You might have heard; there was an election this week. While there is a good deal that remains uncertain (Georgia’s Senate race won’t be settled until next month), one thing that seems universal is our exhaustion over election ads and petty bickering from candidates.
Fortunately, we can all now safely turn on our TVs and not be afraid of eerie music playing behind black and white images of craven politicians attacking one another. We’ll just have to wait a bit longer for those lawn signs to be removed.
Here are our top ten most reprinted cartoons of the week:
If you haven’t noticed by all the political attack ads on television, it’s nearly Election Day! In just a couple of days Americans will be heading down to their local polling place to cast that vote in the 2022 midterms.
Elections are always a long slog for both voters and cartoonists, who just feel fatigued by the whole thing at this point. But at least they give us plenty to draw about.
Here are our top ten most reprinted cartoons of the week:
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Just about half of America’s daily, paid circulation newspapers (around 700 papers) subscribe to CagleCartoons.com. These are the cartoons that editors picked last week.
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Dave Whamond takes ninth place with his second cartoon in the Top Ten.
#10
RJ Matson rounds out the list with his third cartoon in the Top Ten.
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The crazy, pandemic-shortened, crowdless baseball season just started! We got the news that President Trump would be throwing out the first pitch at a New York Yankees game in August, so I drew this one. I thought the gag was a little dull, so I added a talking dog. Talking dogs always work.
Gotta love baseball! Here are my favorite, new baseball cartoons from the CagleCartoonists!
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We had cartoons about nothing but the coronavirus for months and this week the cartoons abruptly changed to the George Floyd protests. Today I went back to the coronavirus with a silly cartoon that expresses no opinion, like newspaper editors prefer.
Our reader supported site, Cagle.com, still needs you! Journalism is threatened with the pandemic that has shuttered newspaper advertisers. Some pundits predict that a large percentage of newspapers won’t survive the pandemic economic slump, and as newspapers sink, so do the editorial cartoonists who depend on newspapers, and along with them, our Cagle.com site, that our small, sinking syndicate largely supports, along with our fans.
I drew a sad couple at the TV yesterday. A goofy TV couple is more typical for me. This nice gag came from a comment on my wife’s Facebook page, so, thanks to whoever wrote that.
Even with the protests, some cartoonists managed to sneak the coronavirus in. Here are five nice ones from our Cagle Cartoonists …
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I watched George Floyd’s funeral on television today; it was moving and sad to watch. For my cartoon, I thought I would just reduce it to the fact that it was sad to watch. Editorial cartoonists like to complain about cartoons with big teardrops that are drawn with every sad, national event. The statue of Liberty with a big teardrop, the Lincoln Memorial statue with a big teardrop, Uncle Sam with a big teardrop, the American Eagle with a big teardrop. Readers respond to the teardrop cartoons even as cartoonists complain about them and continue to draw them.
So I went with an “everyman” couple watching the TV (which I draw often), this time with a mixed race couple and the teardrops. It may be unclear and too reductionist, and big teardrops may be trite, but I felt sad and I went with it.
Steve Sack’s cartoon is better.
Jeff Koterba went with a heart …
Our reader supported site, Cagle.com, still needs you! Journalism is threatened with the pandemic that has shuttered newspaper advertisers. Some pundits predict that a large percentage of newspapers won’t survive the pandemic economic slump, and as newspapers sink, so do editorial cartoonists who depend on newspapers, and along with them, our Cagle.com site, that our small, sinking syndicate largely supports, along with our fans.
Here’s my latest cartoon about the media focus on looting along with my recent protest favorites from all of the CagleCartoonists. Passions are running high on the right and the left, which makes for some great cartoons and many angry readers who object to the cartoons, including my own cartoons. Many of the cartoons, like my cartoon today, are not likely to be reprinted in newspapers. Editors don’t like cartoons with poop and with criticism of other media.
My cartoon is about how looting steals the attention of the media, especially the conservative media, but all of the major media. Here’s are a bunch of great ones from the past couple of days.(I wouldn’t call my cartoon “great,” it is kind of stinky.)
Our reader supported site, Cagle.com, still needs you! Journalism is threatened with the pandemic that has shuttered newspaper advertisers. Some pundits predict that a large percentage of newspapers won’t survive the pandemic economic slump, and as newspapers sink, so do editorial cartoonists who depend on newspapers, and along with them, our Cagle.com site, that our small, sinking syndicate largely supports, along with our fans.
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We have a Cagle Cartoons convention of sorts, every year in France, and I’m leaving for our get-together tomorrow, just as the impeachment news is coming hot and heavy every day. This happened during the last election when the Access Hollywood tape came out when I was stuck, with a bunch of CagleCartoonists, away from our drawing boards as big news came calling. ARRGH!
So, before I leave, here are two impeachment ruckus cartoons. The first is about the Republicans who seem to have little to say about Trump’s Ukraine phone call and the Whistleblower report.
…and when the Republicans are talking, it doesn’t seem that they have been paying much attention.
I thought it would be fun to draw a couple of “reaction” cartoons. They don’t really make an argument, but they point out an interesting reaction. I imagine that Vladimir Putin is having a wonderful time watching the news these days. Here he is …
I regret that I had to put a label on his pants. Labels are for sissy editorial cartoonists who don’t trust their own caricatures to be recognizable – and today I’m a sissy. I had a hard time drawing Putin with a big, happy mouth – that just isn’t something that he does. He’s a dour character, and a big happy mouth makes Putin not look like Putin. I actually struggled with this. The solution? I did my best, and put a label on his pants. Sorry. That said, I think putting the label on his butt is a little funny.
Sorry, but the blog won’t be updating much the next couple of weeks while I’m away. Hold your breath and I’ll be back soon!
Back when I worked at The Famous Artists Schools, a man came to the school looking for a cartoonist who could draw quick stuff on a large pad of paper, y’know, like a chalk-talk kind of thing. I was recommended to him and I took the job.
It involved me going to New York to participate in the shooting of a pilot for a game show. I’ve forgotten what they called the show. They were going to have celebrity guests on this show and an artist who would draw a few lines on a giant pad and stop mid-stream. If the celebrities couldn’t guess what the artist was drawing, he would add a few more lines until someone could finally guess what the image was.
When I arrived at the room in New York where the pilot was being shot, I was introduced to the two celebrities who were going to participate. They were Jonathan Winters and Carol Burnett. They had a large pad of paper for me to work on and the appropriate crayons or whatever I was to use to draw my images.
I started drawing things like a curved line, then I added a circle to the mix and so on and so forth bouncing around on the big sketch adding little details and trying to keep it mysterious and unpredictable as the two celebrity guests threw out guesses as to what I was drawing. It was lots of fun.
We broke for lunch and they brought some food in. I got a chance to talk to Jonathan and Carol as we ate. They were both very nice and, as I’ve found out through my life when I’ve met people in the humor racket like comedians, comic actors, cartoonists or humor writers, they were serious-minded people. They asked about my life and what I did (which wasn’t much at that point) and they told me stuff about their lives. They both had an interest in drawing. Carol was actually taking The Famous Artists Schools illustration course. Jonathan told me that he had almost pursued a career in art instead of show business. He had an interest in becoming a cartoonist when he was young but finally realized that his talent was limited and that he would probably, as he put it, never be better than just an art department guy so when an acting opportunity came, off he went into acting. Carol was pursuing her art as just a sideline hobby.
I drew some cartoons for them and they drew some for me. Carol drew an ordinary fashion-drawing of a girl in a dress. Jonathan drew a couple of World War 2 soldiers which looked just like Mauldin’s Willie & Joe. They were both pretty good drawings. Winters was obviously a BIG fan of Bill Mauldin.
Unfortunately, down through the decades, I’ve lost both of those drawings so I can’t show them here. I’m very bad at keeping stuff like that. I think the drawings were both so derivative of other artists that I didn’t place much stock in them. Now, I realize that drawings by two famous people like that have a certain unique value.
Anyway, it was a very pleasant day with two charming comedians.
Of course the show we were testing never saw the light of day.
Somewhere those two drawings by Burnett and Winters are hiding away there amidst all those socks I’ve lost. Maybe I’ll find them someday.
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Around 1964, I did my very first animation job. It was for CBS and I got to work for the legendary Lou Dorfsman who shaped every aspect of corporate design for CBS in his 40 years there. I was tasked with creating ten, 10 second “teaser” spots which would be used at station breaks on the network.
CBS had just created a break-through technology they called VPA (Vote Profile Analysis) which would hopefully predict the outcome of elections, shortly after voting had begun, with supposedly, a high degree of accuracy. It was top secret. They were going to reveal it when the time was right and the job I had been assigned was to tease the public and build up curiosity until then. We would throw out the letters V P A to the viewers and make everybody wonder what the hell it meant in ten second bits between programs. We also popped the words “Vote Profile Analysis” in small letters in the last few seconds at the bottom of the screen.
So, my first animation experience was to be the manipulation of three simple black type letters into 10 arresting filmic arrangements.
I zoomed a “V” from a tiny dot on the screen to full screenrevolving it upside down while it was joined by “P” which had slid in from the right side. The upside down “V” became an “A” with the addition of the crossbar while the “P” disappeared.
I panned a “V” onto the screen, in another spot, zoomed in to the blackness of the letter and zoomed right back out to reveal that it was now a “P”, then back in and out to reveal the “A”.
I continued on in this fashion, zooming, panning and twirling the letters around through ten variations avoiding the more obvious approach of actually just manipulating the forms into each letter. I kept the letters whole all the time, maintaining their dignity as type forms and not succumbing to “Walt Disney” anthropomorphic transformation or just melding from one letter form to the other.. I felt that it described the “style” of CBS to keep it simple, black and white, elegant movement and transformation.
As simple as it was, and maybe because it was so simple, it became, I think, the most creative endeavor of my short animation career. It’s so compelling to get caught up in the rhythm of a job like that where the ideas just start popping into your brain. It’s good to have a time constraint to work around that forces you to be basic, direct and clean. No time to get “junky” in 10 seconds.
For weeks and weeks before they revealed their proud program that was going to beat all the competition in vote projection, we watched my VPA’s dance around for 10 seconds at every station break.
I haven’t been to the CBS building in many years, so I don’t know what it’s like now, but when I used to go into the building in those days, it wasn’t like going into any other big corporate building; it was carefully designed by Dorfsman (I guess), in every detail. There was the “CBS” typeface that was used everywhere down to the elevator buttons. When you arrived at your floor, there was a spacious waiting area wherein a receptionist sat a plain, clean desk. the décor was of a black and white or subtle grey: floor, rugs, walls, ceiling, etc.. Radiating off this main area there were long corridors going off to the different offices. At the far end of each corridor was the shock of a big square very brightly colored abstract painting. That was the only color. All aspects of the offices were rigidly controlled. Receptionists told me that they couldn’t have even a stray paper clip on their desk. Everything had a place that was design controlled and policed.
When you stepped into that building, you weren’t stepping into a building, you were stepping into a huge, formal piece of graphic design –cool, clean, elegant, black and white.
Down the block sat the NBC building, my next network client, a virtual riot of peacock color.
Here’s a memory about NBC television, from our brilliant cartoonist, Randy Enos.
Over a span of 12 years (late 1960’s through the 1970’s), I worked heavily for NBC. I had left Pablo Ferro Films because his business went sour and rather than go to work at another film house, I decide to hit the streets and just freelance. Our secretary at Pablo’s had a husband who art directed at NBC so she sent me there where I met 9 art directors who gathered around and looked at my portfolio. One of them followed me out to the elevator as I left and said that he had 15 illustrations he needed right away. So, began my years with the Peacock. The art directors were a United Nations of nationalities. There was a Ukrainian, a Russian, Chinese, Arab, English, Irish, a couple of Jewish fellows and so forth. I ended up working for all of them. Some did the national advertising (New York Times, etc.) and others did affiliate station work which included even bumper sticker art while others did on air spot advertising, station breaker slides and film animation.
One memorable film animation job I did for them concerned their airing of the Beatles movie A Hard Day’s Night.
NBC was fiercely proud of their status as THE color network. They were still fairly new at this color thing when I came into their pantheon, but they had developed the system to be compatible with all the black and white sets across the nation which CBS had failed to do at that time. They tried to do as many color shows as they could. When a Movie of the Week was aired it was always a color movie –until A Hard Day’s Night came along. Imagine their embarrassment at having to air a black and white movie. The intro to their color presentations was always “NBC is proud to present the following program in living color”. The color logo of the peacock would appear on the screen and some rippled, burbly music would accompany the unfolding of the logo’s red, orange, yellow, blue and purple feathers.
SO, they came to me and asked if I could figure a way out of this dilemma. They wanted me to design an opening for the movie. An opening that would be for just that one night. They wanted something that could soften the blow of this being a black and white movie on the COLOR network.
Using the off-beat, quirky mind that Pablo Ferro had implanted in my brain, I decided to think about replacing our famous peacock with the only black and white bird that came to my mind, a PENGUIN! I figured I could have some fun with him flapping his small penguin wings up and down as our announcer would intone, “NBC is proud to present the following program in living BLACK AND WHITE!” He actually ended up saying “lively black and white”.
I set about drawing the scene in just line art. The penguin waddles out on the screen, takes off his top hat, waves his little arms up and down to the peacock music while the announcer does his thing. Then he unzips his white “tuxedo” front, it rolls down and emits – THE BEATLES, caricatured by me, tumbling out onto the ground where they quickly compose themselves and start playing. Then girls voices are heard screaming off camera. The Beatles run off to the right and we dissolve right into the opening scene of the movie where a bunch of girls are chasing them down the street.
I told this story on a blog years ago and some guy wrote to me to tell me that it was on YouTube. And here it is:
It’s pretty crude and scratchy and primitive and old looking, ain’t it?
I did quite a few films for NBC in those days but mostly it was caricatures of everybody on the shows even the newsmen, soap actors, etc. along with Flip Wilson, Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, all the Laugh-in people, Bill Cosby, Danny Thomas, etc. etc..
But one of the other films I did was also a one-nighter. Carson had been off sick for a while so to commemorate his return to The Tonight Show, I created an opening which started out with a bird’s eye view of New York with an ambulance running through the streets to the NBC building in Rockefeller Plaza where it drives in… into an elevator… elevator opens up on the studio floor and we cut to Ed McMahon saying his, “H-E-E-E-R-R-R-R-E-E-E-E-S-S-S-S, J-O-O-O-O-H-H-N-N-N-NY!”
We had some friends who used to hold an annual “Tin Cannes Film Festival.” They were all film buffs who used to make their own crude little films that they would show. All the attendees would also arrive in costume. One year, I decided that my wife, Leann and I should dress in film. In the editing rooms at NBC, I remembered seeing big wastebaskets full of giant reels of heavy, thick 35mm film. They were just throwing it out so I asked if I could just grab a bunch of it. I took some reels home and we made complete costumes out of it.
Here’s the weird part. ALL of the film I had brought home were films I had made for NBC.
Back when I worked at The 
CBS had just created a break-through technology they called VPA (Vote Profile Analysis) which would hopefully predict the outcome of elections, shortly after voting had begun, with supposedly, a high degree of accuracy. It was top secret. They were going to reveal it when the time was right and the job I had been assigned was to tease the public and build up curiosity until then. We would throw out the letters V P A to the viewers and make everybody wonder what the hell it meant in ten second bits between programs. We also popped the words “Vote Profile Analysis” in small letters in the last few seconds at the bottom of the screen.
NBC was fiercely proud of their status as THE color network. They were still fairly new at this color thing when I came into their pantheon, but they had developed the system to be compatible with all the black and white sets across the nation which CBS had failed to do at that time. They tried to do as many color shows as they could. When a Movie of the Week was aired it was always a color movie –until A Hard Day’s Night came along. Imagine their embarrassment at having to air a black and white movie. The intro to their color presentations was always “NBC is proud to present the following program in living color”. The color logo of the peacock would appear on the screen and some rippled, burbly music would accompany the unfolding of the logo’s red, orange, yellow, blue and purple feathers.