Roughing It, Volume 37

I didn’t draw as many roughs last week as usual. But out of the small number, five of them became fully-grown cartoons. Let’s check them out.

This was not my favorite cartoon from this collection, but it was my favorite for the CNN Opinion newsletter. My editor, Rich, wrote a brilliant and wonderful column and I felt my cartoon was a great compliment to it. Political cartooning is a solo artform. I want it to remain that way. The few hands involved, the better. But sometimes, I really like being part of a team and producing something together that brings it home.

I wonder what it’s like for my editor to see the rough and not knowing how it’s going to turn out. Full credit to each of them, they seem to trust me because they have picked some cartoons from some really crappy drawings. That’s the case here. Terrible drawing for the rough, as most of them are, but I’m quite pleased with the final product.

the outside press briefing by Trump and his team of sycophants was unique in the amount of ass-kissing from his sycophants, most especially, Mike Pence. I had to draw on it.

But I’m not entirely pleased with how it turned out.

I had a brains idea two weeks ago. I posted the rough for it here. I was tempted to…resurrect…that idea but then decided to make it simpler and more specific to the story that Trump and Pence have been mingling with infected fuckers. No brains!

I felt some pressure for this one as Laura, one of my proofreaders, said she loved the zombie in the rough. So when I was drawing this one, I really focused on Mr. Zombie. He needed to look fun.

I drew this last Friday and put it off for the reaper and brains cartoons. I was finally able to hit it a few days later. I wasn’t worried about it being ruined by the stock market rebounding. Do you know why? Because Donald Trump won’t shut up.

There’s some Looney Tunes inspiration in this one. It’s the cigarette. There’s an old Bugs Bunny cartoon where he fights a wrestler, and at one point…or two, one of them is knocked out of the ring and all the way up to the cheap seats. You have to watch it a trillion times to notice that as people dodge the wrestlers, that a cigarette is flying in the air. It’s kinda the same way with the witch and her hairpins that are left flying every time she takes off on her broom. I like the way this cartoon turned out.

I liked this one and I had the idea in my head for a couple days before I even drew the rough. Then, the TP crisis got thicker and thankfully, this wasn’t…wiped…from my memory yet. When I finally drew the cartoon, I was thinking it would be a good break from drawing Donald Trump which some of my clients would appreciate. A lot of them have run this cartoon. Funny thing is, there were a lot of other TP cartoons published the same day. I should have drawn it a couple days before.

I don’t think I can draw people in an alley without including a cat in a garbage can. Also, it was a good week for drawing skylines.

Now for the ideas that didn’t grow up. I thought this was amusing because Donald Trump actually asked his people, “why can’t we get more people from Norway?” In case you don’t know, Norway is a white country. It’s also a very happy country as very few people want to leave Norway to live in the U.S. I know. Shocking. But I found it ironic that instead of banning Muslims and other dark-skinned people from “shithole countries,” we’ve now banned people from Norway. By the way, “Faen Ta Deg” is nasty.

This was before Donald Trump supposedly took a test.

How bad is it that the NHL said it was a national emergency before Donald Trump? It’s like his ban on flights from China…after all the major airlines had decided to stop them voluntarily. That’s true. Look it up.

I didn’t like the idea. It sucks. But I thought this would be a lot of fun to draw.

I almost drew this one. I had every intention of it actually. One of the cartoons above, I don’t remember which, put it back on the shelf…where it stayed.

I had every intention of drawing this one too.

Which cartoons are your faves? Which ones should have I finished?

You can purchase a signed print of this cartoon.

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