Weekly Toon

Newsprint is dying, its cartoonists a threatened species.

Like radio tycoons two decades ago, ink-based news barons face a shrinking, increasingly banal and narrow, audience.

All enterprises that beget great social institutions typically, and sadly, abandon mission and values faced with financial constraint.

Print media are increasingly jettisoning the very (few) features of cultural value, a move more likely to instantly seal their fate, relegating them to irrelevance as advertising vendors and purveyors of shrill partisan-paid opinion.

Right: TRUE by Daryl Cagle

This is not downsizing expenses, it's devaluing product. It will not preserve former glory or profitability, merely diminish, not enhance, commercial viability. Jettison editorial, and even the New York Times is little more than a letter box freebie. Hey, it is!

No great work of art or valiant achievement of human endeavor could ever eventuate, let alone attain social value, in the inane glare of beancounters' dismal science as applied to noble aspiration. Yet here we are, in our third great millennium of modern civilization, seeing great potential increasingly confined by the mindless juxtaposition of credit and debit.

At U$10 per image, SheepOverboard can ill afford the visual commentaries gracing articles. Despite scant income we choose to offer service over survival.

If only here to flog goods and service, this entire web site would suffice as a forty-foot high single page of hype and hard sell - you know, a squeeze page. "For just $20,000 $9.95 - expiring in sixty seconds, an offer you will never see again - and we'll throw in $2million of bonuses for you alone, because your browser emits pheromones that scintillates our spambot."

Yes, we love our Boligan, Cobb, O'Farrell, and Mr Fish. At least the Cagle toon above is a freebie!

Editor's note

The opinions expressed in TRUE cartoons are the views of Daryl Cagle and NOT associated with SheepOverboard.com

Political cartoons gain impact by ridicule, attacking a point of view or stating the obvious. We offer them at face value, not to offend or incite but so you can enjoy an illustrated viewpoint - whether or not you agree.

Sometimes you are wrong. Life's like that.