Annual Convention

Annual Convention October 5-8

The AAEC and Association of Canadian Cartoonists will be joining with the Cartoon Art Museum in San Franscisco for a 3-day celebration of editorial art and political cartoonists, October 5-8, 2023.

Online registration is now open!


A letter from the prez

Working
as an editorial cartoonist this year—working, that is, if anyone is interested
in employing you—is like living inside Casey Kasem’s brain: The hits keep
on coming. Whether it’s Robert Ariail or Jim Borgman or John Branch or
Gary Brookins or Stuart Carlson or Richard Crowson or Bill Day or Eric
Devericks or Brian Duffy or Peter Dunlap-Shohl or Bill Garner or Steve
Greenberg or Lee Judge or Jim Lange or Drew Litton or Patrick O’Connor
or Dwane Powell or Ed Stein, watching one of these great cartoonists, artists
who developed close ties to their readers and communities, get laid off—and
their positions eliminated—would have been terrible. We’ve lost 21 full-time
staffers (including Chip Bok, Ben Sargent and Tom Meyer, who took buyouts)
since I took the reins in September. Twenty-one! As you know, we didn’t
have many staff jobs to begin with.

The damage to our profession
and newspaper readers is incalculable. Staff jobs are the primary source
of income for editorial cartooning, not least because they provide a base
for the local cartoons that inspire the greatest reader loyalty. Syndication
doesn’t provide health or retirement benefits. And no one has figured out
how to eke a living from the Internet.

At times like this it’s tempting
to echo the oft-heard cry that we are, in the words of Ed Stein, the finest
whalebone corset makers in America—quaint and doomed. But there’s more
to the state of editorial cartooning in 2009 than newspapers going out
of business and/or getting rid of the only graphic political satire on
their pages (who needs readers under 60 anyway?).

As I like
to tell reporters who call for a quote for the latest “death of political
cartooning” story, there are more AAEC members now than there were last
year. And there were more last year than the year before. That’s right—there
are more professional editorial cartoonists. Some are alties. Others are
web-only. Freelancers abound. Meanwhile, laid-off staffers are staying
the course, whether in syndication or online. The future may not look like
the past. (Although I suspect that most of the staffers who have hung on
this long will stick around for years to come—and that there will be actual
staff cartoonist hires before you know it.) But there is a future, both
for American editorial cartooning and the AAEC.

This year
in Seattle we’ll be discussing both futures. The emphasis will be what
you as an individual cartoonist can and must do to navigate the recession-ravaged
landscape of the American newspaper business in this year and years ahead.
Dave Horsey and I have developed an agenda that we hope you’ll find both
useful and entertaining. We’ll also be talking about the future of the
AAEC—and not just the usual BSing that gets forgotten as soon as we return
to our hometowns and the hangovers clear.

On Saturday,
July 4, in the morning just before the usual Business Meeting, we will
hold a working forum to discuss whether the AAEC should change the way
it does business in some important ways. The main topics will be questions
that have been floating around our organization for years, rendered more
urgent by the deteriorating financial situation of our membership and the
obvious difficulties in securing a major newspaper to sponsor conventions:

Should we
transform the AAEC into a guild like the Writers Union? Personally, I wonder
if the time for this proposal hasn’t long passed. Ultimately, a guild is
ineffective unless it can deny essential services to employers in a strike
or other action. It’s a buyers’ market for cartoons. On the other hand,
a guild would be able to take collective action. It could, for example,
organize syndicated cartoonists to deny their work to papers that have
laid off a staffer. It could make sure that every member posts his or her
cartoons to the AAEC website. In any event, it’s time to hash this out.

Should we
merge with NCS? Proponents say we could take advantage of NCS’
ability to negotiate discounted rates at convention hotels, not to mention
save on the doubling of membership dues for editorial cartoonists who belong
to both organizations. Others, like me, worry that AAEC and NCS have different
goals and cultures and would therefore make an uneasy fit. Either way, we
have to consider it.

In order
to reduce expenses, should we hold a joint convention with NCEW or another
journalists’ group to cut costs? This seems like a relatively low-impact
proposal with relatively low negative repercussions. We would, for example,
continue to hold our own panel discussions. Still, they’re there. NCEW,
for example, holds their conventions in September, after the beginning
of school—reducing the ability of many AAEC members to attend along with
their families. It also remains to be seen to what extent NCEW’s membership
would raise our clout in dealing with convention costs.

Should we
give up newspaper sponsorships altogether? I vote an emphatic
“no.” There are still lots of newspapers around, many with budgets that can
easily absorb $20,000 or more to sponsor an AAEC convention. Because we’re
familiar with this model and because we don’t want to establish a precedent
that discourages papers from supporting cartooning if and when the economy
improves, our first choice should always be to get a newspaper sponsorship.
But it may be that future presidents will find it impossible—as I nearly
did after our would-be sponsor, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, folded—to
find a sponsor. In that case, we should strongly consider the NCS model,
which holds conventions at vacation resorts in order to encourage higher
attendance both by artists and their families. High attendance equals lower
room rates. We might also have to copy NCS by raising the registration fee
so that we become self-funding. One hundred attendees paying an additional
$100 each yields $10,000.

After “The
Future of the AAEC” workshop on Saturday morning from 9 to 10:30, we will
hold our Business Meeting from 10:30 to 12 noon. Any serious consensus
that results from the workshop that requires a vote of the membership may
be discussed and formally initiated at that time.

Whew. So
much serious stuff.

Which is
making me thirsty. I can’t wait for the bar to open on July 1st at the
Washington Athletic Club—and to hang out with you there!

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OUR MISSION

The mission of the AAEC is to champion and defend editorial cartooning and free speech as essential to liberty in the United States and throughout the world.

The AAEC aims to be an international leader in support of the human, civil, and artistic rights of editorial cartoonists around the world, and to stand with other international groups in support of the profession.



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CARTOONS IN EDUCATION

Cartoons in Education

Every two weeks throughout the year, The Learning Forum and the AAEC offers CARTOONS FOR THE CLASSROOM, a free lesson resource for teachers discussing current events.  Visit NIEonline.com for more lesson plans.