DarylCagle.com

Lately I’ve been haunting my own past, rummaging through drawers stuffed with self-portraits that stretch back 50 years—from a wide-eyed 19-year-old college kid in 1976 to the bearded, battle-scarred cartoonist I became, dodging hackers, raising a family, and even fielding endless questions about my long-gone Trump-era beard. I’ve got way too many of these staring back at me! This one is from 1976, when I was a student at Santa Barbara City College—pencil on beloved Graphix Duoshade paper (which I still miss). Yep, that’s exactly what I looked like. And yes, that’s how we all dressed in the ’70s.

France Cartoons is collecting self portraits of cartoonists, which has me rummaging through my drawers. This is me from Trump’s first term when I had a white beard. People are still asking me “What happened to the beard?” Trump hasn’t changed, though.

This self-portrait is me with my daughter, Susie, 28 years ago, in a comic I did that ran for about a year in the weekly “TV Times” magazine in the UK and a similar national TV guide type magazine in Australia. Notice the old TV, and old land-line phone, and young Susie. (This was years before the beard.)

I drew this self portrait after we had a big hacker attack that erased our servers, and we could identify that the attack came from China. I can still feel their breath on my neck.

Here’s another old self-portrait. This one is from back when I had a beard and I got my marijuana license. Now marijuana is everywhere and you don’t need a license (in California). That’s progress, I suppose. This ran as a full page in our local Santa Barbara Independent and it features my wife, Peg and son, Buster.

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