Award-winning Politico cartoonist Matt Wuerker writes to Romenesko: “The Village Voice devotes an entire issue to the irony of cartooning being hugely popular while cartoonists have a hard time making ends meet. Then it turns out they didn’t pay for the cartoons they used in the issue. Instead they got the cartoonists to contribute them for ‘exposure.’ Sums up the new media economy perfectly. It’s so ironic it would make a funny cartoon.”
Harsher criticism comes from writer and cartoonist Mimi Pond, who posts in the Voice comments section:
Village Voice, you have got some nerve printing this story after you asked me and god knows how many other cartoonists to contribute free work for this issue-with the stipulation that it would be “good exposure” for me. You can go fuck yourself! You used to pay me decent money back in the 80s to do full-page cartoons for Mary Peacock’s V section. The 80s were very very good to me. I had a real career as a full-time cartoonist and illustrator. I stopped for a minute to have children and then when I looked up again, my career had fallen off a cliff. So thanks, Village Voice. Thanks a lot.
Voice editor Tony Ortega tells Romenesko:
This was a special issue celebrating and commiserating with cartoonists on the tough state of their industry. In order to fill it out with so much art, we asked some artists to donate their work. We then felt we couldn’t do that without disclosing publicly [they weren’t paid]. I figure it’s better to speak up about something like that than do otherwise.
Comments from Dan Perkins (Tom Tomorrow) — they’re included in the Voice story — are after the jump.
“I’m not sure how much you’ll be allowed to write about this,” says Dan Perkins (Tom Tomorrow), “but of course the Village Voice Media chain is one of the major culprits in this—their decision to ‘suspend’ cartoons [in 15 papers in 2009] dealt a serious blow to the struggling subgenre of alt-weekly cartoons.” [Tom Tomorrow returned to the pages of the Voice within a few months. Also, many of the artists in this issue aren’t getting paid, but have contributed work for the exposure.]
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