Here are my last two cartoons, the first one is French President Francois Hollande shrinking. He is wildly unpopular in France after being elected recently, and our world cartoonists draw him all the time, so I thought I would give it a shot. That is “Liberty” from Eugene Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People” who is in the Mom role, measuring Hollande’s growth on the door frame – and that’s a clip of the real Liberty at the right.

Jean Plantu, the cartoonist for Le Monde in Paris, likes to chide me about how I can’t draw bare breasts as an editorial cartoonist in America. Of-course, I am my own editor, and I can draw anything I want – the only problem is getting editors to print what I want.  This cartoon has a triple whammy: boobs, foreign subject matter and a character (Hollande) who American readers don’t know, and I drew it on a Saturday, the dead day for editorial cartoons.

Who cares?! I can draw what I want even if no one will print it.  Here is the messy rough sketch.

There were lots of corrections I made when I traced over this for the final line art, below.

Here is the color version.

Remember you saw it here first, and you may not see it anywhere else.

The previous cartoon is an evergreen for Tax Day, April 15th. It would be better as an evergreen if the IRS Form 1040 didn’t mention the tax year at the top – I’ll have to make that suggestion to them.

For some reason, cartoonists like to put the year into their cartoons, as part of a copyright notice with their signature, which makes their new cartoons look new but makes their old cartoons look old, devaluing them as evergreens for sale online. I’m always telling artists not to put the year into their cartoons – but do they listen? No. That’s the rough sketch at the right.

I downloaded the tax form from the IRS as the backdrop, and clipped some text in Photoshop. That’s how I feel this time of year. The tax form looks pretty gloomy, huh?