This Christmas morning scene is something I bring back every four or five years. Here’s an oldie from a Christmas when the GOP was suffering from some Obama successes …
Here’s one from when Obama was eager to get Obamacare through congress, back in 2009.
The next one is from back in 2001 – before I had settled on a good caricature of George W. Bush, when 9/11 was still fresh and all the talk was about the hunt for Osama Bin Ladin.
Notice that there are thick, cathode ray TVs in W’s holiday stash? This cartoon is fifteen years old. Times have changed.
I’ve enjoyed the recent back-and-forth sniping between Donald Trump and Jeb Bush about whether President George W. Bush “kept us safe.” Of-course the answer to that is that he kept us safe, here but not overseas, from September 12th, 2001 going forward – a couple of qualifiers that Jeb neglected to mention.
A “monkey on the back” is an editorial cartooning standard – in fact, my buddy Taylor Jones drew a better George W. Bush monkey on the back cartoon recently, that I noticed just now, after I finished my cartoon above. I might not have drawn it had I noticed Taylor’s excellent work first – oh well, there will be plenty of monkeys on the back to come.
Here’s President George W. Bush as a monkey on the back of John McCain back in 2008, by David Fitzsimmons.
This is one of my favorite monkey-Bush oldies, by Sandy Huffaker, from the good old days of 2005.
Happy cartoon New Year! I was busily drawing my New Years Day cartoon, with Obama going out and coming in for the year, and with little biting GOP elephants, when the news started blaring about North Korea calling Obama a “monkey.” I am a slave to the news, so I had to do a second version with L’il Kim. Here’s the GOP …
And here is the L’il Kim version …
L’il Kim may be a plague to the world, but he is a gift to cartoonists.
The “Father Time and Baby New Year” thing is standard cartooning fodder. Here’s my New Year cartoon from last year …
Back in December, 2012, all the talk was about the “Fiscal Cliff” budget fight in Congress; it looked like doomsday. I drew this one …
At the end of 2010 the house had fallen under Republican control, and it looked like the GOP was eager to jump into more war – instead, Congress didn’t do much of anything, and Obama got us into more war. Oh well …
At the end of 2008: Obama won the presidency, George W. Bush was out of a job, and my drawings of Obama needed some more time to mature.
As 2005 turned into 2006 George W. Bush’s Republicans had lost the mid-term elections, but Bush was doubling down on the Iraq War anyway. There was lots more war to come.
Back in 2001 all the news was the 9/11 attacks as our troops poured into Afghanistan. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I posted three cartoons yesterday! The first one started out as I was thinking of the Republicans taking “a big bite of the apple” which didn’t quite work, because it looked like the elephant was damaging and consuming the capitol, so I went with a Capitol ice cream cone and a big lick. (No, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the perspective on the Capitol – hey, this is a cartoon.)
And here’s the GOP having a nice day, while the Democrats are having a lousy day.
Here’s the GOP win. They played a good game this time around.
Tic-Tac-Toe cartoons are a favorite of mine; they show more than winners and losers, tic-tac-toe shows a strategy. I drew this one when it became clear that Obama was going to beat Mitt Romney.
I drew this one four years earlier, when it was clear that Obama was going to beat McCain.
Tic-tac-toe isn’t only good for elections. I drew this one a few years ago, when Saddam Hussein’s regime fell.
I regret that my early Iraq cartoons were not very sophisticated, and were much to supportive of the war. I’ve learned my lesson this time around and all the warmongering media and public support for going back into Iraq looks like the old rush to war winning over the public again … as illustrated in the tic-tac-toe-oldie below. Somehow it looks like there is more tic-tac-toe to come.
Sorry to neglect the blog! I’ve been away on two cartoonist convention trips and I need to catch up! Here’s the new one today on Hong Kong.
Most people will see this in newspapers in black and white – and I think it is better in black and white.
I drew this as a riff on an oldie. I have lots of problems with Chinese hackers attacking my web sites, and I drew this self-portrait some time ago. I don’t think it got reprinted much, because it was a personal cartoon – better as a Hong Kong cartoon.
Here are a couple of recent cartoons that I forgot to post in the blog. Here’s Obama transforming into George W. Bush. I’m a little late on this one; I should have drawn it a couple of years ago. It probably wouldn’t have been reprinted much two years ago. Now that’s we’re back in Iraq, more and more, the transformation is clear.
The media’s march to war also matches the old march to war in Iraq under George W. Bush. People don’t seem to get that every party that is fighting over there is a bad guy, and bad guys fighting other bad guys is something we should leave alone. We have our priorities out of place, which is the point of the carton below.
The new smart watch from Apple looks pretty cool, but the emphasis on counting steps and the anal focus on health apps seems unpleasant. Here’s my take on it.
While I was away at the cartoonists convention in France for two weeks, I re-posted an oldie. This “evergreen” dove-bomber cartoon is appropriate all too often.
Here’s another one I missed – another riff on Obama and his pen annoying the Republicans. That’s the last one. Now I’m caught up!
Here’s my new cartoon about the Republican duo of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan:
It is a metaphor that made me laugh – Romney and Ryan, as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, chasing the “impossible dream” of vanquishing the entitlement windmills. It is great fun to rip off recognizable works of art for editorial cartoons – most editorial cartoonists do it every so often.
George W. Bush as King Henry VIII by Hans Holbien is one of my favorite oldies:
Merry Christmas to all our readers! As we begin to wrap up another year and prepare to dive in to glasses of egg nog, I thought it might be fun to look back at some of the Christmas-related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years.
Here’s this year’s cartoon. Figured it’s what’s on the mind of a lot of Republicans this Holiday season:
Here’s one featuring Obamaclaus:
I drew this one back in 2006, after Iraq became the debacle we all know and love now:
Keep you eyes peeled on those Salvation Army bell ringers. You never know:
This was my Christmas cartoon back in 2003, when Bush gave away everything, including the kitchen sink, to be re-elected:
Here’s a golden Cagle oldie from way back in 2000, back when I was still drawing cartoons for the Honolulu Advertiser (now known as the Honolulu Star-Advertiser after being bought by its cross-town rival):
A disturbing old brochure, promoting the World Trade Center.
Ten years ago I was president of the National Cartoonists Society and I brought our annual convention to the World Trade Center, shortly before its demise. I was looking through some of my old files this morning and I found a disturbing brochure (right) promoting the World Trade Center. Oh dear.
With the ten year anniversary of 9/11 coming soon, I collaborated on a French book project with Le Monde’s front page cartoonist, Plantu. We had a 32 page “conversation” about the ten years since 9/11 in comic book format for an anthology called 12 Septembre published by the big Belgian graphic novel publisher, Casterman (they do the Tin Tin books). The cover (left) of the book was interesting, disturbing, perhaps offensive, and a surprise to me. With victims and planes casually falling, or floating without emotion, and a cute, red lipped chick, big in the foreground. I don’t get it – maybe it’s a French thing. I know that cute chicks on book covers sell books … still …
The collaboration with Plantu was great fun. Plantu is a big star in France, with his cartoons gracing the front pages of the national newspaper, Le Monde, for over twenty years. I’ve never heard of editorial cartoonists having a graphic conversation like this before. We decided to bounce back and forth between two page spreads, working forward through the ten years. This was a pretty big project, and explains why I didn’t draw very many editorial cartoons back in January and February.
Le Monde is publishing excerpts from the book in their weekly magazine; a copy of a spread from my conversation with Plantu is below, and further below are a couple of my spreads in English, at a readable size.
One of the spreads from last Sunday's Le Monde, showing my graphic "conversation" with Plantu.
The editor of the Daily Lobo, the student newspaper of the University of New Mexico, issued an apology in response to criticism from students after it published this Hajo cartoon about the death of Osama bin Laden. Many of the protesters said they thought the cartoon resembled images used in the past to justify slavery.
Cartoon by Hajo (click to enlarge)
The cartoon parodies a famous scene from “The Lion King,” having Obama play the role of Rafiki, the baboon. Instead of holding up Simba to announce his birth, Obama is holding up the head of Osama bin Laden, announcing his death. It’s the same scene that Obama tweaked Donald Trump with as a joke at the White House correspondents dinner last week.
We syndicate Hajo’s cartoons. Hajo is based in the Netherlands and draws for the Dutch newspapers NRC Handelsblad, NRC Next and de Pers.
“I’m so NOT racist,” Hajo said via email. “I see Obama a president and a person. And therefore I think it’s OK to let the president act in the Lion King.”
As a European cartoonist, Hajo is less aware of the sensitivity among readers when they see Obama as a monkey. Still. he said he should have known better.
“Not everyone can ‘read’ a cartoon,” Hajo said. “Some people get stuck in simple stereotypes. And that’s too bad, because a lot of the humor and insight lies behind the obvious.”
“Regrettably, this cartoon offended the African-American community — along with many others — who interpreted Obama’s representation as racist,” write Chris Quintana, the editor of the Daily Lobo. “For this oversight, I sincerely apologize.”
In 2009, New York Post cartoonist Sean Delonas drew the now-infamous cartoon showing a chimp shot by two policeman, who say “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.” The prevailing view among the bloggers and talking-heads back then was the cartoon was a racist depiction of Obama as a monkey.
Back then, I suggested that every cartoonist should make a list of every racial stereotype to avoid regarding African-Americans, then go through the check list before putting pen to paper on any Obama cartoon, like a pilot goes through a check list before taking off in his plane.
The difficulty of course is that many cartoonists drew George W. Bush as a monkey. The cartoonists all chose to draw Bush with big monkey ears and a huge, monkey-like upper lip, so drawing Bush as a monkey was a natural progression. Now the cartoonists are all drawing Obama with similar, big monkey ears and we’re starting to hear complaints from readers about how we draw Obama’s lips. Presidents also get shorter in cartoons if they don’t perform well, and chimps are short, forcing cartoonists to have to tiptoe through a racial-metaphor-minefield.
After the announcement late Sunday night by President Obama that we finally found and killed Osama bin Laden, people poured out into the streets to celebrate. Even the most die-hard partisans, like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, gave credit to Obama and his administration, calling his actions a “gutsy move.”
But a couple of our more conservative cartoonists decided not to go the same route, and voiced their opinions about the credit being heaped President Obama’s way. The first, by Gary McCoy, rips Obama for the so-called “leadership” he exhibited in the strike, basically says all the President had to do was tell his team “okie dokie” to get the job done.
Gary McCoy / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by McCoy)
Here are some of our readers’ comments about McCoy’s cartoon:
cf: “After 8 years of Republicans looking for Bin Laden in the wrong place, Obama tries looking *somewhere else* and finds him almost immediately. And now Republicans just can’t admit that a *gasp* Liberal *gasp* accomplished something that they never could.”
PoliticalMangu: “I guess this is the typical conservative response to Obama’s actions on just about anything. Too bad we can’t even celebrate together.”
D.C. Wilson: “It must cause wingnuts physical pain to admit Obama accomplished anything.”
Chris Carveth: “That’s what we fight for -freedom of the press. Agree or disagree…just be willing to defend the process.”
Rosie Felci: “Even Cheney is giving Obama props for it all. Guess even he now recognizes what “Mission Accomplished” looks like.”
The second cartoon was drawn by Brian Fairington, and was actually one of the first cartoons about Osama’s death that our syndicate received. In it, Fairrington wants to make sure Obama doesn’t hog all the credit, and reminds readers about the contributions he feels George W. Bush made in hunting down Osama:
Brian Fairrington / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by Fairrington)
And here are some reactions from readers about it:
mth44sc: “”I don’t know where bin Laden is. I have no idea&really don’t care.It’s not that important.It’s not our priority.” – G.W. Bush, 3/13/02″
JacksonW: “How crass. The man isn’t dead 24 hours and he’s already being used to divide us. The end of the life of the mastermind of 9/11 should bring us together, not be used for petty political points.”
GroovyDave1962: “I disagree. The intelligence came in last August. IIRC Bush was not in office then. At best you might split it 50/50. Bush put the boots on the ground, but President Obama led them to success.”
ejg2: “Clinton tried, was unable. Bush simply didn’t. Obama did. Case closed.”
What do you think? Are these cartoons fair or foul? Comment below, or chime in on our Facebook page or Twitter:
