DarylCagle.comI’m not too happy with my Putin and Bernie in this one, but Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is great fun to draw. Her hair is fun. Somehow I’m guessing she’s be around for a while in one way or another.
Here I am drawing this one live (as of 1:00pm Pacific Time Tuesday, this had another hour to finish uploading – come back later if you are early!)
And here I color it in real time …
Since the Orlando massacre there has been talk on the left about gun control, while the right seems unmoved by arguments to limit assault weapons or ban sales of guns to people on the “no-fly” list. It isn’t hard to see why.
I like the image of the NRA as a pig in a business suit – much the same image that I often use for Wall Street. The pig is a symbol of greed and the NRA is all about money and self interest around their gun issues. Here’s another one with NRA piggies that I drew some time ago.
and here’s another one …
My pigs are influenced by my old Muppet days and I guess I have a pig style that some people see as too similar to my elephants. Whenever I draw pigs in cartoons I’ll get an e-mail from somebody who thinks my pig is a short snouted elephant – some people must suffer from pig-blindness.
The videos of my drawing the new NRA piggy and doggie are below. Note that I ran into a problem with Photoshop when I tried to put in the image of the $100 bill. I thought using a $100 bill was funny and enhanced the message of the cartoon; it created a natural, visual focal point drawing the eye up to the money. Its all about the money. Photoshop blocks images of bank notes as a barrier to counterfeiters, and this has been a problem for me with past cartoons. In the videos you’ll see me struggle with this again. I use money scans rarely enough that I always forget how I worked around it the last time. You’ll see me struggle a bit and figure it out in the video.
Here I am drawing the piggy/doggie cartoon …
and here I am coloring the piggy/doggie cartoon …
Today the house Republicans voted to make Paul Ryan the new house speaker, replacing John Boehner who seems to have taken a responsible turn in negotiating a spending bill.
Paul Ryan was Mitt Romney’s running mate, and he has a history as a budget-cutting-wonk. He also had longer, puffier hair the last time around, which was much more fun to draw.
The Republicans infighting in congress is pretty crazy – enough for another noose cartoon. 
I seem to draw a lot of nooses. I draw lots of wordless cartoons and a noose is a good, simple, graphic threat. Here are the Republicans with a caduceus noose, from when they were trying to stop the government over and over, to protest Obamacare.
And here’s a more recent Trump tongue noose, when everyone, including me, thought that Donald Trumps provocative statements would knock him out of the presidential race – I was wrong; I guess I was playing too loose with that noose.
The Republican battles for Speaker of the House make great theatre. Here’s my new one – a battle royale.
Here are a couple of oldies that I reposted because they seem so appropriate right now.
House Speaker, John Boehner, just announced his resignation. I’m sorry to see him go, he’s a great character, although I didn’t draw him very often. Most of the cartoonists color him orange because of his unnatural tan, and I jumped on the bandwagon with that. Lucha Libre! (The color here is off, he’s not really that day-glow orange in the print version – I have a little compassion, at least in print.)
I also notice that politicians who are heavy smokers do a good job hiding their cigarettes whenever the cameras are around, so I make a point of giving those guys a cigarette in my cartoons. I did that for a while with Obama, but since he’s made an effort to quit, I quit giving him cigarettes also – although I notice that some conservative cartoonists still give him cigarettes.
The other thing to do with Boehner is to draw him crying. I suppose I should have given him a tear in his eye – just as I should do with the Statue of Liberty. Here’s a crying, quitting Boehner by my buddy, Rick McKee.
Today’s cartoon is inspired by a quote from incoming Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, who said that if President Obama does immigration reform with an executive order, over the objections of Republicans, that would be like, “waving a red flag in front of a bull.” Kind of obvious, but it was fun to draw McConnell and Boehner as bulls.
The drawing was a bit more difficult than usual. I think this is the first time I’ve ever drawn McConnell and I’m not really comfortable with him yet. My rough sketch is below.
I was going to label the “red flag” as “immigration reform” but I decided that was unnecessary. I struggled with McConnell and I did a little patch to draw his face over until I was happy with it. Those marks between Obama and the bulls remind me to reposition them when I do the finished line art.
I also struggled with how to draw the bulls’ penises in a way that editors could stand, without killing my cartoon. I like how bull penises seem to come out of the middle of their bellies, and I tried to be discreet.
I like to do line art for the black and white version of a cartoon, without gray tones. There is something more elegant about lines – although it is hard to call this cartoon “elegant.” Here is the color version …
I played a bit with making Boehner orange, and with making the bulls have more light and shadow, but whatever I tried was too busy and I ended up with dull bulls. I’m not really happy with the color on this one. In fact, I’m usually never happy with my color.
I’m looking at doing a video of my drawing my cartoons to post on the site, or possibly to do live as a rather long and boring podcast. It is cartoons like this one that give me podcasting pause, because I fiddled around with it for a long time before I was happy with the caricatures – and cartoonists like to give the impression that drawing everything is quick and easy. I’ll have no secrets. On the other hand, the videos may be so boring that no one will notice.
I looked around for some other bulls and I found this one by Georgia cartoonist, Mark Streeter, who beat me to the matador punch.
Here’s an oldie by RJ Matson.
There was a big Yahtzee of matador cartoons about the European Union, back when Spain was having big financial problems and needed a bail-out. Here’s one I drew then.
This is a nice bull-fight cartoon from John Cole that is probably better now than when he drew it back in 2006. I like the blank, Orphan Annie eyeballs.
There are a whole lot of matador cartoons out there, but there’s always room for more.
And thanks to Jerry Moore for sending me this nice shot of the Op-Ed page of the Los Angeles Times today.
The big election wins for Republicans gave us an elephant cartoon festival that continues today. Here is our great new collection of cartoons on the GOP sweep.
I posted three cartoons yesterday! The first one started out as I was thinking of the Republicans taking “a big bite of the apple” which didn’t quite work, because it looked like the elephant was damaging and consuming the capitol, so I went with a Capitol ice cream cone and a big lick. (No, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the perspective on the Capitol – hey, this is a cartoon.)
And here’s the GOP having a nice day, while the Democrats are having a lousy day.
Here’s the GOP win. They played a good game this time around.
Tic-Tac-Toe cartoons are a favorite of mine; they show more than winners and losers, tic-tac-toe shows a strategy. I drew this one when it became clear that Obama was going to beat Mitt Romney.
I drew this one four years earlier, when it was clear that Obama was going to beat McCain.
Tic-tac-toe isn’t only good for elections. I drew this one a few years ago, when Saddam Hussein’s regime fell.
I regret that my early Iraq cartoons were not very sophisticated, and were much to supportive of the war. I’ve learned my lesson this time around and all the warmongering media and public support for going back into Iraq looks like the old rush to war winning over the public again … as illustrated in the tic-tac-toe-oldie below. Somehow it looks like there is more tic-tac-toe to come.
Fox News is aghast and aflutter about President Obama saying he’ll unilaterally enter into an international agreement on Climate Change. Obama touts that he has a “pen and a phone” to do business without congress. The pen amuses me.
Like almost every cartoon I draw, I think the black and white line version looks better – and it is what most people will see in the newspaper …
I realized that kids these days might not be familiar with fountain pens, and how they would occasionally squirt by mistake. I was reading Classic Peanuts recently as Charlie Brown was writing to his pen-pal with a fountain pen, squirting all over the page. I can’t remember the last time I wrote a letter on paper, or the last time I used a fountain pen. Charlie Brown is a classic, but the strip seemed to define the elderly audience of the newspaper.
At the right is a close-up detail view of Obama’s head from this cartoon. Over the course of his presidency I’ve been drawing Obama more gray haired and more weary looking. He’s having a visual transformation in cartoons as well as in reality. Also, in his news conference yesterday Obama was wearing a light tan suit. I’ve never seen Obama wear anything other than a black suit! For cartoonists the tan suit should have been the big story of the day. I like to draw pinstripes and I’ve gotten comments that Obama doesn’t wear suits like the ones I draw him in – artistic license – the cartoon above would have been lousy with a black suit, the composition needs the black pen and black ink to work – a black suit would ruin it.
The renewed talk about Obama’s “pen” got me thinking about a cartoon I drew when the “pen and phone” talk first came out …
My new Obama-pen cartoon is also phallic. Editorial cartoonists love to make phallic references in their cartoons. At the right is one of my recent favorites from Taylor Jones.
International cartoonists draw a whole lot of phallic cartoons. A recurring image is a warlike character holding a missile in a manly position. Below is one by South African cartoonist Jeremy Nell …
The charmer below is from German cartoonist Rainer Hachfeld …
And yes! We now have a cartoon about Obama’s tan suit from Nate Beeler. I knew that tan suit would find its way into cartoons.
Here is my last week of cartoons. Today I’m headed out for the editorial cartooning convention in St. Just, France, with my brilliant cartoonist buddies, Steve Sack, Bob Englehart and Pat Bagley.
Here’s my most recent cartoon, with the GOP all tied up in a knot. They seem to be pretty dysfunctional right now, gumming up the government for everybody. (I was just drawing the heels of his shoes with the old fashioned nails and gripper on the back, I wasn’t think of his heels having happy faces. I guess I have to think of everything.)
I did a second GOP knot cartoon this week, which makes the point more about the split in the Republican party.
I’m trying to do more texture in my cartoons. I’ve been asked why I do the yellow backgrounds so often in my cartoons. I like the yellow because it is intense and light so that it doesn’t draw away from the line art.
I drew a THIRD Republican knot cartoon this week. This is my knotty Republican week. Here is the GOP hanging himself on the medical Caduseus (Obamacare).
Enough of knots. When Ted Cruz was doing his useless filibuster, reading from Dr. Seuss, and the other cartoonists were all making Dr. Seuss metaphors, I was rather more annoyed with Cruz, so I drew him as a monkey throwing his poop.
I know that there won’t be many newspapers that will print this (if any will at all). I guess that is one of the perks of being my own editor – I can draw whatever I want even if nobody wants to see it. This cartoon is actually a homage to the great, British cartoonist Steve Bell, who drew a famous image of George W. Bush in a similar pose. I’m a big Steve Bell fan.
The last one for the week is this Republican suicide bomber cartoon. I’m leaving for the convention in France at a difficult time, with all the wonderful, crazy politics going on now. I won’t be drawing new cartoons for a week or so, but when I come back I expect to have some pent up angst, ready for the drawing board.
