Here’s another batch of my syndicated TRUE cartoons about Health Statistics!
COVID California
This batch of my syndicated TRUE! newspaper cartoons is on the topic of women’s self images.
President Trump pulled the funding rug out from under ObamaCare, which may not have been failing before, but is much more likely to fail now. Trump supporters claim that this is to light a fire under Congress to fix the problem – more likely, it will just light a fire under the healthcare system, leaving it scorched – like a marshmallow over the campfire.
I love the caduceus symbol for medicine, with the two snakes and the little wings at the top of a pole – it is a wonderful cartoon cliché that allows me to do healthcare cartoons without words. As healthcare poses existential political issues that divide the Republicans, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to bash the elephants with caduceuses.
Obama took a bite out of the Republicans by pushing ObamaCare through congress without a single Republican vote.
Obama took a moment to gloat.
Republicans can’t agree on healthcare, and likely won’t get anything done, leading Trump to blow the system up. Perhaps congress will be more willing to clean up a big healthcare mess of Trump’s making; they can always blame it on Obama.
More likely, I think healthcare will be the issue that sinks the Republican party.
Today we saw the TrumpCare/RyanCare Repeal and Replace bill go down in flames – or poop. Here’s my cartoon.
This is based on a cartoon I drew in 2009 when President Obama and the Democrats were pushing Obamacare through Congress.
Want to see me draw this one in real time? Check out the video below …
And here’s the video of me coloring the cartoon in Adobe Photoshop on my Wacom Cintiq …
The Democrats worked on passing Obamacare for a year and we got lots of cartoons with the medical symbol, the caduseus. Republicans don’t have so much time to plan, they are swallowing healthcare whole without chewing – and it is caduceus time all over again! Here’s my Republican healthcare debate cartoon …
I drew this as a live-stream on Twitch. See me in the video below as I start with a blank sheet of paper and no layout in mind.
The next video show me coloring this one, along with tomorrow’s cartoon about Trump and Twitter …
Here’s my cartoon about Republican deliberations as they craft an Obamacare replacement bill, in secret.
This is a cartoon that I drew many years ago, when the Republicans were fighting about some subject that I don’t remember now (I added the Obamacare title yesterday and reposted the cartoon). It seem the Republicans are united when we have a president who is a Democrat, but a Republican president seems to get them fighting with each other again.
American donkey and elephant characters, as representations of our political parties, is a mainstay of American editorial cartoonists, making our cartoons difficult for foreign readers to understand. Since Trump is often at odds with other Republicans, cartoonists have been drawing fewer elephants recently. There was a time when we could count on Republicans to oppose deficit spending and a static list of issues that don’t register high on the Trump agenda, so the elephant character is hard to define now, and even harder to associate with Trump. But when Republicans fight with each other, I don’t have to worry much about definitions.
With all the news last week about Hillary’s health reinforcing the alt-right narrative about Hillary being sick and secretive, I got to thinking about how Donald Trump might be spending his play time.
I wanted to make Trump look like a little kid, delighted with his toy, as he inflicts dark magical, medical horrors upon Hillary. Want to see me drawing this one in real time? Check it out in the video below.
See me color this one in the video below!
This is the Zika mosquito hitch-hiking from place to place.
Here he is in black and white. I usually do a special version for grayscale, rather than just gray scaling the color art.
In the video below you can see me draw this bad boy. I thought long and hard about whether to put a “Zika” label on the mosquito, and I made the manly decision to forego the label.
In the video below you can see me coloring the mosquito in Photoshop. It should open 14:40 into the video, that’s no mistake, it just takes out the time. I didn’t edit this one!
3/21/16 update: Here’s my mosquito as it appeared today in the Ouest France Newspaper, France’s highest circulation newspaper. Thanks to my buddy Kianoush Ramezani and his united sketches.org foundation that organizes this stuff. I’m impressed that they put my photo and bio alongside the cartoon.
Here is the back story on my last three editorial cartoons!
With Obama’s “middle of the road” budget that was attacked by both sides last week, there have been lots of budget cartoons showing both the left and the right angry at Obama. This is much the same thing, but without picturing the budget, so it might last a little longer.
Notice that in my drawing, Obama is not exactly in the middle … from the reader’s perspective, Obama is a little to the left of the middle -although, from Obama’s perspective, he has moved a bit to his right.
Maybe I’m overthinking this. Here is the rough pencil sketch, on tab sized copier paper in pencil.
Next I drew the finished line art for the cartoon (below), also in pencil, on drafting vellum. This is what most people will see in the newspapers, that still usually print in black and white.
There is something lovely about a black and white editorial cartoon, particularly if it is only line art, without gray tone. I know that people will choose any color over black and white – but I think it is kind of like a classic sail boat vs. a speed/power boat – the sail boat is slow and classy, the power boat is fast, flashy, and people will choose it over the sail boat – still, the sail boat has more class and is nicer to look at.
Here’s a detail – isn’t the black and white nice? It is saved as 1000 dpi tiff and has a nice pencil line quality, up close.
Then I add the color, for the image most online visitors see.
The previous cartoon was another one about L’il Kim. Here’s the black and white – I thought I had to resort to gray to make the multi-panel format work. I like to avoid gray when I can.
Here’s the color …
The next cartoon was intended to be an evergreen. There was a big, Sunday section front in my local newspaper Health section about “superbugs” – antibiotic resistant diseases that are a new plague in hospitals. The newspaper didn’t run one of our nice cartoons or illustrations with the feature article, they had some lousy clip art; and I noticed that we didn’t have good “superbug” art in the database – so this is an attempt to fill the “Superbug” void in the CagleCartoons.com/PoliticalCartoons.com databases. Here is the rough pencil sketch on 11″x17″ paper.
I know, I know, bacteria don’t look like this kind of bug. Here is the black and white line art.
And I thought it might need a bit of gray tone – I’m not sure on this one.
And here is the color, added behind the line art in layers in Photoshop.
This one was fun to draw. Here is a detail.
