DarylCagle.comHere are our best, newest cartoons about EVIL ICE AGENTS!
#1. Rick McKee
#2. Ed Wexler
#3. Pat Bagley
#4. Steve Sack
#5. Pat Bagley
#6. John Darkow
Lately I’ve been haunting my own past, rummaging through drawers stuffed with self-portraits that stretch back 50 years—from a wide-eyed 19-year-old college kid in 1976 to the bearded, battle-scarred cartoonist I became, dodging hackers, raising a family, and even fielding endless questions about my long-gone Trump-era beard. I’ve got way too many of these staring back at me! This one is from 1976, when I was a student at Santa Barbara City College—pencil on beloved Graphix Duoshade paper (which I still miss). Yep, that’s exactly what I looked like. And yes, that’s how we all dressed in the ’70s.
France Cartoons is collecting self portraits of cartoonists, which has me rummaging through my drawers. This is me from Trump’s first term when I had a white beard. People are still asking me “What happened to the beard?” Trump hasn’t changed, though.
This self-portrait is me with my daughter, Susie, 28 years ago, in a comic I did that ran for about a year in the weekly “TV Times” magazine in the UK and a similar national TV guide type magazine in Australia. Notice the old TV, and old land-line phone, and young Susie. (This was years before the beard.)
I drew this self portrait after we had a big hacker attack that erased our servers, and we could identify that the attack came from China. I can still feel their breath on my neck.
Here’s another old self-portrait. This one is from back when I had a beard and I got my marijuana license. Now marijuana is everywhere and you don’t need a license (in California). That’s progress, I suppose. This ran as a full page in our local Santa Barbara Independent and it features my wife, Peg and son, Buster.
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A government shutdown. Costs continuing to rise. Soldiers on the streets of American cities. Political enemies of the president targeted by his administration. Reporters forced out of the Pentagon.
Outside of the peace deal between Israel and Hamas, is there actually any good news out there?
Chris Weyant tapped into that sentiment with one of our most-reprinted cartoons of the week, which features a gameshow appropriately called “How much more of this can I take?” I also enjoyed Dave Whamond’s cartoon, about Americans tuning out of the news and turning to Netflix instead.
Our most-reprinted cartoon was a wonderful John Darkow piece on the government shutdown, which is entering its third week with no end in sight. In his cartoon, Darkow wondered if we’ll all get a break on our taxes with the government at a standstill. I think you know the answer to that, which I guess is just more bad news.
Here are our top ten most reprinted cartoons of the week:
#1. John Darkow
#2. Chris Weyant
#3. Dave Whamond
#4. John Darkow
#5. John Darkow
#6. John Darkow
#7. Dave Granlund
#8. Margolis & Cox
#9. Rick McKee
#10. Bob Englehart
What do people want to read about in the waining days of summer? Gerrymandering.
In Texas, at the behest of Donald Trump, Republicans pushed through a controversial new election map expected to cost five Democrats in Congress their seats during next year’s midterm elections. Democrats in California responded by creating their own map that would flip five Republican congressional seats, a move which will be decided by voters during a special election in November.
This race to the bottom was the target of Monte Wolverton’s cartoon, our most-reprinted this week. I also liked Dave Whamond’s popular cartoon comparing new congressional maps to a Jackson Pollock painting.
With everything else going on, how much do American’s care? Are they even checked in? As Chris Weyant summed up well in his new back-to-school cartoon, the kids are happy “just to get a break from the news cycle.”
Here are our top ten most reprinted cartoons of the week:
#1. Monte Wolverton
#2. John Darkow
#3. Dave Whamond
#4. Dave Granlund
#5. Dave Granlund
#6. Chris Weyant
#7. Taylor Jones
#8. John Cole
#9. Dave Whamond
#10. Dave Granlund
IRS agents. VA workers. Park rangers. Air traffic controllers. Social Security administrators. No one employed by the federal government appears safe with Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency waiving a chainsaw across Washington.
Our top two most-reprinted cartoons of the week come from Chris Weyant, and both mock Musk’s blunt and mistake-prone process of trimming the size of the federal workforce. I also enjoyed Jeff Koterba’s cartoon about astronauts returning home after being stuck on the International Space Station, only to find a “Planet of the Apes” scenario playing out in the U.S.
Here are our top ten most reprinted cartoons of the week:
#1. Chris Weyant
#2. Chris Weyant
#3. Jeff Koterba
#4. Dave Granlund
#5. John Darkow
#6. John Darkow
#7. John Darkow
#8. R.J. Matson
#9. Alexandra Bowman
#10. Bruce Plante
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.
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Editorial cartoonists losing their staff jobs has become old news as staff cutbacks at newspaper chains continue, but yesterday was an especially bad day. The Gatehouse chain laid off three staff cartoonists, Nate Beeler of The Columbus Dispatch, Rick McKee of The Augusta Chronicle and Mark Streeter of The Savannah Morning News. They have been regular contributors to our Cagle.com site for close to fifteen years. Gatehouse’s fourth cartoonist, Dave Granlund, was not laid off, apparently because he works under a freelance contract and was not an employee. Beeler and McKee are part of our CagleCartoons.com newspaper syndicate and are among our most popular cartoonists.
Gatehouse is America’s largest newspaper chain in terms of number of newspapers. (Gannett is the largest newspaper chain in term of number of readers.) The three cartoonists who were laid off were part of Gatehouse’s “More Content Now” shared services, distributing their work in internal syndication to all of the Gatehouse newspapers, so their loss will be felt by a large number of newspapers. Even though the value of the creative contribution of the three cartoonists’ work was multiplied across all the newspapers in the Gatehouse chain, making them much more valuable than the other employees laid off in this round of cuts, this cost-cutting move by Gatehouse doesn’t come as a surprise.
Rick tells me he hopes to continue drawing cartoons for the approximately 850 newspapers that subscribe to our syndicate, and I hope the same will be true for Nate. My sincere condolences go out to all three, and I am confident that they will continue to have successful cartooning careers as their work turns in new directions.
Here are the most recent cartoons by Rick McKee of The Augusta Chronicle, Nate Beeler of The Columbus Dispatch and Mark Streeter of The Savannah Morning News.
On Thursday night, last week, we suffered an unusually effective series of attacks from Chinese hackers against our database server that have brought our database and our CagleCartoons.com download site down, along with our PoliticalCartoons.com store site.
On Friday, my valiant editors Brian and Stacey Fairrington, answered over 250 calls and emails from editors to give them the new, emergency, interim Google Drive cartoon download location where we set up a temporary download site for the recent cartoons. Our new columns are available on Cagle.com, see them on the front page at the right. (If you’re a client who needs access to the interim Google Drive site to download the recent cartoons, email [email protected] and we’ll give you the link.)
Our cartoonists should email new cartoons to us at [email protected], which goes to all of us; we will manually add your cartoons to the Google Drive interim download site and we will be sending new cartoons out to the editors who take email delivery through MailChimp until we have a new CagleCartoons.com back up with a new database and server. We’re updating Cagle.com manually for now, so it may be slow to display new cartoons. Payments to the cartoonists who get paid quarterly went out a couple of weeks ago, and the royalty checks for the monthly cartoonists went out this weekend, for January. Don’t worry, the cartoonists have all been paid!
The Chinese hackers, who leave lots of Chinese language files and malware on our database server every time they break in, have been watching as we repair the server and they come back each time repairs are made to tear the server down again. We’ve tried but we can’t keep them out of our outdated system. The hackers win this round. We had to give up on the old server and we’re scrambling to re-write our management system to work with a current SQL server.
Regular readers know how we’ve had continuing problems with hackers attacking Cagle.com, mostly with DDos/denial of service attacks. Thanks to the generosity of Cloudflare, we’re fending off the DDos attacks. The current problem is that we were using an older database and server for our CagleCartoons.com syndicate site and PoliticalCartoons.com store site, which left us vulnerable. We were too complacent, since the attacks were all against Cagle.com in the past. Our old database system worked so well that I hated the prospect of the cost and hassle of recreating it with newer, more defensible code. I procrastinated too long.
We don’t keep confidential information online. No credit card information was stolen.
The editors have all been lovely about this and we haven’t gotten any complaints – at least not so far. It has been nice to see the support and goodwill from our subscription clients at a time when they could justifiably be grouchy.
I also appreciate the heroic efforts of our staff, Theo, Brian, Stacey and Rob, who have really stepped up this weekend to make things work through our database crisis.
I hate inconveniencing everyone. Thanks for your patience with this mess! We hope to have new versions of the CagleCartoons.com and PoliticalCartoons.com sites up soon.
Perhaps I’ve been drawing too many cartoons of Xi Jinping as Winnie the Pooh.
Now that we have new editorial standards and are killing the raunchiest cartoons, we’re leaving some holes. We rely on our cartoonists to upload their own cartoons, which sometimes leads to some nasty stuff that we’ve been taking down as the world’s cartoonists rage against Donald Trump with the nastiest metaphors in their cartoon toolboxes. After we kill a cartoon on our syndicate sites we can take some time killing the cartoon on Cagle.com, which is left with an awkward hole where the killed cartoon would have been. We also have some tech problems sometimes that lead to a bad image.
All of that led us to the conclusion that we needed an error cartoon to act as a placeholder for Cagle.com cartoons gone bad. Here it is …
Hopefully you won’t see this cartoon very often.
I drew this one live on Twitch – want to see? Watch the video below!
In the next video, watch me coloring the cartoon, while I chat with fans on Twitch …
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?)
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.
The Anglo-American University in Prague responded to our call and recently organized an exhibition of cartoons from our high resolution Charlie Hebdo exhibit package. They also had a very well attended panel discussion event with the exhibit about the impact of the Charlie Hebdo attack and response around the world. Great to see! Read more about the event here.
Thanks to Daniela Chalaniova for organizing the event and thanks to the expert panelists who came to speak (Clemen Stauer and Jakub Janda)!
I met Daniela on a speaking trip I did to Prague a few years ago, and she has since decided to make editorial cartoons her field of study. I wish more academics would focus on editorial cartoons!
Our high resolution Charlie Hebdo exhibit package contains over 300 cartoons from top cartoonists around the world. It is free and we have permissions from all the contributing cartoonists for any institutions who would like to use the cartoons for an exhibit or event.
