Cagle World

Here’s Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman slapping Uncle Sam around a bit, with the dismembered gauntlet/hand of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. It looks like Uncle Sam is just going to turn the other cheek.

While I was working on this one, I read news reports that Turkey’s secret recording of the alleged murder include the sounds of Saudi agents cutting off all of Khashoggi’s fingers, while he was still alive, during his “interrogation.” That left me in cartoonist conundrum – should I draw the slapping hand with all the fingers removed? That would be hard to read, and most people wouldn’t know the story about Khashoggi’s fingers reportedly being chopped off. I went with the fingers still attached – after all, “we need to wait for the Saudi’s to conclude their investigation.”

Those Saudi royals make life tough for cartoonists too.

Every year a big group of cartoonists from our syndicate meet up in France with cartoonists from around the world.

This year 23 CagleCartoonists were there. The “Salon” at St. Just le Martel has become a Cagle convention as we meet with the French cartoonists at their “National Assembly.” There is a great atmosphere as the townsfolk all turn out to support the editorial cartoonists at their very impressive, municipal cartoon museum. We did an exhibition about “guns.”

Here are a few pics of the cartoonists. The first is a group shot of the CagleCartoonists who happened to be there on the last day. That’s me in from, with festival president/founder Gerard Vandenbroucke. There are 19 CagleCartoonists in the photo, which were all we could round up at the moment. A nice French lady who is a courtroom artist wandered into the photo by mistake, so I replaced her head with the head of Angel Boligan, who should have been there but was confused, in the other room. Trying to get cartoonists to do anything together requires mastery in cat herding.

Above, from left to right: Tom Janssen (Holland), Jos Collignon (Holland), Jeff Koterba (USA), Pierre Ballouhey (who is also the president of the French cartoonists association), Gary McCoy (USA), Gatis Sluka (Latvia), Emad Hajjaj (Jordan), Joep Bertrams (Holland), Rick McKee (USA), Bruce Plante (USA), Cristina Sampaio (Portugal), Osama Hajjaj (Jordan), Ed Wexler (USA), Nate Beeler (USA), the head of Angel Boligan (Mexico), pasted on top of a lady who wandered into the photo, Pat Bagley (USA), Brian Adcock (Britain), and Christo Komarnitsky (Bulgaria).

Above, a group of us are having dinner on the first night, taken by a waiter who was rather challenged by the very difficult idea of getting everyone’s face in the photo. That’s me on the left, brave Russian cartoonist Sergey Elkin, who is blocking the face of his wife Tatiana, then there’s Sergei’s son, Toni and Ed Wexler, Nate Beeler and 1/3 of Bruce Plante’s face.

Above, a bunch of us are having dinner at Chez Denise on our last night there – from left to right, Jeff Koterba and his girlfriend Christine, me wearing my son’s band’s t-shirt, Ed Wexler, our waiter/cartoonist/host Noder (Cyril Redon), Cristina Sampaio, Toni Wexler (Ed’s wife) Nate Beeler, brilliant French cartoonist Jackie Redon (Noder’s father and name spelled backwards), and Yves Frémion who publishes the cartoon journal on the table under Jeff’s phone. The restaurant is great, and festooned with 1970’s illustration art like I grew up with in college.

Funny how so much of the internet is devoted to picture of people eating.

The pic above is the room where the Paris City Council meets, in the Paris City Hall – it is the “Tignous Room” named after the famed, late, beloved Charlie Hebdo cartoonist, Tignous, whose cartoons adorn the walls. I can’t imagine a City Council doing something like that in the USA. We had a cocktail party there.

 

The pic above is a panorama photo from my seat at the Cartooning Global Forum at UNESCO in Paris – this shows about a third of the 100 people there. It is very difficult to get cartoonists to agree on what issues face us, even as print is dying for all of us and our colleagues are brutalized around the world. Also, the USA pulled out of UNESCO. Any talk about cartooning issues is a good thing and it looks like this conference will be an annual event. That’s good.

Below are a couple more from the Cartooning Global Forum at UNESCO, from Nicolas Jacquette, one of the tireless, heroic organizers …

And another from Jacquette and his “Studio Irresistible” (with brilliant co-organizer Jerome Leninger) … I’m hidden in this one.

Below are 7 Cagle Cartoonists at an exhibition opening in Limoges, from left to right, Nate Beeler, Me, in the background, the tiny head of Jean-Michel Delambre (the French cartoonist who won the cow/grand prize at St Just this year), Rick McKee, Gary McCoy, Jeff Koterba, Pat Bagley and Emad Hajjaj.

Regrettably, the tradition of a live cow for the grand cow winner in St Just has come to an end. Last year, when Angel Boligan won the cow, the cow went a little “vaca loco” and charged away from its handler, a kid who broke his finger handling the wild cow leash. This year there was a much better behaved inflatable cow for Jean-Michel Delambre.

In the pic below, a bunch of us are drinking at 1:00am in a cafe in Paris. From left to right are Jeff Koterba, the two wives of Tom Janssen and Jos Colignon (Els and Irma), Bruce Plante, Pat Bagley and his lovely girlfriend Kate, Gary McCoy, Ed Wexler, Rick McKee, Christo Komarnitsky, Jos Collignon, a tiny face of Toni, Ed’s wife, me, Gatis Sluka leaning back, Tom Janssen, Jeff’s girlfriend Christine and Nate Beeler. It looks like our waitress is in the back room, throwing up, or “boofing” as Justice Kavanaugh would say.

In the pic below are Cagle Cartoonists Cristina Sampaio (Portugal), Chris Weyant (New Jersey) and Neils Bo Bojesen (Denmark) in the St Just parking lot next to the giant lunch/dinner tent where big, heavy construction vehicles are parked, to prevent a terrorist from driving a truck into the dinner tent. Editorial cartoonists are always under threat, and always hungry.

Here’s a group of cartoonists in a pic from the St Just Salon folks …

I must thank the inspired volunteers for the Salon at St Just le Martel, and the heroic volunteers who put together the Cartooning Global Forum, which I hope to see continue as an annual event!

 

Here’s president Trump shaking hands with Saudi Crown Prince bin Salman, who has blood on his hands for allegedly ordering the murder and dismemberment of Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi. Trump has been quite chummy with Saudi Arabia which seems to be a house of horrors, accounting for most of the 9/11 killers, and a long history of human rights abuses and recent ugly overkill in Yemen.

I like the idea of the black and white image with only the blood in red. Look familiar? I did much the same thing with Trump and Kim Jong Un.

As Trump continues to cozy up to murderous dictators, maybe I’ll make this into a series.

I was riveted to my TV all day yesterday. I thought Christine Blasie Ford and Kavanaugh were both believable. It is interesting that so many people talk about how this is a “he said, she said” thing, with no proof, using arguments that relate to trials and criminal proceedings. Of-course, this is a job interview, and courtroom arguments about proof and procedure are not a part of job interviews. Clearly Kavanaugh won’t be a choice that will reflect well on the institution of the Supreme Court, that’s enough reason to choose another eager candidate. Whether it is fair to Kavanaugh or not, that’s what my cartoon is about; I’m illustrating the notion that Kavanaugh doesn’t reflect well on the Supreme Court.

Kavanaugh isn’t my first caveman. In fact, cavemen are a popular cliché for editorial cartoonists and I’ve drawn my share. Here’s an old Putin caveman from when Russia invaded Crimea.

This old caveman cartoon was from when George W. Bush appointed John Bolton to be the United Nations ambassador. Funny how characters like Bolton never go away. Somehow I think I’ll be drawing lots more cavemen – there are plenty of them in Washington.

Last weekend I was at the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists convention in Sacramento. I’ve been going to this for more than 20 years and it is nice to see old cartoonist buddies. This first pic is five of us having lunch in a pie shop. From left, that’s Tim Eagan, Pedro Molina, Kevin Siers, the New Zealand Herald’s Rod Emmerson and me. Mmm. Pie.

Pedro is in a dangerous spot in Nicaragua, where government goons are attacking civilians under the direction of strongman Daniel Ortega. He won the CRNI Courage in Cartooning Award this year, given to him by cartoonist Zunar from Malaysia, who is quite a hero himself, having recently faced years in prison as the regime cracked down on him, Zunar’s case was thrown out as the regime changed. Not all of the cartooning news is bad news.

Here’s my Canadian cartoonist buddy, Graema MacKay of the Hamilton Spectator winning awards from the leader of the of our cartoonist buddies to the North, and my new buddy, Wes Tyrell.

Here is the talented Charis Jackson Barrios who won the John Locher Memorial Award as the outstanding college editorial cartoonist of the year.

Congratulations and good times to all!

The Republicans seem to be tone deaf about how they sound when they dismiss women’s sexual assault claims. “Tone deaf” and how things “sound” don’t translate well into editorial cartoons, which are all about how things look, so I thought the GOP elephants groping the justice statue character made the same point visually.

The descriptions of Kavanaugh’s alleged high school and college offenses have been pretty graphic, but the bar for how graphic a cartoonist can go in editorial cartoons in America is not set very low, so I’ll be interested to see if newspapers will print cartoon elephants grabbing Justice’s boobies. I’ll know soon!

Last week I got back from “The Line of Fire” conference in Mexico City, an editorial cartooning event put on by CartónClub. We’re hoping this will be the first of many annual conferences that CartónClub will be hosting. I’d like to see them succeed – we need more events like this around the world.

Cagle Cartoons was a co-sponsor of the event and there was a great group of Cagle Cartoonists there, including me, Mike Keefe, Monte Wolverton, Gary McCoy, Rick McKee, David Fitzsimmons, Emad Hajjaj, Osama Hajjaj, Arcadio Esquivel, Rayma Suprani and Nerilicon. My buddy, Bizarro cartoonist Dan Piraro also came. CartónClub’s founder, Angel Boligan and their president, Dario Castillejos are Cagle Cartoonists too.

The event was also co-sponsored by Cartooning for Peace (CFP), which works in Mexico and Canada under the terms of their grant from the EU that funds the organization (notably, the grant excludes the USA). CFP does programs about editorial cartoons in schools and prisons around the world and trains participating cartoonists in how to give these presentations in workshops; they pay an honorarium to the participating cartoonists to keep them going, and giving more lectures. It is a nice program, and the days in Mexico City were filled with these training workshops that didn’t really involve our Cagle Cartoons delegation, so we spent a lot of time as tourists.

I got the chance to talk to representatives of the EU who support Cartooning for Peace at the conference; it was great to hear how they appreciate our art form – I can’t imagine any editorial cartooning programs like these happening through the United States government.

There was a nice exhibition at the El Universal newspaper lobby called “La Linea de Fuego” (The Line of Fire) where a bullet passed through every cartoon, creating some havoc that had something to do with press freedom. That’s my Statue of Liberty entry in the exhibition above.

Here are a couple of photos from our trip. Thanks again to everyone involved!

Here’s another group pix with even more cartoonists, at the La Linea de Fuego exhibition …

Want to see more pix? Take a look at my new Instagram feed @daryl.cagle  I’m just starting Instagram and I don’t know what I’m doing there yet! You can also see more on my Facebook page.

Our Cagle Cartoonist David Fitzsimmons wrote a piece about the trip here.

I realize this cartoon is a bit ambiguous. Perhaps Trump is wrestling with China. Maybe Trump is “facing off” with China. Maybe there is something sexy going on with China that we can’t quite see. It is hard to tell. I went with “dance.” The USA will soon be adding another $250,000,000,000+ of tariffs to Chinese imports, which will move China to retaliate in other ways.

I draw lots of Trump-critical cartoons, but this one isn’t one of them. I think Trump’s approach to China is long overdue. I even posted this one as a “Trump Friendly” cartoon on our CagleCartoons.com newspaper syndication site – although, that is probably ambiguous too.

I’ve drawn Trump and a Chinese dragon before.

Dragons don’t have to represent China, although the chinese style dragons are more fun to draw. Here’s the dragon cartoon I drew the day after the election, when Trump defeated Hillary.

I tell our cartoonists that if they draw urine in a cartoon, that editors won’t want to print it. Here I am, not following my own advice. I’m probably also inviting some angry mail.

I don’t think Trump shed any tears over McCain’s passing.

I didn’t agree with his politics, but McCain was an interesting and likable character and I usually drew him as a foil, suffering from events around him. McCain certainly suffered from his poor choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate. Palin, a hockey mom, made a joke describing the “difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull,” the difference was “lipstick.”

Obama picked up on Palin’s joke, and dissed McCain’s “change” mantra, calling it “lipstick on a pig.” We had weeks of lipstick cartoons, like mine …

The big thing I didn’t like about McCain was that he was a hawk, in favor of jumping into every conflict in the world. I remember him singing “Bomb Bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann.”  Obama warned Syria’s Assad that using chemical weapons was a  “Red Line”; when Obama didn’t attack Assad after the chemical weapons use red line was crossed, McCain fumed.

A big presidential debate was held on national TV at “Ole Miss,” the University of Mississippi; the university hired me to do art for the debate, for their program, posters and visual theme for the event. Here’s what I drew. It was fun to be a small part of this debate. (The art fades out at the top because that’s where the title graphics went.)

Palin liked to accuse Obama of “palling around with a terrorist,” at every opportunity. During the campaign in 2008, the economy crashed and we went into the worst recession ever as financial institutions failed around the world and threatened a second depression. Obama’s running mate, Joe Biden, described my cartoon below in great detail in multiple interviews for a news cycle, and Biden’s comments were spread all over the media. The economy suffered, but at least my cartoon had a good day.

McCain put Obama down for the fact that celebrities liked Obama, who had the support of Hollywood and rock stars and acted like a popular celebrity himself. the Republican base didn’t like Hollywood liberals, and didn’t like that Obama was perceived to be exciting while McCain was seen as dull. The cartoon below doesn’t make much sense now, but at the time Britney Spears had just shaved her head and was caught by a photographer getting into a car while wearing no underwear.

That sounds complicated now, but back then it was simple math.

I’ll miss John McCain.

 

 

Most cartoonists take the weekend off – but a bunch of Cagle Cartoonist went to work on Saturday night to draw memorial John McCain cartoons.

Here are my favorites that came in first …

By Ed Wexler

 

 

By David Fitzsimmons

 

by Sean Delonas

By David Fitzsimmons

 

By Taylor Jones

By Bob Englehart

By Dave Granlund