Interview with Eric Appleman | Sound Authors Radio

December 29, 2008

Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors. Today is Friday, September 12, 2008. We’re in the middle of the political season, it’s been an exciting fall for anyone that watches CNN and listens to the polls like I am. I’ve got four guests on the show today and my first guest will have something to do with the political race. His name is Eric Appleman. The second guest wrote a book called A Nation For All: How the Catholic Vision of the Common Good Can Save America from the Politics of Division; that’s Chris Korzen and Alexia Kelley. The third guest on the show will be Stop Clutter from Stealing your life. Of course that’s always a good thing in our lives at any time of the year. Mike Nelson wrote about clutter from stealing your life. Then I have a musical guest on the show at the end, The Boulder Acoustic Society, a great new band. So my first guest on the show I’d like to welcome Eric Appleman, who edited a book of editorial cartoons called the Race for the 2008 Democratic Nomination, and he also edited a book called The Race for the 2008 Republican Nomination. Welcome to the show Eric Appleman.

Eric Appleman: Thank you, it’s a pleasure to talk with you.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about these books.

Eric Appleman: Yes, so basically I run a website on the presidential campaigns, which I’ve been running since 1998. We have a section where we look at all the different books on the campaign and I noticed there were no books of editorial cartoons on presidential campaigns. There was one done in 1992 on Bill Clinton but there hasn’t been anything since then and so this struck me as a gap and I’ve always been interested in political cartoons. My background is in political communications and how you present ideas. So in 2004 I went to the association’s American editorial cartoonist and said you guys should do a book. I spoke to them at their convention here in Washington DC briefly and no one took me up on that.

I went back again in 2007 and said I’ll work on this book and you guys can get a substantial share of the proceeds; what do you think of that. They went through the Board and approved the idea and the next step was to find a publisher and there was a publisher in Gretna, Louisiana; Falcon Publishing and they’ve done a series every year called best editorial cartoons of the year. So they agreed to take on this project. The idea was to have them out in time for the convention since they describe and show cartoons on the road to the democratic and the republican nomination.

Dr. Kent: Where did you get into the world of cartoons themselves? Of course I guess most folks are more excited about political cartoons than articles and all the rest. They’re fantastic but how did you get this idea for yourself?

Eric Appleman: As I indicated, presidential campaigns is my specific focus, so even in 2000 I clipped a full box of these editorial cartoons and pasted them in a book. So its just basically these are some of the most incisive commentators around and really you can capture in one drawing what you might not even be able to capture in a full length article; the essence of a candidate or a candidacy or an event. So that’s why that’s particularly interesting. But once we got the go ahead to work on the book, it was a very great challenge.

We sent out emails to members of the AAC and I went even further afield to non-members soliciting cartoons. All sorts of cartoonists, over 120 cartoonists, sent in anywhere from one to four or five dozen cartoons and so you can imagine it was a huge challenge to sort through all those and decide which ones were the best ones. The original idea was for a book of 98 pages and we moved that up to 160 pages but even then, that was really not enough.

There were so many good cartoons that we had to cut out and I should really emphasize that this is a unique book because it has cartoons from the top editorial cartoonists around the country who you would see in the paper and news magazines and that was possible through this arrangement with the AACC and in which they receive a substantial share of the proceeds. They also have a very good website that I should note; its editorialcartoonists.com and Ted Rowe, who is the president of that association was extremely helpful in bringing these books together.

Dr. Kent: You have a website called Democracy in Action, the race for the white house. What do you think of it? Its fantastically interesting contest right now. Talk about the election and I guess the importance of political cartoons to us in the middle of what Obama calls silly season where it just seems like lipstick on a pig and all of this stuff. Tell me what you’re following right now?

Eric Appleman: Well, right now we’re just getting off the conventions. I was in both Denver and Minneapolis so I’m still recovering from those experiences, which can be very grueling and they were so close together that there was really no time to recover and so the books came out in mid-June and the idea was to have them available for the convention on the theory that they would be interested in seeing how these candidates emerged and Barack Obama and John McCain. I should note that there were different challenges in putting the two books together. As you can imagine there was a lot more interest in the democratic race and the Hillary / Obama contest. So there was just so much more material to go through and so many more painful cuts that could not be included to try in get in that 160 page limit.

Dr. Kent: And on the republican side?

Eric Appleman: On the republican side, the race ended earlier and so we have included some cartoons from those first few months when senator McCain was out there pretty much as the presumptive nominee but the interesting thing there are the cartoons that show the conservatives distrust of Senator McCain. There are many of those once he was the nominee he kind of distanced the conservatives from himself, which we now see has been somewhat alleviated by his choice for Vice President.

Dr. Kent: So tell me a little bit about you. you’re the author of many political CD ROMs, you’ve self published a field guide to the 1992 presidential campaign, now of course you’ve published these two books with the political cartoons. Tell me about the website, tell me about what you do, what you’re working on now, all of that?

Eric Appleman: Right, well the website p2008.org is really designed to educate folks about the political process and their role in making it work and the specific focus is on presidential campaigns and I really try to be very systematic rather than be turned to a new state where there will be a story on page one on a particular campaign and maybe a story on page B5. I try and lay it all out very systematically and reference original source material and point people to the best available resources by other organizations. So it has done fairly well as indicated by Monster-Sifford in May of 1998 after working on CD-ROMs before that.

The books reflect that approach, so you’ll see in the book that I have included cartoons on some of the candidates who really didn’t get very far, like Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, and Ron Paul for example was a difficult one. The editorial cartoons in some sense reflect news coverage so I had to search far and wide to find some Ron Paul cartoons. I found four finally but you know, I included about 20 each for Giuliani, Romney, Thompson and Mike Huckabee, and really had to scrabble around to just find those four for Ron Paul. So I’m afraid I’ve forgotten your question there.

Dr. Kent: We can keep going. Ron Paul still interests me. He’s apparently still on the ticket out in Montana.

Eric Appleman: I’m not aware of that. I know that he was at the press club yesterday I think it was and had third party candidates on the stage with him and was encouraging people to eschew the two major party candidates and consider voting for a candidate of principle. It was kind of eye opening to see how few of these cartoonists took on a Ron Paul toon. And I should say that after all the editing was done, starting with these 125 or so cartoonists who submitted works, there are about over 75 cartoonists that represented in the books and over 250 cartoons in each book. It’s very rare that you would see such a collection.

Dr. Kent: Tell me the life of a political cartoonist. What do they do every day? How do they go about creating these incredible things?

Eric Appleman: Well, I talked to them and it’s interesting that some of them have very long careers. It’s remarkable they’ve been working for 30 or so years but they go into the office or some of them work out of their home and they face a blank sheet of paper and they’ve got to come up with an idea. Some of these guys are really geniuses and I should also note that the whole industry if one can call it that, or business, is under some pressure. You may have read about newspaper downsizing? And that does affect editorial cartoonists and some of these people have been downsized or offered buy outs.

One of the examples that come to mind is Layne Powell, a Raleigh news observer and a very good cartoonist. He’s been there I think for at least two decades, probably longer and they wanted to reduce his hours and he said no. Bottom line is he’s working there through the election and then after that it’s not clear what he will be doing. So there’s been a lot of stories like that. Another thing that’s very interesting is how cartoonists have tried to adapt to the pressure.

So you see a lot of animation, people working on animations, and that’s very time consuming. Also another thing that you see from editorial cartoonists is some of them have very good logs and they show you some of their early sketches and ideas that they started out; thrown out rather. The newspaper maybe said this is too strong, we can’t do that. So I would be encouraged to take a look at those kinds of things. One in particular was Matt Davies and you can just Google him and he has a very good blog. There are others out there like that.

Dr. Kent: How has it been supporting this book, getting into this world of editorial cartoons so much that you have to have this book and you’re out on the road talking about it and all that? I can imagine it’s like a kid in the candy store.

Eric Appleman: Well you have a fervid imagination there! I haven’t really done much in the public arena; it’s not really my cup of tea. I’m more of a content person so I did you know an appearance out there in Minneapolis at the Civic bash but I have not really done much promotional stuff; I’m not really the most articulate person and I think the books really do speak for themselves. If you are in a bookstore and have a chance to look, just thumb through and you’ll see on any one or two pages there’ll be one that really brilliantly captures the essence of some of these candidates.

Dr. Kent: Well it’s been a real honor speaking with Eric Appleman. He edited two books; one for the democrats, one for the republicans. The Race for the 2008 Democratic Nomination, a book of editorial cartoons and The Race for the 2008 Republican Nomination; a book of editorial cartoons. With all of the recent happenings in the presidential race, wouldn’t it be great if we had a chance to automatically have another book full of the recent happenings but I guess we can check out all of the artists that are within these books on their own websites and blogs. It’s an exciting book, I love reading all of these cartoons. It’s been a great thing speaking with you.

Eric Appleman: Well thanks very much and again I would just refer people to the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, which were essential in putting these books together and their website editorialcartoonists.com.

Dr. Kent: And your website again?

Eric Appleman: That is www.p2008.org.

Dr. Kent: Wonderful, well thank you so much for chatting with me today and I look forward to the next 60 days.

Eric Appleman: Thanks very much, it was a pleasure to be with you, take care.

Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show is going to be Chris Korzen from the book A Nation for All: How the catholic vision of the common good can save America from the politics of division. Come on back for that.

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