In honor of my fallen colleague Rex Babin, I thought I’d share five great cartoons from his archives. The Sacramento Bee has posted a gallery featuring Rex’s best cartoons from 2011.

In a front-page editoral in The Bee, Anita Creamer writes about Rex’s most popular cartoon, which he drew after the “Miracle on the Hudson”:

In Rex Babin’s perhaps most beloved editorial cartoon, huge hands reached down from on high to steady US Airways Flight 1549 as it floated on the Hudson River, passengers standing on its wings.

The “Wings on the Hudson” cartoon showed a different, more emotional side of Babin to Sacramentans who were accustomed to the sharp observations of his political cartoons: It showed his heart.