This week belonged to congresswoman Liz Cheney as she was kicked out of her Republican leadership position for refusing to tell lies about a “stolen election” and swear fealty to Trump. Here’s my cartoon.
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Here are Kevin Siers’ Top Ten cartoons of the year that were most reprinted in newspapers. Kevin is the Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist for The Charlotte Observer in North Carolina.
We keep statistics on how many editors, who subscribe to our syndicate service at CagleCartoons.com, download each cartoon. Over the next few days I’ll post Top Ten cartoons from some of our other CagleCartoonists! See Kevin’s cartoon archive on Cagle.com
Merry Christmas!
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Here are the ten most widely published cartoons of the week (July 18 through July 25, 2020). As usual, no drawings of President Trump are among the most reprinted cartoons. Seven cartoons were related to the pandemic this week, sports and Back to School remain the most popular sub-topics.
Rick McKeereturns to the Top Ten this week, taking the top spot by a wide margin. Dave Whamond and Jeff Koterba dominated yet again with two cartoons each in the Top Ten.
Congratulations to the other cartoonists who made the Top Ten this week, Steve Sack, Peter Kuper, Bob Englehart and Kevin Siers. (One of my own cartoons just barely slipped in at #10.)
Our Top Ten is a measure of how many editors choose to reprint each of our cartoons, from the 62 cartoonists in our syndication package. Just about half of America’s daily, paid circulation newspapers (around 700 papers) subscribe to CagleCartoons.com.
Our reader supported site, Cagle.com, still needs you! Journalism is threatened with the pandemic that has shuttered newspaper advertisers. Some pundits predict that a large percentage of newspapers won’t survive the pandemic economic slump, and as newspapers sink, so do editorial cartoonists who depend on newspapers, and along with them, our Cagle.com site, that our small, sinking syndicate largely supports, along with our fans.
Congratulations to Rick McKeewho drew the #1 most reprinted cartoon this week.
#2
Steve Sack takes second place with the popular Back to School with COVID theme!
#3
Dave Whamond takes the #3 spot with his John Lewis obit cartoon. A number of CagleCartoonists drew great John Lewis portrait style memorial cartoons, but Dave’s was the first one that was posted and the early bird gets third place as editors were clearly eager to get this cartoon printed as soon as possible, and then weren’t interested in a similar portrait obit cartoon after they printed this one.
#4
Jeff Koterba is tied for both 4th and 5th place this week.
#5
Here’s Jeff Koterba again, with an impressive second cartoon in the Top Ten, which is not unusual for Jeff.
My own (Daryl Cagle) cartoon barely slipped in at #10.
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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.
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.
The obvious cartoon to draw for the Disney and Star Wars is a combination character – something from Star Wars with Mickey ears maybe. I thought of doing a chorus line of different combo characters, like Disney’s Wuzzles –but I’m too lazy to draw a cartoon that won’t get reprinted much because so many other cartoonists are drawing something similar. Even so, I’m enjoying the mashups. My two favorites are from Tim Campbell and Frederick Deligne, below.
Those are great, huh? Here are some other good ones …