DarylCagle.comHere’s a new batch of my old TRUE cartoons. This first one is a self-portrait of younger me, sitting on the toilet, talking on my land-line rotary phone. Looking at the old True cartoons makes me feel young again, until I notice details that make me feel old.
I went on my first National Cartoonists Society (NCS), USO trip last week. The NCS has a long history of working with the USO, dating back to the 1950’s and we’re cheap entertainment – all we need is a pen, a pad of paper and a place to sit.
Bahrain, aside from some flashy skyscrapers downtown, is a pretty desolate looking desert, with beige sand, a beige sky and searing heat. Bahrain is a kingdom that has a long bridge to Saudi Arabia. The Saudis like to come to Bahrain to go to a movie, shop and go out for dinner. I suspect the food, movies and restaurants in Saudi Arabia leave something to be desired, so Bahrain is crammed full of hotels, shopping and restaurants.
Out in the middle of nowhere there is a tree they call the “Tree of Life” that grows where there are no other trees in sight. The locals think the tree is thousands of years old, left over from the Garden of Eden. Those cans on the ground are flood lights. Our group of cartoonists is there in the photo, from left to right, Paul Combs (fireman cartoonist and former political cartoonist for the Tampa Tribune); Michael Ramirez, the knuckle-dragging, Neanderthal, right-wing, Pulitzer-winning star editorial cartoonist; Dave Mowder, Illustrator and character cartoonist; Todd Clark, who draws the comic strip “Lola” and writes gags for another half a dozen top strips; next is me in a Hawaiian shirt, and on the right is Ed Steckley, a brilliant caricature artist/illustrator from New York.
I enjoy drawing for the troops! They seem to really appreciate the cartoons. Typically, they will pull out a cell phone with a photo of a boyfriend, a girlfriend or a dog from back home. I sometimes suggest combining the boyfriend with the dog, which is a big hit with the women soldiers, although it doesn’t work the other way around – “girlfriend as a dog” cartoons are to be avoided!
There are US military installations all around Bahrain, including a very big naval base where we spent a good deal of time drawing. We visited a Patriot missile installation and got a great lesson on how the anti-missile missiles work, but they wouldn’t let us shoot one off.
We had originally been slated to visit Afghanistan, but the Pentagon “locked down” Afghanistan as “too dangerous,” so Bahrain was the safe, backup plan. I’m told that some of these NCS/USO cartoonist trips can be rather rugged and adventurous. Since this was my first time, I have nothing to compare it to. It wasn’t rugged. We had a nice hotel. But is was still an adventure.
I was the oldest guy on the trip. It seems to me that the troops are getting younger as I get older. They are kids. Big, tough kids. I appreciate all they do and it was great fun to sit an talk with so many of them.
I’ll be having an exhibition of my work in Ville de Virton, Belgium. If you’ll be around – come and meet me! The exhibition opening is May 18th at 6:30pm at the Caves de l’Hotel de Ville de Virton.
I’m a guest of the excellent Festival International de la Caricature de la BD du Dessin de Press et d’Humour in Rouvroy-Virton Belgium, near Luxembourg, May 19, 20 and 21. I’ll be sitting around doing drawings for folks and I’ll probably give a couple of lectures. This festival is organized by France-Cartoons, the association of French cartoonists that I got to know from the editorial cartoonists Salon in St Just le Martel, so it is my old buddies I travel to hang with. It is cool, and it looks like they have a Trump theme this year! heir poster is funny.
Here’s my year in review! The year started off with Donald Trump knocking off his opponents one by one, in a big Republican field.
Trump attacked his fiercest rival, Ted Cruz, for being born in Canada, arguing that he was not “native born” and constitutionally ineligible to be president.
Trump had a famous, short-lived feud with Fox News host Megyn Kelly, which led him to boycott a presidential debate that was sponsored by Fox News. Trump’s absence seemed to amount to a victory for him.
Bernie Sanders started out strong and threatened to steal the Democratic nomination from Hillary Clinton.
The Democratic establishment couldn’t grasp why young women voters rejected Hillary and flocked to Bernie.
Bernie hung on until the end – Hillary just couldn’t put him away.
Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia died, and the Republicans would not allow a vote for Obama’s nominee for nine months, in the hope that a Republican would win the election.
The terrible Zika virus spread north from South America.
Ted Cruz and John Kasich tried teaming up for a last ditch effort to derail Trump. It didn’t work.
Trump won the Republican party nomination for president – a concept that many Republicans found difficult to accept.
Trump’s fashion model wife, Melania, gave a speech at the GOP convention that seemed to match a speech by Michelle Obama.
Trump attacked a Muslim “Gold Star Family” that spoke against him at the Democratic Convention.
The media was obsessed with Trump, giving him lots of costly air time – but after he won the GOP nomination, the media turned on Trump and Trump’s support surprised all of the pundits.
Many Republicans couldn’t bring themselves to support their new nominee.
The Party of Lincoln was horrified.
“Pay to Play” allegations about the Clinton Foundation stung Hillary.
In other news, Civil War freedom fighter Harriet Tubman was selected to grace the $20.00 bill, kicking slave plantation owner Andrew Jackson off.
Great Britain voted for “Brexit” – an exit from the European Union.
Highly publicized, and unjustifiable police shootings led to attacks on police and nationwide demonstrations.
Greedy drug companies raised priced and screwed customers.
The Summer Olympics were dominated by news of the success of the American swim team, and then by news of the American swimmers vandalizing a bathroom and lying about it.
The Trump vs. Clinton campaign was possible the ugliest presidential contest ever.
Trump made a surprise visit to meet the president of Mexico – to the horror of Mexicans.
Trump seemed to be fond of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, as the Russians hacked the Democratic party boosting Trumps campaign by releasing embarrassing emails through their proxy, Wikileaks.
The race was tight, focusing on swing-states.
Hate groups endorsed Trump – and I heard from many of them by e-mail.
Trump accused Hillary of being too sick to be president.
The presidential debates drew the biggest audiences ever.
“Access Hollywood” recordings of Trump bragging about sexual assaults dominated the headlines.
Trump claimed that the election was “rigged” against him, suggesting that he wouldn’t “accept” the election results if Hillary were to win.
Days before the election, FBI Director James Comey reopened the e-mail investigation of Hillary, an event that Hillary’s supporters believe cost her the election.
Trump won!
Half the nation was shocked.
The election was a Democrat apocalypse.
Trump’s transition was just as crazy as his campaign, with untraditional cabinet picks of generals and billionaires who seem to defy his promise to “drain the swamp.”
We just put up an all new design for Cagle.com – a very big project for us. Please come and take a look, let us know what you think. The site is finally up to date and all device friendly (take a look on your phone). I think the layouts for the topical sections and artist sections are fun.
The new site has been in the works for a long time, and I should thank our contributing “Heroes” for their support over the last year and have made it possible for Cagle.com to continue. (Notice that there are no ads on the new site?)
I’ll be giving a lecture with lots of cartoons at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee (just south of Nashville). It is a rare opportunity to see the reclusive, elusive Cagle – and it is free to the public! It will be at 4:30pm pon Thursday, October 22nd in the Bragg Media and Entertainment Building, Room 104.
Here’s my second cartoon for the altie-weekly Nashville Scene. It is about a crazy 38 house development, with 35 foot high houses on tiny lots, planned to be built next door to me. This isn’t just a “nimby” (“not in my backyard”) issue, Nashville is growing like a weed, a stupid, unplanned weed, so I’m drawing a series on the topic. “Dale and Associates” is a former Nashville City Councilman, Roy Dale, who lobbies his old cronies to get big construction projects approved in town – a local version of the same nasty kind of lobbying we see in Washington when legislators retire to K Street.
I may get mad at something else and keep drawing local cartoons when this nimby battle is over, or I may pick at this scab for a while. I regret that local cartoons are so rare these days – local cartoons are the most fun and can have an impact, but they have to be drawn out of passion, rather than business sense.
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.
I just got back from our Cagle Cartoons junket to the cartoon festival in St Just France. I’m way behind on my cartoons, but I knocked this one out from a snapshot that I took in an obscure corner of the Louvre.
This is a painting by 18th century Neo-classical painter Louis-Jacque Durameau about the death of Marie Antoinette. It struck me as a multi-panel cartoon with a big Nobel Peace Prize medal for Barack Obama. I almost put labels on the frames, “Then,” “… and Now” but I decided less is more. This painting is really funny – and all the more so because it takes itself so seriously.
The photo below is our group having dinner in Paris. From left to right is cartoonist Adam Zyglis, cartoonist Nate Beeler , me, cartoonist Steve Sack, cartoonist Monte Wolverton, Janelle Beamer, the charming fiancé of charming, conservative cartoonist Rick McKee, Nate’s wife Eve and Adam’s wife Jessica.
Here’s another group shot, around the cow statue at the editorial cartoon exhibition in St Just le Martel, deep in the heart of France near Limoges. Left to right is Nate, Eve, me, my wife, Peg, Justine the cow, Adam, Jessica, Janelle, Rick and Monte. Steve Sack was with us too; looks like he went missing in this one.
The grand prize winner of the festival (the winner of the cow, the “Humor Vache”) was Venezuelan cartoonist Rayma Suprani. The prize is an actual cow. Rayma also got a little porcelain cow.
I’ve long been impressed with Rayma. She drew for the El Universal newspaper in Caracas where she was a brave critic of the Hugo Chavez regime. The government took over her newspaper and she lost her job. Rayma may be moving to the USA next; I look forward to seeing what she draws here.
I won the grand prize cow at the festival last year, and I drew the poster for this year’s salon. As part of the winner from last year thing, the brilliant French caricaturist, Moines, drew my portrait. That’s me, giant me, and Moines at the right. Moines draws on a special kind of scratchboard and he carved each of my whiskers into the board with an X-acto knife. Makes me wanna pinch those cheeks. Moines complains that he’s down to his last couple of sheets of this paper, which isn’t made anymore. Shame.
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.
Here’s my non-fiction, autobiographical cartoon about my recently getting my California Marijuana license!
My local altie newspaper, the Santa Barbara Independent, printed this on the back page of their current issue – there it is below. I thought it looked pretty good. The colors always darken up in print, so I try to use light, fruity colors in my cartoons; they hold up better.
And look how cool my autobiographical marijuana license cartoon is in Spanish!
