What does Miles Davis have to do with the MAGA party's Durham Report?

a Candorville comic strip and an editorial cartoon

The answer is somewhere in today’s Candorville cartoon and editorial cartoon (and scroll down below the short story for today’s editorial cartoon):

I flew to Charlottesville last month to join Herblock Award-winners Lalo Alcaraz and Ann Telnaes (who, like me, recently joined Substack) at the University of Virginia to discuss the evolving nature of editorial cartooning.

I don’t speak at colleges often, but when I have, I’ve made sure to tell the story of how

I broke into cartooning, because I felt it would be helpful at that point in their lives.

At nineteen, I knew I wanted to become a professional editorial cartoonist. I was the editor-in-chief and opinion page editor of my high school’s paper, and I drew an editorial cartoon and a comic strip for every issue. I chose U.C. Berkeley only because they’d convinced me their student-run newspaper, The Daily Californian, was the best and most independent paper at any public university.

I attended the Daily Cal’s orientation for prospective journalists during Welcome Week, and brought along a manila envelope full of my cartoons. After the orientation, I approached the editor-in-chief, handed him the envelope, and said I’d like to be their cartoonist. He said “we already have one,” and handed it back unopened. I left, and picked up a free copy of the paper on my way out. I turned to the opinion page, and saw no cartoons. I turned to the comics page, and saw a comic strip. Then I noticed the name of the cartoonist. It was exactly the same as the name of that editor-in-chief.

I was outraged. To my nineteen-year-old mind, this blatant, self-serving conflict of interest on the editor’s part was the greatest scandal since Watergate. I walked back in and headed for the newsroom, but the receptionist stopped me. She said I wasn’t allowed in there, and that I had to clear out because the second group of students was arriving for their orientation. I obliged.

But when the group of students streamed in, I joined them and streamed right back in with them. The receptionist looked in my direction, and I dropped to the floor. Hidden by the crowd, I crawled on my hands and knees to the door of the newsroom, and entered it. Once inside, I stood up, walked through the room like I belonged there, and when I saw a cubicle that had cartoons on the desk, I sat there and waited for whoever occupied that desk to return.

It was the managing editor. I showed her my “Lemont Brown” comic strips, told her she could run them for free for the first semester, as long as she agreed to begin paying me for new ones when those ran out. I asked her to introduce me to the opinion page editor, and she did. I showed her my editorial cartoons, and she hired me on the spot. The next week, my comic strip also began running in the paper.

After a few weeks, when I realized I wasn’t running out of ideas, and that I could actually do this, I began faxing my cartoons to the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other major California newspapers. My first submissions began with “I’m Darrin Bell, editorial cartoonist for The Daily Californian at U.C. Berkeley.”

I faxed the Los Angeles Times a new cartoon almost every day for a year. Finally, Anne Brenoff, then Deputy-Opinion Pages editor at the Times, called me and said “if I assign you a cartoon every other week, would you please stop faxing us cartoons every day?” That’s the story. And every time I’ve told it since the late Nineties, students seemed to find the audacity and perseverance in the face of rejection to be inspiring.

But not this time. This was the first time I’d told this story since before the pandemic, and something must have happened in the interim. This time, the professor was very impressed, but the students seemed genuinely befuddled. Perplexed. Some looked at me as if they were sorry for me. It was as if I was a Victorian-era motorist who’d just tried to regale them with the tale of how I kept turning a hand-crank until my Model T’s engine started running.

“There are no gate keepers anymore.” -Darrin Bell

I realized why later on, when I posted a cartoon to this Substack and to my Patreon. It dawned on me that there are no gate keepers anymore. Not to Generation Z, the first generation to grow up with modern social media. They’re a generation of “content creators.” A generation in which people are more interested in creating their own brand than working for someone else. If I were just starting out today, I’d do what their generation does (and what I’m doing now, with this Substack and by branching out to other endeavors, as insurance for the inevitable collapse of newspapers): I’d post my work online and build an audience of subscribers. That’s it. I wouldn’t try to appeal to editors, and hope that they’d give me their stamp of approval.

When you live long enough, your inspirational story can become pathetic to younger generations. I’m not going to stop telling that story, though. I’m just going to bookend the story with my awareness that it no longer applies to them.

And speaking of pathetic, the long-awaited (by MAGApublicans), and miserably-failed Durham Report came out this week. Republicans had fantasized that it would prove once and for all that Trump’s collusion with Russia was a criminal Democratic hoax, and that in the wake of January 6th, the FBI persecuted conservative FBI agents. But it did nothing of the sort. That’s okay though, Republicans are pretending the impotent Durham Report did all that anyway.