CARTOON: “All The News That’s Huge”

From Clay Jones on his political cartoon “All The News That’s Huge,” Fox News and other fake news sites, and Donald Trump’s newspaper

This cartoon has a lot of lettering. If you find some of it too small and hard to read, click on the cartoon.

I was debating whether I should draw this cartoon because a couple of other cartoonists have done the newspaper thing in response to what The Boston Globe did. The Globe did a fake front page next to their editorial page of a future Trump presidency. It contained stories of mass deportations and the military refusing to take out family members of terrorists.

Fake newspapers and news used to be done by National Lampoon and The Onion. Over the years The Daily Show got in on the action and then Fox News and sites like Breitbart (except the last two are not satire. They’re just lies).

So yeah, the newspaper cartoon was done, but not like this. They didn’t go to town as much as I did. So I went ahead, and after it was penciled I really liked it more. It wasn’t hard to create all the headlines based on Trumpisms.

Almost every cartoonist will tell you that he or she hates lettering. It’s monotonous. I don’t hate it as much, but it’s still time consuming. I usually do the lettering first, as it’s work but it’s very important. Most readers don’t even notice it, even while reading. They only notice if they can’t read it. When I first started cartooning, an old veteran cartoonist told me at a convention he didn’t want to waste any more time reading my work because he couldn’t read the cartoons. Ouch and harsh. But he was right. I had lousy handwriting. So I worked at it.

When my son was born, I made a card announcing his birth, and it contained a cartoon. My mother said, “Great lettering. Who did it?” My handwriting used to be bad on epic levels. like a doctor’s prescription. I realized that when you letter, you’re not writing; you’re drawing the letters. Today, I’m more like that older veteran cartoonist, but hopefully not as brutal. There are cartoonists out there whose work I refuse to read because the letters are too small, or there’s too much of it. I might have violated that one today.

Most cartoonists will also say, and I agree, that the best cartoon is a wordless cartoon. Maybe tomorrow.

claytoonz.com/2016/04/13/all-the-news-thats-huge