DarylCagle.comThere is a lot of Kryptonite around – and Kryptonite is deadly to Superman who runs into the stuff all the time – but Kryptonite never actually kills Superman, who just suffers a bit once in a while from the Kryptonite, then he moves on.
The news seems to repeat itself. Today President Trump announced yet another increase in troops for Afghanistan – after campaigning on getting us out of Afghanistan. Here’s the cartoon.
Look familiar? It wasn’t much different with President Obama …
Somehow I think I’ll be drawing this cartoon with each new president for another 17 years – if I live that long.
When Trump first came on the scene the cartoonists started drawing Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan right away. That annoyed me. So much for that – with Trumps comments today that implied culpability and moral equivalency between Klansmen and Nazis and the people who protest against them.
Last week I drew this cartoon with Trump and L’il Kim mushroom cloud hair. Sometimes I travel around and give a Powerpoint presentation about editorial cartooning and I show a dozen or two cartoons of L’il Kim’s dad, Il, with mushroom cloud hair. I’ve seen a few L’il Kim mushroom cloud hair cartoons, but his Dad, Il, is the king of cartoon mushroom cloud hair.
President Trump has been bashing Attorney General Jeff Sessions every day on Twitter. It looks like he wants Sessions to quit so that he doesn’t have to suffer the ugly politics of firing him.
My biggest issue was whether to draw any blood with the back-stabbing. I went for no blood. Editors don’t like blood. Now I wish I drew blood.
This is actually the first time I’ve drawn Sessions – and he is fun to draw.
Updated 7/28/17
It turned out that I did draw Sessions before – here:
And here it is in my local Los Angeles Daily News this morning. This is nice to see because it is rare that the Daily News, and it’s Southern California sister papers run an editorial cartoon, except on Sundays. Here’s a wrinkly scan (I spilled ice tea on it – can’t do that with the internet!) And paired with Charles Krauthammer – yuck.
Hey. Eye’s up here. Stop looking at my butt. Just because of the anal probe into Trump’s Russia conflicts, as well as his personal finances (we learned today) is no reason to stare at Trump’s butt!
Notice that I gave the bear a bit of a five-o’clock shadow?
This cartoon about the Republican Senate fail on Trumpcare is based on an oldie from Rembrandt titled,”The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp.”
This is actually a double-oldie as I drew this one years ago when Obama beat Mitt Romney, much to the horror of Republicans who then had an “autopsy” to figure out how they could have possibly lost. Their autopsy informed them that they should cultivate Hispanic voters – an idea that seems like a quaint, old-fashioned notion for today’s Trumpy Republicans. I thought it was also a good fit for the current Trumpcare debate in the Senate, so I dusted it off with some new wording.
The original is below. I think Rembrandt would have made a good editorial cartoonist.
As the Trump/Russia scandal evolves, I’ve noticed that the GOP talking points follow a pattern:
It is nice to always have the Clinton comfort place to go back to.
Trump, Li’l Kim, Xi and Putin are a funny ensemble. One problem with editorial cartooning is that we can only draw characters that readers already know from the news, and if the cartoonist isn’t a sissy, he or she won’t label the characters but really try to draw caricatures. As the world goes down the tubes we have more characters and more opportunities to eschew labels. Life is good.
This cartoon is based on an oldie I drew about nine years ago, featuring Li’l Kim’s daddy, Li’l Kim Jong Il.
Sorry that I haven’t been drawing or posting much lately. I’ve been holed up in my office doing annual bookkeeping and quarterly artists royalties. ARRRGH! I have more to do. I’ll try to poke my head out of the muck more often. In the course of all the accounting madness, I neglected to post the grim reaper cartoon below from about three weeks ago when the story of the moment was the GOP’s ugly healthcare bill.
I thought I was being clever at the time – until I saw that dozens of cartoonists were drawing grim reaper cartoons. Great minds think alike. ARRRGH!
This cartoon is about the congressional baseball shooting, and is based on a cartoon I drew six years ago about the Gabby Giffords shooting. Things don’t change much.
I was troubled to see a cartoon by our own Taylor Jones, on the front page of FoxNews.com in what seems to be a screenshot of the congressional baseball game shooter’s Facebook page, along with the headline: “HISTORY OF HATE.” I thought it was unfair of Fox News to put Taylor in that spot.
Steve Sack, the Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune commented, “It could have been any cartoonist’s work there. They’re using a deranged moron’s actions to stifle satire. I’ve seen attacks on TV comedians today as well. Hang in there, Taylor.”
Steve is correct about the right focusing their ire on satire. Conservatives thrive on talk radio where liberals haven’t been able to find an audience because the nature of liberal discourse is different – morning zoo radio and late night comedians are where liberals commune. We would rather laugh at Colbert or Saturday Night Live than listen to hours of Rush Limbaugh preaching reassuringly to his choir. Liberals can laugh at themselves, while conservatives laugh at liberals. This is something we see in totalitarian states around the world, as over half of the world’s population lives in a nation that doesn’t allow cartoonists to draw their nation’s leader. Conservatives and despots both have trouble laughing at themselves. This is a worry to me when Trump talks about limiting press freedoms, and when the media picks up the right’s criticism of satire. I suspect we’ll see more examples of conservative media lumping cartoonists together with monsters.
I’m told that CNN has been repeatedly showing Taylor’s cartoon from the gunman’s Facebook page this morning. Taylor sent me these comments …
I enjoyed watching the coverage of former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony in congress on Fox News, where the talk was all about Hillary’s emails and Benghazi. I’ve noticed that this is a pattern; when the Trump-bashing gets heavy, conservatives retreat into their “happy place” of Hillary (and to a lesser degree, Obama) bashing.
There isn’t a lot of depth to the Republican responses to each increment of Trumpocalypse news. I see it in my e-mail now, when conservatives complain about the Trump cartoons they often ask why we don’t have an equal number of Hillary-bashing cartoons – even though Hillary is defeated and gone.
