Big and beautiful?

It may be big, but it's certainly not beautiful

I'll be posting this for syndication today. Sadly, there are likely few editorial page editors who will be working today. There was a time when, even on a holiday or weekend, if the story was big enough, opinion editors would still go into the newspaper to write up an editorial and possibly publish a cartoon, as well.

The cartoon would depend on whether that newspaper had a cartoonist on staff—most major newspapers back in the day did, indeed, have their own cartoonist. Otherwise, syndicated cartoons wouldn't arrive in the mail until a few days later.

Long before I joined Cagle Cartoons, when I was first syndicated with King Features—of Popeye fame—I would fax my work to King's headquarters in New York. Eventually, I'd email the cartoon. But still, the syndicate would make copies and snail mail cartoons to editors. Granted, we're talking before and even many years after the advent of the internet.

Of course these days, everything is immediately uploaded to a website where subscribing editors can grab the cartoon of their choosing. So maybe—if an editor is either in office today, or working from home—there's still a chance they'll manage to get this cartoon into print over the weekend. Otherwise, they probably won't see it until Monday for a Tuesday edition.

But I digress...