Today's Jerusalem Post cartoons

In a first for me, two of my political cartoons debuted on the same day.

In print, we got this, delayed over from last week. Just a humorous spin on how Muammar Gaddafi's whereabouts continue to be unknown following his recent overthrow. (I was tempted to do a "Where's Waldo"?-type cartoon to illustrate this, but decided not to because a) time reasons and b) other cartoonists have already done it, far better than I can.)

Online, we have Bashar Assad beating the crap out of Syria's civilian population. This one's an extended metaphor that got out of hand: it started as a comparison between "strikes" in the Middle East (AIRstrikes in Libya, striking as in HITTING in Syria, and being ON strike in Israel), which got scrapped when the Libyan revolution basically came to a close. Then I tried to rework it a little later into just a comparison between Israel and Syria, but was stumped how to present it most effectively and anyway didn't have the "feel" for it. Then I got to thinking how strikes can also be BASEBALL strikes. Then I decided to mix it all up and show Assad the batter STRIKING a Syrian catcher while being called out on a progressively higher STRIKE count by the Global Community in the role of an umpire. Then for good measure I stuck Uncle Sam in the background on the pitcher's mound, waiting to throw the Ball of Freedom to the Syrians, because hey why not. From an artistic standpoint, I really, really like how this one turned out, particularly Assad, whose caricature I have very, very clear in my head but am not always successful in transferring to paper. (And in case you're wondering, 00 not only refers to Assad being a worthless zero, but also neatly ties in to the year he took control of the Syrian government, as hinted at by the 76 on the USA uniform.)

Drawn using:
No. 2 pencil (sketch) (both)
Black 0.4 mm pilot pen (second)
Black 0.5 mm pilot pen (both)
Blue 0.7 mm pilot pen (first)
Serif PhotoPlus 6.0 (both)