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Five Great Rex Babin Cartoons

In honor of my fallen colleague Rex Babin, I thought I’d share five great cartoons from his archives. The Sacramento Bee has posted a gallery featuring Rex’s best cartoons from 2011.

In a front-page editoral in The Bee, Anita Creamer writes about Rex’s most popular cartoon, which he drew after the “Miracle on the Hudson”:

In Rex Babin’s perhaps most beloved editorial cartoon, huge hands reached down from on high to steady US Airways Flight 1549 as it floated on the Hudson River, passengers standing on its wings.

The “Wings on the Hudson” cartoon showed a different, more emotional side of Babin to Sacramentans who were accustomed to the sharp observations of his political cartoons: It showed his heart.



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Sacramento Bee Cartoonist Rex Babin Dies of Cancer

I’m very sad to report that my friend Rex Babin, the brilliant cartoonist for the Sacramento Bee and a longtime contributor to Cagle.com, passed away this morning after a two year long fight with stomach cancer. A little over a year ago, Rex took a medical leave from his position as the paper’s staff cartoonist, and has been drawing off and on since.

Rex was a friend, and a mainstay in the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, serving as president in 2010.  He was the winner of the National Press Foundation’s 2001 Berryman Award and was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize. His cartoons were nationally syndicated by King Features.

My thoughts go out to his family, especially his wife Kathleen and their son Sebastian. What a sad day and a terrible loss for the profession.

Here is his last cartoon, which appeared in the Bee on March 4:

Rex-Babin