DarylCagle.comThere are so many great quotes between Trump and l’il Kim that I thought it would be fun to draw the best quotes into a thinking cartoon.
I know. I know. Wordy cartoons are bad. But I didn’t write this one, and the words are crazy!
I think I’ll start drawing l’il Kim with devil horn hair from now on.
Donald Trump called off the planned meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un yesterday because of a typical, belligerent statement from North Korea. It was probably a good move to call off the summit; now North Korea is pushing for a new summit instead of the USA being the eager one, which is probably a strategic necessity. Unlike many in the media, I liked the letter that Trump wrote to L’il Kim, especially Trump’s line, “I felt a wonderful dialogue was building up between you and me.”
Since I’m cool with Trump’s response, I considered this to be one my my rare pro-Trump cartoons –but my drawing of Trump is unflattering so I doubt that the Trumpettes would see this cartoon as pro-Trump. We have a “Trump Friendly Cartoons” section on the front page of CagleCartoons.com and I didn’t put this one there –there’s just too much anti-Trump flavor, even in my pro-Trump cartoons.
It has taken me a long time to develop a Trump caricature that I’m happy with. Cartoonists are still all over the map on the way they draw Trump, but the long red tie has come to be a common device among almost all of the editorial cartoonists. I love the long, red tie.
Here are some of my “summit called off” cartoon favorites that came in today; this one is by Nate Beeler of the Columbus Dispatch:
This one is by Stephane Peray from Thailand:
This one is by Marian Kamensky from Austria:
This one is by Steve Sack of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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?
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.
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.
