Cartoonists Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Knight

So recently Keith Knight posts this after crashing the NCS cocktail party:

Having been a member of the NCS, and having not renewed my membership, I agreed with pretty much everything Keith said.

Daryl Cagle responded and had some good, reasonable things to say.

Then the whole thing blew up at The Daily Cartoonist with the usual suspects calling each other names and blah blah blah blah blah…

*Sigh*

I was going to put a whole lengthy response together, but then decided I couldn’t put it better than Ted Rall:

I can understand why cartoonists who are pros in every respect other than earning most of their income via cartooning would feel offended at not qualifying under NCS admission rules. Professionalism is like porn–you know it when you see it. And of course many well-paid pro cartoonists do really crappy work.

On the other hand, if a group isn’t interested in having you as a member, why would you want to join?

And then on the third hand (I’m an alien), it’s easier to join an existing organization and/or ask it to modernize than to start a new one from scratch.

I’ve long wondered why NCS doesn’t seem interested in becoming more than an annual drinking society for wealthy cartoonists. But it seems to me that the loss is really theirs, not the cartoonists they’re excluding. They’re like newspapers 20 years ago. They’re going to turn around someday soon and wonder why they’re going under. And it’s going to be because they decided, over and over, to reject the future and wallow in irrelevance.

Dead on, Ted. Dead on.

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