Happy New Year everyone! Cartoonists love playing with the visual symbols of New Year - Father Time, Baby New Year, the dreaded hourglass. This year, Pepper Spray seems to have made it into the mix. Nothing says Happy 2012 like a shot in the eye with that. 

Anyway, here's to a health and productive 2012. Check out this year's crop of cartoons in our Happy New Year slideshow.  

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Every Friday, we collect the best political cartoons of the week and stuff them into one big, glorious slideshow.

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

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It's been a LONG year for Republican Presidential hopefuls. Iowa may be just days away, but candidates have been jockeying for position for months and spending millions of dollars on the hope they can challenge Obama in 2012. 

Think about all that's happened in 2011 - Tim Pawlenty's debate fizzle, Donald Trump's campaign flirtations, Rick Perry's "oops" moment, Herman Cain's meteoric rise and fall. 

To take a look back though the eyes of our cartoonists, check out our Year in GOP cartoons slideshow. 

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The end of December is as good a time as any to reflect on the year gone by. As a cartoonist, I find it interesting to look back at all the cartoons I've drawn over the course of the year, reminding me of all the news events and controversies I might otherwise have forgotten (was Arnold's love child already wiped out of your memory too?).

2011 was filled with many monumental moments - the death of Osama bin Laden, the passing Kim Jong Il, the rise of the Arab Spring, the growth of Occupy Wall Street. 

Check out my favorite cartoons from last year in our new Daryl Cagle's 2011 Year in Review, and don't forget to "Like" our cartoons on Facebook. 

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Most cartoonists hate drawing them, but readers love it when their favorite celebrities are memorialized in cartoon form. In 2011, we lost greats like Andy Rooney, Steve Jobs, Elizabeth Taylor and Peter Falk, among others. 

Check out a collection of the best cartoon tributes of 2011 in our Year in Celebrity Memorial Cartoons slideshow.  

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Merry Christmas everyone! As we kick back to enjoy the holiday, here's our gift to you - five funny Christmas cartoons I guarantee you'll enjoy more than Mom's fruitcake! (View our entire slideshow of Christmas cartoons here)

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Merry Christmas to all our readers! As we begin to wrap up another year and prepare to dive in to glasses of egg nog, I thought it might be fun to look back at some of the Christmas-related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years.

Here’s this year’s cartoon. Figured it’s what’s on the mind of a lot of Republicans this Holiday season:

Here’s one featuring Obamaclaus:

I drew this one back in 2006, after Iraq became the debacle we all know and love now:

Keep you eyes peeled on those Salvation Army bell ringers. You never know:

This was my Christmas cartoon back in 2003, when Bush gave away everything, including the kitchen sink, to be re-elected:

Here’s a golden Cagle oldie from way back in 2000, back when I was still drawing cartoons for the Honolulu Advertiser (now known as the Honolulu Star-Advertiser after being bought by its cross-town rival):

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Every Friday, we collect the best political cartoons of the week and stuff them into one big, glorious slideshow.

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

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It’s Christmas time – the season of giving. Unfortunately, the only thing we’re getting from Congress is angina. While everyone agrees that extending the payroll tax holiday for a year is a good thing, leave it to our elected representatives to find a way to muck it up.

Here are 5 funny cartoons, summing up what all of us think about these silly political games we have to endure. Click here to view all our Payroll Tax Cut cartoons.

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Reindeer are as important to Christmas as Santa Claus. After all, how would jolly St. Nick get all those gifts to all the good little boys and girls around the globe without Rudolph and his eight other reindeer tugging his sleigh from chimney to chimney?

Cartoonists like gifts too, so we pay tribute with our new Talking Reindeer cartoon slideshow.  

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With the death of Kim Jong Il, North Korea is now in the hands of the wacky dictators son, Kim Jong Un. Not much is known about the 20-something ruler, other than he is now in charge of a nuclear power and the world’s fourth-largest military.

Check out what cartoonists think of Kim Jong Un in our new Great Successor cartoon slideshow. 
 
 

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Like many cartoonists, I'm sad that I'll never get the chance to draw North Korea's nutty leader Kim Jong Il again. Here's my cartoon about his death:

Kim Jong Il was great to draw. I was able to do this caricature of him featuring the back of his head, and everyone could still get who I was drawing. You can't do that with many characters:

Kim Jong Il was a pain in the rear for many Presidents. The most recent of course was President Obama:

A lot of times, it seemed like Kim Jong Il was toying with the world. Having a nuclear arsenal certainly gave him some leverage:

Most of the time, I think this was his attitude towards everyone except Elvis: 

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He was also a torn in the side of the Bush administration, who tried to reach out to the wacky leader on more than one occasion: 

 

His enduring legacy - a nutjob with crazy hair in charge of a country with nuclear weapons. Sounds like the plot of an Adam Sandler movie: 

 

 

Everyone by now has heard that eccentric tyrant Kim Jong Il died over the weekend of a heart attack at 82, leaving nuclear-powered North Korea in the hands of his son, Kim Jong Un. Cartoonists will miss one of the most fun to draw world leaders to ever grace the globe, but I think we'll manage. 

So who drew the best cartoon about the passing of the wacky North Korean leader - John Cole of the Scranton Times-Tribune, or Cam Cardow of the Ottawa Citizen? 

"Like" our cartoons on Facebook. 

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Surprising news from last night. Kim Jong Il, North Korea's wacky dictator who preferred building nukes over feeding his people, has died heart failure. News reports point to his son, Kim Jong Un, taking control of the isolated nuclear power. 

Kim Jong Il has been a target for cartoonists for years. Check out some of the best cartoons over the years about the North Korean leader in our new Life and Death of Kim Jong Il slideshow. 

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Every Friday, we collect the best political cartoons of the week and stuff them into one big, glorious slideshow.

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

 

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Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays. Season's Greetings. What are we supposed to say again? Christmas might get more complicated year after year, but luckily you can always count on our cartoonists coming up with the best the yule log has to offer. 

So enjoy and share our great Christmas cartoon slideshow.  

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During Saturday night's GOP debate, Mitt Romney offered to bet Rick Perry $10,000 to prove that Perry's allegation that Romney wanted to impose a health insurance mandate nationally was true. Regardless, a candidate who has a problem connecting to voters offering a $10,000 bet is odd, to say the least. 

So who drew the best cartoon about Romney's high-stakes wager - Mike Keefe for PoliticalCartoons.com, or Jimmy Margulies for The Record? 

"Like" our cartoons on Facebook

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It's Christmas time, and no one has benefited from thoughtful gifts more over the years than the one percent. Tax cuts for the rich and access to the halls of power via well-timed contributions have allowed them to prosper greatly over the years. Will this Christmas be any different? 

Who drew the best cartoon - R.J. Matson of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, or David Fitzsimmons of the Arizona Daily Star?

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Terrible news out of Virginia Tech where two people, one of them a campus police officer, were shot and killed. According to msnbc, authorities believed the second victim was the man who shot the campus officer.

Cartoonists are a tough lot, as we bash and ridicule everything and anything in sight, but we've got a soft underbelly that's revealed in moments like this. Click here to view our Tragedy at Virginia Tech cartoon slideshow. 

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I’m saddened to learn that my longtime friend, Jerry Robinson, died in his sleep on Wednesday night. He was 89. Jerry was best known as the cartoonist creator of Batman’s arch-nemesis The Joker.

Jerry started his long career in comics in the late thirties when Batman co-creator Bob Kane hired him. He worked side-by-side with Kane and Bill Finger; he came up with the name “Robin,” and contributed to the creation of Two-Face and Alfred, Bruce Wayne’s butler.

With such a prolific career in comics, most people don’t know he was also a prolific political cartoonist, and drew 6 political cartoons a week as part of two features, Still Life and Life With Robinson, that were internationally syndicated for 32 years. Jerry drew a cool Sunday comics feature called True Classroom Flubs and Fluffs illustrating crazy things that kids really said in school. Jerry is the only cartoonist to serve as president of both the AAEC and NCS. In 2000, Robinson was awarded the NCS’s Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award and was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2004.

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Jerry was also a stanch defender of artists’ rights; he was an important supporter of Jerry Seigel and Joe Shuster in their struggle with DC Comics to win recognition and compensation as the creators of Superman. He played a leading role in defending the rights of oppressed, international editorial cartoonists and did important work to defend the right of editorial cartoonists to use trademarked characters in their cartoons in the landmark “Reddy Kilowatt” case.

I first met Jerry in 1979 when I took his college course in cartooning at the New School in Manhattan; it was a great class and was important in shaping my career as a cartoonist. Jerry emphasized cartoon history and marketing in his class, and he took us all to visit his studio in his Riverside Drive apartment. At that time Jerry was just starting his editorial cartoon syndicate with his own “Life with Robinson” cartoon panel, breaking away from his old syndicate. Jerry’s entrepreneurship with his own cartoons led to the creation of his own syndicate, Cartoonists and Writers Syndicate, now run by his son, Jens.

Jerry was a seasoned world traveler, known to cartoonists around the globe. He was a great guy who made a big difference in my career. I’ll miss him.

Here are some examples of Jerry’s editorial cartoon, Life with Robinson. Check out more here.

 

Santa tends to get a bit stressed out this time of year. Just think how you'd feel if every minute of every day, people were bugging you non-stop for you to give them stuff they wanted. An iPad here, a flat-screen TV there. It's all pretty exhausting. 

All Santa really wants you to do for Christmas is to laugh at our Life of Santa cartoon slideshow. 

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Is college football's system broken? It has become an annual tradition to hate the championship participants selected by the BCS. This year, fans are angered that Alabama would be selected over Oklahoma State (and to a lesser extent Stanford) for the National Championship game. 

So who drew the best cartoon - Rick McKee of the Augusta Chronicle, or John Cole of the Scranton Times-Tribune?

"Like" our cartoons on Facebook

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