Cartoon by Miguel Morales Madrigal
Our newsletter for February is out! You can read it here. If you want receive our monthly update directly in your inbox, you can subscribe. Cartoon Movement is taking a short break this week; there will be no editor’s choices and we’ll be less active on social media. We’ll be back on March 6!
Cartoon by Rodrigo de Matos
Since the start of our newsletter service a couple of years ago, we’ve been using Mailchimp. We always understood the limits of the free service Mailchimp provides, and we were planning to switch to a paid account once our newsletter following got large enough to justify doing so. We believe in paying for online services. However, with the latest policy change further limiting how many subscribers we can have and how many newsletters we can send out, we have decided to switch to Substack.
The basic obstacle to continue using Mailchimp (and paying for it) is that it’s just too expensive. We run three newsletters, a daily cartoon newsletter, a monthly newsletter and a newsletter to our cartoonists informing them of new projects. Mailchimps new policy would require us to upgrade to a paid account for all three of them, and the account that we could afford would still severely limit our number of subscribers.
We do not make money with or newsletters, nor do we have a conversion rate in mind when we send them out. We merely wish to send out editorial cartoons (and news about editorial cartooning) to those people who are interested in them. We’d be happy to pay Mailchimp a fee for this, but with the amount they are asking it seems we’re not part of their (commercial) target market.
So we’re switching to Substack, which will allow us to keep sending out newsletters for free. They operate on a different business model; we get the option of asking our subscribers to pay for (certain) content. They get a commission of the revenue generated by paid subsciptions.
We do not plan to ask money for our newsletters. However, we do want keep to option open for people who want to support us and our cartoonists, on a strictly voluntary basis.
We hope those of you who have subscribed to our newsletters will not notice too much difference. And for anyone not subscribed yet, consider doing so, either to our daily newsletter or our monthly newsletter.
24 February will mark the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Our cartoonists have drawn hundreds of cartoons about the Russian aggression, mocking Putin, condemning the atrocities of war, warning about the threat of nuclear war.
To keep the war in the spotlight, we've created a social media toolkit with 10 of the best cartoons drawn in the past year. Feel free t0 share one or more of them on any of your social media channels. It also includes a video slideshow.
Download the social media kit here as a .zip, which even includes a suggested text for your post(s). Thanks for sharing!
We are happy to welcome UK cartoonist Stephen Lillie to Cartoon Movement. Stephen has been working as a professional cartoonist and illustrator for over 30 years. He has worked for publishers both in the UK and overseas. Clients include Centaur, OUP, Scholastic, Mary Glasgow, Macmillan, Reed, Dennis, Harper Collins and over 50 newsstand magazines. His political cartoons have most recently been published in The Guardian.
German cartoonist Christian Möller has recently joined us. He has been publishing cartoons as a freelance cartoonist since 2018 on digital trends, economics, new technologies, and the future of work. The cartoons are primarily published by the press, educational providers, and businesses. Visit his website here.
Cartoon by Daniel Murphy
What is the impact of image satire and cartoons on society in 2023? Join CM cartoonists Sanaz Bagheri and Tjeerd Royaards on February 25 at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art in Amstelveen (The Netherlands) where they will discuss the current state of visual satire together with Dutch cartoonist Jip van den Toorn in a discussion moderated by journalist and writer Peter Wierenga.
How do they see their role as cartoonists? What is it like to do satire in Iran or during the Nazi regime compared to an open society like the Netherlands, where do you aim your arrows? What makes a cartoon or drawing such an appropriate form for social criticism? What are the reactions to their work and how do they deal with it?
More info here.
We are happy to add another cartoonist from France to our community. Marc Goncalves is is a cartoonist and author. He makes comics and press cartoons, and illustrates children's books. Check out his website to see more of his work.
We are happy to welcome Steph Bravo-Semilla, a freelance artist from Quezon City in the Philippines. She is one of the handful of female editorial cartoonists in the country, having worked for more than a decade for the Philippine Daily Inquirer.