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Trump Christmas

Trump will have a nice Christmas morning!

This Christmas morning scene is something I bring back every four or five years. Here’s an oldie from a Christmas when the GOP was suffering from some Obama successes …


Here’s one from when Obama was eager to get Obamacare through congress, back in 2009.

The next one is from back in 2001 – before I had settled on a good caricature of George W. Bush, when 9/11 was still fresh and all the talk was about the hunt for Osama Bin Ladin.

Notice that there are thick, cathode ray TVs in W’s holiday stash? This cartoon is fifteen years old. Times have changed.

Gotta love Christmas morning!

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Blog Syndicate

Monkey on Your Back

I’ve enjoyed the recent back-and-forth sniping between Donald Trump and Jeb Bush about whether President George W. Bush “kept us safe.” Of-course the answer to that is that he kept us safe, here but not overseas, from September 12th, 2001 going forward – a couple of qualifiers that Jeb neglected to mention.

A “monkey on the back” is an editorial cartooning standard – in fact, my buddy Taylor Jones drew a better George W. Bush monkey on the back cartoon recently, that I noticed just now, after I finished my cartoon above. I might not have drawn it had I noticed Taylor’s excellent work first – oh well, there will be plenty of monkeys on the back to come.
taylorMonkey

Here’s President George W. Bush as a monkey on the back of John McCain back in 2008, by David Fitzsimmons.

This is one of my favorite monkey-Bush oldies, by Sandy Huffaker, from the good old days of 2005.

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Blog

New Years BITE

Happy cartoon New Year! I was busily drawing my New Years Day cartoon, with Obama going out and coming in for the year, and with little biting GOP elephants, when the news started blaring about North Korea calling Obama a “monkey.” I am a slave to the news, so I had to do a second version with L’il Kim. Here’s the GOP …

And here is the L’il Kim version …

L’il Kim may be a plague to the world, but he is a gift to cartoonists.

The “Father Time and Baby New Year” thing is standard cartooning fodder. Here’s my New Year cartoon from last year …

Back in December, 2012, all the talk was about the “Fiscal Cliff” budget fight in Congress; it looked like doomsday. I drew this one …

At the end of 2010 the house had fallen under Republican control, and it looked like the GOP was eager to jump into more war – instead, Congress didn’t do much of anything, and Obama got us into more war. Oh well …

At the end of 2008: Obama won the presidency, George W. Bush was out of a job, and my drawings of Obama needed some more time to mature.

As 2005 turned into 2006 George W. Bush’s Republicans had lost the mid-term elections, but Bush was doubling down on the Iraq War anyway. There was lots more war to come.

Back in 2001 all the news was the 9/11 attacks as our troops poured into Afghanistan. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

 

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Big Election for Republicans and Tic-Tac-Toe

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.

 

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Hong Kong, War and Apple!

Sorry to neglect the blog! I’ve been away on two cartoonist convention trips and I need to catch up!  Here’s the new one today on Hong Kong.

Most people will see this in newspapers in black and white – and I think it is better in black and white.

I drew this as a riff on an oldie. I have lots of problems with Chinese hackers attacking my web sites, and I drew this self-portrait some time ago. I don’t think it got reprinted much, because it was a personal cartoon – better as a Hong Kong cartoon.

Here are a couple of recent cartoons that I forgot to post in the blog. Here’s Obama transforming into George W. Bush. I’m a little late on this one; I should have drawn it a couple of years ago. It probably wouldn’t have been reprinted much two years ago. Now that’s we’re back in Iraq, more and more, the transformation is clear.

The media’s march to war also matches the old march to war in Iraq under George W. Bush. People don’t seem to get that every party that is fighting over there is a bad guy, and bad guys fighting other bad guys is something we should leave alone. We have our priorities out of place, which is the point of the carton below.

The new smart watch from Apple looks pretty cool, but the emphasis on counting steps and the anal focus on health apps seems unpleasant. Here’s my take on it.

While I was away at the cartoonists convention in France for two weeks, I re-posted an oldie. This “evergreen” dove-bomber cartoon is appropriate all too often.

Here’s another one I missed – another riff on Obama and his pen annoying the Republicans. That’s the last one. Now I’m caught up!

 

 

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Cartoons

Obama Transforms Into Bush

154201 600 Obama Transforms Into Bush cartoons

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Senator Ted Cruz Obamacare and Monkey Poop

137981 600 Senator Ted Cruz Obamacare and Monkey Poop cartoons

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Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and Windmills

Here’s my new cartoon about the Republican duo of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan:

mitt romney paul ryan Don quixote

It is a metaphor that made me laugh – Romney and Ryan, as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, chasing the “impossible dream” of vanquishing the entitlement windmills.  It is great fun to rip off recognizable works of art for editorial cartoons – most editorial cartoonists do it every so often.

George W. Bush as King Henry VIII by Hans Holbien is one of my favorite oldies:

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A Very Cagle Christmas

Merry Christmas to all our readers! As we begin to wrap up another year and prepare to dive in to glasses of egg nog, I thought it might be fun to look back at some of the Christmas-related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years.

Here’s this year’s cartoon. Figured it’s what’s on the mind of a lot of Republicans this Holiday season:


Here’s one featuring Obamaclaus:

I drew this one back in 2006, after Iraq became the debacle we all know and love now:


Keep you eyes peeled on those Salvation Army bell ringers. You never know:


This was my Christmas cartoon back in 2003, when Bush gave away everything, including the kitchen sink, to be re-elected:

Here’s a golden Cagle oldie from way back in 2000, back when I was still drawing cartoons for the Honolulu Advertiser (now known as the Honolulu Star-Advertiser after being bought by its cross-town rival):

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Looking Back on 9/11

A disturbing old brochure, promoting the World Trade Center.

Ten years ago I was president of the National Cartoonists Society and I brought our annual convention to the World Trade Center, shortly before its demise. I was looking through some of my old files this morning and I found a disturbing brochure (right) promoting the World Trade Center. Oh dear.

With the ten year anniversary of 9/11 coming soon, I collaborated on a French book project with Le Monde’s front page cartoonist, Plantu. We had a 32 page “conversation” about the ten years since 9/11 in comic book format for an anthology called 12 Septembre published by the big Belgian graphic novel publisher, Casterman (they do the Tin Tin books). The cover (left) of the book was interesting, disturbing, perhaps offensive, and a surprise to me.  With victims and planes casually falling, or floating without emotion, and a cute, red lipped chick, big in the foreground. I don’t get it – maybe it’s a French thing. I know that cute chicks on book covers sell books … still …

The collaboration with Plantu was great fun.  Plantu is a big star in France, with his cartoons gracing the front pages of the national newspaper, Le Monde, for over twenty years. I’ve never heard of editorial cartoonists having a graphic conversation like this before.  We decided to bounce back and forth between two page spreads, working forward through the ten years. This was a pretty big project, and explains why I didn’t draw very many editorial cartoons back in January and February.

Le Monde is publishing excerpts from the book in their weekly magazine; a copy of a spread from my conversation with Plantu is below, and further below are a couple of my spreads in English, at a readable size.

 

One of the spreads from last Sunday's Le Monde, showing my graphic "conversation" with Plantu.