Categories
Blog Newsletter Syndicate

UKRAINE!

Every day the news is full of Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine. We just can’t seem to get enough Ukraine.

We have a great CagleCartoonist from Ukraine, Vladimir Kazanevsky, who has probably won more international cartooning competitions than any other cartoonist in the world –but the international competition world is a different world, with different aesthetics that seem strange and foreign to an American reader.

I noticed that Vlad hadn’t posted any cartoons about the Ukraine/impeachment scandal and I told him that he is the only cartoonist from Ukraine that American readers are likely to see. Vlad’s perch in Kyiv could make his cartoons interesting to Western editors. Vlad then uploaded these three.

It looks like this jester-trap will draw Trump in as he is lured into watching himself on TV.

.

 

Here Ukraine is a clown-seal that is getting Trump’s attention …

 

Here the jester appears to be Ukraine’s brain that is commanding heavy-Trump-the-elephant’s attention.

Vlad’s cartoons are charming, although I must admit that I don’t really understand most of them. This is typical of the international contest cartoonists who have a different cartoon language that doesn’t make much sense to Americans like me. Charming, though.

Here are selections of some of Vlad’s cartoons that I can understand – the first one shows refugees fleeing from a repressive regime.

 

This one shows our climate-change future.

 

Here man struggles with oil.

 

Putin doesn’t seem happy as his cold, Russian Trump-Vodka seems to have turned into poop, which doesn’t go well with caviar.

 

This charming cartoon shows animals who seem to be demonstrating in favor of their own predators.

All of this is only to show that Vlad is great, but I’m not surprised that we don’t see cartoons from Ukraine in American newspapers even while Ukraine dominates the news.

The photo below shows me with Vlad in Vlad’s studio in Kyiv a few years ago. Behind us are some of Vlad’s trophies from over 500 international cartooning prizes he has won in 52 countries. See Vlad’s archive on Cagle.com.

 

… And here’s an endangered tree, praying while stuck in place.

Categories
Blog Newsletter Syndicate

Crazy NRA Board Meeting!

There’s been lots of news about the non-profit National Rifle Association’s recent  money troubles – from a $200,000 wardrobe budget for the NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre, to a $1,000,000 annual salary for spokesperson Dana Loesch. Infighting forced NRA president Oliver North out of his presidency, after North allegedly blackmailed LaPierre – and there’s an investigation by New York state that might take away the NRA’s tax exempt status, insuring the organization’s demise. So many egos! (I’m guessing that Oliver North is the good guy in the mess, trying to save the NRA from itself.) Here’s my cartoon!

Notice how they are in mirror image positions? When I do something like that I’m bound to get an email from somebody saying “Wayne LaPierre isn’t left handed!” Also, did anyone notice that I only drew the gun and the hand holding it once, and duplicated it another seven times in Photoshop? So lazy. And where’s all the blood?

Here are some of my recent NRA favorites. The first one is by New Zealand cartoonist, Chris Slane, who is one of my favorites!

This one is by our newest CagleCartoons.com syndicate cartoonist, Dave Whamond.

 

And this one is by my buddy, Bill Schorr.

Here are some gun oldies I drew back in 1995 for my TRUE! cartoon panel. These are really true, at least they were in 1995.

Categories
Blog Syndicate

College Admissions Scandal

The college admissions scandal not only skewers celebrities, but it brings up the money driven procedures at colleges that are unfair even if they are not illegal. Here’s my cartoon about average student, Jared Kushner’s admission to Harvard, alongs with some of the first scandal cartoons that came in to Cagle.com today.

This one is by Jimmy Margulies from amNewYork …

This is by Rick McKee of the Augusta Chronicle …

 

This is by Milt Priggee …

 

This one, by Steve Sack of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune is my favorite …

This one is by Chris Weyant …

 

This is by Nate Beeler of the Columbus Dispatch …

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories
Blog Syndicate

The Best of Roger Stone

News that comes out on Fridays push editorial cartoons into the next week as cartoonists and editors have already planned ahead for the weekend –that’s how it is with the indictment of Roger Stone last Friday. I’m sure we’ll see more Roger Stone cartoons trickle in this week. Here’s my Stone toon and some of my Roger Stone favorites …

 

I love this Taylor Jones cartoon –and so does Roger Stone, who licensed it from us to run in his recent book.

 

This Stone keystone is by my buddy, Rick McKee of the Augusta Chronicle …

 

Here are a couple from our new, photo-realist cartoonist, Bart van Leeuwen …

 

This one is from John Cole …

This is from Adam Zyglis …

Categories
Blog Syndicate

Snails and Salt!

Snails and salt are a great political cartoon cliché. We’ve all drawn a bunch of them.

That’s Trump’s stooge, Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker as the salt shaker foaming Mueller’s slow moving investigation. Snails have a tough time with salt, as explained in my TRUE! cartoon below …

Here’s one of my snail oldies, from 2005 when George W. Bush was being slimed by FEMA’s slow response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans.

I love snail cartoons.

Categories
Blog Syndicate

Media Shark Dinnertime

The media feeding frenzy grows as more Trump confidants “flip”!

Maybe I’ll draw a follow up cartoon with blood in the water – no blood from Fox News, though; they may just deflate a little as scandals grow.

 

Remember the cartoon below? This shark cartoon was easy to draw because I had already gathered all of the logos!

 

Categories
Blog Syndicate

Trump Sweeps Into My New Store

No matter what garbage comes out each day, Trump just sweeps it under the patriotic rug so it becomes invisible to his supporters.

I drew a similar cartoon some years ago, when I was angry with Obama for sweeping our civil rights under the constitution-rug with his massive system of surveillance on everyday folks …

Sometimes it seems like only the rugs change.

Do you like the Trump flag-rug cartoon? Come visit my cool new store.cagle.com store site where we have framed prints and cool products, like this coffee mug …

… and this phone case …

We’ve gotten requests for framed prints for a long time. We have some nice ones in store.cagle.com now …

I selected by most popular cartoons for store.cagle.com. Come take a look!

Categories
Blog Syndicate

New Suit for Manafort

Paul Manafort has lots of fancy, $15,000 suits from the House of Bijan, which seems to be the most expensive men’s clothing store around. Customers shop at this store by appointment only, but I suspect that Manafort had the fancy tailor come to him. Manafort paid clothing bills of hundreds of thousands of dollars by bank wire transfers, from his secret bank accounts on the island of Cyprus. These bank accounts were so secret that Manafort claims to have known nothing about them – at least that’s what he claims to the IRS, not to his tailor.

Categories
Blog Syndicate

Blood or No Blood?

Editors don’t like blood. Cartoonists love blood. Evil despots around the world, like Syria’s Bashar Assad, are often drawn in a sea of blood. When editors see blood, they move onto the next cartoon. More blood, less ink. So I did two versions of today’s Trump vs Michael Cohen cartoon. I’ll keep an eye out for which version editors choose –but I don’t expect any surprise.

Categories
Blog Syndicate

29 Year Old Oddity

I was going through my old files and I came across this oddity from 1989, about President Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal …

This is odd because I didn’t have a job as a political cartoonist until 1996, seven years later. I was a toy inventor and designer back in 1989 and I don’t remember drawing this; I remember the news, though.

Colonel Oliver North, the Fox News pundit and the newest president of the NRA, was convicted for his role in secretly selling arms to Iran (which was under an arms embargo) to fund the “Contra” rebels  in Nicaragua. There was a lot of speculation about Reagan pardoning North and others involved at the very end of his term in January 1989, but in the end North got a light sentence with no jail time and Reagan was off the hook on the politically difficult “pocket pardon” decision. The next president George H. W. Bush, handed out a batch of pardons, including one to frequent cable news pundit Elliot Abrams –the faces in the news don’t change much.

According to Wikipedia:  In the end, fourteen administration officials were indicted, including then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. Eleven convictions resulted, some of which were vacated on appeal. The rest of those indicted or convicted were all pardoned in the final days of the presidency of George H. W. Bush, who had been Vice President at the time of the affair.

President Reagan was off the political hook because people thought he didn’t know what was going on –in other words “no collusion,” at least not on the part of the president. Reagan, and later George H. W. Bush, refused to declassify documents, making prosecutions difficult. Presidents are in a powerful position to stymie investigations into their own government’s officials.

All of this is to say that the past looks a lot like the present. Nicaragua and Iran are still ugly messes. Our President Trump, who may be as clueless as Reagan was, is making investigations difficult and threatening pardons.

I like drawing Reagan; maybe I came to this profession a few years too late.