The stock market continued its dive this week. My last cartoon showed the impending doom of the falling Chinese economy, now the falling oil prices are blamed for the latest stock market dump.
I drew this one as a live stream on YouTube and Twitch – want to watch me draw it in real time? Here it is on YouTube …
I’m often asked to show how I color my cartoons, so I did a live stream of coloring this one. Want to watch? Here it is!
Republicans loved it when Donald Trump led the “birthers” in their suspicions that President Obama was ineligible to be president because he was supposedly born to his American citizen mother in Kenya. Trump claims credit for forcing Obama to release his “long form” birth certificate to prove he was born in Hawaii. Now Ted Cruz, who was born to an American citizen mother in Canada actually fits the mold.
Republicans likely don’t care much about the “birther” argument applied to Ted Cruz, but I’m enjoying it. Here’s Donald Trump bashing Cruz with his Canadian-flag-speech-balloon.
As I was drawing this I noticed that Trump’s speech balloon is pointing at his crotch. Perhaps this is a visual Freudian slip.
I’m trying to live-stream all of my drawings now. Watch the YouTube video below! My apologies for this video being a little jerky in places; I’m still getting the hang of this.
The stock market took the biggest fall in many years last week as Chinese stocks continued their free fall. I drew this one yesterday as a live stream – well worth an hour and a half of your time to watch the entire drawing unfold in real time below!
I do the Photoshop coloring after I finish the drawing in the video, which is a little unfortunate because it would be nice to see the final art at the end of the video – but the scanning, cleaning up the scan and coloring is pretty boring. Here’s the final art …
The new cartoon today is Donald Trump and all of the other GOP candidates on the teeter-totter, with Trump outweighing them all. With eleven caricatures, this one was more ambitious than my typical cartoon, and you can watch my whole eleven face journey below on YouTube!
Try watching the video below at double speed (one of the nice YouTube settings options). Everyone thinks drawing this stuff is quick and effortless – which is nice, but watching the video gives more realistic picture.
If all goes well, I think I’ll do all of my cartoons as a live stream. Please let me know what you think, and what you would like to see me do differently!
I’m getting a little bit better at live-streaming my cartoons each time. My latest attempt (below) is a drawing of Federal Reserve Chairwoman, Janet Yellen, who raised interest rates this week for the first time in many years. Interest rates had been cut back to zero.
The Fed has been cutting interest rates for a very long time. This cartoon of former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan is from 2001 …
Then seven years later I drew this one with Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, who cut rates to zero. I’ll probably draw another one of these seven years from now.
Now Janet Yellen finally gets to raise rates, seven years after my Bernanke cartoon. This is only my second drawing of Yellen, the first one is below. I like how round she is – her face is round, her body is round, and she has big,round puppy-dog eyes. She’s great.
Take a look at my live stream video! All of my mistakes are on view. I have no secrets and no shame.
I ran across an old CNN video as I was futzing around YouTube figuring out how to do my new drawing videos. This was a news segment, one of two or three they did about a cartoon of mine showing the eagle on the Mexican flag, dead from a hail of bullets. I drew the cartoon in response to a particularly bloody period in the battles with Mexico’s drug cartels.
I had a wild week as the media in Mexico went wild. The Mexican Embassy in Washington D.C. filed a protest with the top brass at msnbc.com, who I was working with at the time. Then in response to the uproar, a number of top Mexican cartoonists drew Mexican flag cartoons supporting me.
That was a fun week.
The video below, from CNN, is pretty crazy. Their anchor, Rick Sanchez, was later fired (not because of this story, of-course).
Strange, huh? Here’s another one from CNN International.
Here’s the cartoon. It was fun for a week and lovely to get all the support form the Mexican cartoonists.
I drew today’s Trump cartoon live on YouTube. Here is the finished color version.
That’s the GOP’s tarnished image at the right, as Trump rockets up in the polls. To really be going up in the polls, he should be facing to the right instead of the left – and I thought about that for a bit, as you can see in the video, but having Trump go the wrong way is better.
Today’s Trump news, about how he would ban Muslims from coming into the USA until we figure out “what the hell is going on” is great fun, because Trump’s supporters love what he has to say, while mainstream Republicans and the media are offended, demanding again and again that Trump leave the race. That tarnished GOP brand is starting to look pretty crusty.
Living here in red-state Tennessee I see angry Republicans are all around me; they live in their own news bubble, with their own history of the world, reinforced by their communities of like minded, angry, evangelical conservatives. The typical Republican voters are much father right than their knuckle-dragging candidates. Trump has plenty of room to his right to be even more outrageous.
Oh! Today I learned that the government of Pakistan is no longer blocking access to Cagle.com within Pakistan! Welcome to all of our new Pakistani readers!
The pundits on Fox News are holding their breath, turning blue, waiting for Obama to say the words, “Islamic Terrorists.” It may be a long wait.
I’ve gotten comments about how there appears to be nothing inside of Obama’s head. I wasn’t really thinking about making him be brainless, rather I was thinking of his skull as something of an echo chamber.
This cartoon was the product of my first try at live streaming the process of my drawing a cartoon. I had some tech difficulties, particularly with the sound. And I see that I will need to develop a new skill set for talking constantly while I draw. I should do a little better next time, solving these problems as I go along. Take a look at the YouTube video of my drawing session below. If the streaming is popular I’ll set up a regular time for it in the future. In the meantime, I’ll announce on Facebook and Twitter when I’ll be going live on YouTube.
Standing in a crowed of bloody, murder victims while saying something ironic or hypocritical is a cartoon cliche that every cartoonist has drawn many times. Here’s a similar cartoon that my buddy Pat Bagley drew recently in response to San Bernardino …
This Steve Sack cartoon is probably my favorite San Bernardino cartoon – it is a response to the New York Daily News prayer front page and the rejection of another gun control vote in congress, with a wonderful rosary.
Here’s another one of my dead field of victims cartoons about Bashar Assar – as fresh today as it was when I drew it some time ago.
Here’s another one where I used the same victims. I traced the same dead crowd, and changed their clothes to Taliban duds. There was a story at the time criticizing American servicemen for peeing on the corpses of Taliban fighters they had just killed in battle. I got a lot of angry reader response to this cartoon.
This also isn’t the first time I’ve drawn the NRA as a pig. Here is a Cagle classic NRA pig cartoon …
Pigs are a wonderful cartoon standard; they are a symbol of greed. Here’s a standard Cagle piggy oldie …
Pigs and standing among fields of the dead are two of my favorite things! (Maybe that’s another reason why those Islamic extremists don’t like cartoonists.)
The Republicans are trying hard to push back against the inflows of refugees and immigrants. Here’s my take. Often when I do cartoons that have muted colors, I get complaints from editors who want brighter colors. Refugees don’t lend themselves well to bright colors.
Often when I do cartoons have have muted colors, I get complaints from editors who want brighter colors. Refugees don’t lend themselves well to bright colors. I’m trying to do more texture in my cartoons now. Here’s a detail.
Here’s my rough and dirty sketch. You can see that I fiddled around with the position of the elephant’s trunk before I was happy with it.
I put a “Thanks to Michael Kounturis” in the lower left. Michael works out of Athens, Greece and he is one of my favorite cartoonists; he recently came back to our CagleCartoons.com newspaper syndicate package after a hiatus. My GOP Doorway cartoon was inspired by Michael’s cartoon below.
I stole a lot from Michael’s cartoon, including the position of the door and the guy pushing back on the door – and the general composition with the doorway poking up, off-center. It is all lovely – so thanks, Michael, and you have my apologies for ripping you off! See more of Michael’s great cartoons here.
This week the House passed a bill that would stop the US from taking in 10,000 Syrian refugees; President Obama promised to veto the bill if it reached his desk. All of the Republican presidential candidates have been crowing about stopping refugee immigrants in the wake of the terror attacks in Paris, and the cartoonists have been doing some healthy Republican bashing in response, often including the Statue of Liberty with its obvious irony. Here’s mine …
I was impressed by this one, from my buddy Pat Bagley of the Salt Lake Tribune, featuring the dead Syrian toddler found on the beach in Greece, with Lady Liberty’s toes …
This Liberty in the position of the dead boy on the beach, by my cartoonist buddy Milt Priggee impressed me even more. (It would have been better without the sentence in the black rectangle.)
This Liberty is from my socialist cartoonist buddy, Rainer Hachfeld, from Germany.
There’s no Statue of Liberty, but this refugees cartoon by Hajo de Reijger of the Netherlands is so elegant in its form that I had to share it here …
Breaking news can make a cartoon go missing. I was finishing up the color on this Donald Trump immigration cartoon last Friday afternoon when the news about the Paris Terror Attacks broke. Clearly, newspapers would not me interested in Donald Trump for at least a week. I notice that it is only today that the Donald is creeping back into the news with word that he is now leading all the polls again.
I thought this cartoon would be provocative, I didn’t guess that it would be ignored. I guessed wrong.