Lareine posted:

Trapezium Dave posted:

Leunig:

the sex ghost posted:

That's an all time lovely label

idonotlikepeas posted:

I put a few other types of cartoons he's done in a post upthread, but yeah, the row of yelling faces is just his resting default cartoon that he does when he doesn't have any other ideas (which is frequently). It's kind of like Payne drawing a car or Ramirez whining about debt D E B T

Microplastics posted:

Imagine being so bad a cartoonist that you depict the debt ceiling as a wall

Vib Rib posted:

His career was "destroyed". By who? We'll never know.

idonotlikepeas posted:

It seems like he's going to be running this other strip on a subscription service

I dont know posted:

As much as I hate it when Prickly City is just spinning it's wheels to get a paycheck, I think I hate it even more when it tries to be Calvin and Hobbes.

Murdstone posted:

If your kid is saying they're a t-rex and you do not play along gently caress you.

Brawnfire posted:

Is that Frederick loving Douglass putting a reassuring hand on trump's shoulder?

Where do I go to die instantly?

Cloud Potato posted:

Mail on Sunday:

“They’ll never change… Would you mind drawing the curtains, Jenkins?... May I have a cup of tea, Jenkins?... Some more cornflakes please, Jenkins...” As Charles backs study into historic connections to slave trade...The Royal Family is hit by new payout demands over their links by Caribbean campaigners who say the Monarchy 'must make repair and atonement' for their involvement

quote:

Charles's support for the academic work, carried out by the University of Manchester with Historic Royal Palaces, was welcomed by researchers and campaigners. But others voiced fears it could open the door to the Royal Family and the Government facing demands to pay compensation, or reparations, for their role in the slave trade and colonialism.

Trapezium Dave posted:

Leunig used to express his opinions about modern motherhood and vaccinations and that's why he doesn't have the Monday political slot in the paper anymore.

It's never enough to drop him completely though.

Leunig, Wellness, and Wokeness posted:

These cartoons displace the crisis of war and refocus attention on the crisis of the self. The self, the real subject of Leunig’s cartoons, is forced into a foetal position through the contemplation of the horrors of modern life. This crisis of the self is solved in Leunig’s cartoons, a least momentarily, by mindfully contemplating a bee or sitting on a hilltop—what the wellness industry refers to as a moment of self-care (or a bit of time-out in nature with a cup of tea). ‘With the world in such a horrible crazy mess, how do we keep going?’ asks one of Leunig’s characters in a recent cartoon. ‘I don’t GO. I just BE,’ says the duck (who is clearly familiar with Pete Evans’s Heal: 101 Simple Ways to Improve Your Health in a Modern World). ‘I just let it all go,’ says the dog. The songbird suggests listening to music or flying away. This is the Platonic ideal of a Leunig cartoon: melancholic pseudo-profundity spoken by companion animals.

The affective palette of Leunig’s cartoons and poems—acknowledging the sadness and confusion of modern life and offering a duck or a bee or a homily about love in return—perfectly suits the modus operandi of the wellness industry. That industry, as Mathias Nilges argues, presents

a softcore, largely gestural critique of capitalism’s tendency to take hold of all parts of our existence, of all of our time. But instead of continuing down this road and aiming for a systemic critique of the conditions under which we live and work (and under which the former increasingly becomes a matter of the latter), wellness … depart[s] from what is ultimately a social and structural matter and turns it into a matter of individual responsibility and strategy.
[...]
Because Leunig idealises maternal love, it’s not surprising that he has spent the last few decades policing the behaviour of young women. Women in his cartoons are either too woke to be in touch with their natural sensuality (there’s a fearsome harridan in one recent cartoon who’s branding a man’s bum with an M for Misogynist), or they’re too feminist, consumerist, or tertiary-educated to be motherly. Leunig’s men are granted the ability to escape and wander over the horizon, while women having any sort of life are abandoning their familial responsibilities (a lonely baby in one of his infamous cartoons says ‘I’m a stay-at-creche baby so she doesn’t have to be a stay-at-home mum’). In his essay ‘The Ties That Bind’, Leunig even salutes the Updikian heroes who ‘revolt’ against the ‘oppression’ and ‘emotional enslavement’ of marriage through adultery; and yet (surprise!) this roguish flouting of convention is not suitable for women, whose job is to maintain eye contact with their children at all times. The freely self-realised individual in Leunig’s work is always a man.
[...]
Partly, this is connected to what we have to assume is a sincerely held belief that he’s still a scrappy working-class kid, never fully accepted by the cultural elite. On ABC Radio National’s The Book Show, Leunig spoke of his ‘inner Holden Caulfield’, the boy-hero of Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, all alone in a society of ‘phoneys’ who push their way to the top. Likewise, talking to Evans, Leunig said that the media industry he navigates ‘is very sort of racy, and tough, and clever … I’m not like that, I feel like I’m a child in a very tough environment’.

But while Leunig believes he’s Puck, the holy fool, he’s actually Oberon, the king of the forest. He’s a rich, white, heterosexual cis man, and a cultural behemoth, whereas his imagined ‘woke’ enemies often belong to historically excluded groups, and are often precariously employed in a shrinking media industry that rarely offers its staff the luxurious platform that Leunig has enjoyed since the 1980s.
[...]
This is how a counter-cultural boomer politics founded on lonely men fleeing faceless corporate oppressors has been rewired, over just a few years, into a reactionary politics of male victimhood.

For Leunig and for those in the wellness mindset, suffering is intimate and private. It’s a burden that the individual bears and that the individual must solve through positive lifestyle change. It’s not a structural phenomenon that groups of oppressed or exploited people can solve together through political action. Leunig, along with those that decry so-called wokeness and cancel culture, also asserts that individuals are constantly menaced by the madness of collectives, online and in real life. Leunig’s opinion columns on this topic lump together collectives of all kinds: armies and empires, street protests and social media. It doesn’t matter if they’re fighting or upholding the status quo—all collectives wield repressive power. ‘Whatever the aim or cause a group may have,’ he writes, ‘be it about social justice, environmental protection, marriage equality or women’s rights, there is always the possibility of an aggressive darkness developing in the chemistry of togetherness.’

Leunig’s embattled individualism relies on a sleight of hand: that he doesn’t belong to any party or identity group. Male privilege doesn’t exist, he argues in a 2017 essay: aren’t we all just humans? And there, in that argument, he betrays his privilege. As a white man, he’s never needed collective action to fight for his own status as human, to fight for basic rights and dignities. He’s had the luxury of getting by on his own—to be the kind of rambling loner he draws again and again for his new followers on Instagram.

Rowson's Website posted:

For this I apologise, though I’m not going to repeat the current formulation by saying I’m sorry if people were upset, which is always code for “I’ve done nothing wrong, you’re just oversensitive”. This is on me, even if accidentally or, more precisely, thoughtlessly. It’s a personal mantra of mine that satirical cartoons are like journalism, all about Afflicting the Comfortable and Comforting the Afflicted. In other words, I should never attack people less powerful than me (which narrows the field more than you might imagine) and I should only attack people for what they think, not who they are.

So by any definition, most of all my own, the cartoon was a failure and on many levels: I offended the wrong people, Sharp wasn’t the main target of the satire, I rushed at something without allowing enough time to consider things with the depth and care they require, and thereby letting slip in stupid ambiguities that have ended up appearing to be something I never intended. But as I’ve always said, once my work is in the public domain, it no longer belongs to me but to the beholder, in whose eye offence dwells just as surely as beauty.

Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa. To work effectively, cartoons almost more than any other part of journalism require eternal vigilance, against unconscious bias as well as things that should be obvious and in this case, unforgivably, I didnt even think about. There are sensitivities it is our obligation to respect in order to achieve our satirical purposes. Despite the tyranny of the deadline, in future I’ll make sure I’ve drawn what I really mean, and mean what I draw.

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

Technowolf posted:

Too many loving words.

idonotlikepeas posted:

David Horsey



Tempted to nominate this one for a Kelly because it's still "well, guess AI is just going to kill everyone", but the scenario described here did happen, making this more of an "a thing happened" cartoon, and it's not a terrible one of those. There is a certain irony advertising in people working on AI technology signing a letter saying "hey, maybe somebody should stop us because we are moving SO fast and breaking SO many things and accomplishing SO MUCH".

Chicken Parmigiana posted:

The Australian audience will immediately understand it to be about Ben Roberts-Smith, who is a victim, really, a poor broken boy

idonotlikepeas posted:

Thanks for the context. This is very interesting (and terrible).

Guavanaut posted:

SimonChris posted:

The Unabomber just died. I wonder what kind of comics we are getting from that.

Ted in heaven with Einstein, Oppenheimer, and other famous mathematicians turned bombmakers while St Peter and Lady Liberty smile and shed a tear.

Apple Pie Hubbub posted:

5

Cloud Potato posted:

gently caress Off Matt:

After The War posted:

I've never really thought about it in all these years, but what the gently caress is up with that kid's hair (or lack thereof)? Is he supposed to be Charlie Brown? Was the stereotypical Impressionable Kid just drawn with a tiny Mohawk for a while?

Electric Phantasm posted:

What

Trapezium Dave posted:

Leunig:

Discendo Vox posted:

Political Cartoons 2023: NUBILE TEENS

Another tally for the "make the US look badass" column. Also, the "US Companies" looks to be added in post- I wonder if those are meant to be specific caricatures.

The Artificial Kid posted:

Not only was this always a lovely argument (akin to saying "you say it will be cold next winter and yet you can't tell me if it will rain next week", but also weather prediction these days is astonishingly good compared to a few decades ago.

Guavanaut posted:

Why does the duck only ever watch TV that he hates in order to roll his duck eyes?

I would simply not watch TV that I hated.

idonotlikepeas posted:

...skeletons are discouraging? An obvious cartoon?

Vib Rib posted:

If getting off-grid is so loving great, why don't you do it Leunig

Skios posted:

A.F. Branco