Wash Post presumably fires Bob Staake, as it ends longtime reader favorite Style Invitational contest

or, more accurately, “Wash Post cancels weekly Style Invitational contest illustrated for 29 years by Bob Staake.”

 

by Mike Rhode (updated 12/3 with comments from Bob) 

 

Bob Staake has been illustrating the Style Invitational contest for well over a decade... actually it's been for three of them. Buried in this story about firing the Post's dance critic (another loss as the paper tries to shrink to greatness, AGAIN) is this nugget, "The paper has also eliminated its weekly Style Invitational humor contest, which involved ending the contract of former longtime Post editor and current contributor Pat Myers." Meyers wrote a column herself as well. And Bob wrote in correcting my headline (which is fair - I wrote it to get attention to the grievous loss of yet more cartooning), noting, "I wasn’t “fired,” the Post simply cancelled a humor column that I illustrated. They didn’t cancel ME. It seems to me the more apropos headline would be 'Wash Post cancels weekly Style Invitational contest illustrated for 29 years by Bob Staake.' No matter how you look at it that’s a Hell of a run and all good things must come to an end." Bob is completely accurate, and we regret the misleading headline, but as they say in the news biz, "if it bleeds, it leads."

One of Staake's last illos

Staake has created an illustration for the contest which has run in color in the Style section (NOT the magazine which they also killed this week) since 1992 (or 1994) and has conservatively probably done 1500 cartoons for it over the thirty years. When he wrote to us here in 2009, he also noted that he'd been working for the Post for 25 years at that time, which puts him starting doing work for them in 1984.  You can find ComicsDC's coverage of him here and it goes across multiple pages. At one point when I mentioned him, out of the blue, he sent me a drawing of WWMRD (what would Mike Rhode do?) which hangs over my dining room table. When he was in town for the National Book Festival, after doing the poster for them, I interviewed him for "Illustrator Bob Staake on Dark Humor, New Yorker Covers, and Analog Art in a Digital World," Aug. 28, 2014, http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/artsdesk/books/2014/08/28/illustrator-bob-staake-on-dark-humor-new-yorker-covers-and-analog-art-in-a-digital-world/ and it was reprinted in the International Journal of Comic Art.

Empress Meyers writes of him, "To Bob Staake, Gene's and then my visual partner since 1994 — way longer than either of us. Over the decades while Bob gained wide renown as a New Yorker cover artist and bestselling children's book author and illustrator, Bob continued to send a cartoon to the Invite, as "really the only steady job I've ever had." Bob and I have met in person only once — he lives on Cape Cod — but every week we're the Invite version of the Kramdens, bickering and threatening to send each other to the moon, but aww we make up."

The end of this contest is probably the last vestige of all the Miami Herald staff and innovations that actually made the Post a must-read for many years beginning in the 1980s as the Watergate sheen was beginning to wear off. I've never entered the Invitational, but I know many people who have, and am sure the complaints about this have started. Personally, I'll miss seeing Staake's cartoon.

I used to compile a list of cartoonists appearing in local publications back when it was worth doing. Here's one from 2007, of which barely any of the publications still exist, and only Matt Wuerker at Politico is really soldiering on.

Cartoonists in Washington, DC area newspapers as of late May 2007

Washington Post
-Tom Toles - editorial cartoonist (semi-daily)
-Richard Thompson - Richard's Poor Almanac (Saturdays); Cul de Sac strip (Sunday's Magazine), illustrations for Joel Achenbach's Rough Draft column (Sunday's Magazine)
-Rob Shepperson, Tim Grajek - illustrations for Sunday's Business section
-Nick Galifianakis - cartoons for ex-wife Carolyn Hax's Tell Me About It advice column.
-Bob Staake - cartoons for Style Invitational contest (Sunday)
-Patrick M. Reynolds - Flashback comic strip; unique Washington version (Sunday comics)
-Eric Shansby - illustrations for Gene Weingarten's Below the Beltway column (Sunday's Magazine)
-Christopher Gash; Christopher Neimen - spot illos especially on Sunday
-Michael Cavna - editorial cartoons in Arts section, extremely irregularly
-Julie Zhu - Montgomery Blair High School student cartoonist for Extra Credit column in local Extra sections
-Saturday box of syndicated editorial cartoons
-Turkish cartoonist Selcuk Demirel illustrations in Book World, semi-regularly

Of the Post people, 15 years later Richard's dead, we gained Ann Telnaes as an online animated political cartoonist, Toles was replaced by Michael de Adder (on contract from Canada, and they're running his piece too small and in b&w on the opinion page), the Saturday box of 4 political cartoonists is still there, Nick Galifianakis continues to illustrate Carolyn Hax's column albeit from an undisclosed location that's not Northern VA, Reynold's retired his Flashbacks strip this fall, and Cavna and Dave Betancourt cover comics stories but far less than they did when their Comic Riffs blog existed. And the Post has 2 pages of comics daily, down from 3, and printed microscopically, and 1 section of Sunday comics, instead of 2. Awww, get the hell off my lawn already. 

 

Updated: Friend of ComicsDC, cartoonist Clay Jones pointed out that Staake had posted about this on his FB page.