Mike Marland
CARTOON CANNOT BE USED IN ANY
WAY WITHOUT ARTIST'S PERMISSION!
Bush/Twin Towers Cartoon
by Mike Marland
The Bush/Twin Towers cartoon ran in the Concord Monitor on Friday February 8. By noon someone had put it on the internet and the Monitor was getting bombarded with negative emails and phone calls, mostly from the New York City area. An editor called me with a headsup that Fox News had wind of it and may try to reach me.
There was such a reaction that Editor-In-Chief Mike Pride wrote a column for the Sunday Monitor titled "Why we shouldn't have run Mike Marland's cartoon" and posted it on the paper's website Saturday morning.
AP picked up the story and the Saturday papers carried a quote from White House spokesman Ari Fleisher who denounced the cartoon, calling it "as wrong as wrong can be and an affront to the people of New York". By Monday the Monitor's email system was so overloaded I couldn't send in cartoons and they had to run syndicate stuff, giving the appearance that I'd been removed from the editorial page for a couple of days. (I'm a freelancer and work at home 70 miles from the paper).
At this point I wrote a column explaining why I used the image, admitting in hindsight that it was a mistake and apologizing to those who personally suffered on September 11 and found the cartoon offensive. I also ripped up the original. In about a week the brouhaha subsided and the stonethrowers and the media went off in search of fresher meat.
In the midst of all this I was dropped from three NH weeklies owned by Salmon Press. This turned out to be part of a cost-cutting measure but the publisher's ill-timed move made it appear to be related to the Monitor cartoon. The notice was delivered by email and one of the paper's editors, Tim McCarthy of The Courier (Littleton), emailed back saying he'd continue to run my cartoons and pay for them himself. Tim and the publisher had been having their differences over editorial policy and the publisher took this as the last straw and fired Tim for "insubordination".
The story got twisted that he was fired because Salmon Press didn't want to be associated with the cartoonist who drew that awful cartoon and he was bucking them. The publisher , being a recently new owner wasn't aware that I began my editorial cartoon career at The Courier in 1978. I was reinstated by the end of the week.
I'm still bewildered by the reaction to this cartoon. As
I said in my apology column, call me stupid, call me naive but I still
don't see it as the abomination that so many others do. I also experienced
a lot of anger over the reaction to the cartoon - mostly along the lines
of "who the hell are you to tell me what I can and can't draw?!" It's
a free country. So I recently blew up a photocopy of the cartoon, put
it on the light table and drew the original back into existence.
For more information contact:
Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons: huckkono@solidarity.com
