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New Year Obama with North Korea

158026 600 New Year Obama with North Korea cartoons

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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!

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Kim Jong Un and Sony Pictures Chickens

157638 600 Kim Jong Un and Sony Pictures Chickens cartoons

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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.

SF2015-POSTER-CARTOONISTS

 

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 
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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.

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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.

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Iran and Oil Price Drop

157399 600 Iran and Oil Price Drop cartoons

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Question: PICK ONE

Here’s my newest cartoon on the police shootings protests. Just pick one, from 1 to 4, then turn your computer over to read the answers. I don’t think that will work if you’re looking at this on your cell phone or tablet, because the screen will pop to right side up if you turn your computer over. I’m an old, desktop computer guy so it works for me. Heavy, though.

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Get Out of Jail Free!

Every couple of  years it is time for another Monopoly metaphor cartoon. Here’s my cartoon today about the police violence protests.

I get contacted by doctoral students who write their dissertations on the usage of particular metaphors in editorial cartoons – they like to count how many times they occur. Takes the joy out of a cartoon, huh? Well, that’s what doctoral students do. I might suggest that if anyone wants to do their thesis on Monopoly metaphors in editorial cartoons, they will have a lot of counting to do.

Here’s one I did back in 2008, on the Sarah Palin VP choice.

1121-PalinCommChestC

The next one is a rare cartoon where I had something positive to say, touting what was then the biggest charitable donation in history – Warren Buffet’s multi-billion dollar donation to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

887B-BuffetDonation_

 

The 1930’s era rich guy character in Monopoly, “Rich Uncle Pennybags“, is classic cartoon fodder whenever news about rich people comes along, and a pig character won’t do. Usually he doesn’t appear in political cartoons that are too flattering to him. I drew this next one with the George W. Bush stock market crash and subsequent bailout of the evil bankers (who, by the way, were never prosecuted).

1130B-BailoutMonopol

 

Remember when five Gitmo prisoners were traded for sketchy American POW, Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl? I drew this one with little caricatures of the released Gitmo prisoners.

GitmoJail

Back when I was working with msnbc.com I rarely got a call from an editor asking for anything, so I was surprised one day to hear from an editor at the Today Show, which was planning lots of coverage on Paris Hilton, who was being released from jail that day. They really wanted a quick cartoon, so I gave them this one.

1086B-Hilton_Jail_CM

When George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin, not so long ago, I drew my most recent “Get Out of Jail Free” cartoon.

ZimmermanJail

So, doctoral students – start counting!

 

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The National Conversation About Race

We have a great collection of cartoons about the Grand Jury decision not to indict policeman, Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri – come take a look!

Here’s the rough sketch for my “National Conversation About Race” cartoon.

Sketch600wide

I draw pretty quick and messy in pencil on 11″x17″ tab size paper. Then I trace it neatly for the line art which most people see in the newspaper.

And here’s the color version for the Web and newspapers that print in color.

Somehow I think we’ll be drawing cartoons on this topic for quite some time.

Here is how the cartoon looks this morning in my local newspaper, the Santa Barbara News-Press.

Conversation600wide

So dark! I anticipate that all of my cartoons will darken when printed, but somehow I’m always surprised by how dark they get.

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Variations on Ferguson Protests

I hate drawing cartoons about crime; I don’t feel like I have an opinion that is worth drawing – crime is bad, police violence is bad, victims are to be grieved – nothing really for me to draw that says more. With so many young black men killed by police in America, it is disappointing that the case that catches the public and media attention isn’t more clear cut, without conflicting evidence, with a more sympathetic victim and a police officer who is clearly guilty. It would seem that there are plenty of better cases to choose to rally behind, but the issue is saddled with the randomness of the media and what catches fire with the public. I can always draw a cartoon about the media, and how they are drawn to violence, so I went with that.

Here’s a detail in black and white, what most people will see in the newspapers.

cagle-ferguson-media-detail

Then I got to thinking that the cartoon was too wide and complex, and it really didn’t need the media – just the juxtaposition of the protestors and the opportunistic thieves was enough. I cut the cartoon back to this …

This one makes a different point without the media in the middle. I like that it is simple and a more standard size that newspapers will likely print bigger. Sometimes I get too baroque and complex when I should just pare it down.

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Bill Cosby RIP

Readers love celebrity obituary cartoons, and until now I’ve waited for the celebrity to die before I drew an obit cartoon. Bill Cosby seemed like the perfect opportunity to make an exception to that rule.

Drawing celebrities is easier now than in the old days. I used to struggle to build a “morgue” of photos of everyone I might have to draw on short notice. I had a lot of file drawers dedicated to scraps of paper with little photos of everyone who might find their way into a cartoon. Those days are over, now every cartoonists simply goes to Google, does an image search and a page full of wonderful photo scrap comes up. Easy research!

In fact, since everyone does the same research now, I’ve noticed how common it is for caricatures to resemble one another. Here’s a recent Bill Cosby cartoon by my buddy, Taylor Jones.

With a Google Images search it usually turns out that one photo is better than all the others – and cartoonists often pick out the same one to work from. Here’s a link to the Cosby photo from the Google Images search.

Taylor’s cartoon is better than mine; Taylor wins. But I have the satisfaction of making Cosby go to Hell.