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Last week, we added a Keith Tucker to our little stable of cartoonists here on Cagle.com. Not only is Keith a political cartoonist, he’s also an Emmy award-winning animator who has worked for many of the top studios, including Warner Brothers, Disney, Hanna Barbera, Amblin, Universal and Marvel.
Here is an animated political cartoon by Keith about “Vulture Pirate” Mitt Romney, a parody of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “HMS Pinafore”:
It is fascinating to watch Fox News’ team effort to promote the Libya attack as an Obama administration scandal just before the election – and their consternation that other media doesn’t share their passion. Here’s the cartoon I drew on the topic.
Our liberal cartoonist, Adam Zyglis drew this “mountain out of a molehill” cartoon …
And our conservative-team-player cartoonist, Eric Allie, responded to Adam with the cartoon below …
Even though I think the Libya “scandal” is right wing wishful thinking, I love the ‘toon tit for tat. See more Libya “scandal” cartoons here.
The North East is getting slammed at the moment by Hurricane Sandy, a rare October menace many experts have dubbed “Frankenstorm.” Hurricanes of this power hitting the most densely populated area of the country are rare, and threatens over 50 million people with flooding, high winds and even snow.
Jeff Parker, the staff cartoonist of Florida Today, has lots of experience covering many, many hurricanes from his home base of Florida. Here are 10 of Jeff’s funniest cartoons:
Cartoons by Rick Detorie who draws the comic strip, "One Big Happy."
California congressman Brad Sherman is in a tough election battle with another incumbent Democrat, Howard Berman, this year in a contest that has drawn national attention to two candidates with hot tempers. Cartoonists have known and despised Sherman for many years, since he was the Chairman of California’s “Board of Equalization” (BOE) which writes regulations governing state taxes. Sherman doesn’t like cartoonists much either, for good reason.
Cartoon by movie industry cartoonist, Tim Burgard.
Sherman championed a set of confusing, contradictory and punitive tax laws that punished California’s artists for many years. California charges a sales tax on “tangible” property, but charges no tax on services; in Sherman’s days on the BOE, authors weren’t charged tax on the copyrights to their written works, but artists were charged tax on their copyrights, even though neither was tangible. Newspaper political cartoonists were exempt from the sales tax, but other cartoonists weren’t, except if they wrote the words that appeared in their cartoons themselves, and didn’t have a separate author. The rules were different than the sales tax rules for rights to artwork in all other states, leading to even more confusion, and the regulations were not applied to artwork by big corporations, like Disney; the taxes were randomly imposed only on little, freelance artists.
Cartoon by nationally syndicated editorial cartoonist, Jeff Stahler.
Sherman took his cartoon frustrations out on a clown – a cartoonist named Rhoda Grossman, who performed at children’s parties, a service that isn’t taxable, except that Rhoda made the mistake of drawing caricatures of the children as a small part of her performance. Sherman and the BOE went after the poor clown for sales tax and penalties on her entire gross income as a performer for the preceding seven years, because of the part of her show that included drawing – a devastating, unexpected, huge, tax bill for poor Rhoda the clown.
Rhoda appealed the tax decision to the BOE, chaired by Sherman, who had been a big supporter of the crazy tax laws imposed against artists and who had just won a race for congress. Sherman moved to Washington, DC and didn’t attend the meeting to hear Rhoda’s plea before the board – he was keeping his salary from the tax board until the last possible day before switching to his new salary from congress, and he cast the deciding vote against Rhoda in absentia, crushing the clown.
Cartoon by Rick Kirkman, who draws the comic strip "Baby Blues."
Top cartoonists from all across America joined in a campaign to draw unflattering cartoons of Sherman, protesting his longtime support of California’s crazy, inconsistent art tax laws. The National Cartoonists Society had determined that Sherman was the one person most responsible for the ugly tax burden that California artists suffered under. Some of the cartoons that were drawn at that time are displayed here, my favorites are the ones below, by Russell Myers, the cartoonist who draws the comic strip “Broom Hilda.” There were some great ones, inspired by the callous indifference of Sherman, the petty tax bureaucrat.
Cartoon by Cathy Guisewite, who drew the comic strip, "Cathy."
The cartoonists were disappointed to see Sherman move on to serve more than a decade in congress, but the story actually has a happy ending. Soon after Sherman left the BOE, the tax board voted to reverse their
Cartoon by Mort Walker, who draws the comic strip, "Beelte Bailey."
decision on Rhoda’s case. Then the California Supreme Court overturned Sherman’s regulations taxing the transfer of intangible reproduction rights to artwork. (Sherman had also cast the deciding vote against the tax appeal of artist, Heather Preston, who went on to overturn the regulations in the courts.) California artists were saved from their tax purgatory, no thanks to Sherman.
And we’re left with a legacy of some great, Brad Sherman cartoons!
Cartoons by Russel Myers who draws the comic strip, "Broom Hilda."
Cartoon by nationally syndicated editorial cartoonist and Mad Magazine artist, Monte Wolverton.
This long election season is finally winding down, and tonight is the final Presidential debate between opponents Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Since our readers have enjoyed the previous open threads we’ve done for earlier debates, here’s an open thread for tonight’s event for everyone to “debate the debate” LIVE.
To start the discussion, here’s my new cartoon about the state of the race. It seems like Obama and Romney are all locked up. Will tonight’s debate change things?
Who do you think will win? Are you rooting for anyone? What do you hope they discuss? Will Biden say something crazy? Comment away below!
I ripped off our ultra-conservative cartoonist Gary McCoy with my new debate cartoon. See Gary’s cartoon below mine. I love you, Gary.
South African political cartoonist Jeremy Nell, whose cartoons I syndicate in our Cagle Cartoons package, was fired from his job at The New Age newspaper for being too political.
“The New Age‘s editorial stance became increasingly out of sync with mine,” Nell wrote on his blog. “This was particularly apparent when the current editor recently told me that he doesn’t “like cartoons [that make] political judgements or statements.” My satire can’t really function under such constraints.”
The move has been greeted with lots of outrage from observers that suspect the paper is editorially aligned with the President Jacob Zuma and ruling African National Congress, someone Nell (and other South African cartoonists) have been harshly critical of.
One noted Zumba critic, the great South African cartoonist Zapiro, drew a cartoon today in The Times in support of Nell. Zapiro famously draws Zuma with a showerhead coming out of his head, after the African President claimed taking a shower after having unprotected sex helped cut the risk of contracting HIV.
Its nice to see professional cartooning camaraderie in such a public venue.
Here a cool video of our talented young cartoonist Adam Zyglis, the staff cartoonist at the Buffalo News. He was interviewed on CNN by Karin Caifa during this years Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC) convention that took place in Washington, D.C. last month.
Recently, I traveled to France to attend the St. Just le Martel editorial cartoon festival. I brought with me our brilliant, knuckle-dragging conservative cartoonist Eric Allie, who seemed like a strange, wild beast to the mostly-lefty French cartoonists.
I had the chance to sit down and interview Eric about his cartooning style and ideas, and I poked and prodded him about all those crazy conservative tropes he enjoys using in his cartoons, like labeling the media the MSM (I actually had to Google it to find out what it meant because I wasn’t living in the right-wing bubble):
Since we have so many devoted readers with as many opinions about politics as our cartoonists (and since it went so well during the first Presidential Debate), here’s an open thread for all of you to have at it LIVE during tonight’s Vice Presidential debate between Joe Biden and Paul Ryan.
To start the discussion, here’s a funny pre-debate cartoon by Nate Beeler of the Columbus Dispatch (check out all our cool Debate cartoons here).
Who do you think will win? Are you rooting for anyone? What do you hope they discuss? Will Biden say something crazy? Comment away below!
For the past six years we’ve enjoyed a partnership with msnbc.com (which recently changed its name to NBCNews.com) and for six years before that, with Slate.com when it was part of the Microsoft Network – all in all, twelve years with Microsoft and MSN.com. I regret to write that our partnership has come to an end.
I was the official “editorial cartoonist” for Slate.com, msnbc.com and NBCNews.com. Of-course, all of the cartoonists that work with us through our Cagle Cartoons syndicate and Politicalcartoons.com were featured on the MSN.com sites, including slide shows on news topics of the day on msnbc.com, the Today Show site and NBC Sports; we did a cartoon week in review and maintained a “CartoonBlog.”
Recently, msnbc.com changed ownership to be run by NBC, and NBC itself recently changed ownership. It isn’t usual these days for cartoons to be cut to save costs, but we were cut for editorial reasons. The reason I was given for our departure was “the new management wants nothing to do with cartoons.” Msnbc.com/NBCNews.com has never had an opinion section, or other opinion content, so it is disappointing, but not entirely unexpected.
Readers of our Cagle.com site will see very few changes – the NBCNews.com logo is gone from our header and will be gone from my attribution in my future cartoons. Our site will look the same as always; we’ll continue our syndication business as always at CagleCartoons.com and Politicalcartoons.com.
Our editors at MSN/Slate/msnbc/NBCNews were wonderful to work with all these years; I’ve appreciated their support for our cartoonists and our art form. They loved what we did, let us do what we wanted and were happy with what we wanted to do – the perfect editors! They were great. I miss them already.
