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Cartoons

A Rod Steroids and Baseball

A Rod Steroids and Baseball © Daryl Cagle,MSNBC.com,A-Rod, Alex Rodriguez, baseball, Baseball Hall of Fame, chamber of horrors, Cooperstown, cryogenic suspension, Liver, Mickey Mantle, New York Yankees, Ted Williams, testicles

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Columns

How To Draw Obama

How to Draw Obama

Obama seems like an easy guy to draw; he’s skinny, has a big chin, expressive eyebrows and lips. As it turns out, no matter how a cartoonist draws Obama, somebody gets mad.

When Obama burst into the presidential campaign cartoonists started drawing him as a caricature without much exaggeration. As time goes by, political figures morph in cartoons into caricatures of caricatures; George W. Bush shrank to knee height and grew huge bunny ears; Bill Clinton lost his pants and grew fatter (even as he got skinnier in real life). At the beginning of the Obama administration, everyone is watching to see how the cartoon Obama evolves.

I worked for twenty years as a cartoon illustrator, doing drawings for books, magazines and advertising. I was often given clear guidelines on how I was supposed to draw African-Americans: with “small noses” and “thin lips”. I was instructed to make any crowds of cartoon characters racially diverse, but only diverse in color, not in facial features. Thick lips and wide noses on African American faces would be returned to me for correction, with a polite reminder of the corporate policies on depictions of minority facial features.

Cartoonist Gary McCoy has been lambasted by readers, and by Salon.com, for drawing racially insensitive, big lips on Obama. Some cartoonists have drawn attention for giving Obama blue lips. Canadian cartoonist Patrick Corrigan of the Toronto Star had an Obama cartoon killed by his editor because of “racist” blue lips. Thomas “Tab” Boldt of the Calgary Sun and Cam Cardow of the Ottawa Citizen have also been rendering Obama with blue lips. Corrigan tells me that everyone in Canada, in the winter, has blue lips.

Readers of my blog explained to me that blue lips are racist and pointed out an old racist expression “blue gums,” which was a new one for me. Corrigan tells me he’ll be switching to purple lips, Cam will be giving up on the blue lips and Tab was laid off. That may mean the end of blue lips for Obama.

Syndicated caricaturist Taylor Jones also sees blue in Obama. He writes:

“One of the most interesting things about Obama’s eyes is the slight blue tinge to the flesh below his eyebrows. It’s also visible on his eyelids. It’s as though he’s wearing a bit of eye shadow. Don’t know if it’s actual blue pigmentation, or just the effect of light bouncing off the skin stretched against his eye sockets. But it adds a nifty touch whenever I’m drawing Obama’s caricature in color.”

I’m considering going all the way, making Obama completely blue (if that’s not racist).

Obama’s ears have grown huge for most cartoonists. George W. Bush’s ears also grew huge, but it took more than a year for Bush’s big ears to catch on — Obama’s ears started right away, and have been expanding faster than the national debt. It may be that after eight years of Bush, we now see huge ears as a standard, presidential attribute. I don’t see any particular reason for either Bush’s or Obama’s ears to grow in cartoons, but with cartoonist peer pressure it will soon be impossible to draw a likeness of Obama without colossal ears.

There seems to be an expectation that political cartoonists are mostly liberals who love Obama and will find it hard to make fun of him in cartoons. Some cartoonists have complained in the press that Obama is dull, and that there is little to criticize about him — we have a term of art for cartoonists like that, we call them “bad cartoonists.” It is the job of an editorial cartoonist to dislike everybody. Political cartoonists have nothing to gain by being in favor of anything. Cartoons that support anything are lousy cartoons. There is plenty for everyone not to like about Obama — and with the porky stimulus package and tax-evading cabinet appointments, there’s more every day!

The cartoon version of Obama will continue to evolve quickly. If we ever actually see him smoking a cigarette, he will always be smoking in cartoons. Obama may turn different colors, and he’ll grow or shrink with his performance. Obama’s ears will keep growing no matter what he does. As Obama’s honeymoon passes and the caricatures become more severe, I expect the complaints about racism in the cartoons will also grow more severe.

But I don’t care. I’m making Obama blue today.

Daryl Cagle is a political cartoonist and blogger for MSNBC.com; he is a past president of the National Cartoonists Society and his cartoons are syndicated to more than 850 newspapers, including the paper you are reading. Daryl’s books “The BIG Book of Campaign 2008 Political Cartoons” and “The Best Political Cartoons of the Year, 2009 Edition” are available in bookstores now.

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Cartoons

Republicans – Ha Ha Ha

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Blog

News Around the Cagle Sites

Over on Cagle.com we have great new collections on Obama Taking Office, Obama’s Inauguration, Obama to close Gitmo, and “NO JOBS!”

Our weekly, MSNBC.com slideshow for last week, January 17 through 23, is up here.  If you ever miss a slideshow, there is an archive of all the past weeks slideshows here.

I was troubled to read about Mad Magazine going from monthly to quarterly, after their 500th issue.  They will also be dropping their new Mad Kids magazine.  It looks like everything in print is dying.

Take a look at Monte Wolverton’s new blog.  Monte’s father, Basil Wolverton, was one of the founding Mad Magazine artists – probably most famous for drawing the ugliest girl in the world.  I was surprised to see that Monte’s dad also illustrated the Bible.

Cartoonist Brian Fairrington rips into Obama as the Media’s Messiah, on his blog.

Brilliant caricature artist, Taylor Jones, just posted a huge piece on how to draw Obama.  Also, don’t miss Steve Greenberg’s new blog.  Now that we have our new blog.cagle.com WordPress servers online, we’ll be inviting more cartoonists to do blogs with us.

We’ve been having trouble with our email newsletters and have been working on a new solution.  The newsletters should resume next week.  We know how our readers love the newsletters and we apologize for the interruption.

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Cartoons

Inauguration Crowd

Inauguration Crowd Color © Daryl Cagle,MSNBC.com,Barack Obama,Abraham Lincoln,election,president,inauguration,Washington D.C.,Washington Mall.crowd

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Columns

How to Draw President George W Bush

How to Draw President George W. Bush

Political cartoonists are not much different from comic strip cartoonists; both draw an ongoing daily soap opera featuring a regular cast of characters. While comic strip cartoonists invent their own characters, the political cartoonist’s characters are given to him by events in the world. For the past eight years, political cartoonists have been drawing little daily sagas starring the same main character, President Bush. Most people won’t miss Bush as a president, but we should all miss him as a great cartoon character.

Around the world, cartoonists almost always draw President Bush as a cowboy. Outside America, a Texas cowboy is seen as: uneducated, ill mannered, a “trigger-happy marshal” or outlaw who is prone to violence. Cowboy depictions of the president by worldwide cartoonists are meant to be insults, but Americans see cowboys differently. In the USA, cowboys are noble, independent souls, living a romantic lifestyle by taming the wilderness and taking matters into their own hands whenever they see a wrong that needs to be righted. We are a nation of wanna-be cowboys.

The image of President Bush evolves with each cartoonist’s personal perspective. Back in 2000, Bush started out as most political cartoon characters start out, as a caricature of a real person, meant to be recognizable from a photograph. The cartoonists soon stopped looking at photographs and started doing drawings of drawings, then drawings of drawings of drawings, so that the George W. Bush drawings morphed into strangely deformed characters that looked nothing like the real man, but are instantly recognizable because we’ve come to know the drawings as a symbol of the man. It is surprising that each cartoonist’s drawings of the president look entirely different, but each is easily recognizable as representing the same character.

For most cartoonists, the president’s ears have grown huge; a strange phenomenon, since the president doesn’t have unusually large ears, and isn’t well known for listening. Some cartoonists have seen President Bush shrink in height; a combination of these has the president sometimes looking like a little bunny rabbit. Barack Obama’s cartoon ears have also begun to grow in cartoons, for no good reason – maybe big ears are the cartoon presidential curse of the new millennium.

The president who shrank most in cartoons was Jimmy Carter. At the end of Carter’s term he was a Munchkin, standing below knee height on almost every cartoonist’s drawing table. President Bush shrank for only the more liberal cartoonists early on, but is short for all of us at the end of his term. President Reagan grew taller during his cartoon term in office. President Clinton grew fatter, even as he lost weight in real life. Bill Clinton’s personality was fat, and the cartoonists drew the personality rather than the man. President Clinton is now skinny, but he will always be fat in cartoons.

Another cartoon characteristic that has grown from years of drawing President Bush are his eyes, two little dots, close together, topped by raised, quizzical eyebrows. The close, dotted eyes are an interesting universal phenomenon, shared by almost every cartoonist, that doesn’t relate to the president’s actual features. Over time, most cartoonists will draw a character with eyes that grow larger, but President Bush’s eyes shrink, while his ears grow. There may be a political message in that, but I can’t figure it out.

I once played “Political Cartoonist Name That Tune.” The game went like this:

“I can draw President Bush in SIX LINES.”

“Well, I can draw President Bush in FOUR LINES!”

“I can draw President Bush in THREE LINES!”

“OK. Draw that President!”

…and I did, two little dots topped by a raised, quizzical eyebrow line. It looked just like him.

Now I need to learn how to draw Obama with three lines; it may take me eight years to do it.

Daryl Cagle is a political cartoonist and blogger for MSNBC.com; he is a past president of the National Cartoonists Society and his cartoons are syndicated to more than 850 newspapers, including the paper you are reading. Daryl runs the most popular cartoon site on the Web at www.cagle.msnbc.com. His books “The BIG Book of Campaign 2008 Political Cartoons” and “The Best Political Cartoons of the Year, 2009 Edition” are available in bookstores now.

See Daryl’s cartoons and columns at //cagle.com/daryl.

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Cartoons

Israel Vs Hamas Shoot the Doggie

Israel Vs Hamas   Shoot the Doggie © Daryl Cagle,MSNBC.com,Israel,Hamas,Gaza,Palestine,Palestinians,dog,Middle East,Mideast