Hi, I am Daryl Cagle, and this is the CagleCast where we're
all about political cartoons.
And today we're talking to Arcadio Esquivel and Taylor Jones.
Two great cartoonists who have drawn a lot of cartoons about Venezuela.
And Nicholas Maduro, and it looks like Trump is just about
ready to invade Venezuela.
So we have all kinds of great cartoons about evil, Maduro and Trump.
Just about to crush Venezuela.
Gentlemen, thank you for joining me.
Thank you, darl.
Thank you.
Uh, Taylor here is a wonderful Maduro Humpty dumpy.
That looks great.
He's getting cracked.
You've really got Maduro down.
He's,
he is I, I have been caricaturing him for a long time.
He's a lot of fun to do and he looks both sinister and like
a buffoon at the same time.
He does, I guess he is fun Here he is leading his minions, CHAM, or death.
It does kind of represent the criminal side of the Maduro regime.
Why is he on a tricycle?
Because he is an idiot.
Alright, here you have Hear no evil.
See no evil.
Speak no evil, Maduro.
With the bullets flying and the Molotov cocktail.
Right.
You know, he puts up with a lot and then end his way through everybody,
pretty much.
And he's, he, well, he is also, and I think our Caio might agree,
he's, he's sort of oblivious to all around him in terms of going on
politics and, and the hatred form.
He just, he just remains sort of, doesn't pay any attention to it.
He might say that about Trump.
That's why they get along.
He says, but I
am a man of peace.
Well, that's the point.
His regime has been unable to deliver.
Basic services that Venezuelans.
Okay, and we'll look at a few of.
Here's Arcadio.
Arcadio is an award-winning political cartoonist in Costa Rica.
He teaches caricature at the University of Costa Rica and
produces the educational TV show.
El Mundo Day, Arcadio on Channel 13 there, and he teaches art and drawing on tv.
His cartoons appear in lots of newspapers through Chicago cartoons.
Nice to have you here, Arcadio.
Thanks.
Thanks Dar.
Let me also introduce, uh, Arcadia's translator, Karen,
who you may hear on here.
This is a very nice one.
Well, that's nicely done.
Well, the situation in between Venezuelan the United States, it's so critical that
it's reaching to a point that it's gonna
explode everything.
I know it might sound silly, but I love the way you've got the sand here.
You've really made an excellent point here.
I think this sums up Maduro's option as well as the last cartoon.
Yes, you are right.
The Maduro is a very easy person to characterize, to
make a caricature from here.
Well,
this is a very nice one.
Who knows where Venezuela's going or gone.
Let's say Maduro is gone a month from now.
This doesn't solve Venezuela's problems.
He's driven half the people out of the country.
Right?
But it's, tell me what you think about that in terms of what Venezuela
will have to do to make itself right.
Good luck, Karen.
No, it's
okay.
First of all, let me just say what ARCA means with the caricature and then I'll
translate the question that you asked him.
Caricature.
It represents a boy in Venezuela, which is very disturbing because this was made
10 years ago so that this hasn't changed.
A lot says this is very concerning and all his stuff needs to go like all of them,
and democracy needs to be reinstated.
Here is your nice portrait of the new Nobel Prize winner.
Tell us about this one.
Ah, this is the two portraits of a man who is very bad man, and a woman who is very.
Woman in Venezuela.
The news we could hear about Maria Carina.
Machado is mostly that she says it's really Trump who won this Nobel Prize.
I dedicate it to him.
Yeah.
What?
What you gonna say?
She might be thinking of a future where she or and or her party are
in charge and they're gonna be relying heavily on Trump for support.
She's wise to know which butts to kiss.
That's
right.
I like, I love your Maduro here.
Great mustache, great great bags under the eyes.
Thank you, Taylor.
He can, he can sleep because he's very in trouble now.
And
the fact that Maria won the Nobel Prize is a huge, huge punch to the go for
Maduro because pressures him a lot.
I don't think of pressure as having much effect on him.
Yeah, I think pressure should be higher.
That's why everything that the United State is doing is great because the
pressure is getting higher for him.
I think Daryl made a good point because to just watch Maduro to look at him,
he looks kind of an immovable object that you can push and push and he just
doesn't go anywhere and that seems to be his way of survival all these years
at least gives us a lot of material for us cartoonist and especially Latin
American cartoonist because he's an idiot.
So it's very want to make fun of him.
I
thought this was
a
nice one.
Ah, yes.
It's very nice.
We're starting to do animated cartoons, and I think this one would work
very well as an animated cartoon.
Yes, you are right, Dar.
It's difficult to have a animation for me at, I try.
It's a controversial subject, Daryl, as you know.
Oh,
about animation.
Yeah.
Cartoonists love it or hate it.
They want us to support the, or animators that are losing their jobs.
You've tried a, you've tried a few animations of mine.
The thing is that.
One thing.
I think even in a cartoon like Aios here, which has no text, it's meant to be read.
And that's where I think in some ways the animations don't,
aren't yet making it yet.
Maybe they will, but I'm not seeing that yet.
Taylor, I have an animation of yours that I can show here.
Go ahead.
Share
the
files.
Release the files.
I didn't mean to show that twice.
Very good.
I thought that was good.
Now, again, Daryl, I think there are some cartoonists who have not allowed
you to do it, at least not yet.
Is that correct?
There's something who just, uh, I haven't
asked anybody that said no, but Oh, really?
I didn't ask, I didn't ask anybody that I thought would say no.
Oh, okay.
Here, here's your Pam Bond.
Not nothing to see here.
That was your Epstein files cartoon.
I thought that was hilarious.
Taylor, how you do that?
I didn't dar, we
did it.
We're using Grok, the AI program.
Gr.
It's pretty easy.
Yeah, this one would be a great one for that.
You should think about it.
Arcadio, we would do that with you.
All right here.
Mission possible.
Yeah.
Uh, he really enjoyed making that caricature.
Actually.
He was about to see Mission Impossible with his son at the cinemas, and he
thought it would be a good idea to make this caricature where MAD's Tongue is
like almost ending running out of time.
A very mission impossible
way.
He is ready to blow.
This is a very nice one too.
This would also make a good animated cartoon.
Yes, you're right.
Taylor.
How many cartoons about Maduro do you do in these years?
Oh, this year, believe it or not, I haven't done one, but over the
past number in the past, I've, I've done at least about 15 or 20.
It's very frustrating here in America for all the cartoons about anything
that happens outside of our borders.
They just don't get into newspapers.
We've got all these wonderful, uh, international editorial cartoonists
who don't get reprinted just because they're outside of the borders.
It's very frustrating.
I post cartoons of mine on my Facebook page whenever I post an
international one interest just.
Drops off, I'll get seven likes.
You just, nobody cares.
It's really unfortunate, but that's the way it is.
It's very frustrating.
Arcadio, you were saying something?
Yes.
Uh,
sure.
Very quick.
First of all, to answer your question about how many cartons has
Taylor done, it has been a lot of 50 or 20 caricatures about Maduro.
Uh, there will, what do you think would be the reason for the cartooning,
the US to be not receiving a lot of.
Use or likes?
I don't think cartoons cross borders.
We notice the same thing in newspapers outside of the USA, that they don't
wanna reprint American cartoonists.
It's very frustrating.
So everybody's throwing rocks at Maduro and he is not gonna last long.
It just represents how much everyone hates him now.
Right.
I'm gonna go through some cartoons by other cartoonists.
This is by cap from Spain, from Barcelona, and I thought this was a very nice one.
Yes, I know, I know him.
I meet in Spain, uh, 19 years ago.
90 years
ago.
Very good.
This one is by Asman Manka from Brazil and earlier from Cuba.
And I think he's just great.
Yes.
He's very, very good cartoon this case.
Oh, and by the way, Daryl, he's a, he's made, he's made Trump a new world monkey
because they have Pral Pencilled tales.
Oh, overall monkeys do not.
Very good.
I love Samka.
This is Rayma Suprani and she is an exile from Venezuela.
She was threatened by government thugs and fired from her newspaper
job, and she is now drawing cartoons criticizing Venezuela from Florida
living in exile given asylum here, and that is wonderful to see her here.
I appreciate that.
It's also a Humpty Dumpty.
It's another Humpty Dumpty tale
that this is a very dark image because it represents a lot of
what MAD is doing to the country.
He's got a whip.
Yeah.
This one is by Rayner Feld from Germany who died recently, and we miss him.
He always made me laugh.
He was our only communist cartoonist.
Well, it's very interesting because he was an European artist and he, but he had a
very Latin American vision, so it's really interesting how he managed the subjects.
Rainer was great and we miss him.
So Arcadio, here you are again.
Maduro.
The day before yesterday.
Yesterday.
Today and tomorrow.
That's that's terrific.
Well, he's falling apart.
This very powerful image.
It's falling apart.
Very Monty Python.
This That's true, Daryl.
Good point.
Arcadio.
This is, this is one of those, this is one of those cartoons
that I wish I had thought of.
It's just great.
Okay.
Thank you.
And this one is by shot in the Netherlands.
And he's another one that I really admire for being so simple and bold.
Daryl, I also think this cartoon is a reflection of how Trump is the focus of.
Everything.
He certainly tries to make himself the focus of everything.
What Argi wants to know is how do the most famous cartoonist in the US see
them subject, because sometimes he thinks that not a lot of US-based cartoonists
do a lot of cartoons about him.
That is true, but that's, that's because of supply and demand.
Mm. One of the, if I could weigh in here, because I have drawn a lot of.
Latin American leaders, not in recent years, but over my career.
And I can tell you, this may seem a strange compliment, but I'll
tell you, Latin America, there's some great faces in politics.
Just great faces and so much fun to draw, cutting.
And so it's great.
It's never, never ending for me.
He did not want to use this image of, of mal, but at the end of
the day, he's very blood thirsty.
At the end of the day, he did not have a lot of choice, so he decided to post
and create this, this drawing of, of mal.
Of course, this is very difficult for newspapers in America too, when these
bloody cartoons that the international cartoonists like to draw, they
just don't want blood in America.
They want no bodily fluids.
They don't like blood.
They don't like pee.
They don't like spit.
They don't like throwing up.
They just don't like any bodily fluids at all.
They don't even like sweat.
That's, that's half of my cartoons.
Daryl, that's half your, that's really what cartoonists wanna draw
most, and it's very frustrating.
A question Uhhuh, if could you go to Venezuela at this point without the
government having minders follow you?
Concern of who you might speak to, who you might see.
Would you be at risk going there?
I don't believe so.
I don't, uh,
there is no way that he could go.
It's very risky.
It's very dangerous.
And he, thanks to de Kegel, his curtains are widely known.
No, this could expose him.
There's a lot of countries I don't think I could go to now.
I certainly couldn't go to Iran or Russia.
I kind of think I shouldn't go to China.
That history of kidnapping businessmen, just to make points.
They'd have a good reason to kidnap me.
Both.
I think that's true of a lot of editorial cartoonists, A lot of places in the world.
You cannot go Dar Taylor.
It's very concerning because the youth is not that well-informed.
Sometimes they don't understand the caricatures and that.
Are making.
He can see it in his class, for instance.
Yeah.
It's very concerning that the youth is not that well informed nowadays.
Boy, that is true.
I see that in my email.
The main email I get is, dear Mr. Cagle, explain the cartoon to me.
My paper is due tomorrow.
I think this one is nice.
This one's by Bart Van Leeuwen and also from the Netherlands.
It makes me laugh.
Is it?
Is that, is that, I love the, this cartoon.
What do you think about this image?
Because this is a very different style from what you have in your website,
so how do you conceive this image?
We get complaints about Bart from other cartoonists that he's
making his cartoons with ai.
We've had him since before.
You could do anything with cartoons in ai, stuff looked like this then.
And now he is using ai, but he's doing the faces by hand in Photoshop and he's
doing mostly the backgrounds in ai.
That makes sense.
And first of all, obviously he's kind of an animator from the way he draws,
but you can sense the reboot there.
That's very sophisticated and that, that looks AI to me.
But those are two rules for us.
No AI and no photography, but for art, since his stuff looks so much
like it did, and I can tell some of his cartoons did the faces,
but the AI is all the background.
First, I'm gonna translate what you said guys to, then I'm gonna
translate to the, the question to you.
And
the question for you guys that what's gonna happen in time
when they have more force?
What's gonna happen to the political cartoon?
Because at the end of it's gonna happen if a lot of image are generated this way.
Can I answer that?
Sure.
Answer that Taylor first.
I'm gonna answer it in Spanish, but you could, you could edit soy viejo.
Thank God I'm old.
Me too.
Why don't, this is, this is something I think about for all
the younger cartoonists out there.
I'm in my seventies.
And it, I, I don't know.
Daryl, this is where you step in and explain
Darry.
What, what do you think, uh, what will happen in the future with the a Uha ai?
I don't think people want to hear opinions from ai.
The question for us is only for cartoons that people write.
Is it okay for them to use AI to do the art?
And I'm not at a point where I want that yet.
Although we have kind of made a little bit of an exception for BART here
also, I don't like the look of ai, but now we're playing with it for
animated cartoons and I think when it's working off of my style for my
animating my cartoons, I often like it.
We'll just have to see how it goes and that I understand that some artists
are very angry about it and insist that we have a boycott of AI to support
the animators that are losing their jobs, and I appreciate that, but.
I'm gonna do what I want.
Daryl, I got some criticism from posting that animated, that grok animation of
that cartoon of me and a boxing a friend.
I didn't, I wanted to do that before I tried even putting a political one
on there that you and I had done.
Can I say something about this car, the particular cartoon by Bart?
It's a wonderful drawing there, but I think in a way it doesn't matter.
I'm just being a critic here.
I think part Pirates of the Caribbean, he could have come up with a better title
because there's nothing pirate about it.
I
think usually when cartoonists put in titles like this, the cartoon's
always better without the title.
I've been guilty of that myself sometimes, but yeah, I see it here.
He, he's gonna present this to his students at the university,
so he wants to, he wants you to tell them how important this is.
The cartoons stay human made and not ai, and they need to remain pure.
So if you could give a little bit of more insight to that, it would be great.
Well, this one is not pure.
This one I think all but the faces was done with AI and we're
syndicating it and it gets reprinted.
I think we're past pure, but we just have to decide case
by case and see how it goes.
I like the animation that AI does to my cartoons and so far the problem with that
is that we just need to find a market for it, and I think we may be finding it.
Market now.
And so we may do that, and I understand why that makes many artists angry.
Well, what
about, excuse me, Daryl, what, what about this, and this is something I've noticed
about the little quick AI animations that show up, for instance, in my feed
on whether it's Facebook or Instagram, where often with photography done very
cleverly, for instance, a common trio of, of people, these little short videos
are Trump, Putin and, and Kim Jong.
And the thing is that they're great.
They're, they're, they're almost.
They're spooky.
They're, 'cause they're so real, they're portrayed as little toddlers.
And the thing is that after you watch a few of them, it's like they're boring
and you don't, you don't care anymore.
And how do you, especially in a, in a world where the attention
span keeps getting shorter, how are you thinking of addressing
that With animating our cartoons,
our memes, paying the price of AI right now.
We're getting very little interest from the internet to pay for cartoons.
Now, they haven't developed a culture of paying for content, and
that is very frustrating, but I'm hoping that that will change soon.
We've got some prospects we're working on, which is why we're interested in
the animated cartoons now, which are only good for the internet, and it
makes sense that newspapers and print clients who are the only clients who
we find pay for cartoons would not have been interested in them yet.
This cartoon is amazing because it's a very hard to draw those incredible
missile now, especially the.
A very, very difficult cartoon.
This is what he sees in Venezuela.
This encapsulates everything that he sees in Venezuela, all the dictatorship.
My suggestion for you on this cartoon would be to not use a computer
font to hand letter everything.
One problem I notice is.
That cartoonists who use fonts, especially in word balloons,
their cartoons get reprinted less.
And I think that's because editors perceive that to be
as something anybody can do.
And it just makes it less of a hand-drawn thing.
It's more of the I AI argument, you know, more of it that looks
like it's done by a computer.
It becomes less valuable.
Daryl, that you, you mentioned that because.
When I started doing more regular political cartooning, I felt that my, I
know, I know this kind of a silly thing, but I felt my lettering really wasn't
good enough because I admire the great masters of car of, of cartoon lettering.
But whether it, whether it's in strips or comic books or or editorial cartoons, and
I remember you telling me exactly that.
And I told you that I, I don't feel I'm quite there yet, but I did, and
98% of my time it has hand lettering.
But there's once in a while where I feel that I just haven't
lettered something well enough and I'll, I'll change it to a font.
But I guess, you know,
Taylor, I've had conversations with cartoonists that think their letter
lettering is terrible and they're, they just love using the car, the
computer fonts, because it gets them away from their hand lettering.
That makes them cringe.
Yeah.
And that's just wrong.
Editors don't see it that way.
They don't mind.
Lousy hand littering.
It's just an expression of the real person's hand that's creating
this, and as long as it's legible and the idea of the cartoon is
good, any kind of hand littering is better than computer littering.
Here's another one from Rama Ani, the Venezuelan cartoonist in Florida.
She makes it very clear how she feels.
Oh, he's an eight old bastard and she was, she was very scared.
She made an escape from there.
I have a lot of admiration for her Russia, Venezuela, and China, and the
Monroe Doctrine from Samka in Brazil.
I wish they would know what the Monroe Doctrine is in the United States and
they just don't, which makes this cartoon unprintable here, but I think it's great.
He loves how he draws Putin and Trump because their faces are
very comical and very funny.
Here is Aaron Van Dam, also from the Netherlands.
We have lots of cartoonists in the Netherlands and Maduro
riding his, his grim horse.
It's a very strong image and it it symbolizes how they
are destroying Venezuela.
Here's another one from Rama in the Venezuelan artists in Florida.
Ab, be Halloween.
Yes, a good Halloween topic.
She makes the mad face excellent for scaring people.
And here's another one from you, Arcadio.
He just can't get out of it.
That he's, he is gonna get blown up.
Can people comprehend this caricature Because he was not sure if people
were able to understand why there were so many locks in the image.
So he, he has that doubt.
I, I hate to.
To just say it this way, you've put a label on Maduro, which again,
I would prefer to have been hand lettered, but for an American audience,
you would have to put Venezuelan President Maduro, because they won't
know from his name who he is aio
with.
I'm curious, I would imagine that.
Maduro doesn't have many supporters in Costa Rica or pretty much anywhere
else in Latin America, but what concerns Costa Ricans more Maduro
and what he is done to Venezuela or Trump's policy of regime change and of
course blowing up the, which is worse in terms of for, for Costa Ricans?
Well, in, in Costa Rica, a lot of people keep admiring maur, and he gets criticized
a lot because he is criticizing Maro.
So it's very strange.
In other words, they're, they're so, they're Costa Ricans who, whatever they
feel about Maduro's policies, they like him standing up to the United States.
So this is from Dave Granlund and he is got Trump saying, I authorize
covert CIA operations in Venezuela.
Covert means secrets, so don't tell anyone.
It's a great Trump,
it, it has a very distinctive style to draw Trump because he feels that
it's very different from how he would draw it, how, how you would draw it.
It's very distinct.
Here's another one from Simanca.
It's just a, it's a charming cartoon.
I love the way he draws the water.
It's
like getting further and further apart.
I think if I was drawing this one, I would've put Uncle Sam in the upper
left standing on the USA, looking down at Venezuela in that position, because
I don't quite understand why he's standing in the middle of South America.
He's visiting.
Visit.
Yeah, he just visiting.
Uh, here's another nice samka one with all the, the Venezuelan
people fleeing to Brazil.
And it is, it is so true that just so much of the population has fled Venezuela.
There's just no food, there's no jobs.
The whole place has failed and attacking.
Venezuela isn't really attacking Venezuela anymore.
They're all living somewhere else
graphically.
That's a very
fine cartoon.
Aren't the buildings wonderful?
Yeah, it has a lot of details.
And he can also see Yeah, and, and he can also see how he, his handwriting,
Karen, the, the houses remind me of the casitas that, that people in Latin
America put up at Christmas time.
Ah, yes.
Brazil.
Right, that's true.
The slums.
Yeah.
This one is by Dario Casts from Oaxaca.
Yeah.
That's very nice.
He's,
oh, that's very, yeah.
Excellent, excellent.
He, he's a very, uh, good friend of mine.
I know him in.
I met him in Mexico in 19, in 2080.
Do you remember him, Dar?
Oh, yes.
Yes.
He was also there on our trip to Mexico City.
He's a very good cartoon.
He's a very good man.
He's very good.
Here you go again.
Arcadio love that
oil.
Well.
He's running out the foil.
He's running out of it, so he will not be able to do that anymore.
Yeah.
Here's another one from Dario.
I think this is very nice.
Yeah.
Wow.
You can see the cartoons are getting a little bit older as we
get it further into the slideshow, because I put the latest ones first.
Here's a recent one.
Here's, here's Trump ready to attack Venezuela again by Dario.
And that's nice.
Well, he thinks that Mexicans have, uh, particular style of drawing
political stuff, and it's very powerful.
They're very powerful at drawing it, especially the.
This is a cartoon that could be animated very well with AI just by making Trump's
body language and his, his arms swinging with the missile in it and maintaining all
of the nice crosshatching and, and keeping it looking like it was all drawn by Dario.
This is the kind of cartoon that I would recommend that.
He animate.
Here's one from you, Arcadio.
This is also one that would be easy to animate with ai.
AI would make the the growling voice probably as a Trump sounding
growling voice, and it would swing the missile back and forth.
Pretty good, easy, reliable, one to do with AI Darl,
I think.
However, I believe you, you mentioned that having a Trump growling voice,
and maybe that's easy to find.
But I have to say, you just give it
a prompt to the, to tell Trump's voice,
but I think it's gonna be important seriously, if the more you pursue
this, that we're gonna have to have a better range of voices.
Because, for instance, the, the Pam Bondi cartoon that you adamant made in mind,
the voice is nothing like Pam Bondy's.
I thought
Pam Bondi has a
pretty
generic
voice.
No, I wouldn't say that at all.
And I, you know, I wasn't pretty close.
I'm just saying it.
I think that's, I think that.
For anybody trying this, that's a problem.
I think it's good.
It's a, there's a solution, but it's a problem.
Well, I don't know the solution yet.
He also wonders what sound can be added instead as well as a voice, because that
would be the interesting part because yes, he's all pro about being animated, but.
His worries are, what songs are they gonna find for that caricature?
Well, if you're animating your own cartoons, you pick what results you want
and you don't have to worry about it.
You just don't choose anything you don't like.
Well, one of the things
that I think a number of cartoonists I've, I've allowed Daryl to try.
Experimenting with a few of my pieces, but one of the things that anybody who's
done this, what you realize, especially if you watch the car, the animation
being created by Grok or some other AI tool, you realize that after a few
seconds, it's no longer your cartoon.
It's something in between being your cartoon and a totally AI creation.
It's a little bit unsettling and you, you get used to it, I guess.
But that's something that I've, I've heard a number of cartoonists object
to that, which is no longer my cartoon.
I felt just the opposite.
Taylor, I thought it did quite a, a nice job of staying true to my drawing.
I felt like from starting your drawing.
Yes.
I thought so.
And the ones that we finished with, with yours, that it also stayed true.
It may not have stayed true to what your vision would be, but I thought
it looked like it was drawn by you.
What
I'm saying is that it?
Yes.
Oh, thank you.
I appreciate that.
It's just that I think it's important.
I think it's gonna take a while for cartoonists to come around to that.
I suppose it's no different than when a, when say a comic book
has been turned into a movie.
I don't mean a mar, I don't mean like a Marvel movie, but say an animated feature.
I guess the difference there is maybe the comic book artist gets a lot of money.
About 20
years ago or maybe 25 years ago, there was a company that was started with the whole
purpose of animating New Yorker cartoons.
I'm forgetting the name of it right now, but it, it failed because it
turned out there was no market for it.
But I don't think that.
Their animations were any better than what we're getting from ai.
Now, they tried to stay true to the way the cartoonist hand drawn thing
looked, but I don't think that they were any more true as animators
interpreting it than, than the AI interpreted it on what we're getting now.
Daryl, the New Yorker, talk about cartoons that are meant
to be ran by the readership.
I don't know that would ever go off.
It's possible.
It's just because New Yorker cartoons are not funny that it didn't succeed
on that.
Do you think it's a possible suggestion that tourists are now animated?
If we get more of a market on the web, I think that there's
more of a demand for it.
We're working hard now on trying to get our cartoons into aggregation apps.
We, it's clear that the publications on the web aren't
gonna pay for it, but maybe.
The aggregation apps will, and if they do, we've gotta analyze how much money
is each cartoon gonna make on this app.
If it makes $25 and it takes me an hour to create the animation, I can't
afford to spend my time doing it.
If it makes $50 closer, if it's gonna make $200, yeah, we should do that.
We've gotta see what it turns out to be.
But again, it's a supply and demand issue, and there's a lot
of cartoonists that draw a lot of traditional cartoons that don't make.
$25 and it wasn't worth them drawing the cartoon.
I know that feels yes,
more than anyone.
We have a problem with the whole syndication model, which is that about
a dozen cartoonists have cartoons that newspapers want, and then all the rest
of the 75 cartoonists they don't want.
And all these, well,
darl, there's what I used to call a book publisher I dealt with for many years.
Uh, I know I've mentioned this before, and that is the Barnes and Noble, I
don't know if they're around anymore, the Barnes and Noble theory, that 10%
of the books, the blockbusters are.
Selling, but it's all the other books that are bringing the
customers into the bookstore.
And then I'll, Betsy, there's a lot of cartoon that newspaper editors are
enjoying immensely, but not publishing.
Sometimes they're probably laughing hysterically at all the blood
gore that some of our coist do, but they don't dare publish them.
I,
I have that in mind with what we do because we have a lot of cartoons
and cartoonists there, even though most of them don't get published.
Much of it all.
Yeah.
And I think that.
If we didn't have those there, it wouldn't look like much of a store.
And just the fact that it looks like there's a lot of
product there is is attractive.
That's not how I feel about the grocery store.
The 95% of the grocery store is stuff I'm not interested in, but
I like that there's all there.
Go ahead.
Arcadio
guys.
How long would it take you to create an animated cartoon?
Daryl for
a good one.
I don't know.
A long time.
It's hard to predict.
A Rockwood not very long.
We, we sat down and we created two or three that I thought were pretty good.
Just over a Google meet.
Taylor.
We did.
I agree.
You can talk to Daryl about this because he's the technical expert.
I'm not.
We can try some,
try some.
Arcadio.
We'll set up a time for Meet and Karen.
Right.
I think we need Karen.
If you were to just try the Grok AI tool, first of all, whether you
like it or not, you'll be scary.
It'll be, you'll be almost scared at how, how efficient it is at animating.
Yeah, we made, we
made ours in gr imagine.
All of the big AI companies have something similar.
Uh, you know, Gemini has Nano Banana, which I think is probably the most popular
one now, but they all have an equivalent.
I've, I've tried 'em all at this point.
I think Crock is best for the particular thing that we do, which is not creating
things entirely, but making art.
Existing drawings come alive and look like, uh, we drew them all the
way through for only six seconds.
This one is from Bogan, which I thought was very nice and appropriate.
Now un unless you look very closely and see that he had in
mind that that was Obama there on the right boxing with Maduro.
Uh, actually that may be Hugo Chavez, Obama there, or maybe that one was too
old, but I thought it was very nice.
He says he has a lot to learn from you because he thinks you both are
great artists and great drawers, and he also thinks that, and and Dario
are brilliant artist, he thinks he has a lot to learn from you.
True, true.
Very true.
We love you too, Arcadio.
He's a nice one.
We don't need to translate.
That was, it's just very clear and very nice.
He's about to fall through.
Very good.
Here's another one from Arend Van Dam in the Netherlands.
Also a timeless cartoon until Maduro is gone.
And again, he was a, he was a bus driver.
That's how he started out.
This is kind of the same cartoon except with a boat.
And here's another one from Rayma with Maduro running off with all the money
as Chavez's statue is on the ground.
Very nice.
This one is from Stephane Peray French cartoonist who lives in Thailand, and
I thought it, I thought it was fun.
St draws really fast and a lot of his cartoons are just crazy, and I like that.
And here's one from Randy Enos, who has just had a stellar career for
many decades, kind of a one of the founding members of the National Lampoon
and many times Playboy cartoonist.
And he often draws with a knife cutting into linoleum.
That's what this is.
Send a linoleum print drawn backwards, does the lettering backwards.
Think of how.
How much nicer this is with him cutting the lettering backwards
into linoleum rather than, rather than using a computer font.
Well, da Vinci wrote backwards in his notebooks.
He's saying that he's definitely gonna do it hand now instead of using the
computer, because he really loved the recommendation you gave him about
not using the font, but using his handwriting because he sees that it's
a brilliant work right here, right now.
He looks natural.
Here's a nice one from Bill Day.
He also has very nice littering.
He had another one from New Arcadia.
How many cartoons of Venezuela?
I did you
do a whole lot of
Venezuela.
This is a very old cartoon.
Remember?
I, I, I, I drew it in 2008 though.
You know this is also a good cartoon for today.
Yes, you, you would take out the opposition card because they're,
they're laughing about dialogue with Trump instead of the opposition.
I'm another, the one,
he, he was a, a boss driver before, so now by driving the
country, well he has crushed it.
So the only thing that is left is a steering wheel and
very good with the hand lettering.
Well, Taylor, I have here extra Maduro cartoons.
This is just a beautiful cartoon and I'm glad we didn't miss it.
I like the expression of Maduro, his face.
Very convincing.
Yes.
There's that look of superiority and not caring about anybody else.
Right?
Well, he likes, he likes sweaters and big, big shirts.
Very beautiful cartoon.
Thank you.
Taylor.
Read this one for us.
Oh yes.
His life was a tribute to the Venezuelans and to Bolivar.
Is death an imperialist plot?
Deals in Venezuela.
Bolivar, of course, was Simon Bolivar, the founder of Venezuela, and that's Jugo
Chavez in the, in the painting there.
It was after, right after his death.
Very nice.
There's another, okay, this one needs no translation.
Oh, sure it does.
Yankee diplomats go home, right?
There we go.
No, and again, the tricycle,
because you know it, it's kind of an imaging cartooning that, you
know, clowns, clownish, politicians, and tricycles go together.
And he was a bus driver, so he should have some kind of thing.
Driver.
I've done
bus drivers, but that was
an out of date one.
I think.
It's very nice.
Well, he just wanted to say thank you and it has been a pleasure because
he considers you to be great artist, so he's very glad that he was able
to share this space with you and to say hello to your, to your viewers
and uh, to, to your audience.
Thank you Arcadio.
First, I think we all owe a debt of gratitude.
Karen for an incredible job.
You, you could be working at the un.
No, not yet.
Thank you.
And thank you for coming stream this episode on kagan cast.com and,
uh, come in next time and, uh, the more you come in, the more likely
we are to do this more often.
Thank you, gentlemen.
Thank you.