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Good afternoon and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

Today is Friday, November 6th.

I'm Dan Moulthrop, the chief executive here, and I am really excited to introduce our forum today, a conversation which is part of our City Club Authors in Conversation series, a conversation and presentation with John Derf Backderf.

For generations, political cartoonists have used art and satire to challenge the politics of their time.

In fact, back in the 1910s, a group of cartoonists and journalists known as the Masses pushed back against a corrupt administration and found themselves targeted by government persecution.

This was in the days before our modern understanding of freedom of speech and the First Amendment.

Our speaker today, John Backderf, is the cartoonist, known as just simply Derf.

Cleveland Magazine describes him as, quote, the cartoonist we need in these uncertain times.

His new graphic work explores this forgotten chapter of American history.

It's called The Dissidents: Autocrats!

Vigilantes!

Communists!

And Cartoonists!

With exclamation points.

It carries a political energy that feels exceptionally relevant today and provides a visual treatise on racism, violence, and political turmoil.

Derf is the international bestselling and award-winning author of some other noteworthy titles, My Friend Dahmer, Trashed, and Kent State.

He is also the recipient of the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for political cartooning.

Not that Robert F. Kennedy.

His weekly comic strip, The City, appeared in more than 150 papers and ran for nearly 25 years.

But he hasn't done that in a while, as he reminded me earlier.

Derf lives here in Greater Cleveland, and like one of the political cartoonists featured in The Dissidents, is an alumnus of The Ohio State University.

So Derf's gonna offer some remarks first and show us some of the, some visuals for us to consider.

If you're listening on the radio, you should check it out online at cityclub.org or ideastream.org.

After Derf's remarks, Ideastream Public Media's editor-in-chief, Mike McIntyre, will sit down to discuss the graphic work and also what this forgotten moment in political history can tell us about the defense of free speech, the free press, and democracy in our nation today.

A reminder for our livestream and radio audience on WKSU, if you have a question during the Q&A portion of the program, you can text it to 330-541-5794, and our team will work it into the program.

Members and friends of the City Club of Cleveland, please join me in welcoming Derf Backderf.

Clicker, clicker, here we go.

Thanks for having me.

Not my usual venue, so it's— I'm open to new things.

This is a graphic novel, by the way.

I just want to make that clear in case anybody's surprised by that.

I asked Dan earlier if there had ever been a graphic novelist who spoke here before, and he reminded me that yes, I spoke here before, which I had completely forgotten.

In my defense, it was 2020, so none of you were here, and I wasn't here either.

It just kind of happened in the ether.

Let's see if I can get this clicker to work.

Oh, be damned.

Very well.

Very well done, Maria.

So this is the book.

It is a political thriller starring cartoonists.

I'm fairly sure this has never been attempted before.

It's a true story.

It takes place in 1916 to the dawn of 1920 and centers on, as Dan mentioned, a publication called The Masses.

Which came out of Greenwich Village in New York during that wonderful Belle Époque of thought and theory and politics and literature and art and cartoons.

So here's the cartoonists.

They were among the greatest political cartoonists of the era, and some of them are among the greatest who've ever lived.

And these— These artists were giants in their time.

They were national celebrities.

They were followed by a vast audience.

And they had a lot of influence.

And they could change the course of things.

This is how political cartoons used to be and sadly are no longer.

I first discovered these people in college.

I went to Ohio State where the Cartoon Museum is, so that's where I found them.

And immediately I was taken with them, but there was not a lot of material on them at the time.

Everything was out of print.

There were no collections, there was no, you know, copies of The Masses were extremely rare, it was before the internet.

So there was no way to track this stuff down except through old archives and things like that, which kind of, it became a hobby.

And this work really began as just that, it was a hobby.

And for many years I just acquired information on this stuff, and the story grew and grew and grew, and I became more and more fascinated and realized, oh my God, this is a really incredible story.

The story is simply this: the cartoons that these men and women were doing so threatened the US government, especially during World War I, that they were hounded, harassed, indicted, put on trial, and in the case of several people, imprisoned for drawing cartoons.

That's the story.

And it's a pretty gripping read, so, because what was happening in society at this time, America, I mean, you know, in Europe was in flames, so we all know that.

But here in America, we have this perception of this time, or at least I did, that it was a fairly peaceful time, that it was everybody coming together, you know, let's go over there and win one for the boys.

And it was this wonderful time of patriotism, and we all pulled together.

That is the exact opposite of what America in 1916 was like.

The country was wracked by vigilante violence, by racist pogroms.

The labor wars were taking place coast to coast.

You had powerful oligarchs that were running everything with their own private armies of hired vigilantes.

If you spoke up in any way, asked for better working conditions, asked for a 5-day work week, something like that, You could— you were invariably beaten, shot, murdered.

The Gilded Age autocrats could do whatever they wanted and seemingly get away with it.

They could murder women and children, as they indeed did, machine gun them in Ludlow, Colorado.

And that was the environment that this group of radical cartoonists working for the masses, which was a socialist periodical, a really unique periodical.

I'll talk about that in a second.

The major antagonist here is Woodrow Wilson, and again, here's this history coming into play.

You think of Wilson, you think of this gentleman in a top hat, very dignified, led us successfully through the war.

This is a bad, bad man.

He was a vindictive, thin-skinned autocrat who convinced Congress to suspend the Bill of Rights.

It didn't exist during World War I. Through something called the Sedition Act, freedom of speech was wiped out.

If you criticized the president in any way, or his policies, or his government, or the war, the, you would be charged with sedition, And the penalty was 20 years in prison.

And Wilson imprisoned thousands of people under the Sedition Act.

He was also a virulent racist, a white supremacist, in fact, and caused just untold damage.

So he's the main antagonist of this story.

There were a huge anonymous group of thugs called the American Protective League, who answered only to the Justice Department and were the muscle that enforced the Sedition Act.

Did any of this sound vaguely familiar?

The parallels between what happens in The Dissidents and the modern day are simply chilling.

And on the other side, there were— there was this huge movement of various radical groups that were speaking to the lower classes and having an effect.

Because the only thing we knew at this time, you know, a lot of these radical theories like anarchism, for example, well, I mean, they're largely nonsense.

But at the time, they'd never been put into practice.

And the only thing we knew was this predatory capitalism that had children working in factories and people making pennies a day while being forced to live in the company Company housing.

So, you know, there was this sense of enough, and the people in power were not about to give way, so that's where the conflict— and it just got bloodier and bloodier and bloodier.

At one point, there were street battles between— I mean, you know about some of the racist pogroms.

Red Summer, I'm sure you've heard about that.

That was in several major cities— Chicago, East St.

Louis— where Black neighborhoods were just torched.

In Washington, D.C., there was actually a street battle between returning African American troops and returning white troops where they faced off behind barricades and shot at each other.

There was a cavalry charge up Pennsylvania Avenue.

There were dead bodies in front of the White House.

And none of this history is really discussed very much.

And of course, the rest of the world is in flames.

It's not only war, which cost 20 million lives, toppled empires, laid waste to much of Europe, but then followed quickly by revolution, which did even more bloody damage.

And there was a very real fear in this country that there was going to be a similar revolution here.

So you get all of these powers and all of these— this cataclysmic change just swirling around essentially the eye of the storm, Greenwich Village, and the offices of The Masses.

Now, what was The Masses?

It was a wonderful, provocative magazine, a very large magazine, the size of the old Life magazine, full of Wonderful analysis and opinion and essays and reportage with some of the great journalists of the day, like John Reed, who I'm sure you've heard about.

If you saw the movie Reds with Warren Beatty, that was John Reed, one of the first great war correspondents.

Max Eastman, the editor, was one of the great thinkers and writers of the day, and especially the cartoonists.

This cover here, they were renowned for their covers, which are just spectacular.

Here, I'll show a couple of them.

And these, you can imagine these things just leaping off the newsstand.

And then they began to get more and more political.

Here you have, in this cover, you have an oligarch dancing around naked with a bomb in one hand and a torch in the other.

I assume he's dancing around through Western Europe.

And the Wilson administration decided they had to move to silence this magazine.

And that's what they did.

They harassed their suppliers, they harassed their subscribers, and finally they just forcibly closed the magazine.

Now, this cartoon in particular is This is one of the greatest political cartoons that's ever been made.

A handful.

I'd say there are maybe 10 others that I can name.

This is by a guy named Robert Minor.

And as you can see, it shows a medical examiner gleefully rubbing his hands, looking at a new recruit who is a giant headless Hulk.

And his caption is, at last, a perfect soldier.

Devastating cartoon.

We're talking as Wilson is steering the country toward war and trying to get people to volunteer.

A reluctant populist, by the way.

America was not behind World War I at first.

It took a massive propaganda campaign to kind of turn public opinion.

So they viewed this particular cartoon as an active threat.

I discovered this cartoon in college.

I had a Xerox copy of this thing hanging above my drawing board.

When I was drawing bad political cartoons for the Ohio State Lantern, just as inspiration.

And that was the first connection I had with these cartoonists, and the more I discovered about them, the more interesting I got.

Now, this cartoon has been repurposed many times over the years.

Here's a recent one with Trump looking at a giant headless man in a suit, The same cartoon, At Last, a Perfect Attorney General.

And this is an actual copy of the paper, holding it in my hand.

We don't know what happened to the original, the original's lost.

Remember, these are 110-year-old cartoons, and this was the challenge here, how to explain what these cartoons were about in the book, because I use a lot of them.

I use dozens of these cartoons worked into this very suspenseful narrative.

But cartoons, political cartoons, as Art Young put it, political cartoons are like confetti tossed at the passing parade.

And that's very true.

They have a lifespan of a day or 2.

And then they're just, they make a big splash when they're fluttering to earth, but then they're just swept away and completely forgotten.

That's the price you have to pay to be a political cartoonist.

So the challenge for me here, working into this story, is how do I explain the power of these cartoons?

That they were so incendiary, that they were so threatening, that people were put in jail.

Robert Minor was put in jail.

He was captured in Europe, arrested in Europe.

He was returning from Moscow, where he had been reporting on the Russian Revolution for some of the New York papers, he was arrested, turned over to the US Army, who scheduled him for execution because of this cartoon.

Just amazing.

It's just this wonderful history that has been completely forgotten.

Now, political cartoons have unfortunately faded considerably over the years.

When I was a teenager, they were still a big thing.

You'd pick up the newspaper, there'd be, on a Sunday for example, on the Plain Dealer, there'd be a page of political cartoons.

And they were extremely well paid, which they certainly were not when I was doing it.

And they had huge readerships, and they had a lot of influence.

And we've lost that.

And I think we're the lesser because of it.

They were silenced.

Corporate media just didn't have space in their concept of what media was for political cartoonists.

They were too much of a loose cannon.

I mean, can you imagine running this cartoon?

I don't think that any corporate paper would do that.

Now, this story, it actually starts out in Cleveland.

This is the old Press Building on East 9th.

I started it in Cleveland mainly because I wanted to draw this building.

I really, really been fascinated with this building over the years.

I gave an interview to a Dutch newspaper.

I think it was before the pandemic even.

And the article came out and the intro was, Derf's entire body of work is set within a 20-kilometer radius of the house he grew up in.

And I thought, is that true?

And I quickly did the checklist and I thought, oh yeah, it is true.

So when I approached the next project, which I hadn't landed on yet, I was determined that it was gonna be set somewhere other than Ohio.

But you know, I couldn't break away completely.

So the book starts out in Ohio and then it moves to Greenwich Village.

Yeah, we'll go through that.

This is the very early days of comics too, and I don't know if anyone's interested in this here, but you'd be amazed how much of early comicdom, and a lot of this is uncollected, a lot of it's lost, how much of it came through Cleveland.

Almost all of it.

And when you spread that a little further to all of Ohio, it is almost everything.

It eventually all landed in New York or Chicago, which were the 2 publishing hubs, but it all came out of Ohio.

The Yellow Kid, which I'm sure you've heard about, the first newspaper comic strip, he's from south of Columbus.

And several of my masses cartoonists are from Ohio.

And it just goes on and on from there.

I could go on forever about that, but I don't think you're that interested in that.

So we'll move on to— These are the masses cartoonists here.

And this is drawn by Art Young.

All of these gentlemen, almost all of them, and one woman, were set to be indicted and put on trial.

And it was no joke.

Art Young is the centerpiece.

If you don't know who Art Young is, he was the dominant cartoonist of the early 20th century.

He's just a— he was a genius.

He was a protégé of Thomas Nast, who you may have heard of.

He was the first famous political cartoonist.

Boss Tweed.

He also created the modern Santa Claus.

This was a very significant cartoonist, and Art Young followed him.

They worked together, in fact.

These are the first, these are some of the Masses staff who were put on trial.

This is them in front of the, The Courthouse.

Now this is a classic Art Young cartoon here.

You see this giant fat oligarch with a ladder running up and some poor child laborer feeding profits into his open mouth.

No doubt what he's trying to say here, but you know, you could run this cartoon today, just change child labor factory to third-world sweatshop, and this cartoon is still perfectly relevant.

But more importantly, he was absolutely solid in his politics.

He was a socialist, a non-Bolshevik socialist, he described himself.

But he had a wonderful sense of humor.

He was, he was a very funny guy and just a beloved individual.

So he was the first person they targeted because he was a celebrity.

Here's another Art Young cartoon.

This again, you could run.

This shows a giant machinery with 2 large hands pushing a vast crowd of people over the abyss into the unemployment dump.

And the machine has the label Modern Machinery.

Change that to artificial intelligence and you could run this cartoon right now.

And just look at the technique and the mastery of line.

And the composition, I mean, these men were— I mean, their work is just staggering.

I looked at it when I was young and just marveled and tried to, in a very pathetic way, emulate what I was seeing here.

This is the one that got him indicted.

It was Ran in the Masses, and it's a group of men dancing around on the floor of a ballroom, throwing money in the air, dancing gleefully.

One is an editor, a capitalist, a politician, and a minister.

And they look like they're having a grand time.

And up in the balcony, Satan is leading a band of— in a merry dance, and the band is playing war cannons and war drums.

And there's no doubt what he's saying here.

But this got him an indictment, and he was put on trial facing 15 years in prison, which would have been a death sentence for him because he was not a young man.

This is Art, he did a self-portrait here.

The bludgeon that was used to silence critics of the Wilson administration was called the Sedition Act.

Any of you know what that one was?

That basically erased the First Amendment.

And so here's Art Young drawing himself as a little dog with a muzzle, It says, Sedition Act for the Safety of the Public.

They laughed in the face of this, but it was no joke.

And this is more Robert Minor, the guy who did the cartoon on The Perfect Soldier.

It's labeled simply Pittsburgh, and it's a very dramatic drawing of a soldier running through a Union worker with a bayonet.

Powerful, powerful image.

Notice the contrast here between what Minor's work and Art Young's work.

Art Young with his precise ink lines and very skilled craftsmanship.

Minor worked in crayon, black lithocrayon, and he's just grinding the crayon into the paper.

You can almost sense the rage with which he drew this cartoon, which it's Titled Pittsburgh, which refers to a bloody labor clash in Pittsburgh when soldiers were sent in to crush a strike.

There I am with the original.

It's in the Library of Congress, which has a huge collection of original art.

I mean, my hand was shaking as I was holding this thing, I can tell you.

That's Robert Minor here, drawn by Art Young.

You can get a sense of what he was like just from this drawing.

Defiant, unmovable, and that was Minor.

Minor, unfortunately, is a tragic figure, and this is another thing I like about this story, is all of these cartoonists were so different, not just stylistically, as I just described, but in terms of their character.

Art Young never wavered.

He was the same at the beginning and at the end.

Robert Minor, on the other hand, changed dramatically.

And I consider him a tragic figure.

He went from being— he started out as an anarchist, believe it or not, which is a very strange political theory that had a lot of traction in the early 20th century.

And then became— when he visited Russia, he was so inspired, he became a communist.

He became a Bolshevik, then a full-blown communist, then a Stalinist, and then a Communist Party apparatchik.

And at that point, he gave up cartooning.

As Art Young put it, he gave up being a great cartoonist to become a third-rate politician.

And eventually became the head of Communist Party USA, and then was purged.

So, are we out of time here?

Or can I keep going?

You can go a little bit more, then we're gonna talk.

Okay.

Then we're gonna get questions.

All right.

So let's talk about one that you may know, George Bellows.

This is The Stag at Sharkey's, the famous boxing match painting, which is in the Cleveland Museum of Art, his masterpiece, and I love it.

I mean, I fell in love with this painting when I was a teenager.

Again, it's just, this book is an indulgent hobby from front to back on my part.

But George Bellows began as a cartoonist for the masses.

And he would do stories like— he would do pieces like this, which is just this wonderful detailed drawing of the Lower East Side tenements, which butted up right against the Village.

This was considered completely inappropriate, so this in itself is a radical cartoon.

It was not approved subject matter in art circles, and indeed Art Young didn't think much of this type of work either, because Bellows and several of his colleagues did a lot of drawings like this, just to show what life was like among the poor.

And Art Young is the one who named them the Ashcan School, meaning they just drew garbage cans and alleyways and dirty tenements.

And the name stuck.

And now the Ashcan School is one of the revered art movements, American art movements.

And Bellows went on to achieve a lot of fame, but he started out actually as a cartoonist for Ohio State.

He went to Ohio State.

He started out as a cartoonist for student publications.

75 years later, I was a cartoonist for student publications at Ohio State.

So I've always felt a great deal of kinship with him.

Another tragic figure.

Bellows went the other way.

Bellows became a pro-war patriot.

In fact, he volunteered to join the Tank Corps.

Luckily, they turned him down.

And he died young, burst appendix.

So he died at age 34, and we lost a great voice.

Just let me talk— I'll wrap up here, okay, Mike?

The influence of The Masses on me personally, profound.

I was looking for inspiration, and I found it.

This is one of the great covers.

That's a piece I did about 5 years later.

See the similarity?

It served me well.

And I like that, I like this drawing so much of 2 workers shaking hands through a brick wall that they shattered, that I included it in the book as a spiked Masses cover.

This is another guy, William Gropper, who was very prolific in The Masses and the subsequent publication, The Liberator, once The Masses was closed.

And you can see the influence he had on me when I began doing my comic strip, The City.

These guys helped me become whatever I became.

And the COVID actually comes from a time at the— my time at the Plain Dealer when I was wrapping up my political cartoonist career.

I was the backup political cartoonist at the Cleveland Plain Dealer for a couple years.

This is a piece I did on apartheid, a giant fist squeezing a guy painfully.

Became the COVID I found that I was unable to draw political cartoons after I gave it up.

I just lost those skills, so I mined my own work.

I plagiarized myself to come up with a cover.

But I encourage you to read the book, obviously.

I wrote it.

And it is a— it's not just an art lesson.

I mean, it is really a lesson in freedom of expression and those who stood their ground.

And it's an incredibly inspirational story.

A painful story, because it does not end well.

It's not a happy tale.

But I think we have a— we can learn a lot from the courage that these cartoonists showed.

Okay.

Hello, folks.

I'm Mike McIntyre from Ideastream Public Media.

And we're going to talk a little bit now with Derf about his work.

First of all, thank you for answering every question that I had written out.

In your presentation, but I've got a few more.

And then we're going to have some questions from the audience as well, the usual Q&A period here at the City Club.

When I took this book on a short weekend vacation with my brother and sister-in-law and my wife, I took the book out and he said, you're bringing a book that big to a vacation book?

You know, it should be something smaller.

And then I opened it and he saw all the drawings and the pictures and he said, oh, it's a comic book.

Yeah, I know, I get that a lot.

But it's not a comic book, it's a novel.

And then when I— a graphic novel.

But when I got to the back of it, that's when stuff got really heavy.

I can't believe the amount of research and footnotes that you have in this.

And it makes me think that— and I've seen all your other work and I'm big fans of Kent State and Trashed and My Friend Dahmer.

But what about the workload for this in comparison to other works that you've done?

Similar, um, I mean, My Friend Dahmer took 19 years to complete, so, for a variety of reasons.

My Friend Dahmer is the true story of my teenage friendship with the strange boy who would grow up to be the most infamous serial killer since Jack the Ripper.

We were friends down in Richfield at Revere High School during junior high and high school.

So, you know, I had a lot of issues going on with that one.

Trashed was simpler.

Kent State took me 4 years.

That was a tough one.

A lot of research, a lot of archives, a lot of interviews.

This book was almost entirely archive work because obviously everyone's dead.

So I didn't have, I didn't have that place to start like I did with Kent State.

Yeah, it was, it was, every book's a different challenge and every book you know, takes a different amount of time.

It just depends on the book.

I mean, people ask me, why did My Friend Dahmer take 19 years?

And my answer is, it took 19 years because that's how long it took.

Um, yeah, I would like to do a book that's not quite this difficult next time.

This book has you in it.

We didn't mention that in your presentation here, but a version of you, Joe Hurdle, right?

Um, tell me about how he came to be in your mind, and why you decided to use this fictional character to tell this real story.

Well, I needed a narrator, because I needed to explain these cartoons, as I was talking about, to put them in context, to explain why they were so incendiary.

Because without that, you're just looking at a cartoon, and you don't understand the issues, you don't understand what's happening, you don't understand the trends in cartooning, or the trends in media.

I needed somebody who could bring that together.

And I wrestled with that because I wanted it to be a cartoonist, but these damn cartoonists, I mean, they just kept coming and going, they never stayed in one place.

So I had to go with somebody that I knew would be there throughout the story.

Yeah, I wrestled with that to the end.

I mean, I don't know, I think it works effectively, but I couldn't imagine another way to do it.

Oh, it works.

The question that I had though is, as you're writing this character, are you seeing yourself?

Like, he's a fanboy.

He loves the work that they do.

He then tries to dip his toe into it and admits that he's nothing like what they are because they're such heroes to him.

Did you feel yourself in that?

Sure.

I mean, I was tapping into my own experience there, especially as a young cartoonist, you know, toiling away at the Cleveland Plain Dealer or the Ohio State Lantern.

It also let me work in some of the immigrant fears of this time, which were massive.

But it was a different set of immigrants.

Back then, they were worried about European immigrants.

In fact, they welcomed Latinos because they wanted them to work the fields.

So it was Germans, Hungarians, Italians, Greeks— they didn't want any of them.

And there was a lot of prejudice directed their way, which I knew about because my ancestors, my grandmother's family, were German Americans.

So they were immigrants.

So I heard these stories my whole life, and I wanted to work that into the story as well.

And the problem with the Masters cartoonists is they were all native-born.

So I needed somebody to be able to inject that into the story.

The only exception was one cartoonist, who was a Russian immigrant.

I could have— that would have worked, except he got thrown in jail halfway through the story, and he was in prison for the rest of the story.

So, well, I mean, there were logistical problems, so I needed that narrator, and I just wound up inventing him.

I've talked to a number of people that have read the book, and I've seen the national coverage, and it really refers to how this era, so closely mirrors in so many ways, and you mentioned it earlier, this era.

The idea of immigrant crackdowns, the idea of freedom of expression and the press crackdowns.

Did you feel that while you were doing the writing, or did it just start getting closer and closer?

The rails got closer as you were finishing?

Yes, it got closer.

I thought it would be— I thought there would certainly be parallels.

I didn't think it would be that kind of chilling parallel.

And that happened with my last book too, Kent State.

Which came out in 2020, right after— by the time I finished the book and it was published, we had the Black Lives Matter protests taking place in Portland and other places.

And I just thought, oh my God, you know, we're going to repeat the same thing here.

I started this book in the middle of the Biden administration.

So, I mean, it was a different landscape.

You could see what was coming, sort of, but it hadn't yet come into focus.

And we certainly didn't imagine it would become what it did.

Uh, so I, you know, I don't want to call it a happy accident, but I mean, it's certainly, uh, the parallels are, I mean, they're jaw-dropping.

Well, even this week with the midterm elections and the blue wave, uh, you saw that in Wilson's era.

Wilson's downfall was the exact same thing.

Yeah, he lost both houses of Congress because he betrayed all his alliances, and he got clobbered.

And then the story gets even weirder after that, but I won't give that part away.

If you want to read it, you can find out what happens to Woodrow Wilson.

Yeah, I don't understand it.

The curious thing to me, the more I thought about it, is the dissidents take place in 1918, 1917.

Roughly 50 years after that, we have the events of Kent State.

In that horrible, those horrible period in American history with Nixon and COINTELPRO and, you know, the crushing of protest and the radical uprising and just all of that.

Then 50 years after Kent State, we have what we're going through now.

Seems like every half century we repeat ourselves.

You wonder how many times can we repeat ourselves before we just fall into the abyss.

But then you and I won't be around in 50 years, so I guess it doesn't matter.

Good point.

The Sedition Act, you referenced it in your speech, lasted just a couple of years, said that it was illegal to print, write, publish, or utter any, quote, disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the government or the military.

Your career would have lasted about 3 days.

Oh yeah, I don't think yours would have lasted a whole lot longer.

My favorite part of that is, is the concept of seditious utterings.

And there were people that were actually thrown in prison for that utterings, meaning if you mumbled, you know, in say in the factory or in the office, friggin' Wilson, bam, they could turn you into the American Protective League, and then the next thing you know, you're being dragged off and put on trial.

It's mind-boggling.

You're big in France.

I'm big in France.

You're big here, but you're really big in France.

And, and I was thinking about the parallels here that we discussed, but Looking at what's going on in France right now, it's burning.

I was just talking to some of my friends over there about that.

Yeah, because I'm scheduled to go there in a couple weeks, so that'll be interesting.

I've already been tear-gassed once when I was in France during the, the Yellow Vest protests.

I stepped off a train into a protest and got a face full of gas.

I don't really want to repeat that.

So, you know, God bless the French, they're always protesting about something.

And they love comics, so I mean, it's a wonderland.

You had a 2-word answer we can't put on the radio when I asked you this before, but I'm gonna ask you anyway.

So what's next?

Geez, next is selling this book, and I just keep selling and selling, probably through next summer, and then I'll take a little break, and then I'll figure something out.

The drawing in this book is just... It's so excellent, and it's so detailed.

When I looked at some of these pages have like 4 or 5 or 6 panels on them.

When you're drawing, how are you mapping out that I'm going to tell this story in a way that sometimes it's 1 page and 1 piece of art, and sometimes it has to be 6?

Well, the narrative determines that, and that's— it's all intuitive at this point.

I just learn how to.

Tell a story.

I have my own way of telling a story.

It comes from a lifetime of reading and making comics, and I've taken pretty well to long-form storytelling, much better than I did at comic strips or political cartoons, which basically means I wasted 30 years of my career.

But that's beside the point.

And it's just, it's just that it's very natural.

I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it.

I guess I'm a good storyteller.

You said we're not in a great era for political cartooning today, clearly compared to 100 years ago, but where are we in the era of graphic novels?

Oh, it's a golden era, yeah.

I mean, there are more graphic novels being published now, there are hundreds published every year, maybe thousands.

It's really taken off.

When I started making graphic novels, it was barely a thing.

There were maybe a handful of publishers that put out graphic novels.

I had trouble finding a publisher for My Friend Dahmer, for example.

It took me years.

I mean, obviously the subject matter is a little bizarre, but it's a very— it's not the book you think it is.

I mean, there's no violence in it at all.

It's this very melancholy look back at this kid who fell between the cracks.

I was rejected by every publisher in the biz, and now it's in its 21st printing.

Which I take great delight in reminding the other publishers I run into from time to time.

So yeah, it's completely changed.

And if you are a comics fan or interested in comics, I envy you because there is so much good material out there right now.

You showed the cartoon of the hands pushing people into the unemployment dump and mentioned that it could be AI.

And I was thinking too, your unique kind of work is yours.

It's Derf's drawings.

But I think if it's— if AI is scraping books and the internet, and I say to AI, I would like you to create an image for me that looks like a fist squeezing a person, it probably could do it.

Are you worried about what AI is going to do to this art form?

Not particularly.

Why not?

Well, there's a huge AI backlash in comics.

I mean, people are not open to it at all, they're not receptive to it at all.

For myself, I'm getting more analog the more, the more that technology advances.

I mean, I do everything by hand, every word, every line, every shade, every letter in that book is put there by me by hand.

And that's the power of my kind of graphic novels, is that it's such a personal statement.

And we're all like that.

And so I, I don't see that changing.

I mean, the big corporate stuff, that'll probably— they'll probably add AI to say, you know, make a new Spider-Man or, you know, all that, uh, big Disney stuff.

But for my type of work, no, I don't see it happening.

Where does that work happen?

Where do you do your work?

Tell me about the process.

Um, I could.

I mean, it's on the slideshow.

You want to see that?

Or you just want me to tell it?

Yeah, let's get the clicker.

All right.

I buzzed right through that, in fact.

I didn't think anybody would be interested, so thank you, Mike.

So here's how I write.

They're called thumbnails.

It's on an 8.5 by 11 sheet of paper, and it's just a very rough outline of what I'm working on.

I put in the words, I put in the narration, it's the whole thing.

It's just enough for me to remember what I'm doing here.

Then I do a very detailed pencil.

This is on an 11 by 17 sheet of paper.

This is in an office at home or something?

Yeah, it's in my studio at home.

When you see the thumbnail and you look at the pencil, you see how close that is.

I just see these scenes like little film clips that play in my head.

It's like, okay, there, yeah, yeah.

And I work it out on the rough very quickly, very intuitively, and then I spend a lot of time on the pencil working it in.

And then I use a fresh piece of paper and a light tablet, which is a big drawing board with light shining through it so you can see the outlines, and I add the inks.

So again, it goes 1, 2, 3.

I mean, it's pretty simple.

Pretty much spot on.

But I mean, it looks easy here, but of course that's 285 pages of thumbnails, 285 pages of pencils, 285 pages of ink.

How many times do you crumple up a page and say, I screwed that one up?

Not that often, believe it or not.

Early on, I think I did a lot more of that, but at this point, maybe my standards have dropped, but at this point, Yeah, I really didn't have a lot of redos.

All right, well, at this point we're going to begin our audience Q&A here at City Club.

For those just joining via our livestream and radio audience, I'm Mike McIntyre, editor-in-chief at Ideastream Public Media.

I'm the moderator for today's conversation.

Joining me on stage is Derf.

He's an American cartoonist and author.

We're discussing his latest graphic novel, The Dissidents.

We welcome questions from everyone— City Club members, guests and those joining via our livestream at cityclub.org or the live radio broadcast on 89.7 WKSU, IdeaStream Public Media.

If you'd like to text a question for Derf, text it to 330-541-5794.

Again, 330-541-5794.

City Club staff will try to work that into the program.

Let's have our first question, please.

Hello.

We're going to start with a text question.

It reads, can you talk about the representation of women in political cartoons and graphic and how have you seen it changing?

Oh, wow.

And we see Cornelia Barnes is the one that you mentioned.

Yes, Cornelia Barnes is who I didn't get a chance to talk about.

I do in my longer lecture.

Cornelia Barnes was actually one of the masses cartoonists.

She was next in line to be indicted.

She was the— I consider her the first great woman political cartoonist.

But yeah, obviously it was a very different time.

I mean, just the thought of a woman political cartoonist in 1915 was pretty, radical thinking.

Comics today is absolutely packed with women.

Now, not necessarily— well, superhero comics are too.

I mean, you've got to understand, in comics there's 2 different worlds.

There's the superhero stuff, the mainstream stuff, and then there's everything else.

And I'm part of everything else.

So I don't really know what goes on in the superhero world that much.

But in my types of comics, graphic novels, self-published comics, small press comics, all of that.

There are, I think, some of the best practitioners working are women.

So especially over the last, I would say the millennials are the ones who really started to turn it around, the millennial creators.

And now it's very open to women.

And there are the usual problems.

But I see more and more women going into the field than ever, especially, and a lot of queer women.

I mean, queer comics really, and that's what we call it, queer comics.

Queer comics really launched the graphic novel golden era.

It was a few really important books early on, especially Alison Bechdel, who did a book called Fun Home.

That suddenly mainstream publishers, big publishers, suddenly got interested in the rest of us, and it just energized the field.

So women have changed everything in comics.

Yeah.

We don't have NEA Comics Service anymore, which you mentioned in Cleveland was basically the hub for distributing 80% of comics across the country.

So how do, how do people who do this get a foothold now?

Good question.

I don't know.

People ask me that all the time, younger creators.

The path I took is gone, 'cause I came up through newspapers.

They just try to get their work into the right hands, and it's not easy.

I think what I tell creators all the time is that it's all about the work.

If you do great work, it will find a way.

It will find its way into the hands of where it needs to be.

And, you know, My Friend Dahmer is a perfect example of that.

It found its way to Abrams and my editor, and my career took off after that.

But it was all about that work.

So do the work.

That's the only— that's the only hope I can offer.

Just do the work and make it good.

Next question, please.

Regarding your current work, is there an institution that has a complete or an almost complete archive of The Masses and its publications?

There is indeed.

NYU.

The NYU Library has a complete archive of The Masses and its subsequent publication, The Liberator, online and downloadable.

And I would highly recommend going there.

You can read every issue.

And indeed, I did do just that.

It was a great, great resource tool.

I can't imagine, I mean, before that I would've had to go to New York to find that.

And I believe the New York Public Library also has a complete archive as well.

So yes, it's out there, but it's rare.

And regarding My Friend Dahmer, which clearly has been a great success despite the challenges of finding a publisher, were there early reactions to it that surprised you, either among those people who went to Revere High School or in the press or elsewhere in the world?

No, it was really critically acclaimed early on.

I think before people knew what the book was about, there was some outrage, like, oh God.

I mean, they imagined just from the title what it was going to be, and it's of course nothing like that.

But once the book came out, then that criticism died down.

It's, you know, people just said, oh well, I mean, it's not what we thought it was.

What did you think of the film based on the book?

It was a very interesting experience.

It was filmed here in Akron and Bath and some scenes up here in Cleveland.

I've never had anything quite like that, and I got to walk the red carpet at Tribeca, which was like Quasimodo lurching across the screen.

I mean, it was It was a unique experience.

Okay, next question please.

All right, we have another text question here, and it reads, how have European cartoonists influenced American cartoonists throughout history, and how does that influence continue to shape their work today?

The wonderful thing about comics is that it, it really doesn't have borders, and it flies back and forth across The Atlantic, and obviously Japan with manga.

And there's just, there's no end to it.

And the sharing of ideas and the sharing of influences is, it's a really wonderful thing to see.

I was heavily influenced by European comics when I was starting out because I, you know, I had a, I was a big fan of that.

The cartoonists of the masses, were heavily influenced by the European cartoonists at the time, who were mostly working in Germany and Switzerland and Austria.

And they shared ideas until, of course, the war shut that down.

So this has been going on since the very beginning, and I think it's a strength of our art form.

Thank you.

Next question, please.

When you're making your books, do you write the narrative first, or are you writing the narrative while you're doing the drawings as well?

Well, so the thumbnail that I showed, that's my— that's what I call writing.

I mean, it's always the words and pictures together.

I'm always thinking, they're always combined.

Oh, so you don't have a— you're not writing a manuscript and then illustrating it?

No.

Each frame is also the words in that order?

Yeah, yeah.

It's very similar to how— well, I don't know.

I mean, film, it's similar to how the films are laid out at some point.

But yeah, for me, it's always been the image and the words together.

Now, I will work on a bit of dialogue on the side, or maybe I'll do a timeline to get everything in order.

I love timelines.

I do that a lot to just get everything, make sure everything's factual.

But then when I actually write, it's always words and pictures together.

Yes, sir.

I loved your book.

My Friend Dahmer is one of my best books that I— Oh, thank you.

Look at it again and again.

The year that book came out, Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco collaborated to produce their The Days of Revolt.

Do you think that that kind of political history writing has increased in graphic novel territory, or?

Since then?

Or— yeah, we don't see like recent protest movements, like let's say the 2020 protests that happened, right?

It's hard.

Well, because graphic novels take so long to do.

I mean, it's hard to do it right in the moment.

It would have to be a very different type of process.

It'd be very sketchy.

Um, so I don't know how you'd pull that off.

I mean, Joe Sacco, if you don't know who he is, he's an absolute master of graphic novels.

Chris Hedges is a very famous journalist and podcaster.

In fact, I was just on his podcast.

And they do excellent work.

And I mean, there's— nonfiction comics are huge right now, and I get asked to speak about that a lot because, you know, some graphic novels, if you're coming out of art school, I mean, it's not really something that those skills are not something you have.

Since I didn't come out of art school, I came out of journalism school, I guess I have those skills.

But yeah, it's wide open now, and I'm happy to see it.

I mean, it's a really fertile subgenre of comics.

Got time for one more?

Absolutely.

So ending with another text question, what examples can you share about the direct impact of political cartoons from the past or present?

Good Lord.

You have 1 minute, go.

Well, the most famous is, of course, Thomas Nast back in the 1870s, who toppled Boss Tweed and the Democratic Party machine, corrupt Democratic Party machine in New York, almost single-handedly through his cartoons.

That's where it started.

That's when people realized how powerful these things were.

And another example would be the cartoonists I write about in this book.

I mean, they were such a threat that, you know, hell, they tried to kill them.

That's it.

Thank you.

I want to say thanks to you, Derf Backderf, for joining us at the City Club Today Forum.

Programs like this one are made possible thanks to generous support from individuals like you.

You can learn more about how to become a member of the City Club, how to support student engagement, at cityclub.org/passthemic.

M-I-K-E, pass the mic.

The City Club would like to welcome guests at the tables hosted by the Friends of Dave Nash and the Cleveland State University School of Communications.

Our gratitude as well to Max Backs for providing on-site book sales of The Dissidents, which Derf is going to be signing.

Just after the show today.

Today's forum is part of the City Club's Authors in Conversation series, made possible thanks to Cuyahoga Arts and Culture and the Cuyahoga County Public Library.

Thank you once again to Derf and to our members and friends of the City Club.

This forum is now adjourned.

For information on upcoming speakers or for podcasts of the City Club, go to cityclub.org.

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