The pundits say that cues from former National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn’s lawyers tell them that he is ready to “flip” and testify against someone higher up – presumably President Trump. Flynn has been under a lot of heat –or as I draw it, on top of a lot of heat, from special prosecutor Robert Mueller.
Flynn is a wonderful character. His harsh face seems to perfectly describe his harsh character. Sometime you can tell a book by its cover. Here are a couple of Flynn cartoons from my archives. I drew the first one when Flynn “resigned.”
Last Spring I had a lovely exhibition in Virton, Belgium, with my France-Cartoons buddies, who you can see below, lined up around a sign promoting the exhibition.
The organizers of the exhibition are Raphael Donay Rafagé (just to the left of the sign) and Angelo Frade, third from the right.
The exhibition included about 100 framed prints of my cartoons in a cool, medieval labyrinth with nifty vaulted ceilings.
The French and Belgian cartoonists know how to party. They have an annual festival in Virton and neighboring Rouvroy, charming places that were the home of some of the most savage fighting in World War One.
There was a nice municipal building with more exhibitions, in neighboring Rouvroy, where we sat at tables drawing for the public, as they do at the French cartoonists’ other big festival in St Just le Martel.
Drawing for the public is a strange concept for American editorial cartoonists. Most visitors ask for caricatures of themselves; American cartoonists might think this is more appropriate for a caricature artists’ convention or an amusement park, but editorial cartoons are much appreciated in Belgium and France and I enjoy doing the caricatures. It gives the public a way of interacting with the “press-cartoonists” at festivals throughout the day, and it is great fun. We don’t charge for the drawings, although some cartoonists ask for a beer in exchange for a caricature.
The French cartoonists argue among themselves about why they draw free caricatures at their festivals; they don’t draw caricatures as part of their regular press-cartooning business, these drawings are only a schtick for festivals. I’m told that the festivals often insist that cartoonists don’t charge for drawings and this annoys some cartoonists who want to be paid (I don’t know if Virton/Rouvroy had this policy and cartoonists regularly sell their books at the festivals). The “press cartoonist” festivals make an ongoing circuit for the Euro-cartoonists who enjoy getting together to party much more frequently than their American colleagues do.
I think the free caricatures make municipalities feel like they are providing something special for the public in return for their support for the festivals. Some cartoonists argue that, as their print clients crash and burn, and their business model collapses, they should be able to make income from drawing at the festivals. Others complain that there are sometimes not enough visitors at the festivals, and they end up drawing each other –this is true, but cartoonists drawing each other is fun. It is all fun for me.
Eating and drinking are the most important activities at “press cartoonists” conventions in Belgium and France. Here’s I’m sitting down for dinner with some charming colleagues, from the left, Nol (from France and Holland), Marilena Nardi (Italy), me, Kap (Barcelona, Spain), Antonio Antunes (Portugal) and Christina Sampaio (Portugal).French cartoonist, Alain “Nalair” Roche, asked me to draw him as an elephant squirting wine – something I draw all too often, but Nalair makes a handsome elephant and the wine was excellent.These charming Belgian ladies, Olivia and Zoe, asked me to draw them together, as ice skating penguins.I should have put this young lady’s name into the drawing so I would remember it. She did a lot of traveling and likes kitties, so she is a traveling kitty with stickers on her suitcase showing where she has been. For some reason, I’m asked to draw lots of kitties when I take requests.
The festival in Virton happens every Spring. Everyone who loves editorial cartoons should go! Many thanks to all the France-Cartoons guys, and to Raphael and Angelo for a wonderful festival and a great exhibition!
Celebrities and politicians are getting slammed with sexual harassment allegations from years ago. It must be the same in the doggie world.
I hate to draw cartoons about crime. Cartoons about bad guys are usually lousy cartoons because they only bash the bad guys, and it doesn’t add much to the public debate to say “that bad guy is bad” in a cartoon. The sexual harassment debate is different because it looks like tribal loyalty “trumps” moral conviction. One accuser against Senator Al Franken, who accepts his apology, is a cause célèbre for Republicans who call the many Trump accusers “fake news.” The same was true of president Bill Clinton; Democrats dismissed Clinton’s many accusers as liars. It seems there are no tribes in Hollywood as accused celebrities are dropping like flies.
Here’s a cartoon I drew about Judge Roy Moore’s supporters last week. The air is thick with hypocrisy these days.
It may seem like sexual harassment hasn’t been in the news until now, when there is little else in the news – but sexual harassment is an evergreen topic with cartoonists. Here’s one I drew about Bill O’Reilly.
And here are two I drew about sexual harassment in the military.
Here’s one on Bill Cosby.
Here’s one on Trump and his infamous Access Hollywood tape.
And I’ll round this out with a couple of Anthony Weiner cartoons.
I’ll give a lecture at California State University Northridge (CSUN) next Monday (November 20th) from 4:30pm to 6:00pm at Manzanita Hall Room 213, on the west side
of campus. It is free, but visitors need to buy a parking pass at an information booth or at a kiosk. Anyone can come who wants to come.
This is being put on by the University’s student SPJ chapter; their journalism professor, Stephanie Bluestein, is my local Los Angeles SPJ Chapter Chairman. I’ll give a PowerPoint presentation with lots of cartoons, and I’ll talk about my work, how my syndicate works, and issues for editorial cartoonists around the world. There will be a one-hour lecture with a half hour of Q&A. The map of where to go at CSUN is below.
I don’t get out much so this is a rare opportunity to see the real me. Don’t be shy. Come on by.
Trump was in China this week. A large part of Trump’s presidential campaign was China bashing, but now Trump’s China bashing is warm and fuzzy, and a bit inconsistent.
I suppose it is obvious that I just wanted to draw a goofy Chinese dragon. I’ve done dragons a few times before. One of my favorites was the cartoon below, about the umbrella revolution in Hong Kong. I was looking at this dragon as I drew and colored today’s dragon, which is why they look like cousins.
I did a speaking tour in China where the audiences were very interested in how I depict China in cartoons. I told them I drew china as a dragon, or as the Great Wall, or as a panda bear, or as that guy standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square (which usually made the crowd gasp, because they don’t mention the Tiananmen Square massacres). At one venue I went through my list and a couple of guys in the crowd got very excited, waving their arms, saying, “Oh! Oh! What kind of dragon?!” That still strikes me funny, although I’m not sure why. I don’t know the answer to that question.
Here’s the dragon I drew when Trump was elected.
And here’s one I drew when Obama finally got Bin Laden, who was hiding out in Pakistan, protected by his Pakistani cronies, who should have also been seen as bad guys for hiding Bin Laden, but we just kept giving a bunch of money to Pakistan anyway.
My “Bad guys, watch out” cartoon is a favorite oldie that I updated.
The recent shootings in Texas, where a good Samaritan with a rifle shot the evil bad guy, then chased him down with the help of another good Samaritan, seems to give weight to the gun-nuts’ argument that we’re all safer when more people carry guns, so I thought it was a good time to bring back this oldie.
Now, I suspect we’ll see more people who are motivated to carry their guns everywhere, to be ready in case a bad guy comes along. I may be bringing this cartoon back every few years, as this issue never goes away.
The new Republican tax plan takes away the deduction for state income taxes, which will hit the high-tax blue states hardest. The red states that voted for Trump are the federal welfare cases.
This cartoon features very blue California and very red Tennessee, two great examples of blue-donor and red-dependent states. I drew this one as a local cartoon for the weekly Nashville Scene when I was living in Nashville and I updated it a bit to apply to the issue today. Things don’t change much.
If this was an issue of fairness, the income tax should be reduced in hight-tax donor states and increased in low-tax dependent states. Of-course this is not an issue of fairness. The red states voted for Trump and now it is time for them to get some payback, at the expense of the Hillary states.
I’ve drawn lots of peeing dog cartoons. One of my favorite oldies is George W. Bush as a dog marking his territory around the world. So naturally I wanted to draw a bull, as Spain, peeing on Catalonia. The problem is, that on the map, Catalonia is in the upper right hand corner of Spain, and for the Spanish bull to pee on Catalonia I would have to have the Spain-Bull stand in France, which doesn’t make much sense. The bull could be standing up to pee, in an arc up to Catalonia, but that’s a little nasty. We have a new “no penises” policy here at Cagle Cartoons, which means that strategic parts of the bull have to be concealed.
So I settled on the doggie style leg up peeing, with the map of Spain in perspective and the pee puddle above the bull. I know that’s a stretch.
Here’s my old favorite Bush peeing cartoon. Bigger map. Smaller doggie. No puddle under the doggie.
Sometimes it’s hard to pee when geography gets in the way – so my Catalonia cartoon is not one of my best. Still, I look to draw peeing “doggies” whenever I can.
Here’s a column I wrote for “The Masthead,” the journal for the ASNE (American Society of News Editors) editorial page editors group.
It is easy to match the topics of editorial cartoons and columns. We deliver our columns with suggested editorial cartoons, and editors can do an easy keyword search of our database of over 200,000 cartoons and illustrations.
What editorial cartoonists want to draw, what editors want to see from cartoonists, and what readers want in cartoons are very different. We have good statistics on which cartoons editors download. Editors prefer cartoons, drawn in a traditional style, which do not express a strong opinion that some readers might disagree with.
Editors prefer cartoons that are funny over cartoons that make readers think or cry.
Editors prefer cartoons that do not deviate from the topics that the pundits are talking about on TV.
American editors prefer cartoons by American cartoonists. International editors prefer cartoons that are not drawn by American cartoonists.
More than half of America’s daily, paid circulation newspapers subscribe to our CagleCartoons.com service for editorial page editors. Our package includes about sixty top cartoonists from around the world and a dozen great columnists. To see how it works, visit CagleWorld.com. We’re cheap and easy and we’re happy to give a generous free trial subscription to any editors who would like to give us a try. We’re the best!
We get statistics on what online readers prefer from the traffic patterns to our Cagle.com site. Unlike editors, readers are open to many topics, including those that are not today’s TV pundit topics. Readers prefer strong opinions in cartoons. Like American editors, our mostly American audience on Cagle.com shows little interest in issues from around the world and they prefer cartoons by American cartoonists.
Editors and readers prefer cartoons about celebrities in the news. The most popular section ever on Cagle.com was Janet Jackson’s boob at the Super Bowl with a whopping sixty million page views. Like most editorial cartoonists, I’m not interested in celebrities, but my most popular cartoons are celebrity obituary cartoons.
Cartoonists prefer cartoons that express strong opinions; we’re frustrated that editors don’t reprint these cartoons much. Most newspaper jobs for editorial cartoonists are gone now; we’re freelancers who are underpaid and struggling. We’re motivated by the joy of being a part of the public debate. We would like for editors to see us as graphic columnists rather than as bomb-throwers or clowns.
We would like for editors to see us as graphic columnists rather than as bomb-throwers or clowns.
Most of America’s 1,400 daily, paid circulation newspapers are small, rural or suburban newspapers with conservative readers, so most editors prefer conservative cartoons to liberal cartoons. The vast majority of editorial cartoonists are liberal and the most frequent complaint we get from editors is that there are not enough conservative cartoons (even though we have many more conservative cartoons than competing packages). We feature a “Trump-Friendly” section on the front page of CagleCartoons.com to point out these cartoons to editors who overlook them. Sometimes dealing with editors is like coaxing kids to eat their broccoli.
Because editors prefer such a narrow range of styles and topics, editorial cartoonists (who are not a diverse group themselves) often come up with cartoons that are similar. Sometimes a dozen cartoonists will draw the same, obvious gag; we call these matching cartoons “Yahtzees.” Columnists do the same thing, often making matching arguments about the issue of the day, but matching cartoons are more obvious than words. Sometimes editors complain that they don’t need to subscribe to more cartoons because the cartoons they see are “all the same,” but editors shun cartoons that are not similar.
Many editors ask, “Why don’t you have more pro-Trump cartoons?” Editorial cartooning is a negative art form. Cartoons in favor of anything are lousy cartoons. Even conservative cartoonists don’t draw pro-Trump cartoons. After the presidential election, cartoonists stopped drawing cartoons criticizing president Obama and Hillary Clinton, a change that disturbed many conservative editors who perceived a sudden shift to the left.
Another top complaint from editors is, “Why don’t you post more cartoons about holidays, and post them earlier?” We put topical keywords on the front page of CagleCartoons.com to help editors find the funny, inoffensive holiday cartoons that they might overlook. Most holiday cartoons don’t go stale. We have a great selection in our archive of over 200,000 key worded cartoons; many editors miss these because they only look at cartoons that are new.
What I would like to see from editorial page editors is more interest in diversity of cartoon content – in style, topic and point of view. I’d like to see editors choose great cartoons over funny cartoons. I’d like for editors to show more tolerance for foreign cartoonists and topics.
All that said, editors are our customers and most of them are great editorial cartoon fans. We love our editors. That’s why we want them to eat their broccoli.
Daryl Cagle is an editorial cartoonist and the owner of Cagle Cartoons, Inc. E-mail Daryl at [email protected]. For more information, visit CagleWorld.com. For a free trial subscription e-mail [email protected].
Every so often a really stinky fish looms over the White House. I have to draw a similar cartoon every seven years or so. Today’s stinky fish is “Whitefish Energy,” the two employee company in WhiteFish, Montana that happened to win a $300,000,000 exclusive contract from Puerto Rico to maintain their electrical system. Why this little company won a contract like this is a mystery to the White House. Interestingly, the tiny town of Whitefish, Montana (population 7.279) is the hometown of the Secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke, and some are wondering if this could be a reason why the little company landed this big contract. Here’s an article with some other interesting Whitefish facts.
Whitefish Energy employs about 300 contractors who are working on tens of thousands of miles of downed power lines in powerless Puerto Rico. Not nearly enough people for the job, but their exclusive contract is keeping more workers out. Sounds stinky to me.
In the past my stinky fish has reared its rotting head for both the Obama and George W. Bush administrations. Here’s my stinky Solyndra fish from 2011, depicting a stinky green energy company that blew through $500 million dollars of taxpayer subsidies before turning belly up.
The stinky fish for the Bush administration in 2007 was the Iraq war …
It looks like we should expect another fish to descend in another five or six years. Keep your eye (or nose) out for it.
10/30/17
Here’s how my Whitefish cartoon looks today in USA Today.
