
New Year Obama with Republicans
New Year Obama with North Korea

Kim Jong Un and his Sony Hackers
The Sony Pictures hacker attack and the cowardly withdrawal of “The Interview” movie has been dominating the cartoons. I drew two!

A universal truth about evil dictators is that they have no sense of humor, so I suggest we mock the despots mercilessly. In fact, mocking mercilessly is really the only tool in my cartoonist tool belt – you know, if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
My second cartoon was quite popular on Facebook, featuring Kim Jong Un and the entertainment industry chickens. This one reminded me of my old Muppet days drawing Gonzo’s girlfriend, Camilla and all her chicken friends.

Today we got the news that North Korea’s internet service went down. Not much of a surprise – and probaby only a dozen people in North Korea have access to the internet – still interesting. North Korea makes a target of itself, which reminds me of a favorite Kim Jong Un oldie I drew below, which I should take out of mothballs.

And here’s one last Kim Jong Un oldie:

History keeps repeating itself! See more great North Korea cartoons on Cagle.com!
North Korea Response

Kim Jong Un and Sony Pictures Chickens

Sketch Freedom in Sweden
My buddy Kianoush Ramezani is putting on a big editorial cartoon exhibition in Gothenburg, Sweden with many of the top editorial cartoonists from around the world. The show is being hosted with the Gothenburg Film Festival with the support of Le Memorial de Caen, the big D-Day Museum in Normandy, France that is a big supporter of editorial cartoonists and hosts a cartoon festival each year (I attended in 2012 and I was impressed).
Kianoush is an interesting guy. He is a political refugee who had to flee the regime in his native Iran which wanted to punish him for his cartoons; he was given asylum in France and lives in Paris. Kianoush’s exhibition, Sketch Freedom, is about freedom of expression. I know most of the cartoonists in the exhibition through Cartooning for Peace, and some are Cagle.com cartoonists.
See if you can spot these Cagle.com cartoonists’ mugs in the collage below: Angel Boligan, Damian Glez, Daryl Cagle (me), Kap (who also did the poster), Kianoush, Peter Broelman, Riber Hansson and Tjeerd Royaards. The second big head under mine in the collage is Liza Donnelly, a New Yorker Magazine cartoonist; I expect the size of our big heads will shrink as new cartoonists are added to the exhibition – although Kianoush would be the first to say that it would take more than that to deflate my big head.
Here’s the full list of artists in the show and poster:
- Adjim Danngar – Chad
- Angel Boligan – Mexico
- Ann Telnaes – USA
- Assad Binakhahi – Iran
- Ayako Saito – Japan
- Bernard Bouton – France
- Cristina Sampaio – Portugal
- Damien Glez – Burkina Faso
- Daryl Cagle – USA
- Elena Ospina – Colombia
- Eray Ozbek – Turkey
- Guy Badeaux – Canada
- Hassan Karimzadeh – Iran
- Jaume Capdevila – KAP – Spain
- Jim Morin – USA
- Kianoush Ramezani – Iran
- Liza Donnelly – USA
- Mohammad Sabaaneh – Palestine
- Peter Broelman – Australia
- Phil Umbdenstock – France
- Riber Hansson – Sweden
- Tjeerd Royaards – Netherlands
- Victor Bogorad – Russia
- Vladimir Kazanevsky – Ukraine
- Xavier Bonilla – BONIL – Ecuador
- Zulkiflee Anwar Haque – Zunar – Malaysia
Inserting New Rectal Feeding
This is a classic oldie showing dinnertime at Guantanamo. The Gitmo prisoners go on hunger strikes and there was lots of news about how they were force-fed “Ensure” through tubes in their noses. I thought that was fun when superimposed on Norman’s Rockwell’s famous dinnertime painting.

When the new Senate report on CIA torture came out we learned that these guys are also fed rectally, and they drink rectally too, with “rectal hydration.” I thought I had to issue a correction, so here it is …

It is important to be accurate.
Oil Prices Drop on the Despots!
Oil prices dropped below $60/barrel this week, to the delight of American drivers and the dismay of ugly, oil-producing countries around the world. I thought of drawing a group scene with even more despots from nasty countries, like Libya, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the list – trouble is, there are too many of them, and they don’t have good, recognizable characters for the barrel of oil to bash.
So, I did three versions of this cartoon, Iran, Russia and Venezuela, which each have fascinating, and from an American point of view, encouraging stories of economic collapse with the drop in oil prices. Newspapers can pair these with Op-Ed pieces on each country’s interesting travails.
I tried combining these, but that was confusing. Simple is good. Here’s Vladimir Putin …

I love drawing Putin – he’s so creepy. Next is Venezuela and their president, Nicolas Maduro.

This is the first time I’ve drawn Maduro. I like his low forehead and widows peak. The last version is Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is a delight to draw, but like Maduro, he requires a label because people don’t know what he looks like.

Iran’s Supreme Leader makes me laugh. He also likes to throw Iranian cartoonists into jail, and my web sites are blocked in Iran – still, the Supreme Leader makes me laugh. Just the fact that he wants to call himself “Supreme Leader” is funny.

Russia and Oil Price Drop

Iran and Oil Price Drop

Venezuela and Oil Price Drop

















