog pee turn to steam and think "Oh yeah, Science!"
🖌️ It’s been quite a week for cartoons.
Many have stood in solidarity with
, who made waves after quitting the Washington Post. People are cancelling their WaPo subscriptions and subscribing to her Substack. Ann is a friend. She is one of the first cartoonists to help me get started in this game, and deserves for her work to be seen far and wide.Today, political cartooning in America has all but dried up to a small pool of fierce, independent cartoonists still striving to speak truth to power from their drawing boards on whatever platforms they can be heard. That place stopped being newspapers in recent years.
I’m grateful we have a place like
to still share our work without fear of being fired/cancelled or worse. But when the court jesters are silenced, we have a very serious problem.“When limits are put on cartoons, it can dampen the message... and that silences voices who speak out against autocratic politicians and governments.”
Read Ann’s piece from today:
Today is a sad anniversary for us ink-slingers:
Ten years ago today, two Islamists went into the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, murdering a caretaker on their way in. They proceeded to ask for the editor, Stéphane “Charb” Charbonnier, and four other cartoonists by name. They then murdered them all. They also killed three other editorial staff members, a police bodyguard, and a guest at the weekly editorial meeting they were in.
At the time, the world stood shocked, watching the graphic video of the terrorists shooting a policeman on the Paris sidewalk (A fellow Muslim named Ahmed Merabet, as it happens.) As they celebrated the mass execution of unarmed civilians, they casually stepped back into their black hatchback, calmly closed the doors and drove away.
The world stood in solidarity with the dead cartoonists. Even if they didn’t agree with the offensive cartoons they’d published, artists everywhere— myself included— drew cartoons in defiance of the attack, denouncing the horrific terrorist attack and professing the profound importance of free speech in a working democracy. For a while.
People marched in the streets, arm-in-arm, in protest of the despicable act of violence. Slogans like Je Suis Charlie flooded social media and banners around the world. Until they didn’t.
People become outraged about these things, and then things simmer down and slowly get worse under our feet while we rage about people in red hats and activists with blue hair. I personally feel that they should move World Press Freedom Day from May 3rd to January 7th, so people never forget what happened that day in Paris.
I was in Paris in May and found myself in the 11th Arr, where the incident took place. I wandered over to Rue Nicolas-Appert and felt a chill down my spine remembering the video. Everything was so quiet and empty. There’s a mural of the murdered cartoonists on the wall.
I was interviewed on the day after the massacre on morning TV. It was all still very raw, and I hadn’t slept at all. This was before my time as President of the National Cartoonists Society, so I wasn’t quite as articulate on cartooning matters as I would have liked. Still, the general thrust of my argument remained: Silencing cartoonists for doing their job is wrong. It always will be. Cartoonists are the canary in the coal mine of any working democracy. When their voices begin to be censored, something has gone seriously awry.
You can read more of my thoughts on the chilling of speech and free expression in my piece below:
This week’s Sketchbook is from my side of the table at Lucien. I go there every Sunday afternoon for a drink with my ‘friendly’ neighbourhood misanthrope,
. It’s always a mistake to give cartoonists a crayon in a restaurant.
Congestion Aggression
The new Congestion Charge landed in Hell's Kitchen on Sunday like a parking ticket on street cleaning day - inevitable, controversial, and causing at least three separate meltdowns I witnessed from my fire escape. Every business owner between the 34th and 59th has opinions about it, and hooooo boy, are they sharing them!
It is a bit weird that they counted the introduction of a fee like it was New Year’s Eve in Times Square. Governor Hochul described the congestion charge (the first of its kind in the country) as a critical step to “unclog our streets, reduce pollution, and deliver better public transit for millions of New Yorkers.” Right. I’ll believe it when I see it.
The subway feels more like walking into a highway casino these days; you never know if your train will arrive or if it’ll even be running that day. And if it is, whether you’ll be set on fire by your friendly neighbourhood psychopath. I used to try to sleep or meditate on the train, but I’m now learning to do it with one eye open. People literally stand against the grimy subway wall now in case someone pushes them onto the tracks. Don’t tell my mum.
