My Missing Donald Trump Cartoon
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Tennessee Marriage Equality Celebration
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Texas Marriage Equality Celebration
Here’s my new cartoon for the Nashville Next altie-weekly newspaper. Tennessee has a number of commissions that are passionately reviewing the Common Core standard that conservatives in this red state just can’t stand.
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Egypt! Snowden! DOMA! Oh my!
It has been too long since I have posted new cartoons here! I took time away for the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists convention in Salt Lake City. (You can see me opine on the convention with Rob Rogers and Pat Bagley here.) Then it was the end of the quarter and I had to pay the cartoonist royalties, another three days lost. So I’m late. But here are the missing cartoons!
I drew this one of Edward Snowden a couple of weeks ago.
It wasn’t long before Ecuador was no longer talked about as a possible asylum for Snowden, so I drew a revision.
Today it looks like Venezuela will be the lucky winner in the Snowden derby.
The next one is Obama sweeping some crud under the constitution rug. I thought about labeling the crud “NSA,” and I could have labeled it “Guantanamo,” but I decided labels are for sissies. Given the e-mail I get from readers, I probably should have labeled the constitution also.
Next is Mohammad Morsi in his prison garb.
This one is actually in response to a reader comment. I had posted this oldie of Morsi on my blog …
Thanks to Cheryl Akins, who posted a comment that I should draw Morsi in prison garb now – and, of-course, she was right. I made his face a little cuter the second time around. I probably should have stuck with the uglier version.
With Egypt falling into chaos, I reposted one of my favorites from earlier this year.
Which brings us back to the Supreme Court’s DOMA and Prop 8 decisions. I drew this one.
We had a nice bunch of DOMA decision cartoons, but the best one came from by buddy Nate Beeler, who drew this big wet kiss that went viral on Facebook.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen an outpouring of love for a cartoon as I witnessed for this Beeler beauty. Nice work, Nate.
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DOMA and Gay Marriage SCOTUS Victory
Here are my new cartoons! The most recent one is about Obama’s response to the crisis in Syria. Drawing Arabs as dogs is deeply insulting – I suppose that just puts dogs onto cartoonists’ palettes of cliches. I may get some angry mail for this one. I’m annoyed by Obama’s worthless response to Syria, at the same time, I’m happy that Obama isn’t jumping in to chew it up in this Syrian dogfight when both sides look to be bad guys.
This one is a drawing of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He’s a pretty easy caricature, and I think I nailed him.
… still, I hate to put labels in cartoons – particularly when the label is to identify someone who is drawn with an identifiable caricature, something lousy cartoonists do when they can’t draw good caricatures. Sometimes I just can’t depend on the readers to know what the guy will look like and I have to put in a label – still I hate it, so I distributed a second version of this one without a label. I suppose this would work as an illustration for an op-ed piece about the turbulence in Turkey. He’s a fun guy to draw. I love the shape of his head. I also like his middle name – it sounds like something Paris Hilton’s dog would say.
This one is about the split in the Republican party on immigration Reform. I suppose we’ll see if any reform-candy comes out of that pinata next week.
The next one is a Muppet cartoon, with Cookie Monster the Republican enjoying all the White House scandals.
Regular readers here know that I worked for the Muppets for the first half of my career and I’m a big Muppet fan. I draw a Muppet themed cartoon about once a year – this is a good excuse to show a few more …
I drew this one back in the George W. Bush days when we were all talking about torture and water-boarding.
I once illustrated a whole childrens’ book about Elmo – who claims a permanent space in my brain – oh! I hear the voice! I drew the one below when we got the news about the CEO of Chick-fil-A opposing gay rights, and the Muppets spoke out against it and in favor of gay rights – makes me proud of my Muppet roots.
This one was when congress was threatening to cut funds to public broadcasting – and Sesame Street.
When the Sesame Street people decided to make Cookie Monster love vegetables, and made cookies a “sometimes food” I drew this one.
I drew this one when there was a scandal at Goldman Sachs, and it was revealed that greedy, Wall Street types derisively call their clients “Muppets.”
Here are my latest three cartoons – hot off the drawing board and Wacom tablet!
The Supreme Court heard two gay rights cases this week, California’s Proposition 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act. The pundits seem to agree that these cases will likely be decided by 5 to 4 votes, so I drew the four, ugly conservatives on the court angrily brandishing their gavels at the cowering gay couple on the cake. Fortunately, the ugly conservatives on the court are also the easiest justices to caricature! Here is my rough sketch.
Drawing caricatures like this is so much easier now than it was years ago! All I have to do is type some public figure’s name into Google Images and I get a page full of great thumbnails. In the old days I had to cut photos out of newspapers and magazines and save them in a “morgue” in case I ever needed to draw a caricature. Technology is grand.
Here is the black and white version of the cartoon, which most people will see in newspapers that still print in black and white.
I draw everything at about 11″ x 17″ on vellum in pencil, and I scan at high contrast so it looks like ink. Then I color it in Photoshop with my Wacom tablet. Here is the color version.
Next I drew a Republican elephant flogging himself as his intolerant views about gay rights do nothing but give him a sore back. Here is the rough sketch.
And here is the finished drawing, in pencil on 11″ x 17″ vellum, with the gray tones added in Photoshop.
It is better if a drawing holds up as just line art with no gray tones – but sometimes I have to resort to gray. This one needed a little tonal substance. Here is the color version.
The most recent cartoon is another riff on an art masterpiece – these seem to be the most popular cartoons I draw. This one is based on a famous 19th century print by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai, titled the Great Wave off Kanagawa (pictured on the right).
This image made for a popular Yahtzee, in editorial cartoons, after the Japanese tsunami. One thing that is interesting about Japanese prints is that the Japanese read from right to left, so the boats in the Hokusai print are sailing from calmer seas into the big bad waves. Of-course, editorial cartoons must read from left to right, with the set-up on the left and the gag on the right.
I printed out the Hokusai image and sketched a little GOP elephant to the right for my rough sketch.
I drew it up like this, then I noticed that the elephant was too big – he needed to be smaller for the wave to look more threatening. Here is the finished line drawing with a smaller elephant.
And here is the color version.
That Hokusai wave is a wonderful wave!
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GOP Gay Marriage Whipping Boy
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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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My Muppet Cartoons
I just drew another Muppet themed editorial cartoon, about Chick-Fil-A, below. I worked for the Muppets from the 1970’s into the 1990’s; the Jim Henson organization made my career as a cartoonist so whenever the Muppets make the news I feel nostalgic.
I drew this one when Congress was cutting funding to PBS.
I remember when Stephen Colbert testified before Congress, in character, and Republicans complained that they might as well have Elmo testify before Congress, another good occasion for a Muppet cartoon.
This one was when the evil Goldman-Sachs traders derisively called their customers “Muppets,” for them, synonymous with “suckers.”
The Children’s Television Workshop folks announced that Cookie Monster would no longer eat unhealthful cookies.
I drew this one when I was a local cartoonist in Hawaii, and Hawaii was running up to a vote to legalize gay marriage (which failed). A conservative Christian group was outraged by the cartoon and organized a noisy protest outside my newspaper, the Midweek, demanding that the cartoonist “come out!” (I wasn’t really inside, I was at home in California, pretending to be a local Hawaii cartoonist.)
Here are some examples of what I drew and designed back in my Muppet years … the good old days. I still love the Muppets.
