I was thinking of making this a four panel cartoon at first, with the doggie growing progressively bigger and a caption, but the simple two panel format won out.  here is the line art that most people will see in their newspapers that print in black and white.

And here is the color.  Readers love the doggies.

I drew the cartoon below when Obama made his first statement about the IRS scandal.  here’s the black and white most people see.

And here’s the color.

Before that I did this one on the ongoing, outrageous, sexual assault scandals in the military.

And I drew this “Energizer Bunny” cartoon about the Benghazi Scandal that the Republicans can’t bear to see fade away.

There was a time when I would see an Energizer Bunny cliche editorial cartoon every week. Alas, those were the good old days.

This week, the pack of cartoonists all ran in the direction of comparing Barack Obama with Richard Nixon because of Obama’s worsening three scandals: the AP records seizure, Benghazi and the IRS.  I draw metamorphosis cartoons every so often, when the news seems to be calling out for them.  Here is the line art for Obama turning into Nixon, which most readers will see in newspapers that print in black and white.

Here’s the color version.

Just after the presidential election, the folks at Fox News were apoplectic about their loss, and ranted that Obama would be free to be the wild, radical leftist they knew he was all along, now that he was freed from the constraints of needing to be re-elected.  So I drew this metamorphosis cartoon.

Back when Apple was rejecting my iPhone app applications, I drew this Apple metamorphosis cartoon …

And I drew this one when Disney bought Marvel Comics.

Cartoonists draw evolution themed cartoons all the time – which are pretty similar to metamorphosis, I guess.  Here is Mitt Romney, and his evolving views about evolution, from back in 2007.

Here’s an evolving Donald Trump from 2011.

And a general evolution of man cartoon …

Cartooning, evolution and metamorphosis! It’s a tradition!  I’m working on another one today.

I thought I would look through the archives for some other “Are we there yet?” cartoons. Here’s a couple of nice ones from RJ Matson of Roll Call.

Here’s an oldie from Joe Heller from back in 2008.

I drew this one about the Gulf Oil Spill, as Obama was being criticized by Fox News for being slow to react – “just like President Bush with Hurricane Katrina.”

This one by New Zealand cartoonist, Chris Slane, amused me.

Click to see a larger view of the Guantanamo force-feeding kit. Dinner. Mmm.

Here’s my weekly update on my new cartoons.

The most recent one is this riff on the famous Norman Rockwell painting, “Freedom from Want.” I thought it would be interesting to juxtapose American values at the dinner table with the dinner table at Guantanamo.

(Added 5/5: OK, from my e-mail box I see that I need to explain this cartoon a bit further as, apparently, it has gone over some readers’ heads. The idea of the cartoon is to show that juxtaposing traditional American values at the dinner table with the “dinner table” at Guantanamo is obviously ridiculous, making the visual point that force feeding the Gitmo prisoners, who are hunger striking and holding the prisoners indefinitely without charge is inconsistent with American values. I can have some fun with injustice, that’s what cartoonists do. Lighten up, people.)

I was intrigued to find that force-feeding the hunger-striking Guantanamo inmates has its own Wikipedia page.  That is a picture of the force feeding kit on the right.

I think Ensure is funny too. It is all the food anyone needs to eat; elderly people, who don’t eat enough, drink yummy Ensure – so, like adult diapers and funeral expense insurance, Ensure is advertised extensively to the geriatric audience on Fox News and CNN. The elderly are the only ones left buying newspapers, and reading editorial cartoons too. Maybe my audience doesn’t think Ensure is so funny.

The previous cartoon, below, was this one about Texas Governor Perry and that big fertilizer plant explosion. Perry is a vocal champion for cutting regulations – and it turns out that more regulations were sorely needed in the case of the exploding plant.

Cartoonists have been clucking about this issue because Perry complained about one Perry bashing cartoon, demanding that the cartoonist be fired for being insensitive to the people killed in the explosion.  In fact, many cartoonists jumped on this bandwagon drawing similar cartoons that Perry would have objected to if he had read more newspapers – like the two below by our own Pat Bagley and John Cole.

…  but I digress! My previous cartoon this week was another Syria red line cartoon.  There have been a heck of a lot of red line cartoons this week, but they are getting lots of ink so I thought it was time for another one. I used a real crayon to draw the red lines.

I also noticed, after I drew this, that I put John McCain’s big eye on the wrong side – his big eye is really on our left, his right.  This got me to thinking, I drew the face that McCain sees when he looks in the mirror, and he’s the only person who sees that face – so he might think this is the only caricature ever drawn that actually looks like him.  That thought makes me smile.

There was a short lived debate about whether a Miranda Warning should be given to Boston Bombing suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who had been questioned without being given the warning. I drew this last Sunday:

I got no response from editors or other cartoonists to this cartoon, but I got such a strong reaction from readers against the cartoon, with many well reasoned arguments, that I changed my mind – something that doesn’t happen much in this profession. (The comments on my Facebook page are representative of the overall comments I received).  So I posted a revised version of the cartoon on Monday. I learned that Tsarnaev was given his Miranda rights shortly before I posted the revised cartoon, so I doubt that this second cartoon got reprinted much.

The second version is the same as the first, but instead of “none of them” deserving to be read their Miranda Warning, the revised cartoon says “all of them” should get the warning.  I’ve changed my mind before, not often, and usually over a longer period of time, but I won’t go back into the archive to delete the old cartoons. I posted them, I should live with my history. So both cartoons are still posted. (My old cartoons supporting the run up to war in Iraq are still posted too – I’m more embarrassed by those.)

I remember when the Miranda decision came down in the 1960′s, on a 5-4 vote. It was controversial for a long time; the only area of the law where “ignorance of the law is no excuse” didn’t hold true. Liberals like it, conservatives still don’t like it.  I decided to disagree with the talking heads at Fox News and I changed my mind to agree with my readers and conclude that the Miranda decision should no longer be controversial – it has become a part of our national fabric. Most of the responses conflate reading the Miranda warning to the suspect with the suspect’s overall civil rights; I have come to the conclusion that is a good thing. (I really do pay attention to the arguments that readers send to me.)

I got very little response to the second version of the cartoon from readers or editors, but there was an angry torrent of responses from my editorial cartoonist colleagues. Some cartoonists blogged that I had a new, insidious business plan to make more money by offering two versions of the same cartoon, for both liberal and conservative editors – to sell twice as many cartoons with only one drawing. Others agreed, adding that I was cheapening the profession with this crass commercialism.

One cartoonist blogged that this was no editorial cartoon at all (and by extension, that I am no editorial cartoonist) because editorial cartoons must, by definition, express only one opinion.  Another editorial cartoonist responded to the cartoon in his blog by calling me the “Osama Bin Laden” of editorial cartooning.

Some cartoonists wrote that I must surely be lying about my reason for changing the cartoon, because the idea that I would change my mind was simply not credible. Others called for me to be punished for my breach of the unwritten laws of cartoon ethics. Some demanded that I remove the old version of the cartoon from my archive, as I would do with a cartoon that was revised to correct a spelling error; the idea that an editor could purchase and print both versions of the cartoon, with two different opinions, was repugnant.  Bloggers and journalism sites reported on the cartoon controversy.

Yes, the cartoon police really do exist.

I know this all sounds unbelievable, but I’m not exaggerating.  It is fascinating that editorial cartoonists have such a different perspective on their own work than editors and readers do. The cartoonists take themselves far more seriously than anyone else takes them.

Perhaps I should change my mind more often – it makes for a wild ride.

My next cartoon, about Fox News and the gold crash, got little attention as the controversy over my previous cartoon raged. Just as well, I draw too many old couples on the couch in front of the TV.

Next came this cartoon about the immigration bill in the Senate. I should note that when I draw cartoons about Mexicans, and draw them with sombreros, I always get some angry mail. I syndicate cartoonists from Mexico, who draw their fellow Mexicans with sombreros just like this, so I take my cue from them.  Don’t get mad.

My most recent cartoon is this “Red Line” cartoon about Syria and Bashar Assad. I drew an actual squiggle with a crayon so that I would get nice, crayon texture, and I squished the squiggle in Photoshop so that it would appear to have perspective on the ground. I thought for a bit about the blood on Bashar’s hands, because bloody hands weren’t integral to the gag – but I decided the bloody hands were a necessary part of Bashar’s personality, even if his hands are a bit of a distraction.

The problem with dominant news stories is that every cartoonist is drawing the same thing at the same time – why?  Editors all want the same thing at the same time.  Usually I like to steer a little different path then the cartoonist pack, because of supply and demand. There were just too many similar cartoons about the Boston Marathon Bombing this week, with bloody tennis shoes, bowed heads on statues, damaged Boston logos, symbolic metaphors breaking ribbons at finish lines – just what editors wanted, but too much of it for them to use.  I tried to take a bit of a different tack with memorial candles, and I wanted to avoid drawing something bloody, still, I’m sure my cartoon didn’t get reprinted much because of oversupply.  Here is the rough pencil sketch.

…and here is the black and white line art, that most people will see in the newspaper.

… and here is the color …

If I use colors in cartoons that are too dark, I get complaints from editors, so the color was a compromise. I’m not sure I’m happy with it. Oh well, it is a cartoon I was obligated to draw and the marketplace didn’t need – the story of my career.

The next cartoon was about the Republicans sinking the gun bill in the Senate. Republicans love their guns a bit too much – and that’s all that this cartoon says. Here is the rough sketch.

I found a photo of an assault rifle on Google and printed it out for my rough sketch.  For a moment, I thought about Photoshopping the actual photo into the cartoon – it would be a jarring contrast to have the drawing of an elephant with what looks like a real, nasty, assault rifle photo – then I thought about how Bill Day tried that and was pilloried by this colleagues, and my good judgement got the better of me. Gotta watch out for those gun photos, they can get you labeled as a “plagiarist” and make you the wallflower at AAEC cartoonist parties.

Here is the black and white art …

and the color …

Ah!  Love in the springtime!

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.

This one was fun to draw. Here is a detail.

Jean Plantu, the cartoonist for Le Monde in Paris, likes to chide me about how I can’t draw bare breasts as an editorial cartoonist in America. Of-course, I am my own editor, and I can draw anything I want – the only problem is getting editors to print what I want.  This cartoon has a triple whammy: boobs, foreign subject matter and a character (Hollande) who American readers don’t know, and I drew it on a Saturday, the dead day for editorial cartoons.

Who cares?! I can draw what I want even if no one will print it.  Here is the messy rough sketch.

There were lots of corrections I made when I traced over this for the final line art, below.

Here is the color version.

Remember you saw it here first, and you may not see it anywhere else.

The previous cartoon is an evergreen for Tax Day, April 15th. It would be better as an evergreen if the IRS Form 1040 didn’t mention the tax year at the top – I’ll have to make that suggestion to them.

For some reason, cartoonists like to put the year into their cartoons, as part of a copyright notice with their signature, which makes their new cartoons look new but makes their old cartoons look old, devaluing them as evergreens for sale online. I’m always telling artists not to put the year into their cartoons – but do they listen? No. That’s the rough sketch at the right.

I downloaded the tax form from the IRS as the backdrop, and clipped some text in Photoshop. That’s how I feel this time of year. The tax form looks pretty gloomy, huh?

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.

We have a wonderful collection of more than 250 North Korea cartoons here! I’ve drawn lots of leaders as doggies in the past.  Here’s is Li’l Kim’s dad, Il, biting Obama’s butt from 2010. Things don’t change much.

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.

This is what the Cagle Post/Mediapass ads look like on Facebook, in the column on the right.

This weekend, visitors to our site probably noticed that there are ads for Cagle Post appearing on web sites everywhere – even on Facebook.  What’s up with that?

We’ve been trying some new things since our partnership with msnbc.com was dissolved recently – trying some because we can now, and couldn’t before, and trying others things because we no longer have the income from our nice, former partners at msnbc.com so we’re forced to make some tough choices.

We’ve redesigned the site to optimize ad revenue and social networking; part of this change was putting many cartoons onto single pages so that we can have comments and permalinks with the cartoons. This change has resulted in better ad revenue and SEO, even though I, and many of our readers preferred multiple cartoons on the pages, multiple cartoons on a page is a lousy layout for SEO – and without our traffic-heavy partners at msnbc.com, we have to pay attention to SEO now.

Another thing we’re trying, which has bothered some of our readers, is a paywall. Everybody hates paywalls, and many of our readers tell me that all content on the web should be free – and until recently, our site has been totally free because msnbc.com wanted it that way.

I see this banner ad frequently as I browse other web sites. It shows up for users who have a cookie showing that they have visited Cagle.com in the past.

Here is the Cagle Post/Mediapass Donkey Skyscraper.

I’d like to see paywalls work. As a content creator and syndicator, the idea that readers should pay a little for content is how I make a living, and advertising on the internet doesn’t pay much. If paywalls could work, it would be great for newspapers, magazines and cartoonists. I’m trying it because I’d like for it to work, but the jury is still out on paywalls.  I remember the feedback from when I was with Slate.com, about when they tried a paywall – it worked, and they made more income, but their traffic fell to a tiny fraction of what it had been, and their underpaid writers were no longer interested in contributing for poor pay plus a poor audience.  Slate gave up the paywall.

Here’s another one I see often around the Web.

Most of our readers probably haven’t encountered our paywall, because most readers just look at the current cartoons, which don’t trigger the paywall.  Right now, if you look at ten pages of archives, you’ll hit the paywall.  We’re asking for a small payment as a “premium subscriber” to keep looking at our hundreds of thousands of cartoons in the database on cagle.com. We’ve chosen settings for the paywall that are very generous to the free content audience. The new way of looking at paywalls is to leave a generous amount of content available for free, and apply the paywall to only the most ardent fans who want to stay on the site for a long time.

We’re using Mediapass.com for our paywall.  So far, they have been nice to work with. They are prodigious advertisers and, as our paywall partners, they have started advertising on our behalf.  Their ads look for cookies in a user’s browser; if the user has visited Cagle.com in the past, it displays the ads for Cagle.com shown above, linking to our e-mail subscriptions page. We have one free daily e-mail newsletter and other newsletters for premium subscribers who can subscribe to individual cartoonist feeds as well as our special “premium” e-mail newsletter, and who, of-course, have unlimited access to the archives behind the paywall.

So, if you are reading this, you probably have cookies on your browser that bring up the Cagle post ads on lots of different sites, and Facebook. It may seen like we’re advertising everywhere – but we’re not, it just looks that way.

Hopefully we’ll stumble our way into finally finding a plan for making the Web work for us. Our little business still depends on print customers who have a tradition of paid content and of paying their bills, and the mortgages of cartoonists. That is a big difference between us and Slate; our cartoonists and columnists are with us because of our 850+ subscribing newspapers, and not because of our audience on the Web, so we can afford to lose some audience to the paywall, without losing our contributors, as Slate did.  That said, so far we haven’t lost audience with our new paywall and layout changes, so I’m hopeful.

And I enjoy seeing the Cagle Post ads everywhere I go on the Web, even if it is only a cookie-driven illusion and everybody isn’t really seeing them.

The Supreme Court heard two gay rights cases this week, California’s Proposition 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act. The pundits seem to agree that these cases will likely be decided by 5 to 4 votes, so I drew the four, ugly conservatives on the court angrily brandishing their gavels at the cowering gay couple on the cake. Fortunately, the ugly conservatives on the court are also the easiest justices to caricature!  Here is my rough sketch.

Drawing caricatures like this is so much easier now than it was years ago! All I have to do is type some public figure’s name into Google Images and I get a page full of great thumbnails. In the old days I had to cut photos out of newspapers and magazines and save them in a “morgue” in case I ever needed to draw a caricature. Technology is grand.

Here is the black and white version of the cartoon, which most people will see in newspapers that still print in black and white.

I draw everything at about 11″ x 17″ on vellum in pencil, and I scan at high contrast so it looks like ink. Then I color it in Photoshop with my Wacom tablet.  Here is the color version.

Next I drew a Republican elephant flogging himself as his intolerant views about gay rights do nothing but give him a sore back. Here is the rough sketch.

And here is the finished drawing, in pencil on 11″ x 17″ vellum, with the gray tones added in Photoshop.

It is better if a drawing holds up as just line art with no gray tones – but sometimes I have to resort to gray. This one needed a little tonal substance. Here is the color version.

The most recent cartoon is another riff on an art masterpiece – these seem to be the most popular cartoons I draw. This one is based on a famous 19th century print by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai, titled the Great Wave off Kanagawa (pictured on the right).

This image made for a popular Yahtzee, in editorial cartoons, after the Japanese tsunami. One thing that is interesting about Japanese prints is that the Japanese read from right to left, so the boats in the Hokusai print are sailing from calmer seas into the big bad waves. Of-course, editorial cartoons must read from left to right, with the set-up on the left and the gag on the right.

I printed out the Hokusai image and sketched a little GOP elephant to the right for my rough sketch.

I drew it up like this, then I noticed that the elephant was too big – he needed to be smaller for the wave to look more threatening. Here is the finished line drawing with a smaller elephant.

And here is the color version.

That Hokusai wave is a wonderful wave!

Saturn/Bankers Eating Cyprus, by Goya and Daryl. Click on the image for a larger view.

It has been too long since I have posted my new cartoons in the blog; so here is a big batch, with some comments.

The Cyprus bank crisis is great fun, and a good excuse for another cartoon abusing an art masterpiece. This time it is Saturn Devouring his Children by Francisco Goya. Of-course, Saturn knew one of his children would kill him, so eating the kids was the obvious thing to do. Goya painted this on the wall of his dining room. A charming, dinnertime feast for the eyes.

Saturn’s son, Zeus, escaped being eaten, came back, cut open Dad’s belly (or induced Dad to vomit, depending on the version of the story) freeing his siblings, who emerged just fine from their digestive confinement. This is an apt metaphor for Cyprus bankers, who consumed Cyprus’ economy, only to have the EU cut their financial belly open sometime next week, freeing the Cypriot economy which will come out of its digestive confinement, looking no worse for wear. By some accounts Zeus also went on to castrate his father, also an apt metaphor for the EU and Cyprus.

A clip from Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Children.

That’s a clip from Goya’s unaltered painting on the left. The problem I had was that I couldn’t just replace Saturn’s child/dinner with a map of Cyprus, because the child and Cyprus aren’t the same shape. And people want to see me draw in my cartoons, not just retouch masterpieces, so I decided to obviously draw over the painting.

What are public domain masterpieces good for, if not a lack of respect?

It is common for cartoonists to use famous paintings as metaphors in cartoons, and I notice that when I do it the cartoons are reprinted much more than any others.  Editors seem to love it – and it amuses me.  So there should be more to come.

My previous cartoon defaced a famous 1632 painting by Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. The cartoon mocks the GOP “autopsy” this week by GOP Chair Reince Priebus – it amused me that Priebus chose to use the word “autopsy,” acknowledging that the patient was already dead. It was actually a pretty good GOP autopsy, and the reaction from the GOP old-guard made me laugh.

The previous cartoon was about President Obama’s trip to Israel, and how I imagined his conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu would go. “Overstating the obvious” always works in cartoon.

Bellicose rhetoric from North Korea dominated the news the day I drew the cartoon below. I enjoy drawing the crazy, comicana cursing. This story doesn’t change much. I think North Koreans and Li’l Kim look for slow news days when they can make crazy threats and get some attention.

The cartoon below is a Euro-evergreen. When I draw “everyman” characters in cartoons, I try to make them look like real people, rather than big-nosed-nobodies. I thought the girl looked kind of like Penny from The Big Bang Theory. Some readers commented that she looked more like Chelsea Clinton, with a “There’s Something About Mary” hairdo, having lunch with young Nicolas Cage. Oh well …

Everyone drew something about Rand Paul’s filibuster. I thought John McCain’s strained reaction, calling Rand Paul a “Wacko Bird” was great fun, and I drew this … I think McCain is hard to draw. His face is like pudding, with no particular shape to it. And, whatever he has to say, he has a “GET OFF MY LAWN” expression on his face.

The cartoon below is about Obama’s recent “charm offensive” where he invited GOP leaders over for dinner or lunch. We saw lots of smiling faces.

This is another “charm offensive” cartoon about Obama’s dinner with Republicans. This was a quickie and I didn’t bother to color it. I got comments from conservatives who thought it was funny that I drew Obama in the role of Jesus at the last supper. hmmm.

Pope Francis as a gaucho.

One last one and I’m caught up! I drew this one (on the right) as fast as I could, when the new Pope was announced, and we learned he was from Argentina. I went to Google Images and looked up all I could find on gaucho costumes. So here is Pope Francis as a gaucho.

I won’t fall so far behind again!  I promise!

Cartoon by Mohammad Saba’aneh.

TELL ISRAEL’S EMBASSY TO FREE SABA’ANEH

TWEET #FREECARTOONIST TO ISRAELI AMBASSADOR OREN

Here is my letter to Israel’s Ambassador …

March 16, 2013

Daryl Cagle
Cagle Cartoons, Inc.

Ambassador  Michael Oren
Embassy of Israel to the United States
3514 International Dr. N.W.
Washington, DC 20008

Dear Ambassador Oren,

I am writing to urge Israeli authorities to release a Palestinian political cartoonist, Mohammad Saba’aneh, who was jailed by the Israeli Defense Forces, on February 16^th, at a border crossing between the West Bank and Jordan. He is being held without charge and is denied access to an attorney. Under Israeli law, Muhammad may be held indefinitely without charge. Only Israeli authorites know why he is imprisoned.

Muhammad is a cartoonist for Al-Hayat al-Jadida, the official newspaper of the Palestinian Authority, and he works at the Arab American University in Jenin on the West Bank. He is a respected cartoonist; he is not a terrorist or a criminal. Arab cartoonists often draw ugly, racist, offensive cartoons about Israel, but Muhammad’s cartoons are not among those; his work, although critical, is more balanced and artful.

Click on the photo above to read more about Saba’aneh’s plight from the Cartoonists Rights Network site.

I met Muhammad in 2010, when the U.S. State Department sent him to our Association of American Editorial Cartoonists convention in Florida, where he got to meet many of his American colleagues. Muhammad told me he was a fan of my work; he is a charming guy, eager to show his own cartoons to all of his new friends. Muhammad is active in the global cartooning community and cartoonists around the world are closely following the story of his plight in Israel.

I run a small business, Cagle Cartoons, Inc., that syndicates the work of cartoonists from around the world to over 850 subscribing newspapers, including half of the daily, paid-circulation newspapers in America. Among the cartoonists we distribute is Yaakov Kirschen, the cartoonist who draws Dry Bones for The Jerusalem Post; Yaakov’s cartoons run in Jewish newspapers throughout the USA. Our American editorial cartoonists are great supporters of Israel, in contrast to cartoonists from the rest of the world who harshly criticize Israel. The contrast is easy to see as editorial cartoons reflect world opinion. American cartoonists are Israel’s most visible suporters, and my own small business is the leader in distributing these views for America and the world to see.

It seems clear that Muhammad has been jailed to chill his cartoons that are critical of Israel. Instead, this ugly incident risks chilling Israel’s most visible supporters in America’s press, at a time when Israel needs our support more than ever.

American cartoonists like to see Israel as a champion of democracy and press freedom in a hostile Middle East – Muhammad’s case undermines that perception and seems to be a clumsy attempt to silence the press. This incident makes Israel appear to be no better than its repressive neighbors.

I’m writing to you in the hope that you will urge the authorities in Israel to release Muhammad, return him to his family and allow us to again see Israel as a democracy that respects a free press.

Truly,

Daryl Cagle
Editorial Cartoonist
President, Cagle Cartoons, Inc.

—————————————————————

Want to hear more about Mohammad Saba’aneh? An interesting audio report from The World, including an interview with my Israeli cartoonist buddy, Uri Fink, is posted below. Here is another recent report about Saba’aneh.  Here is a nice blog that follows the case at Cartoon Movement, including cartoons drawn in support of Saba’aneh.

Le Monde’s editorial cartoonist, Jean Plantu, and his trademark mouse.

I’m a big supporter of French cartoonist Jean Plantu’s Cartooning for Peace organization. It sounds a little silly, because all of the cartoonists are in favor of peace, and the nature of cartoons seems to be frivolous, while peace is a serious topic.

That said, Cartooning for Peace does a lot of great stuff; they organize meetings of editorial cartoonists and hold impressive exhibitions all over the world. I’ve made a lot of worldly, cartoonist friends through Cartooning for Peace. Plantu is the star cartoonist of France – that’s him at the right, with his trademark mouse that appears in the corner of every Plantu cartoon.

One of Plantu’s recent projects is a weekly page in his newspaper, Le Monde, with cartoons from around the world about a topic in the news. Plantu does a great job with it, soliciting the newest cartoons from member cartoonists every week.  I have pasted some pages below.  They look great and show the power of editorial cartoons at their best.

We syndicate a bunch of international cartoonists to about 850 newspapers, and they tend to be less popular than our American cartoonists. Americans aren’t much interested in events outside of the United States, unless we’re at war or threaten to be at war with someone. Passionate cartoons about water issues or the European Union don’t generate much reader passion in the USA.

On the topics that penetrate our borders and generate interest here, collections of international cartoons are a wonderful way to show a variety of world opinions at a glance. My local newspaper, the Santa Barbara News-Press does an international week in review with world cartoonists regularly. I would urge more editors to consider doing it.

The page below is “Egypt: an explosive cocktail”. It includes the Adam and Eve cartoon by Doaa El Adl, that has led to her prosecution by Islamist authorities. I’d love to see newspapers all around the world reprint Doaa’s cartoon.

Gay marriage has recently been a hot topic in France.

Here is the most recent one, on International Womens Day.

And Justice Scalia likened the Voting Rights Act to a racial “entitlement” … we have a great collection of Scalia cartoons, here’s mine …

The big cartoon news this week was the death of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez – and we’ve gotten lots of Chavez cartoon traffic. The death of a despot is always great fodder for cartoons.  The most popular Chavez cartoon, by far, is this gem by Hajo …

We have a great collection of Chavez Obituary cartoons here.  Come enjoy!

We get about two phone calls per day from high school students who ask, “what does the cartoon mean?” We tell them they have to do their own homework and we can’t help them. I thought the phone might be ringing off the hook with this one.

Metaphors with famous paintings are meat and potatoes for editorial cartoonists. Here’s one by Nate Beeler.

Magritte did lots of versions of this painting, some in English. I went with the classic French. I thought I would add this Bagley/Pope/Retirement cartoon here – I think it is the best of the bunch.

And I drew these two about the sequester.

Wedgies are a mainstay for editorial cartoonists. Bagley draws better wedgies too.

The stock market fell when we heard the result of Italy’s crazy election, which I drew as the Wall Street Bull tripping over Italy’s boot. It was only a one day drop, but Italy’s bonds are down the tube, so I think it still works.

After almost 22 and 1/2 years at The Record in northern New Jersey, I became the latest editorial cartoonist to lose a full time staff job at a daily newspaper. Despite having won a few national awards,  syndication and frequent appearances in some high profile places like USA Today, as well as being a popular local speaker and using social media to become one of the most popular features on the paper’s web site, it was not enough to save me from the paper’s decision to trim expenses.

I plan to continue my syndication with King Features as well as self syndicating  my New Jersey cartoons around the state. The Record and I have reached an agreement that I will do a Sunday cartoon for them, as well as possibly be asked to do additional work if a big story happens in the region.

Here are five of my favorite Margulies cartoons.  See Jimmy’s whole archive here.

Want to reprint Jimmy’s cartoons? All of his cartoons are searchable by keyword and available in high resolution instantly at Politicalcartoons.com.

I did a State Department sponsored speaking tour in China some years ago, and I told the Chinese audiences that when I draw cartoons about China I represent China with a Panda, or a dragon, or the Great Wall, or that guy standing in front of a tank in Tienanmen Square.  The Chinese audience would always murmur and look at each other when I mentioned the tank in Tienanmen Square, which was quite provocative for them and always stirred up the crowd. At one college I said that line and one excited college kid stood up and asked in English, “Oh! Oh! What KIND of dragon?!” That still makes me laugh.

Here’s my very rough pencil sketch.

Next I do the finished line art, in dark, hard pencil on a 14″x17″ piece of Duralene drafting vellum. This is what most people will see in the newspapers since most of them still print in black and white.

Here is the color version. The color on this one was fun. I grabbed a bunch of Chinese dragons from Google Images for scrap on the dragon, and I pulled details from three or four different dragons that I thought were cute.

I don’t know what kind of dragon it is. Sorry.

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!

Rick writes:

 

“Sticks and stones may break my bones” and apparently, internet Photoshops can really get under the thin skin of Georgia State Representative Earnest Smith, (D-Augusta). Recently, he became upset, to say the least, over a manipulated photo in which a blogger digitally pasted his head onto somebody else’s very naked body.

So, he’s cosponsoring a bill that would make it illegal to alter a photograph so that it “causes an unknowing person wrongfully to be identified as the person in an obscene depiction.” I understand where he’s coming from. Nobody wants their head stuck on an obscene image. Problem is, it’s perfectly legal and protected by the Constitution under the First Amendment. You’d think a guy in his position would know this.

Of course, he’s brought the wrath of the Internet down upon him. Bloggers and forums are trying to outdo one another with lewd images featuring the noggin of Rep. Smith.

But then Smith goes further and says, ““No one has a right to make fun of anyone. It’s not a First Amendment right.”

Wow. This is truly embarrassing coming from an elected official. If that’s true, then as a political cartoonist, I am breaking the law every day. Go ahead and lock me up. Jon Stewart and David Letterman can be my cellmates.

Perhaps, in the future, our elected officials should be required to take a basic middle-school level civics class. Or, at the least, we could include a disclaimer in their job description, “Warning: This occupation may be a hazard to those with thin skins!”

Lots of the craziest Pope cartoons came from Latin American cartoonists. There were lots of cartoons showing the German Pope as a Nazi, showing him as a devil, and showing him doing all kinds of things with condoms. Mexican cartoonist Dario Castillejos saw the Pope as an evil Holocaust denier.

This one by Cuban/Brazilian cartoonist Osmani Simanca depicts Pope Benedict XVI as the devil – a common theme.

Simanca also drew this devil Pope with condoms …

Cartoonists just love the idea of condoms on the Pope’s shoe.  here’s one by Taylor Jones.

There are a lot with the Pope blowing up condom balloons, here by Rainer Hachfeld …

And here by Taylor Jones …

There were dozens of cartoons about the Pope and condoms.  Here’s another one by Bulgarian cartoonist “Christo.”

This Pope and condom cartoon by Dutch cartoonist, Hajo, made me laugh …

French cartoonist, Jiho, drew the Pope with a condom/suicide vest.

Here’s another Simanca/Pope/Condom cartoon …

Swedish cartoonist, Riber Hanssen, drew the Pope bungee jumping with condoms.

When the Pope gave a speech denouncing “comsumer culture” Simanca drew this cartoon about the Pope’s fancy wardrobe, which made me laugh …

There were a lot of cartoons about the Pope’s role covering up the Pedophile Priest Scandals. This one is by also by Riber Hansson.

Here’s another one  by Taylor Jones that impressed me.  Taylor is the cartoonist for El Nuevo Dia on Puerto Rico, who works from Staten Island, NY.

There are loads of cartoons with the Pope being crucified.  This one is by French cartoonist, Frederick Deligne.

That poor Pope. Here the poor Pope is crucified by Islam, and Mexican cartoonist Nerilicon.

Here the Pope suffers from Islam by Cuban/Mexican cartoonist Angel Boligan - this has gotta hurt.

Mr Fish brought his potty-mouth to his depiction of the Pope.

I think Simanca had the biggest bug in his ear for the Pope. Here’s Simanca’s Pope shark.

Simanca’s Nazi Pope …

I’ll add this one by Pat Bagley, because it made me laugh.

I drew one that was a compilation cartoon of all the Pope Yahtzees.

Then I drew it up as line art, in pencil on vellum.  This black and white version is what most people will see in the newspaper – if newspapers will print this one. I always like the black and white version best.

And here I added color, in Photoshop layers behind the black line art.

Those young people are so disrespectful of Grandpa! Here is yesterday’s cartoon …

My wife’s Uncle Keene e-mailed this idea to me, which he tells me was given to him by a friend who prefers to remain anonymous. I usually don’t draw other peoples ideas, but what the heck, I liked this one.  Thanks, Keene. Here it is as it looked in my local newspaper this morning.

I notice they picked up some gray scuzzy tone in the background. Yuck. Why do newspapers take pretty, clean crispy cartoons and muck them up? Here’s a previous cartoon, about the terrible air pollution in China.

This one was fun, and it is nice to do cartoons with no words. The previous cartoon was this quicky for Groundhog’s Day.

I didn’t bother doing color for this one. The previous one was about the immigration debate …

Now I’m caught up!  I need to post more often.

My lemming cartoon yesterday was about the ongoing tumult in Egypt, and protesting Egyptians running their country off of a cliff.

Back in 2009, during the Obamacare debate, I drew the Democrat/lemmings jumping off of a political cliff. Of-course, their cliff was on the left.

Back in 2007 at the onset of the mortgage collapse, I drew house/lemmings jumping off of a cliff …

Way back in 2003 unemployment was on our minds (things never change much) and I drew this graduation lemmings cartoon.

The lemming metaphor is popular around the world too.  Here is how my graduation cartoon was plagiarized by a cartoonist at a top newspaper in Saudi Arabia.

It amuses me to see how the positions of all of the characters in the Saudi cartoon match my own drawing.

Here are some lemmings by some of my favorite cartoonists.  This one is by Mike Keefe from back in 2007 …

Here’s Colombian cartoonist “Matador” (Killer) with the Eurozone countries as lemmings.

Joe Heller did the lemmings as a Martin Luther King Day cartoon …

This lemming/shoppers cartoon by Andy Singer made me laugh …

This mortgage crisis cartoon that I drew back in 2007 is a twist on the lemmings …

I did a search on the word “cliff” in our cartoon database and came up with 440 results.  Yipes!  There are cliffs everywhere!

Click to see an even bigger cartoonist chicken.

I’m often asked what editorial cartoonists “are like.”  We’re a rare breed; there are only about 60 of us with full time jobs.  What we do and how we do it can seem strange to most people.

I think the best way to explain it is with chickens.  Editorial cartoonists are like chickens.

A flock of chickens is typically all female, with only one male.  Editorial cartoonists are the opposite, all males in the flock with only a couple of females. We work in little cubicles, for chickenfeed. Editorial cartoonists and chickens are all white (it is possible that you might see a brown chicken, but I don’t remember ever seeing a brown one).

When there is a weak chicken in a flock, the weak chicken’s colleagues will peck it to death. Why?  Social Darwinism.  Killing the weak strengthens the flock – a noble cause.  Chickens are little sociopaths, convinced of their righteousness and operating without feelings of guilt or empathy for what they believe is the betterment of the flock.

Chickens strut around like they are important, knowing their heads will soon be on the chopping block. Like chickens, when you cut off an editorial cartoonist’s head, he will keep running around.  I haven’t tested that last fact, but I’m sure it is true – and it gives us hope for the future of our profession.

Then I trace the sketch for line art on vellum.  This is what most people see in the newspapers that still print in black and white.

… and here it is in color.

Obama also seems to be getting more of a spine.  Here is the previous cartoon, on Hillary’s testimony in congress.

That’s really Hillary’s testimony in the small type in her speech balloon, and that’s what she was really thinking in the thought balloon. Hillary is fun to draw, and the glasses are great.

At the right is my most recent cartoon about Defense Secretary Panetta’s announcement that all areas of the military, that had previously been closed to women, will now be open to qualified women – a change that is long overdue.

We have a great collection of cartoons on Women in Combat – come look!

Your generosity has been overwhelming for Bill, who will be quitting his job at the bike shop to devote more time to his cartoons, and he will be able to save his house from foreclosure – all thanks to you! In the next couple of months, Bill will be working hard to put his e-book together and deliver the other perks and original artwork promised to over 800 fans who will be keeping him in our troubled profession for at least another year.

In the last moments of the Indiegogo campaign, we broke the $40,000 mark for Bill. The more contributions that come in, the longer he’ll work beyond his one year commitment so please continue to spread the word as you have because you can still make contributions. If you would like to make a contribution visit: http://www.indiegogo.com/billday

And you can see my pitch for Bill at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4EPKKLOfkA

And again, many, many thanks for all of your support for Bill and for our profession. A few of Bill’s most recent cartoons are below.

With warm regards,

Daryl Cagle

I’m a big fan of the comic strip Soup to Nutz by my cartoonist buddy, Rick Stromoski. Rick has started a Kickstarter campaign to do a new book – come see it here.  I’d love to see Rick reach his goal and see the book happen.  I asked Rick to write a few words for my blog …

Since publication of my first Soup to Nutz collection in 2003 I’ve been asked by many readers of my strip when a second book would be coming out. After much consideration and speaking with other cartoonists who have had success with alternative ways of getting their work published, I decided to try the Kickstarter route. The thing that excites me most is the overwhelming positive response in the first few days where I’ve reached nearly 60% of my goal. I also like the feeling of control over what goes into the book and how it will be distributed. Lastly I’m encouraged by the kind words and supportive calls and emails I’ve reeived in these first few days. So I thank you in advance for your continued interest and support.

The Nutz family is definitely not the Cleavers, the Waltons or the Bradys. But you’ll undoubtedly recognize them anyway. Most likely, they’re a lot like the family you grew up in… Where the oldest boy Royboy when not torturing his younger brother, digs up deceased pet turtles weeks after their backyard funerals, middle child Babs advocates for veganism and solutions to global warming, and youngest brother Andrew would rather wear a tutu than a football helmet and prefer Barbies over GI Joe.

Soup to Nutz is a family comic strip unlike most family comic strips.

Soup to Nutz: A Second Helping is a project long overdue …the second collection of Soup to Nutz daily newspaper comic strips most not seen for a number of years.

I had to erase and think a bit to figure out how to tie the president into a knot. I was a lousy boy scout.  Here he is in line art, the way most people will see the cartoon in the newspapers.

… and here he is in color.

And here is the cartoon the very next day in my local newspaper (The Santa Barbara News-Press).

My previous cartoon was based on a famous old National Lampoon cover. I loved the old National Lampoon – this great one is from 1973, when I was a junior in high school. One of my favorite parts of the National Lampoon was the Chicken Guts comics by Randall Enos – who I now syndicate as an editorial cartoonist!

Unfortunately, I don’t think this cartoon will get reprinted much, because it is name-calling-Republican-bashing, because it requires some popular cultural knowledge, and because it is in a vertical format, which doesn’t fit the standard hole that editors leave open for the editorial cartoon.  Oh well – I’m the boss here at Cagle Cartoons, so I can draw what I want, even if nobody else wants it.

And here is the cartoon …

Check out our great collection of Lance Armstrong cartoons.

Today has also been labeled “Bill Day Day” by the folks behind the popular Facebook page The Pragmatic Conservative. They are posting a Bill Day cartoon every hour, on the hour. So make your way to their page, “like” Day’s cartoons and share them with your friends on Facebook.

Hopefully, we can raise the $2,000 needed and put Bill over the top today! So please continue to spread the word – we may be in the final stretch, but we’re not going to get there without your support, and Bill needs your help now more than ever!

Click here to make a contribution to save Bill Day!

If you haven’t donated yet, please consider doing so. There are some really great perks still available for donors – everything from signed prints of Bill’s work to an actual original piece of Bill Day artwork that you can frame and hang up in your home or office!

Donate enough and you could even receive a custom Bill Day cartoon drawn about any subject or topic important to you! That’s a one of a kind item that you can cherish your entire life!

And forward this newsletter to your friends, relatives, co-workers, enemies – the more people that know about our fundraising drive, the more likely we’re going to be successful in preserving one of the most important political cartoon voices in the country.

Again, thank you for all your generosity and support of political cartoons. You guys are the best!

Click here to make a contribution to save Bill Day!

Here’s a little detail, blown up as it can be hard to see on the Web …

This was fun.

Here is my previous cartoon, on the trillion dollar coin.

The trillion dollar coin is a great idea, and should be great fun for cartoonists.  This one by knuckle-dragging, conservative cartoonist, Eric Allie, is quite funny.

There haven’t been as many trillion dollar coin cartoons as I expected – maybe they are coming soon.

By the way, back when I was working in the toy industry it was a time when toy execs were getting lots of government pressure and press criticism about unsafe toys. I often heard the toy industry argument that many more kids are killed each year by choking on coins than by toys, and the government could fix that easily by putting holes in the middle of coins, as some foreign countries have done.  But nobody cares about unsafe coins and the government was being hypocritical by focusing on unsafe toys while doing nothing about unsafe coins. That’s also an interesting argument with the gun debate, since so many kids continue to be killed by coins, but I’ve never thought of a way to do it in a cartoon, since kids choking on coins (or shot by guns) is nothing anyone wants to see in a cartoon.

Now I’m rambling.  Time to stop.

I have two cool news items to report in our Bill Day fundraising drive. First, we’ve exceeded $30,000, and now just have $5,000 remaining to successfully fund the work of brilliant, unemployed cartoonist Bill Day!

Second, Editor & Publisher magazine did a story on our fundraising campaign. E&P’s Rob Tornoe spoke with Bill, who said the outpouring of support in this crowd-sourcing effort means a great deal to him.

“If we’re successful, it will allow me to continue my passion of drawing editorial cartoons at a time when it’s very difficult for me to continue,” Day said. “We’re so close, and I feel honored that so many readers feel so strongly about my cartoons to support me.”

Day went on to say that he is moved by the experience, and is thankful to everyone who has donated “for their willingness to help the cause and promote the art of editorial cartooning so it doesn’t die… their generosity is truly touching.”

Click here to make a contribution to save Bill Day!

Please continue to spread the word about our fundraising campaign. We’re in the final stretch, and need your help now more than ever!

If you haven’t donated yet, please consider doing so. There are some really great perks still available for donors – everything from signed prints of Bill’s work to an actual original piece of Bill Day artwork that you can frame and hang up in your home or office!

Again, thank you for all your generosity and support of political cartoons. You guys are the best!

Hi Daryl,

That was the first time I drew an edit toon on the Ipad. I used a stylus, which is better than a finger but still not all that precise. App is called Sketch Club. Cost me three bucks. I may do more vids like that from time to time, depending on time and the image I’m attempting. The program doesn’t have all of the Photoshop features and effects one often needs. I just got it Sunday so I’m still learning how useful it will be.

Steve

I can’t get past drawing on paper, although I rely on Photoshop and my Wacom Cintiq.  Here is my rough pencil sketch, in pencil, on a piece of 11″x17″ paper.

Next I draw it with a 4H hard pencil on vellum and scan the drawing at high contrast and high resolution for most people to see in black and white in the newspaper – looking like an ink drawing.  I have to design everything so it works in black and white, and I usually like the black and white versions best – here I did that by making the speech balloons black, so they stand out and are readable making the point of the cartoon.

Next I put in the color in Photoshop, under the black line art layer.

The details get lost on the web – print is still nicer for the details.

Egyptian Cartoonist Doaa El Adl of the Al-Masry Al-Toum newspaper.

It didn’t take long for the new Islamist government in Egypt to start acting like other nutty Islamic regimes when it comes to cartoons.  The latest wacko religious intolerance comes in response to the cartoon below, by Egyptian editorial cartoonist Doaa El Adl.

The cartoon, published on her newspapers online site, shows an Egyptian man with angel wings lecturing Adam and Eve.  The three are on a cloud beneath the infamous forbidden fruit tree.  The man is telling Adam and Eve that they would never have been expelled from heaven if they had simply voted in favor of the draft constitution in the recent Egyptian referendum.  Some of the supporters of the referendum were quoted as saying a “yes vote” guarantees one a spot in heaven, while a “no vote” guarantees one a spot in hell.  Neither Adam nor Eve in Doaa’s cartoon is uttering a word. In short, the cartoon is critical of Egyptians who have recently politicized religion.

The cartoonist is being sued by Egypt’s new Secretary General for the Defense of Freedoms, Khaled El Masry; he claims that the cartoon insults Adam, who is considered a prophet in the Muslim religion.  Egypt’s Attorney General has ordered an investigation.

This is the offending cartoon. The angel who appears to be a typical Egyptian man, is telling Adam and Eve that they would never have been expelled from heaven if they had simply voted in favor of the draft constitution in the recent Egyptian referendum.

I met Doaa El Adl at the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists convention a couple of years ago in Florida, shortly after the revolution in Egypt.  She was the only woman cartoonist in a large group of Arab cartoonists sent by the US State Department to visit their colleagues in the USA.  In our conversations she was beaming with pride and optimism about Egypt’s revolution and her high hopes and expectations about Egypt’s future.

In Egypt, editorial cartoonists are especially important.  There are lots of popular, thriving, competing newspapers in Egypt, and most of them run their editorial cartoon in color on the front page. The editorial cartoonists are the most important voices in each newspaper, and clearly, the most threatening voices to Islamic-extremist politicians. I doubt that Doaa is being sued because of insulting Adam, rather she is being sued to chill her voice, and make it costly to be a cartoonist who is critical of Egypt’s new religious junta.

This is a shame.  Doaa is talented, brave and eager to seek a better future for Egypt – just what Egypt needs right now.  Read more about her case on the Cartoonists Rights Network site.

Our fundraising campaign to pay a salary to brilliant, unemployed cartoonist Bill Day is now in its final stretch. With only 19 days left in our campaign, we really need your help to get to the goal of a $35,000 for Bill, to keep him drawing cartoons and avoid foreclosure on his house! Bill is an important cartoonist, we can’t afford to lose him!  Please help!

This weekend, Bill filmed a short video of his own, where he talked a bit about the history of political cartoons and their importance in the growth of our society. It would be a shame to lose Bill’s unique voice in our increasing homogenized media environment.

I’ve been struck by some of the heartwarming comments posted by people who have already donated to Bill’s campaign. “Bill Day is a brilliant political voice and I hope others will join in to keep that voice heard,” a donor named Gerald wrote.

Another donor named Jean commented, “Support Bill Day – he is a national treasure! He helps us see into the heart of things in a way no one else does.” I couldn’t agree more.

The good news is you still have time to contribute to this worthwhile cause. Not only would you be helping to keep our dwindling profession alive, there are some really great perks you can receive for doing so – everything from signed prints of Bill’s work to an actual original piece of Bill Day artwork, suitable for framing.

Click here to make a contribution to save Bill Day!

So please, considering donating today, or even making a second donation – there is nothing more cool than an original Bill Day cartoon hanging on your wall – except TWO original Bill Day cartoons hanging on your wall!

And thank you all for your generosity and commitment to political cartoons!

Steve has been one of my favorite cartoonists for decades. Steve’s style is deceivingly cute and sweet, masking some nasty, hard-hitting commentary.  Here are a few of my favorites from Steve’s last year.  I’m still laughing at “Rice Konspiracies” below.

This one surely made Republicans growl …

Looney Michelle Bachmann is a local favorite for Steve in Minnesota …

This Donald Trump hair cartoon is great …

I thought this one was wonderful just because of the way Steve draws helicopters …

I’d suggest that a cool way to spend New Years Day is a stroll through our
Steve Sack cartoon archive.  It is great fun.

This Fiscal Cliff mess came about because of the failure of the “Super-Committee.” I remembered a drawing a did of the Super-Committee some time ago, with a nice fight scene between super donkeys and elephants …

I liked that Super-Committee cartoon. Super political stuff is always great for cartoonists, especially when super-politicians fail. It occurred to me that I could use the fight scene again, if the donkeys were elephants, so I printed it out lightly and sketched in some rough changes, adding Obama and making the donkeys into elephants in the same, fighting positions …

… and then I drew over it for finished line on vellum.  This black and white line drawing is what most people see in the newspaper …

… and then I colored it in layers on Photoshop. The line drawing is always better than the color, but readers and editors never seem to think so.

The previous cartoon was also about GOP angst, this time in the form of Picasso’s Guernica (below).

Oh the GOP suffering; oh the humanity!  I did pretty much the same thing with this one. I printed out the Guernica painting and traced a nice line drawing on vellum.

I wanted it to look like it came from my hand, which is why I did all the cross hatching and un-Picasso like line quality.  Then I added the gray tone …

Oh!  Those poor Republicans! My most recent one was the New Years Fiscal Cliff cartoon below. This one probably works better on the Web because you have to scroll down to get to the gag.

My wife thought this one was too cruel to babies. She told me I shouldn’t draw it. My Australian cartoonist buddy, Peter Broelman did a similar one today, without being cruel to the baby – and his will get reprinted more because it isn’t in a vertical format.  My wife likes Peter’s better too.  Oh well.

The cliff is such a natural cartoon that I have to keep drawing it.  This cartoon (right) was from December 20th, when the fiscal cliff negotiations were going nowhere, and I was drawing John Boehner hanging off the cliff where the elephant is, and my son came by and asked me who that was.  It was fine when I explained it, but he didn’t know John Boehner, and I thought I needed to draw and elephant.  We’ve had lots of Boehner cartoons, even a great Boehner section - but he hasn’t risen to the level where young people know him, and I’ve been sticking to the elephant in his place. I hate that our cartoons are puzzles for schoolkids to suffer through.

I’ll draw Boehner soon enough.

The two cartoons below were drawn about the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. I hate that I have to draw cartoons about heinous crimes, because we all agree on how awful the murders were and the issues are all side issues … comments about grieving, and cartoons about gun control are appropriate, I just wasn’t inspired for another round of redundant gun control cartoons.  Then I watched a horrendously insensitive interview on Fox News with parents of a surviving child, and a couple other, awful interviews with grieving parents that made me angry. The hype around this was pretty ugly, and inspired the media vultures cartoon below.  I think it is good to bash another bad guy than the shooter in cartoons – best not to mention the shooter at all – the few news outlets that don’t mention the murderer’s name are being responsible journalists.

The next cartoon is another riff on the same theme. I got a lot of response to these cartoons from readers who were also disgusted by the media reaction to the tragedy.  Ugly stuff.

The next cartoon was about the passage of “right-to-work” legislation by Michigan’s Republican governor and legislature. I know this cartoon won’t get reprinted much, but when you gotta pee, you gotta pee.

There’s no cartoonist who cares about the issue of gun control more than Bill Day. Here are some of Day’s best cartoons about guns in America, including some of his recent cartoons following the tragic school shooting in Connecticut.

(Donate to our Bill Day fundraising campaign and help keep the him drawing!)

What do you think – do we need more gun control laws, or less? Comment below or weigh in on our Facebook page!

As our campaign to help unemployed cartoonist Bill Day from losing his home enters its third week, we need your help more than ever to achieve our goal of raising $35,000.

Bill Day’s most recent cartoon

So far, we’ve raised over $23,000, but we’re also at the point where many campaigns start to lose steam. Don’t let that happen to Bill!

If you haven’t donated yet, please consider doing so today. Not only would you be helping one of America’s top political cartoonists continue working, you can receive some great gifts in return, such as an eBook featuring Bill’s work, a signed print or even an original piece of Bill Day artwork.

Click here to make a contribution to save Bill Day!

If you have already contributed, consider forwarding this post to a friend or co-worker, or sharing it on Facebook and Twitter. With Christmas approaching, what better gift can someone give than helping a brilliant cartoonist in his time of need?

Thank you again for your generosity and commitment to political cartoons! The outpouring of support for Bill has been tremendous, and if we can keep this momentum going, I’m sure we’ll be successful in keeping Bill drawing!

I know this cartoon won’t get reprinted widely,  just because it is in a vertical format; but some newspapers will take advantage of the cartoon and do some interesting layouts, nesting type in the space at the bottom right. I like to mix up layouts – that’s one of the freedoms of not having an editor and a fixed hole to fill in print every day.

Here’s my messy sketch in pencil, hard pencil for a light layout and soft pencil for darker details.

Next I trace over the sketch in pencil on vellum for finished line art, which is what most people see in the newspapers that print in black and white.

And then I color it in layers in Photoshop, with the black line art as the top layer, for the Web and for the newspapers that print in color, and I save it as a 400 dpi, CMYK tiff file, 9 inches tall and about 6 inches wide.

I debated with myself about putting in a background color, or just a white background, and settled on a subtle bit of airbrush blue to make the air/motion/cloud pop out and give a little sense of space.

Below is the messy pencil sketch for my previous cartoon. Yes, i’ve gotten e-mails from some kids who “didn’t get it.” I explained the idiom “cutting off your nose to spite your face” and, somehow, I don’t think that explanation was satisfying to them.

Here’s the final line art, which most people see in the newspaper …

I always think the line art looks best.  Here is the color …

A couple of people e-mailed me to say that they thought it was clever how I turned the elephant into a pig. Actually, I didn’t think of that, but I’ll take credit for it.  Subliminal cartooning.

Bill’s most recent cartoon – Republican Speaker John Boehner and his crocodile tears.

Click here to make a contribution to save Bill Day!

Last week, we launched an Indiegogo campaign aimed at raising enough money to keep unemployed cartoonist Bill Day from losing his home. I’m very proud to announce that a little more than a week into our drive, we’ve raised over $18,000 towards keeping Bill drawing – more than halfway there!

We still have a long way to go, so I humbly ask that you consider donating to this very worthy cause. Not only would you be helping a brilliant cartoonist and important voice continue to contribute to the national discourse, but you could also snag some impressive perks for doing so, including a signed print or one of Bill’s own original cartoons, suitable for framing.

Click here to make a contribution to save Bill Day!

Thank you for your generosity and commitment to political cartoons! The outpouring of support for Bill has been tremendous, and if we can keep this momentum going, I’m sure we’ll be successful in keeping Bill drawing!

Last month I corrected an error in a cartoon by Glenn’s even-more-conservative brother, Gary.  The McCoys are such an inspiration!

Cool news to report – the Washington Post did a story on our fundraising campaign to help save Bill Day and keep the unemployed cartoonist from losing his home. Reporter Michael Cavna spoke with Bill, who said he’s overwhelmed by the response so far to our fundraising drive. “It restores my faith that there are good people in this world who want to help me,” he said.

Click here to make a contribution to save Bill Day!

Cavna also spoke with Indiegogo co-founder Slava Rubin, who is not only aware of the plight political cartoonists face, but is also a cartoon fan himself!

“Political cartoons have appeared daily in our newspapers for decades, and have been an integral part of American history, art and public life,” Rubin said. “As newsrooms get smaller and online journalism grows, this art form is in decline, and Bill’s campaign is a perfect example of how those from the traditional media industry are looking to alternative sources of funding via crowdfunding.”

Check out the Washington Post’s story here, and continue to spread the word. Bill needs your help, and together we can reach and exceed our goal, and keep Bill drawing for years to come!

These are tough times for political cartoonists as newspapers cut back. Cartoonists are still widely syndicated in newspapers across the country, but national syndication pays a fraction of what cartoonists made from traditional staff jobs, making them an endangered species as cartoonists lose their jobs.

Bill Day

The irony is that political cartoons are more popular than ever; cartoons spread quickly across social networks, look great on tablets and smart phones, and reach millions of readers through syndication. Editorial cartoons are part of state-mandated testing in 8th and 11th grade, and are a part of the weekly homework for millions of students in America.

In recent years the number of editorial cartoonists has declined by half, to about 60.  One of the best is Bill Day, who drew for decades for The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, and before that the Detroit Free Press. Bill has a room full of trophies from a storied career as an editorial cartoonist, winning almost every prize a political cartoonist can win. Bill’s cartoons are syndicated to half of the newspapers in America, but there is little money to be made from syndication as newspapers pay pennies a day for cartoons.

When he was laid off from his newspaper, Bill went to work for Federal Express, lifting heavy boxes, until that was too much for his back.  Bill now works every day in a bike shop; he draws his cartoons at night; he is in danger of losing his house and faces the tough choice of retiring from his long career in editorial cartooning — ironically, at a time when more readers than ever are reading his work.

Editorial cartoonists are no different from newsroom journalists, who have been losing their jobs in the same proportion as newspapers cut back.  We know that journalism will continue to be important in the future, but we don’t know what form the business will take, as unemployed journalists now work as freelancers and bloggers; the same is true with editorial cartoonists, but since there are so few cartoonists the cuts threaten the viability of the profession. We may soon face a time when there are only a dozen political cartoonists left, and editorial pages will be like McDonald’s, with everyone in the world choosing their dinner from a handful of choices on the same, bland menu.

You can help stop the decline of our profession, stop the bleeding and preserve the public debate by saving one important voice at this important time.  You can keep Bill Day working, and we’ll make sure that his work continues to be seen by millions of readers in syndication.

We’re doing a crowd-funding campaign at www.indiegogo.com/billday to raise $35,000, to be paid as a salary to Bill to draw four editorial cartoons a week, every week, for an entire year, as if he was working for a newspaper. That’s a total of 208 cartoons, covering everything from the presidential election to Wall Street and our corrupt political system. If we’re able to raise more we will keep Bill working longer.  All donated funds will be kept in a segregated fund, only for Bill’s salary. Bill will send his original drawings as premium gifts to contributors, and will sign prints and send e-books to fans who donate in smaller amounts.

Our unique American art-form needs you.  Bill needs you.  Please, save our editorial cartooning profession, save Bill and keep an important, progressive voice in the public debate by donating to keep Bill drawing for the next year and beyond.

Click here to make a contribution to save Bill Day!

Here’s a video I made for Bill’s fundraising campaign:

And here are a handful of Bill’s terrific cartoons:

For those of you who keep asking me to post my rough pencil sketches, here is the sketch for this one.  I don’t clean these up to show here. I’m really working messy and fast, and making mistakes, like how long his staff should be, and the lousy caricature which I hopefully corrected in the line art. I got his neck too fat and his eyes were wrong. Morsi looks cross-eyed to me, and he’s quite an ugly bastard.

Here he is as line art, for the newspapers that print in black and white.  I think it looks best as line art. I trace the rough sketch in pencil on vellum and scan at high contrast so it looks like an ink drawing. I draw on 11″x17″ tab sized paper.

And here he is in color …

One thing I hate about the web is that our standard image size is so small – 600 pixels wide, which loses a lot of the details and character of the line.  These usually look better in print because of the fine details.  For example, below are Morsi’s left hand and foot blown up in a detail – it is much more fun when it is big, and you can see the character of the pencil line and my quick, messy, Photoshop color, which appears to be much more carefully done when it is reduced.

I did this one 9 inches wide at 400dpi, in CMYK tiff format, for you wonks. Smart newspaper people will print it in full resolution and the black line will come out clean and crispy.  Many newspapers will convert it to an RGB jpg at a reduced resolution because that is how they get their photographs from the wire services and it requires no thought; then the nice crispy lines will be half-toned and fuzzy, which is a shame, and the cartoon in print will look no better than it does on the web. I’d estimate that about half of the newspapers that print in color make this error – and a lot of them who print in black and white will convert the line art to half tone also, for no reason other than that they don’t think about it.  Very frustrating.

Here’s a nice King Tut Morsi by Taylor Jones …

Here’s Monte Wolverton’s Pharoah Morsi …

And Oliver Schopf’s Pharoah Morsi …

Here it is as line art, traced from the rough sketch …

I like the line art best, and most newspapers print black and white so this is what most readers see. I’ve noticed that some papers, including my local Santa Barbara News-Press, sometimes print the color versions of my cartoons in grayscale, so I suppose some people don’t like the harsh line look. I put gray into this one to satisfy those people.

… and here it is in color, as you’ll see it on the Web and newspapers that print in color.

The Macy’s giant balloons are an ongoing theme for editorial cartoonists. RJ Matson, my cartoonist buddy from Roll Call, is probably the king of the Macy’s balloon cartoons. Here’s is an oldie with president Bush that is probably RJ’s Macy’s balloon magnum opus.

This one, with Mayor Guiliani and Hillary is my favorite of RJ’s balloon cartoons …

RJ drew this one a year ago, as Mitt Romney was knocking off his GOP rivals around Thanksgiving time …

This one is pretty old, but it still makes me laugh. RJ titled it “Dick Cheney’s Hot Air” …

John Darkow drew this one today, about the fiscal cliff …

John drew this one last year … when we don’t know what to draw this week, the Macy’s giant balloon metaphor lets cartoonists pile everything in …

John drew this one when the economy collapsed in 2008 …

David Fitzsimmons drew this one today, about the GOP, the fiscal cliff and Benghazi hot air …

The Macy’s giant Thanksgiving Day balloon cartoons are no-brainers, but I love them.

Then I drew it up as the line art that most people will see in their newspapers that still print in black and white.  I printed out a map of the continental United States and traced it for the storm cloud.

And here he is with messy, rainy color.

Ah!  Good times.  Fox News should be fun for a few more days, I think.

And for Romney winning …

This week we’re adding a new cartoonist to our site, and to our online store at Politicalcartoons.com, our online pay-per-use cartoon store – Pierre Kroll, the famed editorial cartoonist from Belgium.  Welcome, Pierre!  Here are Pierre’s two winner alternative cartoons …

Our liberal cartoonist, Bill Day, drew only one alternative, assuming that Obama will win …

Our knuckle-dragging conservative cartoonist, Gary McCoy, also drew only one, assuming that Romney will win …

I guess that’s what passes for optimism with Bill and Gary. No one can accuse Pierre of optimism.

Then I draw with a #2 pencil on drafting vellum, over the sketch, and I come up with a line drawing that is what most people see in the newspaper.  In this case, I traced maps of the swing states and positioned them on a layer to make the spots on the “Twister board,” just because that was quick and easier than trying to draw accurate maps in perspective.  I like to do just line art without grayscale – there’s something more pure about that, but in this case I thought the spots needed to be stronger, so I added gray to them.

There is always something nicer about the sketch than the finish. Romney’s face is better in the sketch.  I draw my finished line in pencil because I’m always fighting being stiff and I want to keep a loose, comfortable quality to the line.

The last step is to add color behind the line art in layers in Photoshop. I don’t do very sophisticated color, just enough to make it clear.

I really draw for the black and white version rather than the color – even though it is always the color version that readers see here on the web. I suppose that if I liked the color better, I would do a better job with the color rather than just doing enough to make it work. I know that’s bad, I should pay more attention to the color – here are my last couple of cartoons in both color and black and white.  I think both are better in black and white.

Those are great, huh?  Here are some other good ones …

Those last three are by Joe Heller, Nate Beeler and Cam Cardow.  Want more?  Here is our big section with all of the Disney/Star Wars cartoons.

Here is an animated political cartoon by Keith about “Vulture Pirate” Mitt Romney, a parody of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “HMS Pinafore”:

Our liberal cartoonist, Adam Zyglis drew this “mountain out of a molehill” cartoon …

And our conservative-team-player cartoonist, Eric Allie, responded to Adam with the cartoon below …

Even though I think the Libya “scandal” is right wing wishful thinking, I love the ‘toon tit for tat.  See more Libya “scandal” cartoons here.

Jeff Parker, the staff cartoonist of Florida Today, has lots of experience covering many, many hurricanes from his home base of Florida. Here are 10 of Jeff’s funniest cartoons:

Cartoons by Rick Detorie who draws the comic strip, "One Big Happy."

California congressman Brad Sherman is in a tough election battle with another incumbent Democrat, Howard Berman, this year in a contest that has drawn national attention to two candidates with hot tempers. Cartoonists have known and despised Sherman for many years, since he was the Chairman of California’s “Board of Equalization” (BOE) which writes regulations governing state taxes. Sherman doesn’t like cartoonists much either, for good reason.

Cartoon by movie industry cartoonist, Tim Burgard.

Sherman championed a set of confusing, contradictory and punitive tax laws that punished California’s artists for many years. California charges a sales tax on “tangible” property, but charges no tax on services; in Sherman’s days on the BOE, authors weren’t charged tax on the copyrights to their written works, but artists were charged tax on their copyrights, even though neither was tangible.  Newspaper political cartoonists were exempt from the sales tax, but other cartoonists weren’t, except if they wrote the words that appeared in their cartoons themselves, and didn’t have a separate author. The rules were different than the sales tax rules for rights to artwork in all other states, leading to even more confusion, and the regulations were not applied to artwork by big corporations, like Disney; the taxes were randomly imposed only on little, freelance artists.

Cartoon by nationally syndicated editorial cartoonist, Jeff Stahler.

Sherman took his cartoon frustrations out on a clown – a cartoonist named Rhoda Grossman, who performed at children’s parties, a service that isn’t taxable, except that Rhoda made the mistake of drawing caricatures of the children as a small part of her performance.  Sherman and the BOE went after the poor clown for sales tax and penalties on her entire gross income as a performer for the preceding seven years, because of the part of her show that included drawing – a devastating, unexpected, huge, tax bill for poor Rhoda the clown.

Rhoda appealed the tax decision to the BOE, chaired by Sherman, who had been a big supporter of the crazy tax laws imposed against artists and who had just won a race for congress. Sherman moved to Washington, DC and didn’t attend the meeting to hear Rhoda’s plea before the board – he was keeping his salary from the tax board until the last possible day before switching to his new salary from congress, and he cast the deciding vote against Rhoda in absentia, crushing the clown.

Cartoon by Rick Kirkman, who draws the comic strip "Baby Blues."

Top cartoonists from all across America joined in a campaign to draw unflattering cartoons of Sherman, protesting his longtime support of California’s crazy, inconsistent art tax laws. The National Cartoonists Society had determined that Sherman was the one person most responsible for the ugly tax burden that California artists suffered under.  Some of the cartoons that were drawn at that time are displayed here, my favorites are the ones below, by Russell Myers, the cartoonist who draws the comic strip “Broom Hilda.”  There were some great ones, inspired by the callous indifference of Sherman, the petty tax bureaucrat.

Cartoon by Cathy Guisewite, who drew the comic strip, "Cathy."

The cartoonists were disappointed to see Sherman move on to serve more than a decade in congress, but the story actually has a happy ending. Soon after Sherman left the BOE, the tax board voted to reverse their

Cartoon by Mort Walker, who draws the comic strip, "Beelte Bailey."

decision on Rhoda’s case. Then the California Supreme Court overturned Sherman’s regulations taxing the transfer of intangible reproduction rights to artwork. (Sherman had also cast the deciding vote against the tax appeal of artist, Heather Preston, who went on to overturn the regulations in the courts.)  California artists were saved from their tax purgatory, no thanks to Sherman.

And we’re left with a legacy of some great, Brad Sherman cartoons!

Cartoon by nationally syndicated editorial cartoonist and Mad Magazine artist, Monte Wolverton.

To start the discussion, here’s my new cartoon about the state of the race. It seems like Obama and Romney are all locked up. Will tonight’s debate change things?

Who do you think will win? Are you rooting for anyone? What do you hope they discuss? Will Biden say something crazy? Comment away below!

South African political cartoonist Jeremy Nell, whose cartoons I syndicate in our Cagle Cartoons package, was fired from his job at The New Age newspaper for being too political.

“The New Age‘s editorial stance became increasingly out of sync with mine,” Nell wrote on his blog. “This was particularly apparent when the current editor recently told me that he doesn’t “like cartoons [that make] political judgements or statements.” My satire can’t really function under such constraints.”

The move has been greeted with lots of outrage from observers that suspect the paper is editorially aligned with the President Jacob Zuma and ruling African National Congress, someone Nell (and other South African cartoonists) have been harshly critical of.

One noted Zumba critic, the great South African cartoonist Zapiro, drew a cartoon today in The Times in support of Nell. Zapiro famously draws Zuma with a showerhead coming out of his head, after the African President claimed taking a shower after having unprotected sex helped cut the risk of contracting HIV.

Its nice to see professional cartooning camaraderie in such a public venue.

Check our Adam’s terrific cartoons here.

I had the chance to sit down and interview Eric about his cartooning style and ideas, and I poked and prodded him about all those crazy conservative tropes he enjoys using in his cartoons, like labeling the media the MSM (I actually had to Google it to find out what it meant because I wasn’t living in the right-wing bubble):

To start the discussion, here’s a funny pre-debate cartoon by Nate Beeler of the Columbus Dispatch (check out all our cool Debate cartoons here).

Who do you think will win? Are you rooting for anyone? What do you hope they discuss? Will Biden say something crazy? Comment away below!

I was the official “editorial cartoonist” for Slate.com, msnbc.com and NBCNews.com.  Of-course, all of the cartoonists that work with us through our Cagle Cartoons syndicate and Politicalcartoons.com were featured on the MSN.com sites, including slide shows on news topics of the day on msnbc.com, the Today Show site and NBC Sports; we did a cartoon week in review and maintained a “CartoonBlog.”

Recently, msnbc.com changed ownership to be run by NBC, and NBC itself recently changed ownership.  It isn’t usual these days for cartoons to be cut to save costs, but we were cut for editorial reasons. The reason I was given for our departure was “the new management wants nothing to do with cartoons.” Msnbc.com/NBCNews.com has never had an opinion section, or other opinion content, so it is disappointing, but not entirely unexpected.

Readers of our Cagle.com site will see very few changes – the NBCNews.com logo is gone from our header and will be gone from my attribution in my future cartoons.  Our site will look the same as always; we’ll continue our syndication business as always at CagleCartoons.com and Politicalcartoons.com.

Our editors at MSN/Slate/msnbc/NBCNews were wonderful to work with all these years; I’ve appreciated their support for our cartoonists and our art form.  They loved what we did, let us do what we wanted and were happy with what we wanted to do – the perfect editors!  They were great.  I miss them already.

Tim O’Brien, the president of the Albany Newspaper Guild, has a nice blog post up about the lost of de Rosier’s cartooning job at the Times-Union, and its larger implications to a newspaper that just earned a Newspaper of Distinction Award from the Associated Press:

A distinctive art form is being steadily destroyed by people who look purely at revenue. It’s hard to say that an editorial cartoonist generates a certain amount of income for the newspaper, just as it is hard to say how much any single reporter or photographer does. But eliminating the cartoonist sends a message to readers: We are taking away something you value, something that makes your newspaper distinctive, something you cannot get anywhere else. We value your newspaper less, and you should too.

It’s a terrible message, and it comes at a price that may not be immediately apparent but will cost newspapers dearly in the long run.

“We know staff cuts can hurt our product,” wrote Times Union editor Rex Smith in an email to employees, “but we also know that we’re working smarter and more efficiently than we ever have before, and we recognize the promise of journalism in the digital age.

It’s a shame Smith doesn’t recognize the importance and promise political cartoons can offer to newspapers online in the digital age.

We have lots of European cartoonists that contribute to our site, so I thought I’d turn it over to them to get their thoughts about the EU winning the award…

Christo Komarnitski / Bulgaria (click to view more cartoons by Christo)

Martin Sutovec / Slovakia (click to view more cartoons by Sutovec)

Patrick Chappatte / International Herald Tribune (click to view more cartoons by Chappatte)

Joep Bertrams / The Netherlands (click to view more cartoons by Bertrams)

Frederick Deligne / France (click to view more cartoons by Deligne)

Meanwhile, as this terrific cartoon by Kap illustrates, some EU countries are doing better than others…

So just relax and catch up on a week’s worth of news with our Best Cartoons of the Week collection.

Joe Heller / Green Bay Press-Gazette (click to launch collection)

To start the discussion, here’s a funny pre-debate cartoon by The Hill’s Chris Weyant (don’t miss all our great Vice Presidential Debate Cartoons):

Who do you think will win? Are you rooting for anyone? What do you hope they discuss? Will Biden say something crazy? Comment away below!

RELATED: 2012 VP Debate Prep Cartoons 

As we await the start of tonight’s highly-anticipated Vice Presidential Debate between Joe Biden and Paul Ryan, here are five funny cartoons about the Vice Presidential Debate in 2008 between Biden and former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

John Cole / Scranton Times-Tribune (click to view more cartoons by Cole)

Nate Beeler / Columbus Dispatch (click to view more cartoons by Beeler)

Mike Keefe / PoliticalCartoons.com (click to view more cartoons by Keefe)

David Fitzsimmons / Arizona Daily Star (click to view more cartoons by Fitzsimmons)

Mike Keefe / PoliticalCartoons.com (click to view more cartoons by Keefe)

Bob Englehart / Hartford Courant (click to view more cartoons by Englehart)

Today, John de Rosier, the staff cartoonist at the Albany Times Union, was notified he was among the newspaper’s layoffs.  de Rosier has been the paper’s editorial cartoonist since 1999. A staff photographer was also laid-off.

“Currently, the Times Union is building a new press, so I think many employees were thinking that, although finances are tight – as they are with the entire industry, perhaps the worst was behind us, especially following a much larger layoff several years ago,” de Rosier said. “Now it’s time for new directions, and I really do see that for the huge opportunity that it is. I am confident that great things await.”

Interestingly, de Rosier enjoys metalworking, and has produced some impressive jewelry. Check out his Web site here.

Just last week, Syracuse Post-Standard editorial cartoonist Frank Cammuso found out he was among 115 employees who won’t have a job after January 31, when the paper adopts the three-times-a-week schedule other Newshouse papers have moved to in an attempt to lower costs and bolster their digital offerings.

“Unfortunately for political cartoonists, the writing has been on the wall for a while,” Cammuso said. “Luckily, I have been preparing for this day. I’ve been writing and drawing graphic novels for last ten years. It’s time now to do it full time.”

Check out Frank’s cartoons and his graphic novels at his terrific Web site.

We’ve had a lot of cartoons come in over the past week about Romney trying to kill Big Bird, so in order to prove not all cartoonists think alike, here are a handful of cartoons about the effort to defund PBS from our more conservative cartoonists. 

Eric Allie thinks President Obama might have the wrong priorities…

While Augusta Chronicle cartoonist Rick McKee thinks Big Bird’s argument might be mistimed…

Columbus Dispatch cartoonist Nate Beeler finds the one Muppet that doesn’t support the President…

Beeler also introduces us to this Christmas season’s hottest toy…

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review cartoonist Randy Bish thinks the argument boils down to simple math…

It’s a big 4th birthday for Bo! He’s getting some extra treats today. –mo

— Michelle Obama (@MichelleObama) October 9, 2012

Here are five cartoons from our archives about Bo, the Portuguese Water Dog that was a gift  from the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and wife Vicki. At the time, the Obama administration was caught up in a scandal of several staffers owing hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes, so you see that cropping up in a couple of the cartoons:

Daryl Cagle / NBCNews.com (click to view more cartoons by Cagle)

Jeff Parker / Florida Today (click to view more cartoons by Parker)

Joe Heller / Green Bay Press-Gazette (click to view more cartoons by Heller)

Jimmy Margulies / The Record (click to view more cartoons by Margulies)

Dave Granlund / PoliticalCartoons.com (click to view more cartoons by Granlund)

RELATED: View our Best of Biden cartoon collection

This means that unfortunately for Obama, he’s going to have to remove the tape from Joe’s mouth, like in this cartoon by Taylor Jones…

Arizona Daily Star cartoonist David Fitzsimmons thinks Biden might be able to take advantage of an inexperienced Paul Ryan…

At this point, Delaware cartoonist Rob Tornoe thinks Joe Biden is a wildcard…

While Augusta Chronicle cartoonist Rick McKee knows where Biden will be resting prior to the debate…

Minneapolis Star-Tribune cartoonist Steve Sack takes a quick peek into the mind of Joe Biden, Looks fun…

RELATED: More example of Cartoon Yahtzees

So when five or more cartoonists draw the same gag, we refer to it as a “Cartoon Yahtzee,” and as always, there is a basic rule of thumb to go by: if one other guy drew it, he’s a plagiarist; if five other guys drew it, they’re hacks; if a dozen other guys drew it, they are honoring a tradition.

John Darkow / Columbia Daily Tribune (click to view more cartoons by Darkow)

Gary Varvel / Indianapolis Star (click to view more cartoons by Varvel)

Michael Ramirez / Investors Business Daily (click to view more cartoons by Ramirez)

Bob Gorrell (click to view more cartoons by Gorrell)

The final cartoon isn’t a political cartoon per se – it comes from the cover of The New Yorker and is drawn by illustrator Barry Blitt. But as Blitt often uses ideas and concepts that stem from the world of political cartooning, it’s included here:

So just relax and catch up on a week’s worth of news with our Best Cartoons of the Week slideshow.

One of the most talked-about nuggets to come out of the debate was Romney’s renewed call to cut funding to PBS, despite the fact it only accounts for 0.012 percent of the budget (check out all our Defunding PBS cartoons). Here’s the cartoon I drew at the time Republicans proposed defunding PBS as a way to help balance the budget:

Rob Tornoe’s cartoon from last night also weighs in on the desire to give the budgetary axe to Sesame Street. Poor Big Bird:

Our conservative bomb-thrower Gary McCoy predicted how the so-called “mainstream media” would try to spin last night’s debate results:

While Mobile Press-Register cartoonist JD Crowe dug past the soundbytes to try and find the truth fact checkers seemed so desperate to uncover:

Speaking of fact checkers, Bob Englehart of the Hartford Courant figures with all the misstatments during last night’s debate, they’re about ready for the funny farm:

Meanwhile, Adam Zyglis of the Buffalo News reminds us what follows every presidential debate:

To start the discussion, here’s my pre-debate cartoon (don’t miss all our great Debate Cartoons):

Who do you think will win? Are you rooting for anyone? What do you hope they discuss? Comment away below!

The main thing most American’s notice when they arrive in India is the poverty. When I arrived in Mumbai and Delhi, the crowds of beggars were impressive, with newborn babies pressed against the windows of whatever car I was in as the desperately poor pushed through traffic on the streets. They followed me down the street wherever I walked in Mumbai and Delhi – but not in Kerala.

Probably the second biggest impression for me, and for most Americans in India is the crazy traffic. The disregard for traffic laws is awesome – combine with driving on the wrong side of the road there is a constant sense that my car is hurdling toward a head-on collision. India’s traffic is wonderful drama. I’m still shaking.

I gave speeches at schools all over India, and they all had a funny, common sequence of events. First, I would be invited for a cup of sweet tea with the Dean of the school or teachers, while a room crammed with students waited patiently until we were quite late for my talk. Then it would take ten to fifteen awkward minutes, after we’re already late, to set up the projector for my Powerpoint presentation.

After my presentation the students rush up to the front of the room, asking me to do sketches, which I’m usually happy to do. Sometimes I’d be given more tea, groups of girls would tell me about how they all knew my work already, because my cartoons appear in their high school textbooks in India (something I’d like to see). The college talks in India were great fun.

The food in India was wonderful – I think I was steered to the best places to eat, and the food was truly great. I can’t get used to eating with the fingers rather than a knife and fork, though.

I thought about eating with my fingers at a local favorite India restaurant here in California after I got back, just to show what I had learned, but my local manners got the better of me.

With the first big Presidential debate approaching between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, I thought it’d be fun to look back at this collection of cartoons about the Presidential debates in 2008 between Obama and Arizona Senator John McCain.

Click the image below to view the full collection of 2008 Debate cartoons!

I was inspired to draw this cartoon by President Obama’s recent television ad campaign in Pakistan, designed to quell the riots that seemed to be in response to a video that some nut posted on Youtube.  I thought the ad campaign was ridiculous, and Obama’s constant, never-ending re-affirmations of his respect for Islam are as tiresome as they are ineffective in making the Pakistanis love us more.  Considering the president as the source of the message and considering our cultural differences, this simply isn’t a message that will work with the Pakistani audience – that is the point of the cartoon.

It seems our readers’ comments focused more on my Obama-bashing, and the fact that I gave the president boobs.  Yes, Obama is indeed dressed inappropriately to be promoting Islam, again, that’s the point.  Our conservative cartoonist, Gary McCoy sent this comment:

“Intended or not, very interesting social science experiment, Daryl. You do a rare “conservative” cartoon, and though you get swarms of negative feedback, none of it contains the kind of hateful vitriol your usual left-leaning pals reserve for Eric Allie and me. Kudos for stepping out of your comfort zone though. Oh, and thanks for getting me hate-posts on a day when I didn’t even do a cartoon. I was feeling lonely there for a minute.”

The mail and the comments seemed pretty angry to me; here are some  examples …

Steven Dinero: Nope, doesnt work on so many levels. Sorry.

JaJa888: I thought Mr. Cagle was a liberal. I really hope that this is sarcasm, because otherwise the propaganda is getting to him…

Kevin Mystic-Rose Rosenthal: Pandering to the radical nut jobs. Is that your intent?

Cora Elizabeth Mason: I do not like it. It is insulting to the POTUS, not good at all, and why make him breasts?

Lissa Albert: Dems will hate it (as is evidenced here) and many will see the caustic humoreality of it. I happen to think this is brilliantly edgy!

Susan J Frary: I find it offensive. I also think it is not based on any facts, but on false perceptions. President Obama is working hard to develop peaceful relationships with many in the Middle East – failing to offend them is not easy. That is why it is called DIPLOMACY.

Rob McGrath: Not sure why his boobs are bigger than his ears.

Diane Hargreaves Talbot: You’d waste your chutzpah on this tripe? Really? Cagle? Who are you and what have you done with Daryl Cagle? Totally incendiary and inappropriate and wrong. Yuck.

Sue Hulett: Maybe you should go read his UN speech again. You seem to have misread it, or else you really are just an ass hat.

What do you think? Comment below, or drop us a line on our Facebook page.

If you tune into conservative media outlets, they’ll tell you the bad polling data is a liberal media plot to keep Republicans from voting…

Meanwhile, Romney is still on the hook for telling fundraisers he thinks nearly half the people in the country are “lazy” and feel “entitled” to government benefits, despite all the other taxes they pay…

Romney hasn’t convinced critics that his comments don’t represent his real opinions about the 47 percent. Instead, he tried to piggy-back on the outcry over an old video of Barack Obama talking about “redistribution” of wealth, but that only distracted voters for a short amount of time…

Unfortunately for Republicans, Romney’s personality is about as warm and inviting as plants that grow in the heat of the desert…

Mike Keefe decided to go after Apple Maps and the so-called “geniuses” that work at Apple…

If the NFL hadn’t made a deal with the referees, Ottawa Citizen cartoonist Cam Cardow had the soultion to get rid of those pesky replacement refs…

Columbus Dispatch cartoonist Nate Beeler remembered back to the time when Apple really did create innovative products…

While John Cole of the Scranton Times-Tribune just felt betrayed…

So just relax and catch up on a week’s worth of news with our Best Cartoons of the Week slideshow.

Chris Weyant / The Hill (click to launch slideshow)

Last week, my daughter Susie Cagle, a journalist and cartoonist, sat down with Cartoonist Rights Network International’s Executive Director, Robert Russell, to discuss how she was wrongfully arrested twice by Oakland, California police. In fact, a charge from her first arrest, failing to leave the scene of a riot, has never been dismissed by the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office.

Susie also talks about the state of media, and how paid reporters who have been laid off have been replaced by citizen journalists, individuals who are personally passionate about the topics they’re covering and documenting, which allows police and government officials to ignore their rights as journalists.

“The mayor of Oakland in February or March, called them fake journalists, fake media, and we need to figure out a way to separate them from the real journalists,” Susie said. “It really goes to show a deep misunderstanding of what’s happening in media right now.”

And here are some of Susie’s drawings. To see more, visit her Web site or follow her on twitter @susie_c.

See my hour-long seminar on Saturday, October 6th, at 10:00am in the conference room of the “center.”  On Friday, October 5th I’ll lead off a panel on depictions of presidents, translated into French, at 4:00pm in the same conference room.

My cartoon exhibition, featuring over 100 cartoons by myself and 18 more Cagle Cartoons cartoonists, drawing about the presidential election, is in the “lounge,” open from 9:00am to 7:00pm daily from Saturday September 29th through Sunday October 7th.

I’ve heard about St. Just for years, and this is my first time going.  Few American cartoonists go, but the international guys tell me they love it and the festival has gained quite a reputation.  The little town near Limoges just decided that they love editorial cartoons and would have a big cartoon festival every year for political cartoons.  They even built a big museum for editorial cartoons in the middle of a cow pasture.  Families from the small town put the visiting cartoonists up in their homes – the whole town really gets behing this thing.

It is hard to imagine anything like this ever happening in the USA.

My portrait by the brilliant Shri Shankar Parmarthy of the Sakshi newspaper in Hyderabad, India.

I was so rushed with the end of my India trip that I neglected to do a post about my visit to Hyderabad, the huge, hi-tech city in the middle of India.  The Hyderabad cartoonists were great, and I enjoyed drinking with them through the night in the backyard of the Press Club, where I had some particularly hot Biriyani that made me sweat and shake, to the amusement of my colleagues.  I especially enjoyed meeting renowned, veteran Hyderabad cartoonist, Mohan, who moved on from being a local, Telegu language political cartoonist for the huge Sakshi newspaper, to running his own animation studio.

The US Consulate put on a lovely show of my work in cooperation with the Muse Art Gallery at the Marriott Hotel in Hyderabad – they did a great job. I was impressed that they included my more edgy cartoons that would have gotten me thrown in jail, if America suffered the same, poor press freedoms as India.

I gave speeches at the Sri Venkateswara College of Fine Arts and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, and at each a bunch of girls ran up to me after my talk to tell me how they have known my work for years because my cartoons appeared in their high school textbooks, which was fun.

The controversial cartoon that was banned from india's textbooks, after a long debate in Parliament.

There has been a lot of talk in India recently about banning some cartoons from high school text books, in particular, this one (below right).

This textbook cartoon controversy was much more interesting to the Indian cartoonists that I met than the brouhaha about the jailing of Aseem Trivedi, which was raging at the time.  The cartoon was the subject of debate in the Indian Parliament, where it was described as racist, for showing former Indian Prime Minister Nehru, supposedly whipping Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, a lower caste politician who is riding a snail.  In fact, Nehru is not whipping Ambedkar – both Nehru and Ambedkar are whipping the snail, because they want the process of writing India’s new constitution to go faster.

In America we have idiots who fight to take evolution out of science text books all the time, so the idea that the Indian cartoonists were so invested in this debate, when one of their colleagues was thrown in jail for drawing their Parliament building as a toilet, seemed to be misplaced priorities to me.

I was very impressed by the colored pencil work of Shri Shankar Parmarthy, the staff cartoonist for the Sakshi newspaper, who did this great caricature of me standing in front of Hyderabad’s historic Charminar (top right).

I’ve posted Shankar’s brilliant Mother Teresa and Dalai Lama caricatures below. Impressive stuff.

Dalai Lama by Shri Shankar Parmarthy.

Mother Teresa by Shri Shankar Parmarthy.

I thought the classic phrase “the Emperor has no clothes” worked well visually for the point I was trying to convey, but it occurred to me afterwards that by drawing Romney naked, I omitted something important that is at the core of his beliefs – the religious “garments” he wears as underwear.

For Mormons, these temple “garments” are a special piece of clothing worn to represent a symbolic gesture of the promises they have made to God, and are seen as either a symbolic or literal source of protection from the evils of the world.

There’s a long tradition among editorial cartoonists of drawing politicians in their underwear, but not religious underwear like this. For instance, many cartoonists illustrated President Clinton’s sexual dalliances by drawing him with his pants around his ankles and wearing boxer shorts with a pattern of little hearts.

The same underwear treatment is given to serial adulterer politicians like Newt Gingrich, Arnold Schwarzenegger and too many members of congress to list. Even Batman and Superman wear their underwear on top of their tights. As an editorial cartoonist, I cherish my right to draw anyone I want in their underwear.

Here are a couple of cartoons I’ve drawn featuring Romney wearing his Mormon “garments.” I have gotten a bit of flack from readers about drawing the mysterious underwear on Romney, but not as much as I expected:

Charlie Hebdo editor Stephane Charbonnier, who publishes under the pen name “Charb.”

Sipa news agency is reporting that French police have detained a man who is suspected of threatening to decapitate Stéphane Charbonnier, the editor-in-chief and cartoonist of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, after publishing naked caricactures of the Prophet Muhammad.

According to the report, the 43-year-old man is suspected of making the threat on an Internet forum, allegedly writing, “The essential thing is not to let him live in peace.”

Speaking about the cartoons, White House spokesman Jay Carney said the Obama administration believed the cartoons “will be deeply offensive to many and have the potential to be inflammatory.”

“We don’t question the right of something like this to be published,” he said. “We just question the judgment behind the decision to publish it.”

Charbonnier, who goes by the pen name “Charb,” defended the cartoons to the AP in part by telling reporters that Muhammad isn’t sacred to him.

“I don’t blame Muslims for not laughing at our drawings,” he said. “I live under French law. I don’t live under Quranic law.”

He also said he doesn’t regret publishing the cartoons, nor does he take responsibility for any violence that may ensue.

“We’ve had 1,000 issues and only three problems, all after front pages about radical Islam.”

Watch the video from the AP here:

Previously: France Closes 20 Embassies Over Naked Muhammad Cartoons

Related: Cartoons about the reaction to drawings of the prophet Muhammad

So just relax and catch up on a week’s worth of news with our Best Cartoons of the Week slideshow.

Cam Cardow / Ottawa Citizen (click to launch slideshow)

Conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who got into trouble earlier this year for calling Georgetown Law Student Sandra Fluke a “slut” for her advocation of birth control, blamed the male “shrinkage” on a group he dubs the “feminazis.” (view all our Rush Limbaugh cartoons)

“I think it’s feminism,” he said. “If it’s tied to the last 50 years — the average size of [a male's] member is 10 percent smaller than 50 years — it has to be the feminazis, the chickification and everything else.”

According to our terrific caricaturist Taylor Jones (whose cartoons I syndicate in our Cagle Cartoons package), that “chickification” has effected Limbaugh too:

Stephane Charbonnier, the editor of Charlie Hebdo, says the cartoons were an attempt to poke fun at the furor over the anti-Muslim film causing protests throughout the Arab world, and will “shock those who will want to be shocked.”

According to the French newspaper Le Monde, one of the cartoons inside the magazine, entitled “Muhammad: a star is born,” depicts a bearded figure crouching over to display his buttocks and genitals.

The front-page of the magazine features a cartoon of an Orthodox Jew pushing a Muslim man in a wheelchair, who is saying, “You mustn’t mock us!” under the headline “Untouchable 2,” a reference to a popular French film about a paralyzed rich man and his black assistant.

NBCNews.com has reported that France is temporarily closing its embassies and schools in 20 countries, fearing a violent backlash from protestors over the cartoons. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said on France Info radio, “Is it relevant and intelligent in this environment to add fuel to the fire?”

Charlie Hebdo is available on news stands all over France and is a top publishing venue for many top, French gag cartoonists. “Hebdo” is French for “weekly” and “Charlie” is a reference to the iconic cartoon character, Charlie Brown.

Charlie Hebdo’s web site went down yesterday because of a hacker attack. Our own site at cagle.com went down for a time yesterday in response to an unusually sophisticated, denial of service attack.

Most American cartoonists have spent the past few days drawing about Mitt Romney, after a grainy video was released of the Republican Presidential candidate telling a group of fundraisers almost half of the country feel they are “entitled” to government benefits and “lazy.”

So I thought I’d share a handful of cartoons by foreign cartoonists weighing in on the growing protests and outrage in the Arab world:

Luojie / China Daily, PoliticalCartoons.com

Patrick Chappatte / International Herald Tribune, PoliticalCartoons.com

Emad Hajjaj / Jordan, PoliticalCartoons.com

Tom Janssen / The Netherlands, PoliticalCartoons.com

Pat Bagley of the Salt Lake Tribune evokes the etch-a-sketch in his cartoon about Romney’s flubs…

Rob Tornoe shows how Romney can do no wrong on Fox News, no matter what he says…

The Hill’s Chris Weyant sums up the only message Romney seems to be able to stick to…

Dave Granlund see’s the Romney campaign as just one pothole after another…

Tim Eagan goes a bit existential with his cartoon about Romney’s continued pandering…

C-SPAN aired a segment about the role editorial cartoonists play in journalism featuring syndicated cartoonist Mark Fiore and our very own John Cole, the staff cartoonist for the Scranton Times-Tribune (whom I syndicate via Cagle Cartoons).

 

So just relax and catch up on a week’s worth of news with our Best Cartoons of the Week slideshow.

Mike Keefe / PoliticalCartoons.com (click to launch slideshow)

Matson is one of the most prolific editorial cartoonists working today. In addition to his job with Roll Call, Matson was the daily staff cartoonist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for seven years, before being laid-off last month as part of a paper-wide cutback of employees to save money.

I interviewed Matson about being laid-off, and he shares my fear about the future of editorial cartoons, which are more popular than ever online and in syndication, but threatened by these continued job cuts.

“It’s such a difficult job to do well day after day, I don’t see how cartoonist can crank out stuff like that unless it’s a full-paid job treated with a lot of respect by the publisher,” Matson said.

“The cartoonist is essentially a columnist and a vital voice for the paper, and a vital voice for the community,” Matson continued. “People love to see events in their town reflected back in editorial cartoons… If newspapers give up on that, they’re giving up on their local scene.”

Here’s the interview:

Our cartoonists, despite kicking back in Washington D.C., preparing for this year’s Association of American Editorial Cartoonists’ (AAEC) Convention, have also put pen to paper in response to Romney’s highly-politicized remarks.

Arizona Daily Star cartoonist David Fitzsimmons doesn’t think Romney is ready for primetime:

Bill Day decided to draw Romney being hung by his own tongue:

Bob Englehart of the Hartford Courant drew Romney giving his press conference on the grave of the diplomats who lost their lives in the attack:

While Bill Schorr drew the Republican Presidential nominee leaving something behind in the cemetery:

That's me with famed Kerala cartoonist, Toms, and his character "Unni" kicking me in the groin. Ouch.

Kerala is wet, steamy, tropical and charming, with an extensive network of estuaries called the “backwaters.” While I was here there was a big trade show going on, which brought India’s Prime Minister to town and was an excuse for me to do some cartooning speaking engagements.  I had a lovely exhibition of my work here and I spent a sightseeing day with my new, Indian cartoonist buddies.

One highlight was meeting legendary Indian cartoonist “Toms,” who draws what I think Americans would describe as an Indian Dennis the Menace cartoon called Unnikkattan.  Toms is the elder statesman of the cartoonists here, and we celebrated the 25^th anniversary of “Unni.”

Here I am accepting a lovely portrait from talented young cartoonist Anjan Sathish.

I should give congratulations to three winners of the Kerala Cartoon Academy’s cartoon contest, Santhosh, Shiva and Ragesh – nice work!

Special thanks to my new friend, Sudheer Nath, the cartoonist for the Thejas newspapers, in Kerala’s Malayalam language; also Prasannan Anikkad, the freelance cartoonist chairman of the Kerala Art Academy and Unnikrishnan, the cartoonist for the Mathnubhumi newspaper – they all showed me a great time touring Kerala’s historic sights, and introducing me to the fascinating food here, which is served on big banana leaves, eaten with much drama with gooey fingers mushing things all about.

From left to right, Unnikrishnan, the cartoonist for the Mathnubhumi newspaper, me, Prasannan Anikkad, the Kerala Cartoon Academy Chairman, and Sudheer Nath, cartoonist for the Thejas newspapers.

Kerala has an outsized cartooning tradition, and the Kerala Cartoon Academy (KCA) is at its heart.  The KCA doesn’t exist as a school, rather it is a cartoonist professional organization that organizes events, like my visit here and the tribute to Mr. Toms.  They do “cartoon camps” for kids and publish books and magazines; I was very impressed with them.

I’m so rushed I haven’t had a chance to write about my visit to Hyderabad – that will come next.

Near the end of my visit we got the sad news of the murder of J. Christopher Stevens, the US Ambassador to Libya, who was a career foreign service officer, and a friend and colleague of the State Department people who were hosting me here. It was a grim reminder that the world outside of Kerala can be an ugly place, putting things into some perspective.  I’m impressed with the dedication of the State Department people I’ve met on my travels and I appreciate their service.

Trivedi's drawing shows India's Parliament building as a toilet, a commentary on corruption in India's government.

The Cartoonists Rights Network, a foundation associated with my professional organization, The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, is giving their Courage in Cartooning award to Trivedi this weekend at our convention in Washington DC.  I’ve been spending the past two weeks talking to the media in India, and early on I would get no interest or follow up questions about Trivedi – then when Trivedi went to jail it was all over the news, in banner headlines in all the newspapers and dominating TV news.  All of India was outraged at the ridiculous charges and injustice of putting a cartoonist in jail for drawing symbols of the state.

I heard and read a lot of outraged opinions on the case in the media here, and I don’t recall hearing anyone argue in favor of jailing Trivedi.  He got support from all corners of India, although I notice that nowhere in the media did I see anyone reprint or show the offending cartoons.

Also interesting was the motivation of journalists here to tell “both sides” of the story, but since nobody would speak in favor of jailing the cartoonist, the “other side” came out as derision, describing Trivedi as a “bad cartoonist,” and the cartoons as “terrible,” although “nothing that should land the cartoonist in jail.”  I think that attitude is just plain rude.  Trivedi isn’t a bad cartoonist – as regular readers of our site can see, his cartoons hold up pretty well to cartoons by other foreign cartoonists, and cartoonists from India.  I think he’s a good cartoonist, and he deserves some respect for his artwork.

This image, a parody of India's national seal, was the cartoon described most often in the media here.

Trivedi also deserves some admiration for the way he handled himself through this media storm.  He refused to accept bail for days, keeping the story alive and in the headlines.  He’s been appearing all over the media since his release, giving interviews and making intolerant authorities here look silly.  I think he’ll have a strong impact on moving India to a more free press.

There is a general rule that editorial cartoons are a barometer of freedom in any country – if cartoonists can draw the president of their country then the country has a free press.  We don’t see Chinese cartoonists drawing their president; Fidel Castro is never drawn by cartoonists in Cuba.  Our cartoonists in Singapore tell me that they are free to draw anything, as long as it isn’t about Singapore.

In India there is a mixed message on the cartoonist barometer.  The press savages the Prime Minister, who is regularly lampooned in cartoons, but drawings of the President of India, who has a less substantive, ceremonial role, are barred.  Cartoonists are forbidden by law from offending religious sensibilities – and Trivedi did well to limit his cartoons to symbols of the state, so that religious issues never came into the argument.  Cartoonists in India are forbidden from drawing symbols of the state, without first getting permission from the state – that may change soon, because of Trivedi, and it is an important change.  It is the role of editorial cartoonists to criticize government, and symbols of government (flags, seals, currency, government buildings like India’s Parliament building) are the prime tools in every editorial cartoonist’s tool chest.

This offending Trivedi cartoon shows "Corruption" about to rape "Mother India." Trivedi's "seditious" cartoons all used symbols of state in commentary about government corruption.

If I couldn’t draw symbols of governments, and I was barred from offending religious sensibilities, there wouldn’t be much of substance left for me to draw.

Trivedi has done an excellent job of making his point against government corruption in India and against the absurd restrictions against cartoonists in India.  He’s an excellent artist too, and at the young age of 24 he’s now India’s star cartoonist.  All in all, a great result for a talented, media savvy, young activist.

Adam Zyglis, the cartoonist for the Buffalo News, thinks expectiations are high for the Bills this season:

The Bills are playing the New York Jets today, and boy, those Bills fans just hate Tim Tebow:

Rob Tornoe, who draws sports cartoons for the Philadelphia Inquirer, weighs in on the replacement referees in charge of today’s Eagles opener:

Their quarterback, the infamous Michael Vick, is injury-prone, but one of his sponsers guarenteed he would be hurt as long as he was wearing their protective flak jacket. I’m sure that will end well:

Joe Heller, cartoonist for the Green Bay Press-Gazette, draws about the overwhelmingly-high expectations of Packers’ fans this season:

Meanwhile, New Englander Dave Granlund thinks as long as Tom Brady remains :