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!
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 …
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.
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.
Decades after being dismissed by George S. Kaufman as a genre that “closes on Saturday night,” satire, like the measles and mumps, is making a comeback. And in many quarters, remains the most feared of the three conditions.
Some experts hold to a strict definition: “Satire portrays a viewpoint, while intending something different.” The most famous example being Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” the essay in which he advised Ireland’s poor to alleviate their poverty by selling their babies as food for the rich. At least we assume he was kidding. Hopefully no besotted chefs replicated his ingredients list.
Cartoon by Gary McCoy
Another example is the CIA’s assertion that “we don’t torture anybody,” when obviously what they meant was “yeah, we’ve been torturing people since way before we assured you we weren’t. And we’ve gotten pretty good at it.” You could say the CIA is America’s only straight up satirical organization. Proof that satire can exist without laughs.
Modern satirically has loosened up to embrace many forms of humor: sarcasm, cynicism, scorn, contempt, bile, ridicule and recently, an endless fascination with body parts and fluids. Anything to spotlight perceived injustice. Tweak the nose of pomposity. Kick arrogance in the groin.
Seth Rogen and his stoner buddy, that darn Franco guy, first thrust funny onto the front pages with their movie, “The Interview;” a farce about assassinating the President of North Korea. Which you could say, the President of North Korea did not find amusing. You could also say armadillo snouts make inferior shot glasses.
Despots and extremists have the sense of humor of asphalt. With the emphasis on the first syllable. And yes, that’s an example of using a body part as humor. So, in response, North Korea orchestrated a monumental hack of the studio releasing the film. Doing damage to the economy and scaring the bejesus out of Wall Street. We know this happened because the CIA said it didn’t.
The fracas was exacerbated when Hollywood celebrities went to the mats defending free speech while imploring the public to boycott websites exhibiting their pilfered emails, revealing them to be petty snarks. This is known as irony, a brother to satire.
A greater tragedy is the thousands of Americans tricked into watching this cinematic opus under the guise of nationalistic pride. “Laugh, or the terrorists win.”
Then in January, the world witnessed the ghastly murders of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo staffers by lunatic Muslim assassins. Who claimed to be offended by a cartoon. Which confused many US citizens. France has satirical magazines. America has Spongebob. It’s a trade-off.
It’s sad. Call yourself a satirist in America today and folks think you have goat legs. And play the pan flute. Especially when you consider the grand tradition of American political humorists- Twain, Bierce, Mencken, Rogers, Bruce, Krassner, Trudeau, Carlin, Hannity and the Cheneys.
The teachable moment here is how imperative it is we encourage artists to stay on the offensive. To mock and scoff and taunt for the sake of democracy. They should be stopped on the street and thanked for their service. Laugh, or the terrorists win.
Patriots on both sides of the political spectrum need to rally and support our brave perpetrators of mockage and scoffsome taunterating. And to do it even after the CIA says it’s okay to stop. Especially then. Je Suis Charlie. Je Suis Hebdo.
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Will Durst is an award-winning, nationally acclaimed political comic. Go to willdurst.com to find about about his new one-man show “BoomeRaging: From LSD to OMG,” and info about the San Francisco premier of the documentary film “3 Still Standing,” on January 29th @ the Marines Memorial Theater.
Email Will at [email protected]. Visit to willdurst.com to find about more about his new CD, “Elect to Laugh” and calendar of personal appearances.
The Sony Pictures hacker attack and the cowardly withdrawal of “The Interview” movie has been dominating the cartoons. I drew two!
A universal truth about evil dictators is that they have no sense of humor, so I suggest we mock the despots mercilessly. In fact, mocking mercilessly is really the only tool in my cartoonist tool belt – you know, if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
My second cartoon was quite popular on Facebook, featuring Kim Jong Un and the entertainment industry chickens. This one reminded me of my old Muppet days drawing Gonzo’s girlfriend, Camilla and all her chicken friends.
Today we got the news that North Korea’s internet service went down. Not much of a surprise – and probaby only a dozen people in North Korea have access to the internet – still interesting. North Korea makes a target of itself, which reminds me of a favorite Kim Jong Un oldie I drew below, which I should take out of mothballs.
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.
My last two cartoons have been about Kim Jong Un. The first was Li’l Kim making himself into a target. Here’s the rough sketch.
Here he is as line art. Most newspaper readers will see the cartoon in black and white like this.
I thought I would be bold with the color on this one – to make it more powerful with only line art and red. I’m sure some editors won’t print it because of my color choice. Editors like lots of “pretty” and “bright” colors. Editors generally avoid anything that can be called “bold.”
Since North Korea is still dominating the news I drew another one. This one with Li’l Kim as a doggie, with President Obama and the new Chinese president Xi Jinping.
I’ve done a whole lot of cartoons with leaders as doggies. In this case, i thought it would be interesting to have Obama reacting to Li’l Kim’s threatening barking, while Jinping reacts to Li’l Kim’s pee, with exactly the same body language. Here is the line art that most people see. Yes, I decided to move Obama closer, and I realized that I needed a label on Jinping, because he’s new and I didn’t know what he looked like until I looked him up.
Here is the color version – which is never as good as the simple black and white.
Here’s one where Obama is the doggie on Wall Street’s leash.
Here’s Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu as the doggie.
I drew this one back in the 2008 primary season, with President Clinton as the doggie on Hillary’s leash. Ugh, I hate looking at my old, early Obama.
I drew a lot of doggie cartoons with President Bush. The military was W’s doggie.
Drawing Muslims as doggies is deeply insulting to them, which is why so many cartoonists do it, I suppose. Here are the Sunnis and Shiites fighting at the height of Bush’s Iraq Mess, with Iraq’s president Maliki.
I drew lots of W as a doggie. Here he is marking his territory.
And here is W the doggie, during the run-up to war in Iraq.
I’ll bet my cartoons would be much more popular if I drew nothing but doggies. I’ve considered it.
Here are my newest cartoons. Fans always tell me that they like to see my messy rough sketches, so here we go again.
Here’s my quick and dirty sequester cartoon sketch. I drew it up first in hard pencil, I wasn’t happy with my Obama so I drew over him in soft (darker) pencil, made a note to move his position, and fiddled with just how he should be twiddling his thumbs. I often don’t get things right the first time.
Then I drew it up in finished line art, in hard pencil on nice drafting vellum. This black and white line art image is what most people see in the newspaper and I always like the BW version best. I think about the heavy blacks to be sure the image pops and I saw that the speech balloons needed to be reversed to black to give the words more weight.
Then I saved it with the white background transparent, and colored behind the image in layers in Photoshop to get this …
The previous cartoon was about former Senator Chuck Hagel’s nomination to be Defense Secretary being held up by angry Republicans. I threw the sketch for this one away. Sorry. Here’s the black and white, which looks better.
I thought about how much cross-hatching to put into the elephant skin. Elephants have interesting, textural skin, and I think I got to the point where he started to look like a rhino – maybe I went too far. It was fun to draw, though. Here it is in color.
And here it is a couple of days later in my local newspaper, The Santa Barbara News-Press – printed nicely this time. I like how they put my liberal cartoon sneering at wing-nut Linda Chavez’s Hagel-bashing column.
The previous one was about North Korea’s “Li’l Kim” annoying China with his missile and bomb tests. Here’s the rough sketch. You can see I fiddled with the position of the missile-cigar and the Panda’s hand.
Here is the black and white art. I made the missile-cigar smoke the only gray part of the image, so it would stand out as extra annoying.
… and here’s the color version, with a nice Chinese red background.
The previous cartoon is an oldie that I reposted with the news of Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation. I drew this one the last time the College of Cardinals met to choose a new Pope and we were all told that the Cardinals don’t really pick the Pope, it is God picking the Pope through the Cardinals. That struck me as funny.
It is pretty common for editorial cartoonists to use Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel image of God in editorial cartoons. Here’s a recent one by Nate Beeler.
… and a conservative one by Rick McKee …
… but I digress. I should post the new cartoons more often! Here’s the previous one, Obama has GOP fleas.
I didn’t do a color version of this one. That’s it – I’m all caught up!
