Iran, NASA, Melania and Trump! Top ten cartoons of the week
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Iran Cartoon for Cagle Column
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Florida Medicaid Expansion
Here’s my long interview with Bob Andelman (Mr. Media) about my work, the editorial cartooning business and editorial cartoons around the world.
This is a cartoon I was working on when I did the interview at my drawing table.
In his acceptance speech for a recent award, one of many awards he’s received in his long career, Doonesbury creator, Garry Trudeau, made these comments about the murdered Charlie Hebdo cartoonists:
“Ironically, Charlie Hebdo, which always maintained it was attacking Islamic fanatics, not the general population, has succeeded in provoking many Muslims throughout France to make common cause with its most violent outliers. This is a bitter harvest.”
“Traditionally, satire has comforted the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable. Satire punches up, against authority of all kinds, the little guy against the powerful. Great French satirists like Molière and Daumier always punched up, holding up the self-satisfied and hypocritical to ridicule. Ridiculing the non-privileged is almost never funny—it’s just mean.”
“By punching downward, by attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority with crude, vulgar drawings closer to graffiti than cartoons, Charlie wandered into the realm of hate speech, which in France is only illegal if it directly incites violence. Well, voila—the 7 million copies that were published following the killings did exactly that, triggering violent protests across the Muslim world, including one in Niger, in which ten people died. Meanwhile, the French government kept busy rounding up and arresting over 100 Muslims who had foolishly used their freedom of speech to express their support of the attacks.”
Trudeau is all wrong. Satire, and great editorial cartoons, are about speaking truth to power – and the most powerful people are those with guns, enforcing their will through violence. Trudeau seems blind to the threats that the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists saw all around them as Islamic extremists continue raping, enslaving and killing thousands of innocents while threatening to murder even more cartoonists.
Editorial cartoonists work in comfortable safety in America, but around the world our profession has always been dangerous. Cartoonists are murdered, beaten and jailed by the powerful people with guns, who the cartoonists criticize. Editorial cartoonists outside of the USA are the bravest heroes of journalism.No personal bravery is required of editorial cartoonists in the USA, where the government we lampoon defends us against the dangers faced by our cartoonist colleagues overseas. It takes no bravery to blame a rape victim for her own rape, as it takes no bravery to blame a cartoonist for his own murder. Perhaps the rape victim wore a provocative dress, or the cartoonist drew a provocative cartoon, it shouldn’t matter. It is the violence that should be condemned, not the victim of the violence.
Trudeau’s cartoons don’t “comfort the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable;” Trudeau simply chooses targets that he feels comfortable afflicting – targets that don’t shoot back.
Editor’s Note: After I wrote this column, Trudeau appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press to answer widespread (mostly conservative) condemnation of his comments about the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists. In the interview Trudeau argued that he didn’t mean to blame the cartoonists, then went on to defend his comments and blamed the cartoonists again. Trudeau’s Meet the Press interview can be viewed here.
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Insure Tennessee Cuckoo Clock
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Euro Bomb Repost
This is my cartoon about the Clinton and Bush dynasties. Note that Hillary is on the left and Jeb is on the right.
Hillary is a great character for cartoonists; I’m still getting comfortable with Jeb Bush, who really looks very little like George W. and his parents.
Playing cards are a metaphor staple among editorial cartoonists. Here’s a nice oldie, from Taylor Jones, with Obama and McCain.
I got mail in response to my cartoon, from readers asking why both Hillary and Jeb were not Jokers. I suspect Taylor got some angry mail for calling Obama a “spade,” I would have avoided that. Still, nice cartoon.
As I was writing this, I did a search on our CagleCartoons.com site for cards, and I came up with the lovely Boligan cartoon below. Clearly, Boligan has in mind that the fat, happy tourist is flying around the world, spreading the money around from his many credit cards.
Sometimes I look at a cartoon and think, if only he had done something different, that would have made for another great cartoon. With this one, I would have had a consumer Sysiphus, with too many credit cards flying too close to the sun, with his credit card wings melting, falling apart. Maybe I’ll do that, with a “thank you” to Boligan.
Cards are great for cartoons, huh?
Florida Senator Marco Rubio announced that he is in the presidential race a couple of days ago. He’ll be running against his old mentor, Jeb Bush, so, here is Marco as a doggie, biting Bush in the butt.
Maybe it’s just me, but it seems that almost everyone running for president this time around is really easy to draw. A couple are duds, Scott Walker and Martin O’Malley have lousy faces, but hopefully I won’t need to draw them.
I like the line art better, and I send it out to newspapers as the black and white version, but I’ve notices that papers are more often printing a grayscale version of the color cartoon. Frustrating. Editors like the tone and color, even though simple lines are more elegant.
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The NRA and Comic-Con
This weekend I went to the National Rifle Association (NRA) convention in Nashville, Tennessee, my hometown. I’m an editorial cartoonist; I sit at home drawing and I rarely go to big conventions. The only thing I have to compare the NRA to is the San Diego Comic-Con, and I thought the NRA convention stacked up pretty well to Comic-Con.
The NRA convention is half the size of Comic-Con. The crowd was certainly different, with the NRA sporting more beer bellies and gray hair than Comic-Con. Both the NRA and Comic-Con are mostly male, and both are full of fervent fans. It is a lot easier to park and get a hotel room at the NRA convention, and it is much cheaper and easier to get into the NRA than Comic-Con, which costs well more than ten times the $25 it costs to join the NRA and attend the NRA convention. Comic-Con sells out months in advance; anyone can go to the NRA at the last minute — like me.
There isn’t much religion at Comic-Con, although it isn’t unusual to hear people exclaim, “Oh my God” when they see the length of the line to meet the cast members of “The Big Bang Theory.”
There’s lots of religion at NRA conventions. The Saturday morning NRA annual meeting began with everyone in the audience holding hands and bowing their heads as someone on the stage prayed about how God has chosen the NRA to lead the fight against the “enemies of freedom” who, we were later told, are President Obama, Hillary Clinton and Michael Bloomberg, in that order.
Everyone in a crowd of thousands at the NRA Annual Meeting held hands, bowed their heads and followed along in a prayer about how God has chosen the NRA to defend us against the “enemies of freedom.” I was actually near the front of the room, where I took this photo. That’s the NRA’s executive officers on the stage in the distance, holding hands
There are enemies at Comic-Con too; scattered through the crowd are assorted Darth Vaders, storm-troopers, super-villains and monsters. Years ago there were Klingons everywhere, but the Klingons have dwindled in recent years, and now they are rare. My effort to build up my Klingon vocabulary has clearly been a waste of time. “Ghay’cha’!”
There was an anti-gun protest group, in town for the NRA convention, that had trouble making a dinner reservation. I’m told they were unwelcome at nearby restaurants, and their group had to drive thirty minutes out of Nashville, to Murfreesboro, for dinner. It is also difficult to make a dinner reservation at Comic-Con.
The exhibit floors at the NRA and Comic-Con are fascinating. One NRA exhibit I enjoyed featured videos of cool stuff getting shot, including row after row of watermelons, which made impressive explosions. Rows of televisions being shot were much less interesting than the watermelons. The legislature in Tennessee is debating allowing exploding targets. Tennessee already allows for the sale of fantastic fireworks — the aerial kind that would start forest fires if they were allowed in flammable California – but in Tennessee, fireworks are wholesome fun. Explosions are popular at Comic-Con too (the Death Star comes to mind). Alas, real, legal explosions in California are just the stuff of dreams.
Tennessee’s Republican legislature has been pandering to the NRA in the weeks leading up to the convention; they are close to passing a “Guns in Parks” bill that would prohibit cities from banning guns in their municipal parks. Most of the prospective Republican presidential candidates gave speeches at the NRA convention on the first day. At the annual meeting, many mentions of vile Democrats were met with hisses from the enthusiastic, Republican crowd, who were equally angry about Islamic extremists, defending the border with Mexico, and President Obama as they were about threats of gun control. The NRA convention is about much more than guns; it is about a broad agenda that is Republican, conservative, and Christian.
The same mission-creep is apparent at Comic-Con, which should be about comic books, but has grown to be about anything entertainment related, which may have nothing to do with comics. Any TV show. Any movie. Whatever. Are there some TV stars from a detective, procedural show doing a panel? Yes? Let’s go stand in line! My God, the line is so long.
As the Klingons would say, “petaQ!”
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Daryl Cagle is the editorial cartoonist who runs the CagleCartoons.com newspaper syndicate, distributing editorial cartoons to more than 850 newspapers around the world including the paper you are reading now. Comments to Daryl may be sent to [email protected]. Read Daryl’s blog at www.darylcagle.com.
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Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio
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Insure Tennessee and GOP
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Clinton and Bush Dynasties
