PoliticalBastards.com featured on Editor and Publisher

Let me again point you to the new animated site by my friends Mike Shelton and Jocelyn Leger: PoliticalBastards.com.

The latest animation — which pops up right away — is one of Obama’s new “change you can believe in” policy on taxes. I’m still chuckling about it. A snapshot is above; the actual animation is the real thing.

President Obama is going to be a rich vein of humor for our two animators. It almost makes me look forward to paying higher taxes.

Editor and Publisher, a newspaper industry magazine, just wrote a nice feature on their site:

“Animation is where the future of editorial cartooning is heading,” Shelton told E&P.

“It’s an exciting time as political cartoonists animate, take it to the Web, and hope the art form doesn’t die out,” Leger added during a separate phone interview.

As followers of the newspaper business know, the number of staff cartoonists at print dailies has dropped sharply in recent years.

Animation IS labor-intensive; Leger said each new weekly offering can take as much as 60-80 hours to create. But she hastened to add that “we have a passion for it. It’s fun.”

Shelton agreed, noting: “It’s been a lot of fun and it’s been a lot of work”….

The duo hopes the new site — designed by Leger — will eventually become self-supporting via ad revenue after traffic for PoliticalBastards.com grows. “We think there’s an audience for it,” she said.

Currently, the site includes faux ads. Visitors will, after a minute or so, see caricatures of Joseph Biden and Fred Thompson emerge out of the lower left corner of the home page and run across the screen into the faux beer ad in the upper right corner.

“Jocelyne’s a wiz at special effects,” said Shelton.

This is the future of political animation and their site is going gangbusters. Don’t miss the laughs.

(Here’s my original article on PoliticalBastards.com.)