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We cartoonists are a dying breed. It’s a canary in the coalmine for a dysfunctional democracy. As New Yorker cartoonist Jason Chatfield writes, staff cartoonists used to be the only ones in the building paid to point at the building. Everyone else eventually answers to the owner, but they answer to the reader.
https://www.crikey.com.au/2026/09/29/cartoons-cathy-wilcox-fiona-katauskas-ann-telnaes-kevin-kal-kallaugher-jason-chatfield/
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I was recently thumbing through the latest edition of Inkspot, the club magazine of the Australian Cartoonists’ Association, when I felt a low hum of anxiety. This is the oldest cartooning organisation in the world. I edited Inkspot myself in the early 2000s, back when the scariest thing in its pages was the treasurer’s report.
By the back cover, I was needing a mug of breakfast wine. Pages 6 and 7: the Herald Sun had been running AI-generated cartoons. Page 9: Cathy Wilcox was leaving The Sydney Morning Herald after 37 years. This little club magazine now read like a casualty report with a style guide.
Wilcox announced her exit on stage at the Sydney Writers’ Festival at a sold-out forum about free speech, which is the most Cathy Wilcox way to do it: mid-sentence, in public, on topic. The paper, in her telling, had developed a scorching case of “editorial timidity”. She spent nearly 40 years drawing lines; the last one she drew was under the whole arrangement.
I now keep a list of departed cartoonists, and it is more depressing than the shopping list of a 42-year-old divorcee who lives with his dog (I’ve done the research).
Last January, Ann Telnaes quit The Washington Post after almost 20 years, when the paper, after a slew of incidents, spiked her cartoon of tech billionaires genuflecting to a statue of Donald Trump. One of those billionaires was Jeff Bezos, who owns the paper. Four months later, Telnaes won the Pulitzer Prize, largely for the work she did on her way out the door.
Five months after Telnaes, the Baltimore Sun let Kevin “KAL” Kallaugher go after 31 years — he’s a two-time Pulitzer finalist, drawing for The Economist since before I was born. The Sun’s managing editor explained they had decided to “allocate our freelance budget to other areas”.
Remember that phrase.
Fiona Katauskas, named Australia’s political cartoonist of the year in 2023, is now freelancing (including in Crikey) after Guardian Australia didn’t re-up her gig earlier this year. Col Wicking retired from the NT News in 2022 and his chair was never filled, which is the preferred method: you don’t fire the cartoonist, you wait for them to leave and quietly brick up the doorway behind them.
Indeed, nobody calls it a purge, because it doesn’t need to be one — the desks are being wheeled out. This is the end of the era of the staff cartoonist, which ran roughly 150 years, from the invention of the halftone to the invention of the quarterly earnings call. Not a bad innings, but not a great sign for a functioning democracy.
Now for the bit that turned my low hum into a dull roar. In August, the Herald Sun ran an AI-generated illustration of Victorian Premier Ben Carroll as a pirate, taking great pains to point out it was labelled as AI-generated. Ah, well then. It’s not a burglary, officer — it says “burglary” right there on the sash! The paper reassured everyone, too, that it had been quietly doing this for two years.
Then, just two weeks ago, the Baltimore Sun (yes, it’s hard to keep track of all these repugnant Suns) published an editorial cartoon with a caption noting it had been produced using AI tools. They indeed found those “other areas”, letting go of a man who spent three decades learning to draw exactly what he thinks, and filling the space with a machine.
For the young artists joining the party just as they’re sweeping up the cups, here’s what a staff cartoonist actually was: the one person in the building paid to point at the building. The court jester with a parking spot. Every other job at a newspaper answers, eventually, to the owner. Ours answered to the reader, and everyone had agreed, in writing, to pretend that was fine.
This is exactly why the cartoonist is the first to get the axe. It’s not that we got expensive; we were never expensive. It’s that we got inconvenient, and “budget” is the polite word a company uses for that.
I watched all of this from the front row. I was president of the Australian Cartoonists’ Association, then of the National Cartoonists Society in America, which sounds impressive until you realise it’s roughly equivalent to being elected mayor of Pompeii. Before 2023 was out, the newspapers that carried my work for decades let me go, too. I can’t prove a machine took my chair; I just know the chair went.
The job is dying. The cartoonists, inconveniently for everyone, are not. Because here is the difference between us and the machine, and it’s the only difference that matters: AI can generate a cartoon in seconds — it just can’t get fired for one. But trying to get fired for one is the entire job.
Jason Chatfield is an award-winning New Yorker cartoonist and stand-up comedian based in New York. He is a former president of the Australian Cartoonists Association and National Cartoonists Society. His best-selling Substack is NewYorkCartoons.com"
#cartoonist #PoliticalCartoons #FuckGenerativeAI
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