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Carly Fiorina – Look at my face!

This is my first Carly Fiorina cartoon. It looks like I may be doing more over the next year. She’s actually pretty easy to draw, with her eyes that tip up at the edges of her face, the long nose, pointy chin and skinny neck. It is fascinating to me how objectively bad her business record was, and still she runs on her business record as her qualification to be president. When she launches into a moralistic screed it makes my skin crawl – I think she is my least favorite Republican, but this cartoon goes easy on her.

Of-course, the cartoon refers to her spat with Trump about her “face” – as long as people look at her face – or look at anything but her record, she’s on her way up in the polls.

This Fiorina cartoon by David Fitzsimmons is my favorite. It conveys some information, something I usually try to avoid doing in cartoons (it takes too many words), but it works here …

 

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El Diablo Volkswagen

Here’s my Volkswagen cartoon – this is a simple “name-calling” cartoon; editorial cartooning in its purest form.

I thought about making a Volkswagen car into a devil, but I didn’t think that would be too easy to read, so I went with the logo, which is a little strange looking, but what the hell. And I included lots of hellish smoke. I notice the Yahtzee cartoon for this issue is a Volkswagen logo obscured with smoke, or with a little exhaust pipe and smoke.

My favorite so far is from Danish cartoonist Herbjorn Skogstad, who drew a guy doing a giant Volkswagen fart. I think it is the duty of editorial cartoonists to draw farts, poop, dogs and Statues of Liberty at every opportunity.

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Pied Piper Trump!

This Donald Trump cartoon will probably stay on the Cagle.com front page for a long time as I’m traveling between far too many conventions this month. I just got back from the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists convention in Columbus, Ohio. Tomorrow I’m headed off to a big editorial cartoonist confab in Caen, France. Then I’m off to another in Quito, Ecuador. After that there is the big annual editorial cartoonists weekend in St. Just le Martel, France.

These are stressful times for our profession as we’re squeezed between a changing business environment and terrorists who want to kill us, so the conventions take on special significance. All of these conventions have impressive security. The cartoonists have renewed esprit de corps as we struggle to come to grips with our new environment.

This is a tough world for editorial cartoonists, but at least we have Donald Trump to kick around, and that makes my world look bright.

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Africa Dumping Refugees on Europe

I spent some extra time on this cartoon which was more complicated to draw than usual. I always complain about the cartoon ideas that enthusiastic readers suggest I draw because the readers think in words rather than images, and I get pitches like, “have one army on the left clashing with another army coming in from the right while the sky is filled with helicopters.” I’m much too lazy for that.

So, here I’m drawing a crowd of refugees crashing down on, and running through Europe. I’m too lazy for that, but, well … at least the sky isn’t filled with helicopters.

I laid it out in pencil first …

AfricaSketch700wide

And here’s a close-up view of the little refugees …

little-refugees

This is much bigger than my actual drawing and it looks pretty messy when it is blown up – rather disturbing – makes me want to go back in and clean it up a bit. I have to be realistic here; like the European Union, there’s a limit to how much of my resources I can free up for refugees.

 

 

 

 

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Rick McKee’s BIG New Book

My brilliant, conservative, cartoonist buddy, Rick McKee has just announced a big new book of his work, shipping in late November with pre-orders being accepted now! (See some samples of Rick’s cartoons below, and visit his archive on Cagle.com.)

cover mock up FB2It’s a 224-page hardcover, color, coffee-table collection of some of his best work since he began drawing for The Augusta Chronicle in 1998. The book kicks off in the Bill Clinton years and takes off from there, through the Bush and Obama presidencies with lots of social issues, sports and some local topics thrown in as well.

McKee is known for his hard-hitting conservative cartoons, but there is something for everyone in this book, with a foreword by Pat Sajak, host of the popular, long-running TV game show, “Wheel of Fortune,” and lover of political cartoons. There’s also a step-by-step, behind-the-scenes look at how McKee creates his cartoons. The link to pre-order the book at a discount is http://mckee.cartoonistbook.com

 

03 TOON OBAMA
Rick says, “President Obama has presided over the era of Islamic terrorism. He just can’t bring himself to say the words.”

 

02 TOON BUSH
Rick says, “President Bush was fun to draw, but his presidency was a dark time with 9/11 and the Iraq War. I think a lot of satirists struggled to find the humor in the daily news.”

 

01 TOON CLINTON
Rick says, “I was fortunate to begin my cartooning career as President Clinton’s troubles exploded. His numerous ‘bimbo eruptions’ were like cartooning manna from heaven.”

 

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Hillary and the Email Storm

Hillary is a gift to cartoonists. The fact that she is humorless makes her all the more fun.

International cartoonists make a lot of use of the “@” sign to represent email in their wordless cartoons, something that is not seen so often in American cartoons. (They also go crazy with UPC codes in their cartoons, representing commerce or general, modern commerce.) Wordy American cartoonists could do with fewer words.

Most newspapers print my cartoons in black and white. The black and white version below is just line art, which I think is more elegant, but I find that newspapers prefer to take my color cartoons and grayscale them rather than use the more simple and elegant line art. In this case, that will give them more emails, I suppose.

I drew a similar, symbolic Hillary/email cartoon some months ago, with the “@” symbol as a ball and chain. Some readers didn’t get this one – maybe because the “@” needs a gap at the end of the curl, maybe because the idea of an “@” as email is just too obscure, and “@” rain will go over their heads too. I’ll find out soon enough.

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Grouchy, Dependent Tennessee

This cartoon about grouchy, California-bashing, government-dependent Tennessee conservatives marks the end of my Summer stint as a local cartoonist for the alternative-weekly Nashville Scene newspaper. I’m back to drawing national/world cartoons again. Thanks to my local fans in this little blue spot in very red Tennessee!

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Nashville and Developers

My new local, altie-newspaper, Nashville Scene cartoon is about city planning. The “NashvilleNext” plan has been in the works for a long time, and it is pretty good, placing new, high density developments in appropriate high traffic corridors (I know, you’re falling asleep). The problem is that Nashville is booming and developers are pushing to put their developments anywhere they can make a buck (like next door to me). Our pro-growth Metropolitan Planning Commission likes to let developers do whatever they want, and those developers, with their deep pockets, are hard to resist.

cagle-nashville-Newlyweds700

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Nashville’s Churches Could be BIGGER

Here’s my latest local, altie-newspaper cartoon for the Nashville Scene. Nashville is called the “buckle of the Bible Belt” because the place is full of colossal, mega-churches and giant church corporate headquarters. The scale of these churches is stunning. I’m from California where people don’t talk to each other as often as chatty Tennesseans. Often, the first thing I hear in a conversation with a neighbor, or someone I don’t know, is “where do you go to church?”

CagleNashvilleKingKong

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In the Trump Shadow

Donald Trump casts a big shadow over the Republican field as we approach the first debate. I drew little caricatures of all the candidates – can you name them all? (I would have missed Jim Gilmore – he declared late and I stuck him behind the crowd, behind Ben Carson, as an afterthought.)

I started off drawing this one with Donald Trump as a storm cloud raining on the other Republicans.

When I posted this we started getting calls from editors who wanted a color version, and I haven’t done that yet. I suppose I still should, but I think the shadow version is better.

I’m guessing that the Fox News debate will be either storm or shadow, with Trump on top. We’ll see.

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More Nathan Bedford Forrest

This week the State of Tennessee’s Department of Transportation rejected a request from Nashville’s Metro Council (City Council) to plant foliage that would block the view of the atrocious Nathan Bedford Forrest statue that commuters see every day from Interstate 65.

I’m starting to enjoy Nathan as a cartoon character! I think I’ll use him some more in my local, Nashville Scene cartoons (the newest cartoon is below).

Cagle-Nathan2

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Tennessee Shooting Memorial

This is my cartoon on the Tennessee shooting tragedy. I didn’t think I could do anything more than the flowers and flags I’m seeing on the news, so I went with flags at half mast. This is probably a local cartoon, since many readers around the country won’t know the Tennessee flag, still, it is a local tragedy deserving of a local cartoon.

This reminds us that Tennessee is part of a big, ugly world.