My Time At 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. In October, 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. What may be of especial interest to the readers of Crossleft are the many cartoonists who incorporate social commentary in their work.

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. 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. 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."

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. Knights comics autobiographical but they became more political after 9/11 and it was a very trenchant critic of the Bush administration. 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.

In the Attitude book, Knight wrote about the evolution of his comic:

"The strip didn't get called The K Chronicles until I got to college. It was more like a daily gag strip than an autobio back then. It wasn't until I moved to San Francisco and discovered underground and alternative weekly cartooning that the strip morphed into what it is today.

In San Francisco I discovered folks like Nina Paley (Nina's Adventures), Jamie Crespo (Narcolepsy Dreams), Lynda Barry (Ernie Pook's Comeek), and Lloyd Dangle (Troubletown)- folks who were talking about all the stuff I wanted to talk about. Issues, sex, drugs- it was an eye opener... The older I'm getting, the more political it's getting. September 11th really kicked up the politics, though.

...I wanted to do a strip that most anybody could relate to, but where it's a black character that's everyone is relating to. Black characters tend to be so one-dimensional in the mainstream media. I was putting a character out there that me and all the guys I grew up with could relate to."

Though many have a stereotype that most cartoonists are guys, there were a lot of women cartoonists in the expo. 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.

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. I discovered the books 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. In the first Attitude book, Rall wrote about the goal of his cartoons:

"First and foremost, my goal is to make my reader think about a topic or an issue in a new way. If you can cause people to question deeply-held convictions, you've opened their minds. I'm not a propogandist but that's only because I'm not good at it. If I could figure out a way to convince the American people that they should espouse income equality and put environmental concerns first, I'd do it in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, I don't know how to do that. One thing that I pride myself upon is my ability to reach conservative and right-wing readers, which I do by speaking their language rather than ridiculing them. For instance, I'm not prototypically liberal. I'm in favor of the Second Amendment (permitting gun ownership) and believe that people who are irresponsible or lazy don't deserve any government assistance whatsoever. Those stances get me in the door where my party-line liberal peers wouldn't find as welcome a reception. If I can make people smile or laugh, that's a bonus, but it's hardly a top priority for a political cartoonist worth his or her salt. My former editor Stuart Dodds, at San Francisco Chronicle Features, used to say that I had a cubist approach, by which he meant that you could come away with two or more different conclusions from the same cartoon. I'm conflicted and my work reflects that. I suspect that many of my readers feel the same way. For example, many Democrats know that their party isn't much better than the Republicans."

Stephanie McMillan is the cartoonist/activist who created the radical comic strip Minimum 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 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 do my own webcomics for Everyday Citizen, a progressive activist website. 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