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We Added a New and Old Cartoonist

One of my favorite cartoonists has rejoined our CagleCartoons.com newspaper syndication package this week. Cuban cartoonist, Alen Lauzán, who emigrated to Chile and works from Santiago. Alan uses no words in his cartoons and has a wonderful, illustrative style. He’s back after eight years away. Welcome back Alen!

No cartoonist in Cuba has ever drawn Fidel Castro – but ex-patriot Cubans draw Fidel all the time! Here’s a great Fidel as Freddy Krueger that Alen drew back in 2008.

Alan likes to draw cartoons about technology, usually combining the old with the new, like this one …

Here’s Lauzon’s take on Liberty …

 

 

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The Clinton Foundation

Now, as I’m looking at this “Clinton Foundation” cartoon I notice that I signed it TWICE as “DarylCagle.com”. That’s a ridiculous mistake that I’ve never made before.

There have been quite a few “crumbling foundation” cartoons about Hillary – I’m just another dog in the pack – except I’ve got TWO signatures. Try to beat THAT.

Here you can see me drawing this one, with my 4H pencils on Seth-Cole Dura-Lene paper. Really. It is pencil. Really.

And here I color it in Photoshop on my Wacom Cintiq.

 

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Trump and Hitler-Hillary!

When I was drawing this Trump – Hillary/Hitler cartoon I was thinking it was pretty silly, but looking at Trumps recent comments about Hillary the bigot, it isn’t too hard to get to the bottom of Godwin’s Law and jump straight to Hitler. That’s Hillary’s official State Department photo from when she was Secretary of State, with her hair made a little but blonder, and blacker.

I recently wrote a column noting how so many cartoonists have been drawing Trump as Hitler. I guess it was time for me to jump on the Hitler bandwagon. I love drawing Trump, but I haven’t quite found the shorthand caricature of Trump that I’m happy with and I struggled a bit before deciding on this face. I’ll get used to Trump before long. Or maybe not.

I had some tech problems with the video of my drawing this one – but I have the coloring video! Take a look below and check out all the cartoons and videos in my archive at DarylCagle.com.

https://youtu.be/D13FXcGtIss

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Our Proud Olympic Swimmers

I remember the jocks back in high school were a bunch of arrogant jerks, so the behavior of the American Olympic swimmers is no surprise to me. No one should look to self-entitled athletes as representative of their countries, unless we look to them as representative of the biggest jerks in their countries.

The epidemic of bad behavior among athletes is on ugly display in sex scandals at colleges across the USA, which led yesterday to the interesting resignation of Ken Starr, the former president of Baylor University where he oversaw a coverup of Baylor’s football players’ sexual assaults. Remember Ken Starr? He was the sanctimonious independent prosecutor in charge of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” to bring down Bill Clinton in the 1990’s. What goes around comes around, huh? Irony is a bitch.

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Ryan Lochte, Jimmy Feigen, Gunnar Bentz, Jack Conger and a security guard. (Notice how the swimmers naturally seek out the water.)

My cartoon is based on early news reports that described the drunken athletes breaking a door at a gas station where they stopped to go to the bathroom. More recent reports describe the swimmers peeing on the gas station building because it had no bathroom, with Lochte tearing a framed advertisement off of the building’s wall rather than breaking a door. I suppose my cartoon could be criticized as “inaccurate” but I still think it captures the gist of the event.

This swimmers scandal has stolen the oxygen from the rest of the Olympics and it has given American cartoonists a welcome respite from our toxic presidential campaign. Here are a couple of my favorite swimmer-jerk cartoons:

This one is by Sean Delonas, the long-time cartoonist for The New York Post who has started up drawing again for Cagle Cartoons. The chickens make me laugh.

 

This Steve Sack “dope” cartoon sums it all up.

 

Sometime I think that, if not for Pinocchio, there would only be half as many editorial cartoons. This one is by Dave Granlund.

Watch me draw my cartoon in real time on YouTube below!

 

Now, watch me color the cartoon on Photoshop!

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Ugly Purge Lands a Turkish Cartoonist in Jail – Again

UPDATE Friday August 19, 2016: Dogan Guzel is released! Read about it in Spanish here, and the Google translation of the article here.

Two great cartooning organizations that I support, Cartooning for Peace and Cartoonists Rights Network International are spotlighting the arrest and imprisonment of Turkish cartoonist Dogan Güzel who was swept up in a mass arrest of journalists as he was visiting colleagues at the pro-Kurdish newspaper, Özgür Gündem in central Istanbul, which was raided and closed in the wake of the failed July 15th coup in Turkey. The Turkish police reportedly confiscated computers at the newspaper offices, which editors described as “looting” on Twitter.

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Cartoonist Dogan Güzel being dragged off off to jail this week in a mass arrest at a small newspaper in Istanbul. He reportedly asked an attorney for a new shirt.

Dogan was convicted, sentenced to seventeen years in prison and spent a year and a half in jail for drawing cartoons critical of the regime in Turkey. He was given amnesty in 1999 and moved to Spain where he lived for more than ten years and was given political asylum; he is a Spanish citizen. He now lives in both Seville and Istanbul. Dogan is being held on the charge of “making propaganda for the Kurdish armed group PKK”.

The Özgür Gündem newspaper is small, with a circulation of only 6,700; it has been banned many times for its coverage of the Kurdish conflict, a continuing thorn in the side of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan who seems to be using the coup as an opportunity jail all of his critics. Here is a nice report in Spanish. There is little or no coverage of this story in English.

Cartooning for Peace is soliciting cartoonists to draw on Dogan’s behalf. Cartoonists Rights Network International posted the report below.

Cartoonist Dogan Güzel was among the journalists arrested in the government raid on the Kurdish newspaper Özgür Gündem in Istanbul on Tuesday. Photos show the cartoonist in a torn shirt in police custody. In 1999, Dogan Güzel was the first recipient of CRNI’s Courage in Political Cartooning award. At that time, he had just spent a year in jail for “drawing a cartoon that called the state ‘weak,’ and for publishing his cartoons in the Kurdish language.” Cartoonists Rights joins Reporters Without Borders in condemning the closure of the newspaper and calls for the release of the journalists.

Message from CRNI founder Robert Russell
We have recently come to know that our friend and former Courage in Editorial Cartooning award winner, Dogan Güzel, has been rounded up in a raid on his newspaper in Turkey.
 
We call on the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to quickly release our colleague Dogan Güzel, and all other journalists who are legally carrying out their professional duties in accordance with their constitutional rights. This kind of thing will happen in any country where the head of state is allowed to act as if they are more important than the constitution that they swore to protect. All of Turkey seems to be evolving into its own prison.
Robert Russell
Executive Director

Here is a sample of Dogan’s work. See more here.

DoganSample750
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Trump, Hitler and the Worst Time for Editorial Cartoons

I have the same conversation over and over. “Oh! You’re a political cartoonist! You’ve got so much great material now! What a wonderful time to be a cartoonist!” and I reply, “Well … no.” In fact, this is the worst time ever for editorial cartoonists.

Interest in politics doesn’t translate into better sales for editorial cartoons; there is still only one hole for a cartoon on the editorial page of each newspaper, even when the news is brisk.

As newspapers have suffered in recent years, and cartoonists continue to lose their staff jobs, the quality of editorial cartoons has flourished with a broader range of styles and viewpoints, and with cartoonists doing better work than ever – but that was before Donald Trump. I’m not aware of any professional political cartoonist who supports Trump. There is no range of views in cartoons about Trump.

There is an internet truism called “Godwin’s Law,” which states that the longer an online discussion goes on, the more likely it is to end up with a reference to Adolph Hitler. Cartoonists didn’t have a conversation that ended up with Trump as Hitler, we drew Trump as Hitler from the start and the Trump/Hitler metaphors continue unabated. There are countless monster cartoons with Trump’s hair or face on Godzilla, King Kong, Frankenstein, Satan, the Ku Klux Klan and Dracula.

Editorial cartoonists rely on common metaphors or “clichés” that allow us to draw cartoons that convey complex ideas with few words. Our palette of clichés is limited to images readers would know and when there is only one subject dominating the news (Trump), and only one point of view (anti-Trump), we have a recipe for matching cartoons. Endlessly matching cartoons. We see the same monsters, Pinocchios and Nazis, over and over.

The most famous example of matching cartoons came the day after the 9/11 attack when virtually all of the cartoonists in the world drew a weeping Statue of Liberty witnessing the burning twin towers. The satirical newspaper “The Onion” continues to rub salt in this cartoon wound with their parody cartoons that always feature a weeping Liberty. Nowadays the Statue of Liberty kicks Trump out, or Trump is Lady Liberty kicking immigrants. Every famous statue has Trump hair, or a full Trump face, especially the Lincoln Memorial and Mount Rushmore. There are not enough cliché statues for Trump. When passions run high there are too few arrows in the cartoonists’ cliché quiver that are powerful enough to express outrage.

Editorial cartoons are at their best when they make witty, graphic arguments on issues where there are different opinions and where minds can be swayed. The Trump cartoons are simple name-calling, reviled by Trump’s supporters and appreciated by Trump’s foes. No minds are swayed by these cartoons.

I distribute a group of about eighty top political cartoonists and columnists to hundreds of subscribing newspapers. My best customers for reprints are school textbooks and testing services because editorial cartoons are included on state mandated AP Social Studies testing – but the book and test clients don’t want to buy Trump/monster cartoons.

Most syndicated columnists and pundits are riding the Trump-bashing train too, but their matching arguments are somehow excused as consensus. Readers may tear Trump/Hitler cartoons out of the newspaper to stick on their refrigerators, but they never tear out Trump/Hitler columns to stick on the fridge. We just don’t notice columns like we notice cartoons so cartoonists suffer while columnists, who are equally banal, benefit from being less obviously banal.

We don’t see positive cartoons about Hillary Clinton either. Cartooning is a negative art and a supportive cartoon is a lousy cartoon. Hillary is a rich character that we have known for decades. There is a grand history with Hillary and Bill Clinton that gives us many more clichés for a broader cartoon palette. If Trump loses in November we should enjoy four years of great Hillary cartoons.

If Trump wins in November, the Trump-monster cartoon-apocalypse will continue. God save us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Hillary and Trump – @#%$!!

I almost didn’t draw this cartoon, because Hillary and Trump would never wear t-shirts and it just looked wrong – but then I got the idea of having them wear the t-shirts on top of their pant-suit and suit-suit, and that struck me as funny!

I also struggled with Hillary’s face in this one, as you can see in the video below. That’s the problem with these videos; all my struggles are on full display. The magic is gone.

In the next video I clean up my messy drawing and color it in Photoshop with my Wacom Cintiq.

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Off the Record TRUMP DISASTER and Cavemen Cartoonists

Today’s cartoon isn’t really an exaggeration – this is what “on-the-record” and “off-the-record” interviews with GOP politicians are really like these days. Sometimes a cartoon is nothing but a slice of life.

I’m setting up my studio again in Los Angeles after my move back from Nashville and I’ll hopefully be drawing more cartoons! This is the first one I’ve live-streamed from my new setup. There are too many things to remember with the streaming; with this one, I forgot the little sandpaper that I like to have on the side as I draw, to make the chisel points on my pencils – so I went outside and grabbed a couple of rocks. I can draw with rocks instead of sandpaper, just like the caveman editorial cartoonists used to do, back in the days of newspapers and dinosaurs as I saw depicted on my recent visit to the Creation Museum in Kentucky, where they recently opened a $100 million full size replica of Noah’s Ark, funded by taxpayers. The project is supported by $60 million in tax-free municipal bonds and ongoing tax support from a sales tax rebate and a tax on wages of all the employees who work for businesses in the Ark’s tax district, along with an $18 million tax rebate from the Kentucky Tourism Development Finance Authority. Here’s a nice article about it.

Gotta love Kentucky. The video below shows me drawing the “Off the Record” cartoon, rocks and all.  Thank God.

In the next video I color the cartoon, like a modern cartoonist on my Wacom Cintiq.

 

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Trump and the Khan Family

The Democratic National Convention seems to have all boiled down to one speaker, Khizr Khan, who’s son was killed in action in Iraq, and who’s speech wasn’t even scheduled in prime time. Trump wants to strike back at anyone who criticizes him, without regard to who is giving the criticism.  Tone-deaf Trump compares his own “sacrifice” as a businessman to the Kahn’s sacrifice.

And on the other side, it is interesting to see the GOP stalwarts stand up for a “gold star” family in this case, given how nasty they have been to Cindy Sheehan over the years.

Watch me draw this one in real time in the video below.

Wasn’t that great? Now watch me color it in Photoshop!