Barack Obama turned fifty on August 4. I guess the most common reaction to this piece of information is something like “Well.. good for him.” Or that’s what I was thinking, anyway. Still, it made me look up the Obama cartoons on toonpool.com (full list here). While doing so I noticed, that Mr. Obama rose to global fame about the same time that our site went online and has, in a way, accompanied us ever since

The first Obama cartoon was posted on January 9, 2008, not quite two months after toonpool.com was opened to the public. I have to admit that I’m not really sure about this particular cartoon’s meaning. Still, browsing through over 1700 Obama cartoons brings up a few memories and gives some insight into the way in which editorial cartoons and caricatures develop. If you would like to take a look into three years of political cartoons, here’s a rough timeline. [Unfortunately, the links in the titles are not permanent - things will change as soon as new Obama cartoons are added, but everything should be fine for couple of days]

Phase One : Democratic Primaries (~Januar-June 2008) [Wikipedia]

A lot of fierce battles between Obama and Clinton here. I really liked the Monty Python cartoon. Some apparently thought that McCain would profit from this.

Phase Two : Obama VS McCain (~June-October 2008) [Wikipedia]

A lot of cartoons about everyone idolizing Obama here. This was also the time when he traveled to Berlin. And the time Sarah Palin showed up. On a sidenote: I remembered people talking about Obama walking on water.. but John McCain?!

Phase Three: Winning the Elections (November 2008) [Wikipedia]

Boy, were cartoonists enthusiastic about this. By January, a couple of  people began to get tired of it, though.

Phase Four: Obamacare (~August 2009- March 2010) [Wikipedia]

We have cartoons about its unsuspected difficulties, its cost, and – of course – about  “death panels” (in case you forgot about those: more Wikipedia).

Phase Five: The Nobel Peace Prize (October – December 2009) [Wikipedia]

That one was a bit weird.

Phase Six: Nuclear Disarmament (April 2010) [Wikipedia]

There weren’t too many bad things people had to say about New START.

Phase Seven: The BP Spill (April-July 2010) [Wikipedia]

The “walking-on-water” thing was used a couple of times here. By the way.. does anyone know what things are like on the Gulf Coast?

Phase Eight: Midterm Elections (November 2010) [Wikipedia]

People who hadn’t heard about the Tea Party movement definitely did after November 2.

Phase Nine: Osama Bin Laden (May 2011) [Wikipedia]

If we have learned one thing from this, it’s that “Obama” sounds almost like “Osama”.

Phase Ten: The Debt Ceiling (~July-August 2010) [Wikipedia]

It was a wild ride, but we are safe now, right?

Paul Hellmich (Twitter)

title image by Tjeerd Royaards

“Turkey Types” By Kamil Yavuz

Kamil Yavuz from Istanbul has created a series of photomontage caricatures of Turkish politicians. I can’t really tell if they resemble their subjects because he didn’t provide any names and because I am far from familiar with Turkish politics.

Still, these portraits look amazing – the different textures and perspectives and the blown-up details work together perfectly. Please also note the animal familiars assigned to each politician (the guy to the left has bees) If anyone knows what this is about, please drop me a line.

“Hundsgemein” by Andreas Prüstel

I have to admit that Mr. Prüstel is my favourite collage artist on toonpool.com. I guess it’s a mixture of his humor (by the way: the caption reads “Bite!”) and the retro feel of the collages.

The photos Prüstel uses are usually dated and slightly yellowed – if they are in color at all. Following the aesthetics of the Dada artists, these cartoons do not try to create an illusion of (sur-)reality but emphasize the incongruency of the elements pasted together. They would work great in a Terry-Gilliam-style animation.

“Music Has No Age” by LuciD

Romanian artist LuciD has a very different approach. The elements of his digital collages are  blended together perfectly. Just look at the way he added the Ovation double-neck to Caravaggio’s Lute Player. I bet she is playing “Stairway to Heaven” and annoying the hell out of the store owner.

As with many of LuciD’s works, I wonder where he took the photos from. From my own experience I know that finding stock photos in the right angles takes a lot of time. So perhaps he takes the photos himself. Which may also take a lot of time.

“Modern Times” by Prinzparadox

Creating this collage, on the other hand, didn’t take too long. The artist added a single word. But the minimalism makes the whole thing work. There is more here than the contrast between age groups and the questionable comedic value of totally radical senior citizens.

Please note that he book she is reading is not a book about Eminem (like, for example, as “The Way I Am” by Eminem). It’s Eminem, the book. Or the Book of Eminem. This is serious business.

“Let’s Dance!” by Willem Rasing

Not much to say here, really. It’s a chicken with prosthetic legs and it’s about to shake them. This has been proven to be funny as early as 1986.

It’s the grotesque jusxtaposition that does it. On one hand the plucked cadaver looks awkward and vulnerable, like naked people. People dancing in the nude are funny. Things dangling, and all. On the other hand it is a cadaver – dead meat (OK… poultry). And those legs.. they are meant for mutilated people. With stumps. Probably victims of land-mines, punji sticks or thalidomide. Being reminded of mortality and the fragility of our bodily integrity gives pretty much everyone the creeps.

Paul Hellmich

PS: click here for a collection of photomontages , and here to see all cartoons marked as “collage” (some mislabeled images)

PPS: You can now follow me on Twitter

The EHEC epidemic that has befallen Germany about a week ago has spurned a surprisingly large number of cartoons. Admittedly, the infection has had some grave consequences. As of Thursday 4:30 PM, 17 people have died, about 2000 cases have been reported in Germany. While this is certainly  a topic worth commenting on (we had similar cartoon peaks with both swine & bird flu), I think there’s another reason for the great amount of cartoons. Looking at last week’s colibacteriatoons, you will notice that majority of them concentrates on the (false) allegations that Spanish cucumbers caused the deadly epidemic.

Cucumbers, it turns out, are an intrinsically funny type of vegetable. One could try to explain this with their utterly harmless watery blandness or their closeness in shape to bananas – yet another intrinsically funny fruit. But I think we should face the truth: Cucumbers are funny because they are shaped like male genitalia. They subconsciously (or very consciously at times) speak to the adolescent in us, the part of us that likes to giggle, point and whisper: “Look, it has the exact shape of a ..”. There are whole websites dedicated to this tendency. Now don’t ask me why we think that penii are hillarious. It’s probably some act of carnivalesque defiance to phallocentric culture or an affirmation thereof.  I am sure there is more than one book on this topic. Bottom line is: Cucumbers are funny. Too bad, that they are off the hook now. Let’s wait and see what vegetable options the next days will bring.

Here are five cartoons about EHEC, that I thought were interesting:

Harm Bengen, Ulm

This was one of the first EHEC cartoons on toonpool.com. We didn’t know about Spanish cucumbers back then. The vegetables in question look like carrots and broccoli and those are definitely not as funny as cucumbers

Since we are pretty much back were we started in terms of information about the causes of the epidemic – apart from it being some creepy mutated version of Escherichia coli – newspapers could start using this cartoon again.

Tobias Wieland, Hamburg

Tobias Wieland has a lot of experience in creating anthropomorphic versions of .. well .. things (e.g. here). So, naturally, he succeeds with his grim cucumbereaper.

It has the green fires flaring deep inside his eyes, the inexplicable scythe (how is he going to swing it?), it is of undetermined height – both original and man-size would be ridiculous – and, most of all it has the exact shape of a..

Munguia (Costa Rica)

Francisco Munguia is not the only one who came up with the idea of weaponized cucumbers (here & here) but I like his green terrorist for the maniacal laughter and the alarming red background.

The one good thing about food scandals is that they don’t create the permanent background fear actual terrorism does. They also  tend to be suppressed pretty quickly. Or do you know anyone still seriously scared of BSE?

Hayati Boyacioglu, Berlin

Hayati came up with a character named “Mr. Cucumber”, a major suspect in the EHEC case. This one works great with the following cartoon by Matiello.

There is something decidedly sketchy about this Mr. C. People in yellow jackets just aren’t to be trusted. He is probably a used car salesman or a 1990s TV presenter who lives somewhere near Bielefeld.

Ernst Mattiello (Switzerland)

Mattiello combines Tuesday’s acquittal of Swiss TV presenter Jörg Kachelmann with the Spanish cucumber’s acquittal on the same day.

I guess that the judges in the cucumber case didn’t have as many doubts as with Kachelmann. The search for the real culprit will continue. Still I am sure that eventually justice will be done.

Paul Hellmich

Click here to see all current EHECartoons on toonpool.com.

title illustration by Tchavdar

Vahe (Armenia)

In this cartoon, Vahe comments on the inconsistencies in the first accounts of Operation Neptune Spear (AKA Operation Geronimo). In the first few days, stories about the killing changed almost hourly – he was armed / wasnt armed, used his wife as a human shield / didn’t use her as a human shield, etc.

While the cartoon is pretty crudely drawn, Vahe did a great job with Bin Laden. The fierce glare , the briefs and the little movement lines really make the whole thing work.

Yasar Kemal Turan (Turkey)

Yasar Turan’s cartoon points out another weird part of the operation. Why would you follow military operations on video if you can’t influence what’s going on? Does that just prove that you are important enough to see these things or is it meant to form a special bond between you and the people you represent?

I also believe that the artist has a point in making the connection to entertainment. We have watched too many films, TV shows and Youtube flicks to fully accept things happening on screens as reality.

Badham (Germany)

German artist Badham makes fun of the formulaic and inevitable video messages of Al-Qaeda and the like.

In addition to that, it hints to the fact that Jihadis will most likely continue Jihad because that’s, like, their thing. Or, perhaps more accurately, because none of the circumstances that made them want to fight in a Holy War in the first place have been altered with Bin Laden’s death.

[The original cartoons is in German. Sorry for messing with your cartoons]

Garrincha (USA)

As an American, Gustavo “Garrincha” Rodriguez probably has less of an emotional distance to the fact that America’s Public Enemy Number 1 has finally been gotten. The cynicism present in the the German cartoon above is not only missing from this cartoon but from most American TV shows, newspaper stories, etc.

Please note that Uncle Sam put on his special shiny crotch-kicking boot for the occasion.

Beto (Brazil)

Like several other artists, Beto makes the point that terrorism is far from dead and that the execution of Bin Laden could actually create new terrorism. Looking at the cartoon I have to say that the tiny Bin Ladens are actually pretty cute. Just imagine their high-pitched war cries. They will probably grow very fast, though. Then we will have to abandon them somewhere on the side of the highway.

[Please note that I had to edit this cartoon to make it fit the layout of this page. Click to see the original configuration]

No (France)

I have very mixed feelings about cartoons like this one. Showing Bin Laden’s insignia being swiped off the earth like dust or dirt makes me feel uncomfortable. On one hand it’s my German background that sets off alarm bells when the concept of “cleansing” is used in a figurative sense. On the other hand I think that statements like this one are too simple to make for good cartoons.

On a third hand very specific to this cartoon I think that it is a bit weird to use an impersonal, probably divine broom as a metaphor for a US Navy Seals operation.

Tchavdar (Bulgaria)

There are a number of cartoons that use the World Trade Center to comment on Bin Laden’s death (here is one that uses a very similar gag).

You can simply read them as “An Eye For An Eye” or a kind of Karmic Death fantasy. But some of them, and particularly the one to the left, end up comparing the killing of Bin Laden with a terrorist act like the 9/11. Which, intentional or not, is a very, very problematic thing to do. Still, this is nicely draw. And it has Jack Elam guest starring as Al Quaeda.

Hezz (Finland)

Quite a few cartoons imagine Osama bin Laden in the afterlife – either a fire-and-brimstone version of Hell or fluffy cloud Heaven. These cartoons very often employ Schadenfreude and more often than not mention the virgins allegedly promised to Islamist martyrs.

This one is my favorite because its utter absurdity makes up for the simple morale of a bad guy getting what he deserves. Of course Finnish artist Hezz has long years of experience with very weird Bin Laden cartoons (e.g. this one).

Lloyy (Spain)

This cartoon falls into the “Evil Bin Laden” caricature category. I thought that it was pretty unsettling – is it some kind of corpse portrait? In fact there are several cartoons that show Osama Bin Laden’s dead body – sometimes even his severed head in some kind of medieval display of power à la “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia”. This one at least doesn’t have any blood.

On a sidenote: What’s with the shark? It’s probably meant to say that both are dangerous predators.. but that fish is tiny.

Caminante (El Salvador)

Caminante’s portrait of smiling Bin Laden got several bad ratings. I actually liked it for its goofiness – there are very few caricatures that approach him that way. I am not sure if it got the bad ratings for the simplistic style – in fact it resembles him more than some caricatures that got better ratings.

Another explanation would be that it was his goofiness and his smile. Maybe there shouldn’t be anything goofy or smiley about a guy who caused the death of thousands of people. In the end it could also have been the sickish green background color.

These ten cartoons should give you an idea about the topics in international Osama bin Laden cartoons. You can find most of the Bin Laden cartoons on toonpool.com here. You can find some additional cartoons if you search for alternative spellings like “Usama” or “Ben Laden”.

title image by Bacsa

Paul Hellmich

In this section I try to try to explain cartoons that require very specific knowledge about a certain country’s politics and culture.  If you have any editorial cartoons that you would like me to figure out, just send me an email.

For the third installment I picked a cartoon by Canadian artist Graeme MacKay. It is called “Elephant and Mouse”.

Who are these people?

The elephant represents the United States of America, sole remaining superpower and birthplace of the Ziploc Bag. The image is not related to United Statesian uses of elephants as a symbol for the Republican Party.

The mouse reprents Canada, the United States’ neighbor to the north. Covering an area of 9,984,670 square kilometers Canada is actually  the larger of the two nations. Its population, on the other hand, is only about an ninth of the United States population.

Sir Not-appearing-in-this-cartoon: This is Pierre Elliott Trudeau (1919-2000), Canadian Prime Minister between 1968 and 1969 and once again between1980 and 1984. Trudeau was a member of the Liberal Party.

What’s the point?

The cartoon’s iconography refers to a statement made by Mr. Trudeau in 1969 . The Prime Minister told the Washington Press Club :

“Living next to [the United States] is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”

This image has become a common-place analogy for US-Canadian relations, which may seem a bit neurotic from an outside position. While Canadians tend to emphasize that they are different from the US, at the same time they are somewhat obsessed about the doings of their neighbor. Much to their dismay, the other Americans are usually quite ignorant about what Homer Simpson once called “America Jr.”.

The cartoon was originally published on November 30, 2010 , just after the first diplomatic cables had been published on WikiLeaks. Back then, the  United States were frantically trying to keep the damage from the publication under control. MacKay parodies the Canadian media’s excitement about Canada being mentioned in the cables. As with most Western countries, the revelations in the cables from Ottawa contained common knowlege rather than the kind of information US diplomats were worrying about.

The 2009 cable quoted in the cartoon – apparently the most offending one -  stated that:

“[Barack Obama's] decision to make Ottawa [his] first foreign destination as President will do much to diminish — temporarily, at least — Canada’s habitual inferiority complex vis-a-vis the U.S. and its chronic but accurate complaint that the U.S. pays far less attention to Canada than Canada does to [them].”

(read a Globe & Mail article on the cables )

I hope this was of any help.

Paul Hellmich with Tim David Kremser

In this section I try to try to explain cartoons that require very specific knowledge about a certain country’s politics and culture.  If you have any editorial cartoons that you would like me to figure out, just send me an email.

This month I picked a political cartoon by Shyam Jagota from India. It goes by the very matter-of-factly title “Indian Political Cartoon” but I prefer the more detailed in-panel caption “Rahul Jumps to PM’s Aid“.

Who are these people?

You may have recognized India’s Prime Minister (“PM”) Manmohan Singh by his trademark blue turban (dastar). Singh is a member of the Indian National Congress party (INC), commonly known as “Congress”. Congress has been the dominant political party in India for most of the time since the country gained independence.

This is Rahul Gandhi of the influential Nehru-Gandhi dynasty (no relation with the Gandhi, though). His family is strongly tied to the National Congress. Rahul’s father, grandmother, and great-grandfather all served as Prime Minister of India. Rumors about him aiming for said position have been around since he entered national politics in 2004. The next chance to become Prime Minister would be the 2014 general elections. Rahul is especially popular with young people and makes frequent visits to universities and the like (see, for example, this article).

What’s the point?

The cartoon plays with the motif of Rahul’s youth. He addresses Mr. Singh using the English word “uncle”, which is common in India when addressing elders who are not related by blood. It is, however, nothing you would do in a professional relationship and is meant here to show Rahul not being up to par with experienced politicians. The wooden horse, too, is a hobby horse rather than the Trojan Horse frequently found in European cartoons.

Manmohan Singh pushing Rahul’s horse addresses the hopes of him and other Congress members to revitalize interest in their party by playing on the “Rahul factor” despite occasional setbacks (see this article).

The cartoon was published in November 2010 and refers to some public statements Rahul made in the defense of Mr. Singh. In one interview he emphasized how honest the PM was by calling him the “cleanest man in Indian politics”. At another occasion he said that Singh had not done any wrong in the so-called “2G spectrum scam” (which I am not trying to explain here.. if you are interested go to Wikipedia).

I hope this was of any help.

Paul Hellmich with Pooja Gupta

This cartoon features free fur coats on mountain tops and growing suspicions.

Last week several NY mafiosi were arrested. Most of them had awesome nicknames

The Deaths on vacation - Hilarity ensues. Please note the ice cream & beer gut.

Hu Jintao cartoons tend to repeat yellow peril clichés. Hence a simple caricature.

Hungary's and Romania's traditional music instruments fail EU standards.

Pisa, Italy. Home to a lot of people with horribly bad posture. And some mice.

Somewhat late, (news-cycle-wise) I still like the idea and execution of this Assange punch.

Modern man and quiet defiance in the face of Facebook. A watercolor cartoon.

Toilet humor in a desert island cartoon. Could a traditionalist could wish for more?

Personal Favorite

This guy's desk looks familiar. Working from home I just had to pick this cartoon by Australian artist Mark Lynch. I am also a sucker for "static plaid".

Paul Hellmich

Elihu Duayer is a new member from Rio de Janeiro. Elihu has been working for major Brazilian magazines since the 1980s.Perhaps not surprisingly, if you consider both Brazil’s ecological riches and its economic growth, several of his cartoons and illustrations concentrate on environmental issues. His “Prison City”, “Amazonian Eden”, and his portrait of unionist and environmental activist Chico Mendes all are good examples. Again other drawings deal with topics like generational misunderstandings, racism, and new technologies. I am sure that Elihu also does simple gag cartoons though – after all he has been working for MAD magazine.

Cartoons of Interest

Ah, museum guards... I guess those killjoys are acceptable targets for stereotypization.

A link to toonpool's growing collection of cartoons on the recent events in Tunisia.

A charming portrait of famous Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker

I wish I knew enough Italian to know what M. Petrella's beautiful strips are about.

A cartoon portrait of The Who. Please note drummer Keith Moon's monkeyish charm.

A caricature of David Bowie by Darrell. Does Mr. Bowie really have those ugly fingers?

Personal Favorite

Western labor's two greatest fears finally combined in a cartoon by Swiss artist Martin Guhl. By the way.. does anyone know a decent comic font for the captions? The one I'm using looks awful.

Paul Hellmich

I would like to introduce a new format to this blog. I am going to try to try to explain cartoons that require very specific knowledge about a certain country’s politics and culture. Doing so may ruin every gag whatsoever. On the other hand… these cartoons aren’t funny anyway if you don’t have any idea what’s going on. If you have any editorial cartoons that you would like me to figure out, just send me an email.

For the first installation of “So… What’s This All About?”, I picked an easy (read: German) one. “Kerners Abzug” (“Kerner’s Withdrawal”) by Christiane Pfohlmann was posted on January 12, 2011. The translation is mine and unfortunately not 100 per cent precise. But you get the general idea.

Who are these people?

This is German Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor Guido Westerwelle (FDP). Mr. Westerwelle recently announced that some German troops would be withdrawn from Afghanistan by the end of this year.

This is German Minister of Defense Karl-Theodor [...] zu Guttenberg, a member of the conservative CSU party. Mr. Guttenberg  protested the announcement claiming that “the withdrawal depends on the current security situation” and that any fixed date would endanger German soldiers.

This is Johannes B. Kerner, German talk show host and occasional seltzer spokesman. In December 2010 he travelled to Afghanistan together with Guttenberg to record a talk show in Mazar-i-Sharif. Mr. Kerner is sometimes criticized for his “soft” approach to interviews and for being sickeningly harmless.

What’s the point?

Guttenberg is sort of a polarizing figure in Germany. A lot of people think that this eloquent offspring of an aristocratic family will and should be our next chancellor. Others consider him a bit too keen on publicity and shaping his public persona. Apart from Kerner he also took his wife on that December trip to Afghanistan – an uncommon move in sober German politics. Some people accused him of turning the official visit into a publicity stunt and photo op.

The reference to Mr. Kerner in this cartoon does not imply any political influence on his side – he is no Bill O’Reilly or Glenn Beck. It rather denounces the personalization and PR-ization reminiscent of US campaigning that  the artist sees in Mr. Guttenberg’s approach to politics.

I hope this was of any help.

Paul Hellmich

Nikola Angelkoski is a new member from Skopje. Most of his works depict Macedonian celebrities so I can’t say too much about resemblance. What I thought was interesting about them is their variety of styles. The only constant feature is Nikola’s reliance on pens and pencils instead of computers. There are some portraits done in pencils and some in red chalk. Some are  very losely sketched in ink (here & here) while again others are meticulously cross-hatched or (I think) done in drypoint. I especially like the somewhat old-fashioned character of works such as this portrait of Macedonian revolutionary  Goce Delčev.

Cartoons of Interest

A portrait of Wikileaks' Julian Assange by Ben Heine. This probably took some time.

A snowman cartoon. Berlin is rather slushy these days - but we won't give up hope.

A lot of people here worry about high levels of dioxins found in poultry products.

Terpsichore. I couldn't identify the original painting, but it works great in this cartoon.

The sad truth about pirates and parrots. It also explains the eye patches and peg-legs.

So... this guy walks into a bar and meets this whoopee cushion. No, really.

Personal Favorite

My favorite cartoon is another "snowman" cartoon. It's from a series of cartoons called "Who's Perfect" by German artist Martin Zak. For more carrot-and-coal cartoons check out our collection "There's No Men Like Snowmen".

Paul Hellmich