The crazy, pandemic-shortened, crowdless baseball season just started! We got the news that President Trump would be throwing out the first pitch at a New York Yankees game in August, so I drew this one. I thought the gag was a little dull, so I added a talking dog. Talking dogs always work.
Gotta love baseball! Here are my favorite, new baseball cartoons from the CagleCartoonists!
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My cartoon today depicts the bear on the California flag pulling down a statue of Junipero Serra, the controversial Catholic saint who oversaw the opening of nine missions in colonial California. Serra participated in the Spanish Inquisition and enslaved native Americans, imprisoning them at his missions. Statues of Serra have been vandalized recently as many protests toppling statues commemorating racist historical figures have swept the nation, and the world, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
The California bear is something of an “everyman” character. I like seeing the movement to purge symbols honoring racist, historical figures; perhaps it is a bit of wishful thinking on my part to see California’s “everyman” tearing down Serra since there is quite a bit of support for defending the many Serra statues that dot our state like a pox. President Trump is using an executive order to boost penalties for defacing racist, historical monuments. My depiction of the California flag today is more a symbol of hope that these protests succeed than than a depiction of today’s reality.
The statue is based on one located in San Juan Capistrano that was relocated recently to protect it from protesters. I lifted Serra’s robe a bit so that I could get some Saddam Hussein action going with his ankles.
When I was in third grade I was required to build a model of a California mission and I was taught a false, fairy tale story about Padre Serra. Thirty years later my kids went through the same thing in school. California students have been required to build those models and have been fed a whitewashed version of history for many decades. That may be changing now as the protests continue. Maybe our “everyman” bear will finally tear down that statue!
Scroll down to see some more of my favorite “everyman” California bears.
California always has a drought …
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Sometimes the drought is worse …
Even when it floods, we still have a drought …
We have fires too. And heroic firemen …
And we have legal marijuana …
And California was one of the first states to legalize gay marriage …
And president Trump doesn’t like California’s auto emissions standards …
Our reader supported site, Cagle.com, still needs you! Journalism is threatened with the pandemic that has shuttered newspaper advertisers. Some pundits predict that a large percentage of newspapers won’t survive the pandemic economic slump, and as newspapers sink, so do editorial cartoonists who depend on newspapers, and along with them, our Cagle.com site, that our small, sinking syndicate largely supports, along with our fans.
President Trump seems to be staking out his positions in opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement. As the saying goes, “not all conservatives are racists, but all racists are conservatives.” Trump is playing to the ugliest impulses of his base.
None of this is lost on the Cagle Cartoonists. Here are my favorite cartoons on Trump and race.
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As we’re seeing new momentum to “defund the police” we’re also seeing new videos of terrible police brutality. The police horrors are damaging the police themselves, that’s the idea behind my cartoon for today.
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Here are the ten most popular cartoons of the week (May 30 -June 6, 2020). Our Top Ten is a measure of how many of our subscribing newspaper editors choose to reprint each of our cartoons, from the 63 cartoonists in our syndication package. Just about half of America’s daily, paid circulation newspapers subscribe to CagleCartoons.com.
Getting cartoons in front of readers is one of the goals of every cartoonist. Regrettably, many of our cartoonists get few or no reprints, especially the foreign cartoonists. 20% of the cartoonists get 80% of the sales and reprints, and most of the cartoonists never make it into the Top Ten.
Congratulations to Jeff Koterba of The Omaha World-Herald for the #1 most reprinted cartoon this week. Dave Granlund was a close second. Congrats also go to Dave Fitzsimmons of The Arizona Daily Star, and Bruce Plante of The Tulsa World, who each have two cartoons in the Top Ten. I was happy to see Milt Priggee make his first appearance in the Top Ten this week. Kudos also go to the rest of the artists with the most reprinted cartoons: Rick McKee, John Cole, and Dave Whamond.
Our reader supported site, Cagle.com, still needs you! Journalism is threatened with the pandemic that has shuttered newspaper advertisers. Some pundits predict that a large percentage of newspapers won’t survive the pandemic economic slump, and as newspapers sink, so do editorial cartoonists who depend on newspapers, and along with them, our Cagle.com site, that our small, sinking syndicate largely supports, along with our fans.
Dave Fitzsimmons takes the #10 spot with his second of two cartoons in the Top Ten this week.
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Here are some of my favorite cartoons about the ongoing protests. We see a big divide in the news coverage between Fox News and conservative media vs the rest of the media; we see the same divide with the conservative cartoonists drawing about law and order, and the rest of the cartoonists drawing about racial justice.
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While the world is absorbed by the coronavirus, China’s nominal legislature decided take away any doubts about Hong Kong independent “special status.” Protestors are now facing the full brunt of China’s heavy hand. I drew this as the Chinese panda digesting Hong Kong, and burping.
I debated whether I should make the burpy umbrellas yellow; yellow umbrellas were the symbol of Hong Kong’s protestors in 2014, and more recent protests have embraced black umbrellas as protection against projectiles and water cannons from police, so I went with black
There aren’t many cartoons about Hong Kong now and my cartoon probably won’t get much ink – still, this should be a time for Hong Kong cartoons. I have selected some of my favorite Hong Kong protest cartoons from the past few years. At the end there are three Hong Kong cartoons from Luojie, our CagleCartoonist who draws for the China Daily, China’s official English language newspaper and voice of the communist government.
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The huge, English language, official, government owned newspaper, The China Daily, subscribes to CagleCartoons, and we syndicate their lead cartoonist, Luojie. I have included a bunch of recent cartoons at the bottom of the page, from Luojie about the protests in Hong Kong. As we would expect, Luojie’s cartoons express the official view of the Chinese government, that the Hong Kong protesters are rioting terrorists.
Luojie‘s cartoons capture the tenor of the Chinese press reports and editorials about the Hong Kong “riots” which mention nothing about the protestors’ demands for continued autonomy and democracy, and have no mention of excessive violence by Hong Kong police that we are used to seeing in Western coverage. In fact, Luojie’s Hong Kong cartoons stand in stark contrast to all of the other cartoons from CagleCartoonists, and I would guess, from any editorial cartoonists outside of China.
I just got back from a couple of weeks visiting China for a big festival in the coastal city of Xiamen, put on by ASIFA China. I was invited to be a judge for their big cartoon competition.
They had two categories of judges for print and animation (I was on the print jury).
Here I am in the photo below, with my colleagues from both juries – that’s me in the center/front. The other Westerners are cartoon scholar John Lent on the far right, and Bosnian animator/DJ Berin Tuzlić behind me in the colorful shirt.
It took my jury three days of work to go through all the print submissions. The top prizes are $15,000.00 USD each, which is a hefty prize. I’m surprised that American cartoonists don’t enter this generous, annual competition. The Xiamen festival has invited a bunch of CagleCartoonists to be jurors in recent years, including Steve Sack, Bruce Plante, Milt Priggee and Pat Bagley. We all thought the competition and festival were great.
This big poster shows all the nominees in the animation and print categories.I took my son, Michael along on the trip. Here we are standing with our lovely interpreter, Jasmine Xu, at the beautiful Buddhist temple in Xiamen.
Like other cities in China, Xiamen looks brand new; it is busy, bustling and crammed full of tall skyscrapers. Xiamen is a small city by Chinese standards, with a population close to the size of Los Angeles, and it is home to lots of CGI animation studios.
I see Xiamen, and all of China, as a gastronomic adventure – eating is a joy in China!
The festival looked more like a business conference than a Comic Con. Here’s a photo from a room listening to a presentation about the business of a CGI animation studio.
I saw that the major Western news sites were blocked by China’s “Great Firewall” and I learned how to use a VPN (Virtual Private Network) to read the Western newspapers and download my podcasts through Japan. The TV in my hotel room included CNN International, which was running regular updates on the conflict in Hong Kong that were either entirely blacked out, or selectively blacked out, showing criticism of the protestors but going silent and black when each segment turned to criticism of the government or police.
This festival photo shows the orderly, businesslike kiosks on the convention floor.
China’s “One Country, Two Systems” plan for Hong Kong isn’t looking very good; China makes the same pitch to Taiwan – a pitch that isn’t very attractive right now as it looks more likely that Hong Kong will be fully consumed and digested into China’s communist system, as the protests continue and intensify. I didn’t find anyone in mainland China that agrees with me. The Chinese folks I talked to privately told me that they shared the official view that the Hong Kong protestors were terrorists that must be put down.
I’m disappointed that President Trump seems to side with the government in China against the protestors, even so, the official view in China is that America is “supporting the terrorists” in Hong Kong, as Luojie illustrates. Here’s Luojie‘s official take on the Hong Kong protests …
The riots in France have been fascinating to watch. The “Giletes Jaunes” (Yellow Vest) protests were triggered by increases in gasoline taxes that French President Emmanuel Macron implemented to discourage people from driving, as part of his battle against Climate Change. The protest movement sees Macron, a rich, former investment banker, as an aloof elite. Those yellow vesters can go “eat cake.”
I love those crazy, historic, giant French hair-doos with depictions of ships and birds and crazy, coiffed, exotic stuff.
Poor and rural “Gilets Jaunes” who must drive to work, donned the yellow vests that they are required by law to keep in their cars for roadside emergencies, as a theme for their protests against Macron and the rich elite that they see as out of touch with their reality. Here’s a class warfare cartoon by my buddy Robert Rousso, the dean of the French cartoonists (“jaune” or yellow, rhymes with “Jones” in French.)
Marie Antoinette is a great cartoon cliché. Here’s a “TRUE!” cartoon I drew back in 1995. This really is true.
Here’s Marie Antoinette as a cow, in a poster I drew for the Press Cartoon Festival in St Just le Martel, France, side by side with a cow sculpture that festival organizer, Blanche Vandenbroucke, dressed to match my poster. I think Blanche did an impressive job!
Every couple of years it is time for another Monopoly metaphor cartoon. Here’s my cartoon today about the police violence protests.
I get contacted by doctoral students who write their dissertations on the usage of particular metaphors in editorial cartoons – they like to count how many times they occur. Takes the joy out of a cartoon, huh? Well, that’s what doctoral students do. I might suggest that if anyone wants to do their thesis on Monopoly metaphors in editorial cartoons, they will have a lot of counting to do.
Here’s one I did back in 2008, on the Sarah Palin VP choice.
The next one is a rare cartoon where I had something positive to say, touting what was then the biggest charitable donation in history – Warren Buffet’s multi-billion dollar donation to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The 1930’s era rich guy character in Monopoly, “Rich Uncle Pennybags“, is classic cartoon fodder whenever news about rich people comes along, and a pig character won’t do. Usually he doesn’t appear in political cartoons that are too flattering to him. I drew this next one with the George W. Bush stock market crash and subsequent bailout of the evil bankers (who, by the way, were never prosecuted).
Remember when five Gitmo prisoners were traded for sketchy American POW, Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl? I drew this one with little caricatures of the released Gitmo prisoners.
Back when I was working with msnbc.com I rarely got a call from an editor asking for anything, so I was surprised one day to hear from an editor at the Today Show, which was planning lots of coverage on Paris Hilton, who was being released from jail that day. They really wanted a quick cartoon, so I gave them this one.
When George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin, not so long ago, I drew my most recent “Get Out of Jail Free” cartoon.
