Here’s Commander-in-Chief Hillary! Back in 2008 there was a lot of chatter about whether Hillary was up to the job of commanding the troops. Hillary told a story about how she was “dodging bullets” as she flew into Bosnia – a story that would have shamed even Brian Williams.
We also heard a lot about how Hillary thought America would rather she got an emergency call at 3:00 in the morning, instead of Barack Obama. I drew a cartoon similar to this one in 2008, with Hillary’s medals, and I realized that in only seven years, many of the medals have changed, but Hillary is basically the same. Here’s a new, updated version of my military, Hillary golden oldie. Come see our big collection of Bill ‘n Hillary cartoons.
This is my cartoon about the Clinton and Bush dynasties. Note that Hillary is on the left and Jeb is on the right.
Hillary is a great character for cartoonists; I’m still getting comfortable with Jeb Bush, who really looks very little like George W. and his parents.
Playing cards are a metaphor staple among editorial cartoonists. Here’s a nice oldie, from Taylor Jones, with Obama and McCain.
I got mail in response to my cartoon, from readers asking why both Hillary and Jeb were not Jokers. I suspect Taylor got some angry mail for calling Obama a “spade,” I would have avoided that. Still, nice cartoon.
As I was writing this, I did a search on our CagleCartoons.com site for cards, and I came up with the lovely Boligan cartoon below. Clearly, Boligan has in mind that the fat, happy tourist is flying around the world, spreading the money around from his many credit cards.
Sometimes I look at a cartoon and think, if only he had done something different, that would have made for another great cartoon. With this one, I would have had a consumer Sysiphus, with too many credit cards flying too close to the sun, with his credit card wings melting, falling apart. Maybe I’ll do that, with a “thank you” to Boligan.
This weekend I went to the National Rifle Association (NRA) convention in Nashville, Tennessee, my hometown. I’m an editorial cartoonist; I sit at home drawing and I rarely go to big conventions. The only thing I have to compare the NRA to is the San Diego Comic-Con, and I thought the NRA convention stacked up pretty well to Comic-Con.
The NRA convention is half the size of Comic-Con. The crowd was certainly different, with the NRA sporting more beer bellies and gray hair than Comic-Con. Both the NRA and Comic-Con are mostly male, and both are full of fervent fans. It is a lot easier to park and get a hotel room at the NRA convention, and it is much cheaper and easier to get into the NRA than Comic-Con, which costs well more than ten times the $25 it costs to join the NRA and attend the NRA convention. Comic-Con sells out months in advance; anyone can go to the NRA at the last minute – like me.
There isn’t much religion at Comic-Con, although it isn’t unusual to hear people exclaim, “Oh my God” when they see the length of the line to meet the cast members of “The Big Bang Theory.”
Everyone in a crowd of thousands at the NRA Annual Meeting held hands, bowed their heads and followed along in a prayer about how God has chosen the NRA to defend us against the “enemies of freedom.” I was actually near the front of the room, where I took this photo. That’s the NRA’s executive officers on the stage in the distance, holding hands. Click on the photo to enlarge.
There’s lots of religion at NRA conventions. The Saturday morning NRA annual meeting began with everyone in the audience holding hands and bowing their heads as someone on the stage prayed about how God has chosen the NRA to lead the fight against the “enemies of freedom” who, we were later told, are President Obama, Hillary Clinton and Michael Bloomberg, in that order.
There are enemies at Comic-Con too; scattered through the crowd are assorted Darth Vaders, storm-troopers, super-villains and monsters. Years ago there were Klingons everywhere, but the Klingons have dwindled in recent years, and now they are rare. My effort to build up my Klingon vocabulary has clearly been a waste of time. “Ghay’cha’!”
There was an anti-gun protest group, in town for the NRA convention, that had trouble making a dinner reservation. I’m told they were unwelcome at nearby restaurants, and their group had to drive thirty minutes out of Nashville, to Murfreesboro, for dinner. It is also difficult to make a dinner reservation at Comic-Con.
The exhibit floors at the NRA and Comic-Con are fascinating. One NRA exhibit I enjoyed featured videos of cool stuff getting shot, including row after row of watermelons, which made impressive explosions. Rows of televisions being shot were much less interesting than the watermelons. The legislature in Tennessee is debating allowing exploding targets. Tennessee already allows for the sale of fantastic fireworks – the aerial kind that would start forest fires if they were allowed in flammable California – but in Tennessee, fireworks are wholesome fun. Explosions are popular at Comic-Con too (the Death Star comes to mind). Alas, real, legal explosions in California are just the stuff of dreams.
Tennessee’s Republican legislature has been pandering to the NRA in the weeks leading up to the convention; they are close to passing a “Guns in Parks” bill that would prohibit cities from banning guns in their municipal parks. Most of the prospective Republican presidential candidates gave speeches at the NRA convention on the first day. At the annual meeting, many mentions of vile Democrats were met with hisses from the enthusiastic, Republican crowd, who were equally angry about Islamic extremists, defending the border with Mexico, and President Obama as they were about threats of gun control. The NRA convention is about much more than guns; it is about a broad agenda that is Republican, conservative, and Christian.
The same mission-creep is apparent at Comic-Con, which should be about comic books, but has grown to be about anything entertainment related, which may have nothing to do with comics. Any TV show. Any movie. Whatever. Are there some TV stars from a detective, procedural show doing a panel? Yes? Let’s go stand in line! My God, the line is so long.
Here’s my new one. I was trying to stretch this to make a better tea-party reference to the elephant, but I decided, nah, it is clear enough. Then I thought of putting the GOP elephant in a Fox New t-shirt, and I thought, nah, it is clear enough.
Here’s a Hillary, Benghazi, GOP oldie that will probably never grow stale. Hillary is a wonderful character – I’m looking forward to the campaign!
I don’t quite understand the Hillary e-mail scandal. There was no law against her using her own e-mail at the time she did it. She had her own e-mail server and 50,000+ emails, but I also have my own e-mail server and 50,000+emails, so it doesn’t seem so strange to me. And if she hadn’t had her own server, all of her emails would Surely have been stolen and revealed by Edward Snowden, so in retrospect, it seems prudent. Much ado about nothing, I think.
E-mail is always a great topic for cartoons.
I’ve been thinking of updating the Hillary-general cartoon below to add an e-mail medal, and take out the stale medals about 2008 election news that everyone has forgotten (like “Michigan” and “Florida”). I drew this one when the daily pundit babble was about Hillary claiming she would make a much better commander in chief, compared to Obama.
I suspect Hillary would have been much more of a hawk than Obama, and would have gotten us much more mixed-up into the middle East muddle. If I had to choose between Hillary and goofy Rand Paul, I think I would vote for Rand Paul, just because I trust that he really don’t want our military meddling around the globe.
I remember back in 2007 there was a scandal about Karl Rove deleting his emails while he worked at the White House. Pundit hacks like Rove benefit from our short memories, as they attack Hillary now.
And please help us out with Cagle.com, now that the site is so much more expensive for us to host. Visit: http://cagle.com/heroes
As a cartoon character, Hillary is definitely the best choice for president and her dive in the polls has some editorial cartoonists sweating.
As an editorial cartoonist I don’t make up my own characters; the world provides me with characters. Great characters. Better characters than I could ever make up. I sit around at my desk all day, watching Fox News and MSNBC. I get angry and I think of cartoons. It’s the good life.
Compared to a comic strip cartoonist, I’ve got it easy. Comic strip artists spend their whole careers developing characters in tiny, daily increments. It takes years and years of strips before readers know just what is in Lucy’s mind when she holds the football for Charlie Brown – that kind of intimate knowledge of character gives cartoons wonderful depth. When our readers know our characters, we can draw cartoons that are rewarding just because we see the character acting as we already know he will. A subtle bit of body language can be a punch line when readers really know the characters, and it is the best kind of humor when the gag was years in the making.
Hillary Clinton is a cartoon character that has taken many years to develop and every editorial cartoonist can claim her as his own. We know Bill Clinton as intimately as we know Charlie Brown. We know Hillary as intimately as we know Lucy. They are an editorial cartoonist’s treasure.
I drew a cartoon with Bill and Hillary that was probably my most reprinted, most popular cartoon ever. They were on a book tour, and I drew Bill and Hillary at a table together, signing books. Bill had his book open with a Playboy style fold-out dropping out of the book, and Hillary whacked Bill on the side of his head her book. There were no words, just facial expressions and body language. My readers loved it! Oh! The mail I got on that one!
As Hillary’s campaign prospects fade I’m seeing my best characters fade away. Obama is easy to draw, but there’s nothing behind the long face – no pain we all shared, no national embarrassment, no anger, no crazy, complex, cheating spouse. For all the excitement of his supporters, Obama is dull. He’s a straight man, commenting on the events around him, or riding the crest of a wave, or driving a steamroller over Hillary. There isn’t any facial expression I can put on Obama that will make the readers say, “I know just what he’s thinking!” The guy is a cartoon disaster.
John McCain isn’t much better. The term of art for McCain is “pudding-face.” In fact, McCain is more like tapioca, with a lumpy face that looks like he has his cheeks filled with marbles; that doesn’t help me much. McCain has a reputation for a hot temper, which is fun for a cartoonist, but we haven’t seen enough of his temper to expect it in a cartoon. Al Gore and John Kerry were stiff, dull and just as bad for cartoonists.
When President Bush ran against Sen. Kerry in 2004, there was no doubt that the best choice for the cartooning business was Bush. In the past eight years we’ve had great material for cartoons. We’ve had wars, terrorist attacks and some ugly times in Washington, but there have been some great cartoons during the Bush administration. Tough times make for good cartoons too. In fact, I’ll bet my cartoons would look better if I knocked my head against the wall a few times. I’ll try that when Hillary drops out of the race.
Daryl Cagle is a political cartoonist and blogger for MSNBC.com. Daryl is a past president of the National Cartoonists Society and his cartoons are syndicated to more than 800 newspapers, including the paper you are reading. He runs the most popular cartoon site on the Web at www.cagle.msnbc.com. His books “The BIG Book of Bush Cartoons” and “The Best Political Cartoons of the Year, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 Editions,” are available in bookstores now.
