Cathy Wilcox, Ann Telnaes, Kevin “KAL” Kallaugher, Fiona Katauskas, Col Wicking... The era of the staff cartoonist is over. Nobody bothered to tell the cartoonists.
Cartoonists’ staff jobs are being mowed down en masse on three continents…
Brooklyn, NY 14th September 2026
I was reading the latest edition of Inkspot this week: the club magazine of the Australian Cartoonists’ Association, the oldest cartooning society in the world, and the one I grew up in. I edited Inkspot myself for a time in the early oughts, back when the scariest thing in its pages was the treasurer’s report. (It’s now done by the industrious Steve ‘Noz’ Panozzo- and has been for a LONG time.)
For an expat, it reads like a letter from home. You pour a scotch, you settle in at the drawing board, and you catch up on who drew what, who won what, and who said something unrepeatable at the annual dinner. That’s what I sat down expecting from the new Autumn/Winter number…
Instead, somewhere between page 6 and page 9, a pattern emerged, and by the back cover I was deeply unsettled, a thing the treasurer’s report never once achieved…
Page 9: Cathy Wilcox is leaving the Sydney Morning Herald after 37 years. Near the back: a review of Dave Blumenstein’s book about AI and cartooning, rereleased in a new expanded edition, on account of everything in it coming true.
One issue. One quarter. One country. The little club magazine I used to edit now reads like a casualty list with production values.
Cathy’s Farewell cartoon
Let’s start with Cathy, because Cathy is the reason I put the scotch down.
The news had already reached me in August, the way cartoonist news travels now: a screenshot in a group chat, followed by the word “mate”, which in Australia carries roughly the emotional payload of a 21-gun salute. But we’re print people, our lot. Nothing is properly true until it’s been typeset. And there it was on page 9. Typeset.
Cathy drew for the Herald for 37 years. She announced it on stage at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, at a sold-out forum about free speech, which is the most Cathy Wilcox way imaginable to resign: mid-sentence, in public, on topic. The paper, in her telling, had developed a case of “editorial timidity”, and she wasn’t about to make herself smaller to suit it. She spent 37 years drawing lines. The last one she drew was under the whole arrangement.
WHen the Herald Sun ran that AI slop above, Cathy drew this:
Cathy’s cartoon after the Herald Sun used slop to replace human cartoonists
The List.
She isn’t the first. She’s just the latest, and I want to be clear that I’m not being poetic when I tell you I keep a list now. I do. It’s a real list, and it is not a fucking fun one.1
January last year: Ann Telnaes quit the Washington Post after 17 years, when the paper killed her cartoon of tech billionaires kneeling in front of Trump. One of the billionaires was Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post. You couldn’t submit that as fiction; any decent editor would bounce it back for being too on the nose. 4 months later, Ann won the Pulitzer Prize, largely for the work she did on her way out the door…
5 months after Ann, the Baltimore Sun let KAL go. Kevin Kallaugher. 31 years at that paper, a 2-time Pulitzer finalist, and he’d been drawing for The Economist since before I was born. The Sun’s managing editor explained that they had decided to “allocate our freelance budget to other areas”.
Fiona: So, I found out on Friday that my gig at the Guardian is coming to an end in late August. Needless to say I’m rather bummed by this development AND in need of a new job so if anyone’s looking for a cartoonist HMU…
Emma Cook, let go from Stuff in New Zealand after 8 years. Colin Wicking retired from the NT News in 2022 and was simply never replaced, which is the preferred method these days: you don’t fire the cartoonist; you just wait for them to leave and quietly brick up the doorway behind them. (That’s without mentioning the ouster of people like Rob Rogers and Michael DeAdder under the first Trump Admin.)
I know, I know. I’m meant to be funny on here— It’s a humorous newsletter and I’m supposed to distract you from the boundless horrors of the world. But if you’ll indulge …
Nobody calls it a purge, because it doesn’t need to be one.
The door only swings the one way. Nobody is being hired to fill these vacant desks. The desks are being wheeled out. This is not a run of bad luck. It’s not a blip, or a rough patch, or a “challenging media environment”. It is the end of an era: 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.
And no, this is not just ‘the death of print’ -News media has moved online along with everything from crosswords and puzzles, horoscopes, job listings, editorials, and everything in between. But somehow, cartoons are the thing being jettisoned at a rate unlike anything else. (Daily comic strips were the canary in the coal mine, because they always are.)
Look, the bottom line is… 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 fucking difference that matters. AI can generate a cartoon in seconds. It just can’t get fired for one. Getting fired for one is the entire job. I’d know. I turned out to be pretty good at it.
A word, said plainly, because this is the rare essay where the ask and the subject are the same thing. Every cartoonist above lost a newspaper. This newsletter is the one I built to replace mine. There’s no proprietor here to spike a drawing, no budget meeting I can quietly lose; there’s just you, me, and this here button…
Now.. for the part that really stings. Back to pages 6 and 7.
In August, Melbourne’s Herald Sun ran that AI-generated illustration of the Victorian Premier you saw earlier, and took great pains to point out that it was clearly labelled as AI-generated.
Ah. Well then. It’s not a burglary, officer; it says “burglary” right there on the sash. The paper added, by way of reassurance, that it had been quietly doing this for 2 years.
And then, just weeks ago, the Baltimore Sun (yes, that Sun, the sameone) published an editorial cartoon with a caption noting it had been produced by the editorial staff using artificial intelligence tools…
Other areas.
They found “other areas.”
They let go of a man who spent over 30 years learning to draw exactly what he thinks, and filled the space with a machine that has never thought anything. Kevin KAL Kallaugher called the result slop, which I felt was generous. The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists published an open letter in protest, which is our profession’s equivalent of a strongly worded fist.
Fiona Katauskas said watching AI illustrations spread through the papers felt like “a punch in the gut”. She’s right, and I’d only add that this particular punch works for free and never asks about superannuation.
Artwork by David Blumenstein
Oh, and that book from the back pages of Inkspot? David Blumenstein (longtime Deputy President of the Australian Cartoonists’ Association) has literally drawn the book on this racket: Octane Render: Cartoonists Talk About AI Art. He lays the business model out in 3 tidy panels: scrape everybody’s art off the internet without asking, use it to teach a machine to draw, then launch a for-profit company selling the output back to the people you scraped. He published it in 2023 as a warning. It has just been re-released in a revised and expanded edition, which tells you precisely how the warning went.. (Almost as well as mine that year.)
Cartoonists exaggerate for a living. It’s the whole kit. So let me be uncharacteristically precise: we are not imagining this:
It is actually happening, on three fucking continents, to the best people we have.
Continue reading this post for free, courtesy of Jason Chatfield.
