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Trump Meets Kim Jong Un

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.

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Hawaii Missile Alert

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.

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New Year Trump and Little Kim

As the years pass, some things stay the same.

Presidents come and go, but North Korea remains a pain in the butt. Things don’t change much. Here’s a New Year’s cartoon I drew three years ago with Obama and Li’l Kim.

I don’t think we’ll see a change in North Korea, but hopefully we’ll see a new president getting bitten in the butt in another three years.

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Double Eagle

Yesterday I drew two cartoons with eagles. The first one is in response to the news of additional economic sanctions against North Korea, including banking restrictions that should put a crimp in the wallets of North Korea’s elites.

The next one is a Mexican eagle cartoon (the eagle and snake characters on the Mexican flag). Next to a weeping Statue of Liberty, weeping eagles are an editorial cartooning standard – so much so that we should probably avoid these cartoons, but when the times call for weeping eagle it is hard to say “no.”

About a month ago I vacationed in Mexico City with my family, staying in an Airbnb apartment in the La Condesa neighborhood which was one of the hardest hit in the earthquake. The scenes on TV look terribly familiar. It is a lovely neighborhood and the neighbors were all very nice; I’m not surprised to see the residents all pulling together in these difficult days. Such a horror.

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Trump and L’il Kim Again

Last week I drew this cartoon with Trump and L’il Kim mushroom cloud hair. Sometimes I travel around and give a Powerpoint presentation about editorial cartooning and I show a dozen or two cartoons of L’il Kim’s dad, Il, with mushroom cloud hair. I’ve seen a few L’il Kim mushroom cloud hair cartoons, but his Dad, Il, is the king of cartoon mushroom cloud hair.

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Kick Me!

Trump, Li’l Kim, Xi and Putin are a funny ensemble. One problem with editorial cartooning is that we can only draw characters that readers already know from the news, and if the cartoonist isn’t a sissy, he or she won’t label the characters but really try to draw caricatures. As the world goes down the tubes we have more characters and more opportunities to eschew labels. Life is good.

This cartoon is based on an oldie I drew about nine years ago, featuring Li’l Kim’s daddy, Li’l Kim Jong Il.

Sorry that I haven’t been drawing or posting much lately. I’ve been holed up in my office doing annual bookkeeping and quarterly artists royalties.  ARRRGH! I have more to do. I’ll try to poke my head out of the muck more often. In the course of all the accounting madness, I neglected to post the grim reaper cartoon below from about three weeks ago when the story of the moment was the GOP’s ugly healthcare bill.

I thought I was being clever at the time – until I saw that dozens of cartoonists were drawing grim reaper cartoons. Great minds think alike.  ARRRGH!

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Defending the Convention Rules

I have to agree with Donald Trump’s criticism of the Republican party rules. It has been interesting to hear the establishment Republican defense, from Paul Ryan, Reince Priebus and other flacks; I think that all of these arguments could just as appropriately come from the mouth of lil Kim Jong Un.

Watch me drawing this one in the video below!

I color the cartoon in Photoshop in the video below …

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Apple vs. the FBI and Third World Despots

The legal battle between the FBI and Apple promises to be epic. I come down on Apple’s side; we’ve seen how important technology is in undermining evil despotic regimes around the world. If courts can force tech companies to become foot soldiers in regime efforts to spy on their populations that will be a loss for freedom around the world.

apple-despots

I drew this one as a live stream. Watch me color it in Photoshop in real time in the YouTube video below (scroll past the timer at the beginning).

Click on the YouTube video below and it should start at 2:48:40 where I start drawing the Apple vs Despots cartoon. This was a long afternoon of work, and I drew the previous cartoon before this one. Sorry for the lack of editing, but hey, you see everything. I have nothing to hide.

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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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New Year Obama with North Korea

158026 600 New Year Obama with North Korea cartoons