miss piggy – DarylCagle.com

Here’s another installment of oldies from my overstuffed garage! This was a big poster I did for Scholastic in 1989 for the 1990 election. It was titled, “Be a Party Animal, Register and Vote” and was distributed to all high school libraries.

This unusually big gouache painting was a box for an old Nintendo GameBoy game called “Triumph” where I was given a bunch of screenshots of the minimal, Japanese characters to work from and “Americanize” – they are surrounding the “target customer,” a “30 year old, casual, professional male”. Every so often I hear from fan/scholars who know all the history of the obscure game and are eager to learn more about this art.

Here’s a very old box for Fisher-Price, with software for your IBM PC or Tandy computer.

This fishy oldie obviously went on some round toy – but I don’t remember! (Thanks to cousin James Cagle for reminding me that this was an infant teething ring, that you would fill with water and put in the freezer.)These Muppets Take Manhattan plastic cups were a promotion for Frito-Lay.

This conservative magazine cover is only 13 years old. They used the art I did for one of our annual Best Political Cartoons of the Year books.

I did a lot of work on “Trash Bag Bunch,” a line of monster figures hidden in dissolving, bubbling trash bags because you wouldn’t buy it if you saw what you were buying. This was a concept from brilliant sculptor/inventor Mel Birkrant.

Here’s the dusty old Trash Bag Bunch three pack. I also did a bunch of comics telling the story of the Trash Bag Bunch, with lots of editorial changes (hassles) by executives at Galoob toys. A talented sculptor, Bryan Fulk is bringing these back and just did a successful Kickstarter – maybe my old comics telling the back story will be printed afterall. Here’s Bryan’s Kickstarter.

Here’s a Cleopatra Piggy coffee cup, front and back, and a companion Kermit cup for Enesco.

Miss

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.

1622-ElmoColbertCong — Sesame Street Muppets, Stephen Colbert, Congress, Elmo

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.)