…I think I have enough material now, both in the cartoon archive, and in stuff I never posted to the site because it wasn’t topical when I did it, to consider doing my first book of political cartoons.

A co-worker who also cartoons recently showed me a book he’d done, using a printer who takes small job orders (100 or so copies).  For the past several years I’ve been gathering material on how to go about getting an ISDN number and such.  The mainstream media won’t review stuff by self published creators, but this is a new world now, and I can simply bypass the commercial publishing world if I want to.  And there are online sellers, big ones including Amazon.Com, who will take orders for books from self publishers.  Scribus is an open source page layout program that I keep hearing good things about.  My co-worker used it to do his book.

Typically, a book of political cartoons is just one page after another of recent cartoons, with the occasional explanatory text written beside them.  What I want to do is something more like what Herblock did with his books.  Every four years, during a presidential election cycle, Herblock would publish a book of his previous four years work, organized into chapters by topic that started out with his really killer essays about the times he was living in.  He was every bit as good a writer as he was a cartoonist.  I may not be at his level, but I’ve always thought that was the way to do a book of political cartoons. 

I probably need to re-work some of my early stuff, and that will take some time.  I need to figure out how to divide the material into chapters, and what I want to say in the essays for each one.  But I’ve already got a title for it, and a cover page.  It’ll be the cartoon I did for March 4, 2002, reworked a tad to fit on a book cover.  The title of the book will be Deviant Signs.