My Missing Donald Trump Cartoon
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McCain and Rand Paul Wacko Bird
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Cartooning for Peace
Le Monde’s editorial cartoonist, Jean Plantu, and his trademark mouse.
I’m a big supporter of French cartoonist Jean Plantu’s Cartooning for Peace organization. It sounds a little silly, because all of the cartoonists are in favor of peace, and the nature of cartoons seems to be frivolous, while peace is a serious topic.
That said, Cartooning for Peace does a lot of great stuff; they organize meetings of editorial cartoonists and hold impressive exhibitions all over the world. I’ve made a lot of worldly, cartoonist friends through Cartooning for Peace. Plantu is the star cartoonist of France – that’s him at the right, with his trademark mouse that appears in the corner of every Plantu cartoon.
One of Plantu’s recent projects is a weekly page in his newspaper, Le Monde, with cartoons from around the world about a topic in the news. Plantu does a great job with it, soliciting the newest cartoons from member cartoonists every week. I have pasted some pages below. They look great and show the power of editorial cartoons at their best.
We syndicate a bunch of international cartoonists to about 850 newspapers, and they tend to be less popular than our American cartoonists. Americans aren’t much interested in events outside of the United States, unless we’re at war or threaten to be at war with someone. Passionate cartoons about water issues or the European Union don’t generate much reader passion in the USA.
On the topics that penetrate our borders and generate interest here, collections of international cartoons are a wonderful way to show a variety of world opinions at a glance. My local newspaper, the Santa Barbara News-Press does an international week in review with world cartoonists regularly. I would urge more editors to consider doing it.
The page below is “Egypt: an explosive cocktail”. It includes the Adam and Eve cartoon by Doaa El Adl, that has led to her prosecution by Islamist authorities. I’d love to see newspapers all around the world reprint Doaa’s cartoon.
Gay marriage has recently been a hot topic in France.
Here is the most recent one, on International Womens Day.
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Obama and Republicans Have Dinner
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Cardinals, Scalia and Hugo Chavez
Here are my most recent two – I think cardinals are great fun. See more Pope Retirement cartoons here.
And Justice Scalia likened the Voting Rights Act to a racial “entitlement” … we have a great collection of Scalia cartoons, here’s mine …
The big cartoon news this week was the death of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez – and we’ve gotten lots of Chavez cartoon traffic. The death of a despot is always great fodder for cartoons. The most popular Chavez cartoon, by far, is this gem by Hajo …
We have a great collection of Chavez Obituary cartoons here. Come enjoy!
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More Pope, Italy, Sequester and Wedgies
Here are my latest cartoons. Today the Pope quit, and I drew this one as a riff on Rene Magritte’s famous “This is not a Pipe” painting (right) that we all studied in art history class. We had a recent discussion on Facebook about our brilliant, Mexican/Cuban cartoonist, Angel Boligan, who drew another Magritte allegory about the Pope, which got me thinking.
We get about two phone calls per day from high school students who ask, “what does the cartoon mean?” We tell them they have to do their own homework and we can’t help them. I thought the phone might be ringing off the hook with this one.
Metaphors with famous paintings are meat and potatoes for editorial cartoonists. Here’s one by Nate Beeler.
Magritte did lots of versions of this painting, some in English. I went with the classic French. I thought I would add this Bagley/Pope/Retirement cartoon here – I think it is the best of the bunch.
And I drew these two about the sequester.
Wedgies are a mainstay for editorial cartoonists. Bagley draws better wedgies too.
The stock market fell when we heard the result of Italy’s crazy election, which I drew as the Wall Street Bull tripping over Italy’s boot. It was only a one day drop, but Italy’s bonds are down the tube, so I think it still works.
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The is not a Pope
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Jimmy Margulies and More Grim Cartoon News
I’m sad to report that one of my favorite cartoonists, Jimmy Margulies, is the latest editorial cartoonist to lose his job. This is a long term trend as less profitable newspapers cut back the ranks of political cartoonists. Jimmy wrote this for us:
After almost 22 and 1/2 years at The Record in northern New Jersey, I became the latest editorial cartoonist to lose a full time staff job at a daily newspaper. Despite having won a few national awards, syndication and frequent appearances in some high profile places like USA Today, as well as being a popular local speaker and using social media to become one of the most popular features on the paper’s web site, it was not enough to save me from the paper’s decision to trim expenses.
I plan to continue my syndication with King Features as well as self syndicating my New Jersey cartoons around the state. The Record and I have reached an agreement that I will do a Sunday cartoon for them, as well as possibly be asked to do additional work if a big story happens in the region.
Here are five of my favorite Margulies cartoons. See Jimmy’s whole archive here.
Want to reprint Jimmy’s cartoons? All of his cartoons are searchable by keyword and available in high resolution instantly at Politicalcartoons.com.
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Chinese Dragon and Me
I drew a self-portrait in today’s cartoon. All the news about Chinese hacking strikes close to home as we’ve had lots of trouble with hacker attacks on our servers, that our ISP has traced to China. I’m guessing that the Chinese junta doesn’t like American editorial cartoons much. I drew a Chinese dragon looking over my shoulder.
I did a State Department sponsored speaking tour in China some years ago, and I told the Chinese audiences that when I draw cartoons about China I represent China with a Panda, or a dragon, or the Great Wall, or that guy standing in front of a tank in Tienanmen Square. The Chinese audience would always murmur and look at each other when I mentioned the tank in Tienanmen Square, which was quite provocative for them and always stirred up the crowd. At one college I said that line and one excited college kid stood up and asked in English, “Oh! Oh! What KIND of dragon?!” That still makes me laugh.
Here’s my very rough pencil sketch.
Next I do the finished line art, in dark, hard pencil on a 14″x17″ piece of Duralene drafting vellum. This is what most people will see in the newspapers since most of them still print in black and white.
Here is the color version. The color on this one was fun. I grabbed a bunch of Chinese dragons from Google Images for scrap on the dragon, and I pulled details from three or four different dragons that I thought were cute.
I don’t know what kind of dragon it is. Sorry.
Here are my newest cartoons. Fans always tell me that they like to see my messy rough sketches, so here we go again.
Here’s my quick and dirty sequester cartoon sketch. I drew it up first in hard pencil, I wasn’t happy with my Obama so I drew over him in soft (darker) pencil, made a note to move his position, and fiddled with just how he should be twiddling his thumbs. I often don’t get things right the first time.
Then I drew it up in finished line art, in hard pencil on nice drafting vellum. This black and white line art image is what most people see in the newspaper and I always like the BW version best. I think about the heavy blacks to be sure the image pops and I saw that the speech balloons needed to be reversed to black to give the words more weight.
Then I saved it with the white background transparent, and colored behind the image in layers in Photoshop to get this …
The previous cartoon was about former Senator Chuck Hagel’s nomination to be Defense Secretary being held up by angry Republicans. I threw the sketch for this one away. Sorry. Here’s the black and white, which looks better.
I thought about how much cross-hatching to put into the elephant skin. Elephants have interesting, textural skin, and I think I got to the point where he started to look like a rhino – maybe I went too far. It was fun to draw, though. Here it is in color.
And here it is a couple of days later in my local newspaper, The Santa Barbara News-Press – printed nicely this time. I like how they put my liberal cartoon sneering at wing-nut Linda Chavez’s Hagel-bashing column.
The previous one was about North Korea’s “Li’l Kim” annoying China with his missile and bomb tests. Here’s the rough sketch. You can see I fiddled with the position of the missile-cigar and the Panda’s hand.
Here is the black and white art. I made the missile-cigar smoke the only gray part of the image, so it would stand out as extra annoying.
… and here’s the color version, with a nice Chinese red background.
The previous cartoon is an oldie that I reposted with the news of Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation. I drew this one the last time the College of Cardinals met to choose a new Pope and we were all told that the Cardinals don’t really pick the Pope, it is God picking the Pope through the Cardinals. That struck me as funny.
It is pretty common for editorial cartoonists to use Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel image of God in editorial cartoons. Here’s a recent one by Nate Beeler.
… and a conservative one by Rick McKee …
… but I digress. I should post the new cartoons more often! Here’s the previous one, Obama has GOP fleas.
I didn’t do a color version of this one. That’s it – I’m all caught up!
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That First Amendment is SOOOOOO Annoying
Rick McKee, our brilliant, Conservative cartoonist from the Augusta Chronicle in Georgia, drew this interesting cartoon today, and I asked him to explain.
Rick writes:
“Sticks and stones may break my bones” and apparently, internet Photoshops can really get under the thin skin of Georgia State Representative Earnest Smith, (D-Augusta). Recently, he became upset, to say the least, over a manipulated photo in which a blogger digitally pasted his head onto somebody else’s very naked body.
So, he’s cosponsoring a bill that would make it illegal to alter a photograph so that it “causes an unknowing person wrongfully to be identified as the person in an obscene depiction.” I understand where he’s coming from. Nobody wants their head stuck on an obscene image. Problem is, it’s perfectly legal and protected by the Constitution under the First Amendment. You’d think a guy in his position would know this.
Of course, he’s brought the wrath of the Internet down upon him. Bloggers and forums are trying to outdo one another with lewd images featuring the noggin of Rep. Smith.
But then Smith goes further and says, ““No one has a right to make fun of anyone. It’s not a First Amendment right.”
Wow. This is truly embarrassing coming from an elected official. If that’s true, then as a political cartoonist, I am breaking the law every day. Go ahead and lock me up. Jon Stewart and David Letterman can be my cellmates.
Perhaps, in the future, our elected officials should be required to take a basic middle-school level civics class. Or, at the least, we could include a disclaimer in their job description, “Warning: This occupation may be a hazard to those with thin skins!”