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Iran Pull-Out

My new cartoon is unusual for me because I would call it “pro-Trump.” I’m not bothered by this pulling the USA out of the Iran deal, as most of the world seems to be. The pallets of cash that were secretly delivered to Iran as part of the deal were enough to turn me against it, even if Iran wasn’t such an active bad actor on the world stage. My cartoon shows Iran’s Supreme Leader. I suppose readers won’t recognize the Supreme Leader, but what the heck, he looks pretty archetypal, so I didn’t give him a label.

 

I thought the rug should be a Persian carpet – it didn’t have to be, but it seems appropriate. I Googled Persian carpets and found that there are a number of artists who do paintings of Persian carpets. That sounds like fun; I enjoyed drawing the Persian carpet.

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Trump Meets Kim Jong Un

Bloody hands are a standard cliché for editorial cartoonists so this is a pretty simple cartoon. I thought I would make it more interesting by having the red blood be the only color in the cartoon.

This cartoon doesn’t really work for newspapers that only have black and white available. When papers have color available, they really want bright colors and pulling back on the color might make them skip this one, even though the color is making a point here. If another cartoonist asked me if he/she should do this, I’d probably tell them no. But, what the heck.

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Triple Putz

With all the talk of “landing the triple lutz” at the olympics, it occurred to me that Trump is a “triple putz”.

I thought “putz” was Yiddish slang for “penis” with the meaning of “jerk” but according to the Google dictionary:

putz
ˌpəts,ˌpo͝ots/
NORTH AMERICAN informal
noun
  1. 1.
    a stupid or worthless person.
  1. engage in inconsequential or unproductive activity.
    “too much putzing around up there would ruin them”

That definition is not quite what I meant. I told our Cagle cartoonists that we weren’t going to accept penis gags any more. That was quite a difficult edict to enforce – I’m even violating it with this triple putz. Putzes win, I guess.

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Trump Undermines Mueller

My goal with this cartoon was to make it look like the situation is threatening to both Trump (who can have the ground fall in on him) and Mueller (who may fall).

So … who will be the first to fall, and the first to get squished, when this all collapses?

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Hawaii Missile Alert

The missile alert in Hawaii last weekend was pretty crazy, with people calling their loved ones to say goodbye, and others jumping into sewers.

I spent my first years as an editorial cartoonist working for newspapers in Hawaii doing local cartoons, first for the Midweek, then for Gannett’s Honolulu Advertiser – now my cartoons run in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. Hawaiian politics are wonderful fodder for editorial cartoons. I miss those days.

I used to fill my cartoons with local details. My wife went to Punahou school with Barack Obama, back in the day, and she would translate my cartoons into pidgin so I wass able to fool everyone into thinking I was a local. The missile alert was a horror for Hawaii but was a bit of cartoon nostalgia for me.

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Racist President

I read what was pretty close to the donkey’s quote this morning in the Los Angeles Times, attributed to Cristina Jiménez, the founder of United We Dream.

This is about where we are now, I think.