New Yorker cartoonist not cool with “appropriation”

New Yorker cartoonist David Sipress pens–in text and image–his feelings and thoughts concerning artist Karl Haendel’s use of Sipress’s cartoon in one of Haendel’s art projects. Sipress,

I’m willing to bet every penny I’ve earned granting permission to reprint the cartoon in question that Mr. Haendel is, even now, bent over a light box, tracing someone else’s work of art, perhaps even another New Yorker cartoon. (According to the cartoon-related Web site Attempted Bloggery, to date Haendel has appropriated at least twenty-seven New Yorker cartoons.)

So why hasn’t Haendel been sued? Who knows, maybe he was sent demand letters and he settled, maybe cartoonists don’t care, maybe cartoonists need a copyright refresher, or maybe Haendel doesn’t get the Prince royal treatment on Instagram. Regardless, Haendel’s defense is likely to be that his work “critiques” something, perhaps “post-post-capitalism in a neo-Colonial mindset absorbed and transgressed with migration, subjectivity, impeachments, representation, existence, love, hate, and the Pez dispenser.”