It was a real smorgasbord of a week, with topics ranging from president debates to airplanes falling apart to the threat of yet another potential government shutdown.
Our most popular cartoon this week was Jeff Koterba’s funny peek into something we’re all dealing with – managing out ever-growing list of streaming subscriptions and passwords.
Here are our top ten most reprinted cartoons of the week:
Here’s my new cartoon about what the presidential race is looking like now. I talk all about it on our new Caglecast! We have three brilliant cartoonists, Michael Ramirez, Gary McCoy and Rivers showing off their cartoons from their alternative news bubble reality on the right.
You can learn more about this cool Ed Wexler, Tucker Carlson cartoon and thirty more on our new Caglecast podcast!
Watch the video! We’ve got cartoons about tanned testicles, Swanson TV dinners, Tucker’s lies from the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit discovery, snuggling up to Putin and denying the violence at the January 6th insurrection –we’ve got a Cartoon Tuckerfest!
Cartoons are a great insight into the news, distilling complex issues into images. We have the best cartoonists to explain what’s behind the cartoons, giving their witty insights on the Fox News and Tucker, who we now know were lying the whole time. This is a great Caglecast –don’t miss it!
Our three great cartoonist guests on the video podcast are:
GARY McCOY, who draws two newspaper comics strips, The Flying McCoys and the Duplex in addition to drawing editorial cartoons for our CagleCartoons.com syndicate and lots of other stuff. ED WEXLER, who is a brilliant caricaturist who worked for 30 years as a creative director at Disney. For 12 years he was a regular cartoonist for US News & World Report magazine. Ed is known for his caricature cover art for The Hollywood Reporter’s Academy Awards and Emmy Awards issues also for 12 years. And ADAM ZYGLIS, who is the Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist for The Buffalo News in New York.
The discussion turns into an argument with our conservative cartoonist friend, Gary, about whether the January 6th insurrection was even an insurrection at all, or just a pleasant day for tourists in Washington. We also have a close examination of Tucker’s testicles and Tucker’s relationship with Vladimir Putin.
Here are a few more great cartoons from the Caglecast. Tune in to see them all, and see the cartoonists argue about them! And we really would appreciate your clickin g the “subscribe” button on YouTube.com/@caglecast!
by John Darkowby Pat Bagleyby Bart van Leeuwenby Adam Zyglisby John Darkowby Dave Granlundby Chris Weyantby Adam Zyglisby Dave Whamondby Pat Bagleyby Gary McCoyby Pat Bagley
On this week’s Caglecast we’re joined by two of our most conservative cartoonists, Gary McCoy who also draws two comic strips, “The Duplex” and “The Flying McCoys”; and Rivers, who draws anonymously and joins us with a disguise and an altered voice.
The vast majority of editorial cartoonists are liberal so the few, conservative cartoonists stand out as unusual, and often stand alone voicing ideas that seldom find their way into general circulation newspapers; Gary and Rivers are among the best among the few conservative cartoonists, and they talk about living in a world of liberal editors which includes their liberal editor who is hosting the podcast, me, Daryl Cagle.
Gary and Rivers show lots of their favorite cartoons, they enjoy denigrating Dr. Anthony Fauci; they deny the efficacy of COVID vaccines; they complain about the ignorance of liberals who watch MSNBC; they let us know that we wouldn’t have this war in Ukraine now if Trump was in office; they tell us about how the insurrection wasn’t an insurrection at all, and how most of the MAGA folks on January 6th were out for a peaceful stroll.
We could have titled this “Cartoons from the Bizarro Dimension.” …but we love Gary and Rivers. Really, we do. Here are a few of the images that are discussed in the video.
Please subscribe to Caglecast on Apple Podcasts! Thanks!
Tempers run short in turbulent times, so it is no surprise that provocative editorial cartoons sometimes get blowback from readers. Cartoons generate angry conversation on social media, but they seldom generate complaints to us, or to the newspapers that run them – unless there is an organized campaign to solicit complaints. These campaigns usually take the form of Facebook pages that demand that an editor or cartoonist is punished, or simply demands an apology, and newspapers are often quick to apologize.
The offending Antonio Antunes cartoon that lost a job for CagleCartoonist Patrick Chappatte, crushed a little syndicate and lost a top venue for all editorial cartooning as the New York Times banned cartoons.
Earlier this month there was yet another complaint campaign about a Gary McCoy cartoon in the Florence SC Morning News. This longtime CagleCartoons subscribing paper prints just about every cartoon that opposes abortion rights and there aren’t a whole lot of those, so when one pops up it is no surprise that it gets ink in Florence. The abortion topic doesn’t mix well with Black Lives Matter (I thought the cartoon was offensive myself) and the paper apologized, going the New York Times route of announcing that they are no longer running any editorial cartoons at all. They still like our columnist Michael Reagan though, so they continue to be a good subscriber and we hope to woo them back with more, great conservative cartoons. (Those anti-abortion cartoons are pretty hard to resist in Florence.)
There are more recent examples with cartoons from cartoonists who aren’t represented by my little syndicate generating complaints campaigns and newspaper apologies, but I’m not posting them here because, well, they aren’t represented by my little syndicate.
This is the new normal:
1. A reader is offended by a cartoon she disagrees with in her local newspaper and puts up a Facebook campaign soliciting complaints demanding an apology, the firing of the editor and/or the firing of the cartoonist.
2. The Newspaper apologizes for their poor choice of cartoon; or they stop running all cartoons. No other newspapers get complaints about the cartoon, only the one paper that has a campaigning reader gets complaints.
We need your support for Cagle.com (and DarylCagle.com)! Notice that we run no advertising! We depend entirely upon the generosity of our readers to sustain the site. Please visit Cagle.com/heroes and make a contribution. You are much appreciated!
I pitched the idea to Gannett of running collections of favorite cartoons of the decade every day in December, the last month of the decade, with a selection by a different cartoonist each day. We, along with USA Today, selected the CagleCartoonists we would invite to participate and we asked them each to choose their favorite cartoons from the past ten years. I submitted twenty-nine batches of cartoons, selected by each of twenty-nine of our CagleCartoonists. USA Today plans on showcasing their own Gannett employee cartoonists, Thompson, Marlette, Murphy and Archer, through Thursday, with our CagleCartoonists finishing out the month, starting this Friday with Pat Bagley.
USA Today started off their daily, decade slideshows today with their talented cartoonist, Mike Thompson, who also did the work of laying all of these collections out for The USA Today Network sites (that includes the individual Web sites for all of Gannett’s 100+ daily newspapers). Visit USA Today’s Opinion page online to see these every day this month. Click on each cartoon in each slideshow to see a full-screen, high-resolution version of each cartoon, which is very nice.
It is very difficult to select a small batch of cartoons to represent an entire decade!!
Getting twenty-nine CagleCartoonists to each select a decade of favorites was challenging. Obama certainly got shorted as many cartoonists are obsessed with Trump now. A couple of cartoonists selected only Trump-bashing cartoons, which made for a poor representation of the decade –but hey, the fact that the cartoonists chose their own favorites made this project interesting. Some cartoonists, who have been with us for less than ten years, had to dig into their personal archives to cover the whole decade, so some of the cartoons haven’t been seen on Cagle.com. New Yorker/Mad Magazine/graphic-novelist Peter Kuper joined CagleCartoons.com just a couple of months ago and had to dig up his whole collection from his magazine gag cartoon archives. Dave Whamond and Ed Wexler, who joined us more recently, reached into their vaults for some of their early-decade cartoons; Ed selected some from when he was regularly drawing for US News & World Report magazine. Mike Keefe and Bill Schorr came out of their recent retirements to contribute their selections of favorites.
I wouldn’t call these selections the “best” of the decade, they are just the artists’ choices. I also can’t say that they represent the decade well (but what the heck).
We need your support for Cagle.com (and DarylCagle.com)! Notice that we run no advertising! We depend entirely upon the generosity of our readers to sustain the site. Please visit Cagle.com/heroes and make a contribution. You are much appreciated!
The French call editorial cartoons “press cartoons” and editorial cartoonists are “dessinateurs de presse.” It was a struggle to get our dessinateurs de presse together for a group Cagle photo this year! Here’s one attempt.
And here’s another attempt about fifteen minutes later with two new French CagleCartoonists added on the left, Robert Rousso and Jean-Michel Renault. Others wandered off. We missed seven or eight of our CagleCartoonists who were in St Just and didn’t show up for either photo. The cats just won’t stay in one place, and they don’t come when called.
This short video shows about half of our CagleCartoons Trump vs. Iran exhibit at St Just. We also participated in two other exhibits there, one bashing The New York Times for dropping editorial cartoons, and another, of memorial cartoons for the festival’s beloved founder, Gerard Vandenbroucke, who passed away in the last year.
https://youtu.be/54vreTdaJQ4
My charming and generous St. Just family, Greg and Geraldine Decoster, who hosted us, in the cartoon museum with me and my cartoonist/musician son, Michael.
I’ve been coming to St Just for seven or eight years now and it has grown into an effective Cagle Cartoons convention for us. There is no other festival for editorial cartoons in the world that is anything like it. All the folks in the little village turn out to welcome the cartoonists, who they host in their homes. The cartoonists bond with their local host families and stay with the same family year after year. The charming and generous St. Just family, Greg and Geraldine Decoster, who hosted me and my cartoonist/musician son Michael, are shown in the photo at the right, in the cartoon museum.
The town’s teenagers are waiters at the huge, impressive dinners for the many editorial cartoonists from around the world. The video below was created by our CagleCartoonist, David Fitzsimmons, which shows the dinner scene, along with showing the cool editorial cartoon museum, the cute little town, St Just’s medieval church, the presentation of the cow to the cartoonist of the year (Swiss cartoonist, Thierry Barrigue) and more. (See my son, Michael drawing on the table at dinnertime in the video.)
Here are a bunch of Americans drinking and carousing at the home of Steve Sack‘s lovely St Just family (who prefers to remain anonymous).
Who are we? From the bottom going clockwise: in the red shirt there’s Jeff Koterba, in the lower left is my cartoonist/musician son, Michael, moving up and around the table, there’s Ed Wexler, Gary McCoy, Steve Sack‘s son and daughter-in-law Adam and Mandy, Dave Fitzsimmons, Ed Wexler‘s daughter Sarah, Adam Zyglis, Dave’s wife Ellen, Pat Bagley‘s girlfriend Kate and Pat, Steve Sack, and Ed Wexler‘s wife Toni. I’m missing from the photo. (Maybe I’m taking the picture, holding that mysterious glass of red wine.)
The festival (or “salon” as they call it) is growing and this was their biggest year out of nearly 40 years in existence, and they are taking on an increasingly important role for our troubled profession. St Just le Martel is much appreciated! Thanks everyone!
Last week I got back from “The Line of Fire” conference in Mexico City, an editorial cartooning event put on by CartónClub. We’re hoping this will be the first of many annual conferences that CartónClub will be hosting. I’d like to see them succeed – we need more events like this around the world.
I was the only USA cartoonist in the La Linea de Fuego show. A bullet passed through each cartoon about press freedom. Violence against journalists is a big problem in Mexico.
The event was also co-sponsored by Cartooning for Peace (CFP), which works in Mexico and Canada under the terms of their grant from the EU that funds the organization (notably, the grant excludes the USA). CFP does programs about editorial cartoons in schools and prisons around the world and trains participating cartoonists in how to give these presentations in workshops; they pay an honorarium to the participating cartoonists to keep them going, and giving more lectures. It is a nice program, and the days in Mexico City were filled with these training workshops that didn’t involve much of our Cagle Cartoons delegation, so we spent a lot of time as tourists.
I got the chance to talk to representatives of the EU who support Cartooning for Peace at the conference; it was great to hear how they appreciate our art form – I can’t imagine any editorial cartooning programs like these happening through the United States government.
There was a nice exhibition at the El Universal newspaper lobby called “La Linea de Fuego” (The Line of Fire) where a bullet passed through every cartoon, creating some havoc that had something to do with press freedom. That’s my Statue of Liberty entry in the exhibition above. We had panels and discussions. It was all good.
Here are a couple of photos from our trip. Thanks again to CartónClub and to everyone involved!
Here is a gaggle of cartoonists at the CartónClub conference!
Here’s another group pix with even more cartoonists, at the La Linea de Fuego exhibition …
Want to see more pix? Take a look at my new Instagram feed @daryl.cagle I’m just starting Instagram and I don’t know what I’m doing there yet! You can also see more on my Facebook page.
Don’t miss our new BIDEN BASHING (and Trump) podcast on YouTube!
