Tariff refund: Top ten cartoons of the week
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Obama Pours Money on Bank Fire
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Ugly Stock Market Mathematics
That Racist New York Post Dead-Monkey Cartoon
All the pundits are talking about the recent cartoon by the New York Post’s Sean Delonas, showing a chimp shot by two policemen who say, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.” The prevailing view among the bloggers and talking-heads is that the cartoon is a racist depiction of Obama as a monkey. Al Sharpton has taken the opportunity to grab the media spotlight by condemning the cartoon. New York Post employees are reportedly “unhappy and ashamed” of the “offensive cartoon.” The media love arguments about race.
I was thinking of drawing a cartoon with the media frantically rushing to cover the “racist” Delonas cartoon, while Attorney General Eric Holder calmly stands in front of the melee telling Americans how they are “cowardly” in avoiding discussions about race. I expect we’re in for a lot of this for the next four years.
Some cartoonists (Ben Sargent of The Austin American-Statesman and Steve Bell of the Guardian in Britain, for example) consistently drew George W. Bush as a monkey. The cartoonists all chose to draw Bush with big monkey ears and a huge, monkey-like upper lip, so drawing Bush as a monkey was a natural progression. Now the cartoonists are all drawing Obama with similar, big monkey ears and we’re starting to hear complaints from readers about how we draw Obama’s lips. Presidents get shorter in cartoons if they don’t perform well — and chimps are short. Cartoonists tiptoe through a racial-metaphor minefield.
A standard, workday ritual that editorial cartoonists do is to list the major news stories of the day, and then think of how to combine two of the unrelated stories into a cartoon. Combining two unrelated things in a cartoon is funny. Monkeys are funny and the killer chimp was the big news one day along with the stimulus bill. Delonas is a staunch conservative who didn’t like the stimulus bill; this cartoon is a formulaic “no-brainer.” I’m sure the reaction to the cartoon was a surprise to Delonas.
But the reaction shouldn’t be a surprise. I’d suggest that every cartoonist should make a list of every racial stereotype to avoid regarding African-Americans, and assume that every cartoon will be considered to be a metaphor for Obama — then go through the check list before putting pen to paper, like a pilot goes through a check list before taking off in his plane.
And watch for a lot more cartoon plane crashes.
Daryl Cagle is a political cartoonist and blogger for MSNBC.com; he is a past president of the National Cartoonists Society and his cartoons are syndicated to more than 850 newspapers, including the paper you are reading. Daryl’s books “The BIG Book of Campaign 2008 Political Cartoons” and “The Best Political Cartoons of the Year, 2009 Edition” are available in bookstores now.
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A Rod Steroids and Baseball
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How To Draw Obama
How to Draw Obama
Obama seems like an easy guy to draw; he’s skinny, has a big chin, expressive eyebrows and lips. As it turns out, no matter how a cartoonist draws Obama, somebody gets mad.
When Obama burst into the presidential campaign cartoonists started drawing him as a caricature without much exaggeration. As time goes by, political figures morph in cartoons into caricatures of caricatures; George W. Bush shrank to knee height and grew huge bunny ears; Bill Clinton lost his pants and grew fatter (even as he got skinnier in real life). At the beginning of the Obama administration, everyone is watching to see how the cartoon Obama evolves.
I worked for twenty years as a cartoon illustrator, doing drawings for books, magazines and advertising. I was often given clear guidelines on how I was supposed to draw African-Americans: with “small noses” and “thin lips”. I was instructed to make any crowds of cartoon characters racially diverse, but only diverse in color, not in facial features. Thick lips and wide noses on African American faces would be returned to me for correction, with a polite reminder of the corporate policies on depictions of minority facial features.
Cartoonist Gary McCoy has been lambasted by readers, and by Salon.com, for drawing racially insensitive, big lips on Obama. Some cartoonists have drawn attention for giving Obama blue lips. Canadian cartoonist Patrick Corrigan of the Toronto Star had an Obama cartoon killed by his editor because of “racist” blue lips. Thomas “Tab” Boldt of the Calgary Sun and Cam Cardow of the Ottawa Citizen have also been rendering Obama with blue lips. Corrigan tells me that everyone in Canada, in the winter, has blue lips.
Readers of my blog explained to me that blue lips are racist and pointed out an old racist expression “blue gums,” which was a new one for me. Corrigan tells me he’ll be switching to purple lips, Cam will be giving up on the blue lips and Tab was laid off. That may mean the end of blue lips for Obama.
Syndicated caricaturist Taylor Jones also sees blue in Obama. He writes:
“One of the most interesting things about Obama’s eyes is the slight blue tinge to the flesh below his eyebrows. It’s also visible on his eyelids. It’s as though he’s wearing a bit of eye shadow. Don’t know if it’s actual blue pigmentation, or just the effect of light bouncing off the skin stretched against his eye sockets. But it adds a nifty touch whenever I’m drawing Obama’s caricature in color.”
I’m considering going all the way, making Obama completely blue (if that’s not racist).
Obama’s ears have grown huge for most cartoonists. George W. Bush’s ears also grew huge, but it took more than a year for Bush’s big ears to catch on — Obama’s ears started right away, and have been expanding faster than the national debt. It may be that after eight years of Bush, we now see huge ears as a standard, presidential attribute. I don’t see any particular reason for either Bush’s or Obama’s ears to grow in cartoons, but with cartoonist peer pressure it will soon be impossible to draw a likeness of Obama without colossal ears.
There seems to be an expectation that political cartoonists are mostly liberals who love Obama and will find it hard to make fun of him in cartoons. Some cartoonists have complained in the press that Obama is dull, and that there is little to criticize about him — we have a term of art for cartoonists like that, we call them “bad cartoonists.” It is the job of an editorial cartoonist to dislike everybody. Political cartoonists have nothing to gain by being in favor of anything. Cartoons that support anything are lousy cartoons. There is plenty for everyone not to like about Obama — and with the porky stimulus package and tax-evading cabinet appointments, there’s more every day!
The cartoon version of Obama will continue to evolve quickly. If we ever actually see him smoking a cigarette, he will always be smoking in cartoons. Obama may turn different colors, and he’ll grow or shrink with his performance. Obama’s ears will keep growing no matter what he does. As Obama’s honeymoon passes and the caricatures become more severe, I expect the complaints about racism in the cartoons will also grow more severe.
But I don’t care. I’m making Obama blue today.
Daryl Cagle is a political cartoonist and blogger for MSNBC.com; he is a past president of the National Cartoonists Society and his cartoons are syndicated to more than 850 newspapers, including the paper you are reading. Daryl’s books “The BIG Book of Campaign 2008 Political Cartoons” and “The Best Political Cartoons of the Year, 2009 Edition” are available in bookstores now.
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Republicans – Ha Ha Ha
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News Around the Cagle Sites
Over on Cagle.com we have great new collections on Obama Taking Office, Obama’s Inauguration, Obama to close Gitmo, and “NO JOBS!”
Our weekly, MSNBC.com slideshow for last week, January 17 through 23, is up here. Â If you ever miss a slideshow, there is an archive of all the past weeks slideshows here.
I was troubled to read about Mad Magazine going from monthly to quarterly, after their 500th issue.  They will also be dropping their new Mad Kids magazine.  It looks like everything in print is dying.
Take a look at Monte Wolverton’s new blog.  Monte’s father, Basil Wolverton, was one of the founding Mad Magazine artists – probably most famous for drawing the ugliest girl in the world.  I was surprised to see that Monte’s dad also illustrated the Bible.
Cartoonist Brian Fairrington rips into Obama as the Media’s Messiah, on his blog.
Brilliant caricature artist, Taylor Jones, just posted a huge piece on how to draw Obama. Â Also, don’t miss Steve Greenberg’s new blog. Â Now that we have our new blog.cagle.com WordPress servers online, we’ll be inviting more cartoonists to do blogs with us.
We’ve been having trouble with our email newsletters and have been working on a new solution. Â The newsletters should resume next week. Â We know how our readers love the newsletters and we apologize for the interruption.
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Inauguration Crowd
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How to Draw President George W Bush
How to Draw President George W. Bush
Political cartoonists are not much different from comic strip cartoonists; both draw an ongoing daily soap opera featuring a regular cast of characters. While comic strip cartoonists invent their own characters, the political cartoonist’s characters are given to him by events in the world. For the past eight years, political cartoonists have been drawing little daily sagas starring the same main character, President Bush. Most people won’t miss Bush as a president, but we should all miss him as a great cartoon character.
Around the world, cartoonists almost always draw President Bush as a cowboy. Outside America, a Texas cowboy is seen as: uneducated, ill mannered, a “trigger-happy marshal” or outlaw who is prone to violence. Cowboy depictions of the president by worldwide cartoonists are meant to be insults, but Americans see cowboys differently. In the USA, cowboys are noble, independent souls, living a romantic lifestyle by taming the wilderness and taking matters into their own hands whenever they see a wrong that needs to be righted. We are a nation of wanna-be cowboys.
The image of President Bush evolves with each cartoonist’s personal perspective. Back in 2000, Bush started out as most political cartoon characters start out, as a caricature of a real person, meant to be recognizable from a photograph. The cartoonists soon stopped looking at photographs and started doing drawings of drawings, then drawings of drawings of drawings, so that the George W. Bush drawings morphed into strangely deformed characters that looked nothing like the real man, but are instantly recognizable because we’ve come to know the drawings as a symbol of the man. It is surprising that each cartoonist’s drawings of the president look entirely different, but each is easily recognizable as representing the same character.
For most cartoonists, the president’s ears have grown huge; a strange phenomenon, since the president doesn’t have unusually large ears, and isn’t well known for listening. Some cartoonists have seen President Bush shrink in height; a combination of these has the president sometimes looking like a little bunny rabbit. Barack Obama’s cartoon ears have also begun to grow in cartoons, for no good reason – maybe big ears are the cartoon presidential curse of the new millennium.
The president who shrank most in cartoons was Jimmy Carter. At the end of Carter’s term he was a Munchkin, standing below knee height on almost every cartoonist’s drawing table. President Bush shrank for only the more liberal cartoonists early on, but is short for all of us at the end of his term. President Reagan grew taller during his cartoon term in office. President Clinton grew fatter, even as he lost weight in real life. Bill Clinton’s personality was fat, and the cartoonists drew the personality rather than the man. President Clinton is now skinny, but he will always be fat in cartoons.
Another cartoon characteristic that has grown from years of drawing President Bush are his eyes, two little dots, close together, topped by raised, quizzical eyebrows. The close, dotted eyes are an interesting universal phenomenon, shared by almost every cartoonist, that doesn’t relate to the president’s actual features. Over time, most cartoonists will draw a character with eyes that grow larger, but President Bush’s eyes shrink, while his ears grow. There may be a political message in that, but I can’t figure it out.
I once played “Political Cartoonist Name That Tune.” The game went like this:
“I can draw President Bush in SIX LINES.”
“Well, I can draw President Bush in FOUR LINES!”
“I can draw President Bush in THREE LINES!”
“OK. Draw that President!”
…and I did, two little dots topped by a raised, quizzical eyebrow line. It looked just like him.
Now I need to learn how to draw Obama with three lines; it may take me eight years to do it.
Daryl Cagle is a political cartoonist and blogger for MSNBC.com; he is a past president of the National Cartoonists Society and his cartoons are syndicated to more than 850 newspapers, including the paper you are reading. Daryl runs the most popular cartoon site on the Web at www.cagle.msnbc.com. His books “The BIG Book of Campaign 2008 Political Cartoons” and “The Best Political Cartoons of the Year, 2009 Edition” are available in bookstores now.
See Daryl’s cartoons and columns at //cagle.com/daryl.
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Israel Vs Hamas Shoot the Doggie
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Bush the Cat and Shoes
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Cartoony Politics in Canada
I’ve never paid much attention to Canadian politics and I’ve never really understood the cartoons that my colleagues north of the border draw.
But lately, the Canadian political cartoons have taken on a frantic tone and I asked two of my Canadian cartoonist buddies, Thomas “Tab” Boldt, of the Sun Media newspaper chain, and Patrick Corrigan, of The Toronto Star, to explain it all to me in a way that even an American cartoonist can understand.
CAGLE: What’s happening with the crazy politics in Canada?
CORRIGAN: Well, Daryl, we don’t elect our Prime Ministers up here, our Parliament picks them, and sometimes decides to throw Prime Ministers out with a “no confidence vote,” also known as “throwing the bums out.”
Our Parliament was just about to toss Prime Minister Harper out, so Harper decided to close Parliament down, as any bona fide third-world dictator would do.
On bended knee, Harper begged the Queen’s representative to Canada, a former TV reporter who usually doesn’t do much of anything except swan around and look official, to help him out.
She agreed to “prorogue” parliament … and if you say “prorogue” fast enough, it sounds like “democracy,” or, maybe not.
TAB: Not so fast here! Technically my colleague is correct, just a little hazy on the details. First of all, we had to suffer through an eye-glazing Canadian election just a few short weeks ago. Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party got more seats than the other parties, not enough to govern with authority, but enough seats to somehow run the country in cooperation with the other parties.
As it turned out, the opposition didn’t like the results of that election; they also didn’t like that Harper was attempting to withhold their public funding. So like bona-fide-tin-pot-would-be-coupists, the opposition parties tried to overturn the results of the election, claiming that the Conservative government was not acting fast enough on the economic crisis.
Prime Minister Harper’s main opponent, a chap named Dion, lucked into the leadership job of the Liberal Party. Dion’s main platform in the recent election was to raise “green” taxes. A sure-fire winner that somehow failed to get the voters excited.
Then Dion, still unable to articulate whole sentences in clear English, thought he’d have another kick at the can, this time without having to bother the voters or having to count ballots. It’s easier that way.
Dion’s slick move to oust Harper and the Conservatives was supported by the two other opposition parties, the Liberal-Socialist-Separatist Coalition, but we’re already seeing cracks in that group. Dion just got booted and the whole coup junta will last as long as an election promise.
Speaking as a cartoonist, it’s been an exciting time. It’s a little like shooting piranhas in a waste barrel, you can’t miss, and whatever you hit probably had it coming anyways. There are no innocent parties in this spat.
CAGLE: Yikes! When will Parliament come back and try to throw Harper out again?
CORRIGAN: Not until late in January. In the meantime we’ll all just cozy up in front of our TVs and watch curling … I can explain that too if you’d like.
TAB: Anyway, Harper’s main opponent, who is from Quebec and barely speaks English, and couldn’t lead anybody to the men’s room, is walking the plank as we speak. He’ll end up on YouTube selling organic backpacks.
CAGLE: So … what do most Canadians think about this mess?
TAB: All we can agree on is 100 lashes on the foot soles for every member of Parliament (double that number for the separatists).
CORRIGAN: I think Tab is sending out a petition in Alberta to quit Canada and hook up with Idaho — or Frankfurt. Nova Scotia has returned to Scotland and pledged allegiance to Sean Connery. Toronto has acquired Buffalo on the NASDAQ .
TAB: Actually, I’m sending out petitions to join Hawaii. It’s as close as Eastern Canada is to us in Alberta, but a lot warmer.
CORRIGAN: Harper gets a second chance, but the rest of Parliament will gang up again as a rickety “coalition” and try to throw the Prime Minister out. By then the Queen’s representative will be tired of canceling her dinner parties and make the clowns have another election. That’ll be sometime next summer, and by then, Canadians will all be unemployed; record numbers will go the polls and vote for a new and truly inspiring party… the Wayne Gretzky party
CAGLE: Should I be worried about our once reliable, stable neighbor?
CORRIGAN: Naw, we’re OK. We’ve put up “no trespassing” signs around all our nuclear reactors. Rumor has it that the Queen may intervene if things get out of hand. Apparently she’s more than willing to send Prince Charles over to take charge and become the King of Canada.
TAB: Should Canadians be concerned about the U.S. would be a better question. What we have seen these past 8 years wasn’t exactly confidence and friendship inspiring. We up north are old fashioned; we believe in the Geneva Convention and basic human rights. We are such softies.
CORRIGAN: Just tell your friends south of the border that an Alberta Clipper temporarily burst the pipes of Parliament so we shut her down for a couple of weeks. No worries. Until then, you can reach all 35 million of us in the Bahamas at the Banana Republic Lounge, leg-wrestling in the back corner, near the kitchen.
CAGLE: Very good. I’m relieved to hear that there are only 35 million of you.
Cartoons by Thomas “Tab” Boldt of Sun Media Newspapers, and Patrick Corrigan of The Toronto Star.
Daryl Cagle is a political cartoonist and blogger for MSNBC.com; he is a past president of the National Cartoonists Society and his cartoons are syndicated to more than 850 newspapers, including the paper you are reading. Daryl runs the most popular cartoon site on the Web at www.cagle.msnbc.com. His books “The BIG Book of Campaign 2008 Political Cartoons” and “The Best Political Cartoons of the Year, 2009 Edition” are available in bookstores for Christmas.
See Daryl’s cartoons and columns at www.caglepost.com.