DarylCagle.comHere’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.
Our Cagle.com site was down yesterday afternoon with a massive “DDoS Zombie” hacker attack. I’m not sure where they came from this time, but in the past we’ve traced them to China. I drew this cartoon with China looking over my shoulder, at the time of an earlier attack. A “zombie” attack, like the one we suffered yesterday, is one that uses multiple automated scripts; a DDoS is a “distributed denial of service” attack which attempts to flood the server with requests in order to deny it’s ability to serve content or interrupt service. Yesterday we suffered a huge flood of automated zombie requests.
Cagle.com is blocked by the government of Iran, and I’m sure we have some enemies around the world, but I think the attacks we continue to suffer come from criminals. We’ve had hackers insert malware/viruses onto Cagle.com, and we’ve been pretty good about getting that down as soon as it goes up – still, it is jarring. Most often I think the attacks are fishing for ways in to our server, to search for any information, like credit card numbers, that have some value to the worldly crooks.
Just so that all of you hackers out there know, we don’t keep credit card information online. When we have repeating charges for syndicate subscribers, we write the credit card information on a piece of paper, with a pen, and enter it manually into Paypal each month. We don’t store the credit information anywhere digitally. When hackers attack us, all they will find are our cartoons, that are already on display on the Web.
So, please, go attack someone else.
My last two cartoons have been about Kim Jong Un. The first was Li’l Kim making himself into a target. Here’s the rough sketch.
Here he is as line art. Most newspaper readers will see the cartoon in black and white like this.
I thought I would be bold with the color on this one – to make it more powerful with only line art and red. I’m sure some editors won’t print it because of my color choice. Editors like lots of “pretty” and “bright” colors. Editors generally avoid anything that can be called “bold.”
Since North Korea is still dominating the news I drew another one. This one with Li’l Kim as a doggie, with President Obama and the new Chinese president Xi Jinping.
I’ve done a whole lot of cartoons with leaders as doggies. In this case, i thought it would be interesting to have Obama reacting to Li’l Kim’s threatening barking, while Jinping reacts to Li’l Kim’s pee, with exactly the same body language. Here is the line art that most people see. Yes, I decided to move Obama closer, and I realized that I needed a label on Jinping, because he’s new and I didn’t know what he looked like until I looked him up.
Here is the color version – which is never as good as the simple black and white.
We have a wonderful collection of more than 250 North Korea cartoons here! I’ve drawn lots of leaders as doggies in the past. Here’s is Li’l Kim’s dad, Il, biting Obama’s butt from 2010. Things don’t change much.
Here’s one where Obama is the doggie on Wall Street’s leash.
Here’s Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu as the doggie.
I drew this one back in the 2008 primary season, with President Clinton as the doggie on Hillary’s leash. Ugh, I hate looking at my old, early Obama.
I drew a lot of doggie cartoons with President Bush. The military was W’s doggie.
Drawing Muslims as doggies is deeply insulting to them, which is why so many cartoonists do it, I suppose. Here are the Sunnis and Shiites fighting at the height of Bush’s Iraq Mess, with Iraq’s president Maliki.
I drew lots of W as a doggie. Here he is marking his territory.
And here is W the doggie, during the run-up to war in Iraq.
I’ll bet my cartoons would be much more popular if I drew nothing but doggies. I’ve considered it.
I drew a self-portrait in today’s cartoon. All the news about Chinese hacking strikes close to home as we’ve had lots of trouble with hacker attacks on our servers, that our ISP has traced to China. I’m guessing that the Chinese junta doesn’t like American editorial cartoons much. I drew a Chinese dragon looking over my shoulder.
I did a State Department sponsored speaking tour in China some years ago, and I told the Chinese audiences that when I draw cartoons about China I represent China with a Panda, or a dragon, or the Great Wall, or that guy standing in front of a tank in Tienanmen Square. The Chinese audience would always murmur and look at each other when I mentioned the tank in Tienanmen Square, which was quite provocative for them and always stirred up the crowd. At one college I said that line and one excited college kid stood up and asked in English, “Oh! Oh! What KIND of dragon?!” That still makes me laugh.
Here’s my very rough pencil sketch.
Next I do the finished line art, in dark, hard pencil on a 14″x17″ piece of Duralene drafting vellum. This is what most people will see in the newspapers since most of them still print in black and white.
Here is the color version. The color on this one was fun. I grabbed a bunch of Chinese dragons from Google Images for scrap on the dragon, and I pulled details from three or four different dragons that I thought were cute.
I don’t know what kind of dragon it is. Sorry.
Here are my newest cartoons. Fans always tell me that they like to see my messy rough sketches, so here we go again.
Here’s my quick and dirty sequester cartoon sketch. I drew it up first in hard pencil, I wasn’t happy with my Obama so I drew over him in soft (darker) pencil, made a note to move his position, and fiddled with just how he should be twiddling his thumbs. I often don’t get things right the first time.
Then I drew it up in finished line art, in hard pencil on nice drafting vellum. This black and white line art image is what most people see in the newspaper and I always like the BW version best. I think about the heavy blacks to be sure the image pops and I saw that the speech balloons needed to be reversed to black to give the words more weight.
Then I saved it with the white background transparent, and colored behind the image in layers in Photoshop to get this …
The previous cartoon was about former Senator Chuck Hagel’s nomination to be Defense Secretary being held up by angry Republicans. I threw the sketch for this one away. Sorry. Here’s the black and white, which looks better.
I thought about how much cross-hatching to put into the elephant skin. Elephants have interesting, textural skin, and I think I got to the point where he started to look like a rhino – maybe I went too far. It was fun to draw, though. Here it is in color.
And here it is a couple of days later in my local newspaper, The Santa Barbara News-Press – printed nicely this time. I like how they put my liberal cartoon sneering at wing-nut Linda Chavez’s Hagel-bashing column.
The previous one was about North Korea’s “Li’l Kim” annoying China with his missile and bomb tests. Here’s the rough sketch. You can see I fiddled with the position of the missile-cigar and the Panda’s hand.
Here is the black and white art. I made the missile-cigar smoke the only gray part of the image, so it would stand out as extra annoying.
… and here’s the color version, with a nice Chinese red background.
The previous cartoon is an oldie that I reposted with the news of Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation. I drew this one the last time the College of Cardinals met to choose a new Pope and we were all told that the Cardinals don’t really pick the Pope, it is God picking the Pope through the Cardinals. That struck me as funny.
It is pretty common for editorial cartoonists to use Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel image of God in editorial cartoons. Here’s a recent one by Nate Beeler.
… and a conservative one by Rick McKee …
… but I digress. I should post the new cartoons more often! Here’s the previous one, Obama has GOP fleas.
I didn’t do a color version of this one. That’s it – I’m all caught up!
Here are my most recent cartoons! Here’s the rough sketch for today’s cartoon, a little snarkiness pointed at troubled newspapers. I drew the three characters on the left, and then took a piece of tracing papers to make some changes for the panel on the right, to keep them looking consistent.
Then I drew it up as line art, in pencil on vellum. This black and white version is what most people will see in the newspaper – if newspapers will print this one. I always like the black and white version best.
And here I added color, in Photoshop layers behind the black line art.
Those young people are so disrespectful of Grandpa! Here is yesterday’s cartoon …
My wife’s Uncle Keene e-mailed this idea to me, which he tells me was given to him by a friend who prefers to remain anonymous. I usually don’t draw other peoples ideas, but what the heck, I liked this one. Thanks, Keene. Here it is as it looked in my local newspaper this morning.
I notice they picked up some gray scuzzy tone in the background. Yuck. Why do newspapers take pretty, clean crispy cartoons and muck them up? Here’s a previous cartoon, about the terrible air pollution in China.
This one was fun, and it is nice to do cartoons with no words. The previous cartoon was this quicky for Groundhog’s Day.
I didn’t bother doing color for this one. The previous one was about the immigration debate …
Now I’m caught up! I need to post more often.
There is a tense international situation developing in China surrounding blind activist Chen Guangcheng. Chen, who served time in prison for exposing forced abortions and sterilizations being done to comply with China’s one-child policy, escaped from house arrest early this week and was being given refuge at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.
Here’s the first cartoon I drew on the subject:
Once the Chinese government found out about U.S. involvement, they demanded that the U.S. apologize for meddling in its affairs, and according to reports, threatened the safety of Chen’s family. According to Chen, U.S. officials promised that at least one representative would stay with him at the hospital where he was being treated for an injury he received while escaping. But once he was brought to the hospital room, they all left, and now have no access to the activist.
The New York Times reported the Obama administration was “exposed to criticism from Republicans and human rights groups that it had rushed to resolve a delicate human rights case so that it would not overshadow other matters on the bilateral agenda,” such as the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs and China’s currency and trade policies.
So here is my new cartoon on the incident:
Chen now says he wants to leave China as soon as possible. “My fervent hope is that it would be possible for me and my family to leave for the U.S. on Hillary Clinton’s plane,” he told The Daily Beast.
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