Hey everybody, I'm Daryl Cagle, and this is Caglecast where we're all
about political cartoons and you have just watched a grand slideshow
of 125 Pope Francis cartoons and what a fantastic thing that was.
I'm here with my buddy Taylor Jones, and Taylor's gonna talk about his.
Pope Francis cartoons that were just standouts on the
slideshow that you just saw.
Nice to have you here, Taylor.
Thank you.
I, um, we got, I should in introduce my little friend
here, or she, she's a female.
Luna Moth emerged from its cocoon just moments ago.
And
Luna Moth like the moon.
That's correct.
LUNA.
Uh, you don't have, not in California.
They're a Eastern mall and they're pretty common in Florida.
But of course, like everything else, uh, the numbers of butterflies and moss are
declining pretty much everywhere, all over the world, and we're not helping.
Well, Taylor, I should say that you live in a big butterfly
farm, and that's great fun.
And you are just the most brilliant caricaturist that ever could be.
And here you have Pope Francis with his rainbow colored doves.
He was lauded for being more accepting of, of gay people.
Although I did not find him to be that accepting.
No, uh, in fact, a lot of talk, not as much action obviously was, is dealing
with a Vatican that I would say is far less open-minded about these
things than, than he wanted to be.
And it seems to me that.
Pope went out of his way to express his emotional support for the
gay community, but a little hard, I think, to deliver on things.
And I think, you know, there's still, uh, kind of saying,
well, to, they can be blessed.
But no, the Catholic church was not going to condone gay marriage.
So I mean, it's a better, better,
I don't think he went any farther than just to say, be nice to everybody.
Oh yeah.
Well, well, I've heard quoted several times in the news today.
His most famous two words, "Judge not."
Well.
All right.
This is a nice one with all the popey hats and his Argentina hat.
Well, you know, that was the, that of course was the first character I'd drawn
of the Pope, first cartoon of the Pope.
And like others, I was waiting with bated breath with a smoke to turn
white and to see how easy or hard this new pope was gonna be to draw.
And, uh, this was the best shot we had at first there at the window, or,
uh, not the window at the balcony.
And, you know.
Welcoming the hurrahs of the assembled, uh, religious below there in St.
Peter Square and
very good.
So I'd add the Argentine touch to it.
Well, I thought he was a nice enough Pope.
I mean, you compare him to the other popes, he's gotta be least bad Pope.
Well, certainly I should point out I'm not a Roman Catholic, so this is
strictly an observer from afar as opposed to Catholic friends I know who may be
conflicted about their Catholicism.
But the Pope is still ahead of their church, I think.
Yes.
The Pope has been lauded around the world for his compassion and his
tolerance, or at least seeming tolerance.
Who is this with the Pope?
This is, uh, Dilma Rousseff.
She was for a term, the president of Brazil.
She was a lieutenant to, uh, Lula Lula Lula de Silva, who's the president now?
President again.
Like Trump, a non-consecutive president and she was vice
president and ran and won.
And uh, yes, the Pope had come to Brazil I remember on this trip.
And of course we got all the roses and, uh, Dilma wasn't very popular.
Well, this is cute.
I like the throwing the roses and throwing the eggs and the poop.
I wanna point out that Pope Francis was always a pleasure to draw a great face.
A very malleable face.
And Benedict was fun too, but for a very different reason.
What's the different reason?
Well, I, I kinda liked Benedict.
He had a tough, he was a Pope.
John Paul II had stayed and stayed on the, well, he stayed till he
died and had stayed as long as he possibly could, just hung on.
As you might know, the last number of years, uh uh, in his.
Papacy, he'd be around his popemobile, but was based sort of like a statue.
He could barely move.
He had tremors that, well, his movement was tremors.
I don't know if he had Parkinson's, but of course, Benedict had to kind of
clean up a bit in the wake of the, uh, pedophile scandals among the priests.
He had a tough job, very con, but he was also very, very
ecumenical, very conservative.
It's a tough job because they don't wanna sell out all of their
buddies who were covering up for all of these pedophile priests.
It wouldn't be such a tough job if you didn't have any tolerance for it.
If they really had zero tolerance.
Well that's, that's right.
But he had, well, you know, one thing certainly praise, uh, Benedict
for is that unlike John Paul II, Benedict actually apologized formerly.
I mean, it's just, you know, an apology is just an apology, but.
But, uh, his predecessor had never basically acknowledged that he, he, you
know, I think a lot of cardinals were getting shuffled, priests were getting
shuffled around and kind of a coverup.
But, but Benedict said that
kind of a coverup,
well, yes, an extreme coverup, but Benedict basically shed light on it.
Not saying much was done, but he did.
He took that first step, and I think he deserves some praise for that.
But the thing is,
tiny step.
Well, of course we're on, we're concentrating on, on Francis, but I
wanna get back to Benedict a little bit.
So lemme here.
Okay, well, who is this?
Uh, this is of course, I should point out that, uh, I drew most of my, uh, most
of my, uh, Francis cartoons for El Nuevo Dia Puerto Rico's largest newspaper.
I was not an employee, but I was doing drawing as a freelancer at this time,
about three or four cartoons a week for them, it alternated and I drew them.
I wrote them in Spanish.
My, I'm not fluent.
I had to lean on my editor a lot.
I had to come up with the ideas.
And Spanish is Puerto Rico's first language and.
El Nuevo Dia is a Spanish language newspaper.
So he would come to my rescue after having me kinda struggle quite a bit
to come up with a text in Spanish.
And the hardest part of the job was to kind of think up a numerous
ideas each time in Spanish.
Hope they made sense.
I hope they were funny so he'd help me if he needed to.
This is, Pope Francis is uh, from Argentina, and this
was for a couple of terms.
The president of our Argentina, Christina.
Fernandez de Kirchner
did a lot of dancing the tango?
They did politically, because Pope Francis was also very tuned to what was
going on in Argentina and you know, a lot of poor people in Argentina and they
were having terrible economic times.
And Kirchner, you know, Kirchner was, Christina was approaching it from the
standpoint of a politician having to, uh, please as many sides as she could.
And he had to kind of, you know, give his advice, but not intervene too close.
Very nice highlight on her hair there, Taylor.
Thank you.
She was also fun to draw.
So you have Obama and the Pope, and that looks like Raul Castro.
That's Raul Castro.
Yes.
He, by then he'd sort of assumed power as Fidel.
I don't know if by this time Fidel had actually died, or the last few years.
Raul was basically,
yeah, I don't think we saw Raul at all until Fidel died.
He probably didn't appear in a single cartoon.
Oh, he did with - for me - because I was drawing them for, for, for the
newspaper in Puerto Rico, and they were very, very up on Cuban politics.
But here, of course, there was a bit of a thaw in our relations that they were
able to get some things along the margins and the Pope helped facilitate this.
So Obama was presenting a gift to Raul, and Raul was
presenting a Cohiba cigar to
President Obama.
This is a cute one.
You really excel when you bring in the animals in Taylor.
I think you should just do animals all the time.
Well, I don't draw them enough.
Uh, birds especially are fun to draw for me.
And uh,
is that the same critter that's on your head now?
No, no.
That's a, that, that is a not very well drawn Morpho butterfly,
which you had in Latin America.
You don't have them here?
No.
I I could have put a aluminum off on there.
But, uh, you do have a little, you do have Morphos in Argentina, so there's
toucans as well, at least in the tropical parts of Argentina in the north, and
then a three toed slaw and an ostrich.
Fun to draw this, of course, Pope Francis was kind of a friend to Friends of the
Earth, Pope and World Wildlife Fund Pope.
So that's.
Why, uh, the creatures
great and small loved him.
Well, that's an excellent drawing.
Let's give it a big look.
Oh, good looking drawing Taylor.
Well, the jowls for Benedict always helped, but he had just
always bemused expressions and, uh, that was useful for me.
So who are these guys?
Well, uh, one is still around, that's uh, Mahmoud Abbas, the
president of the Palestinian Authority, who's 90 years old now.
And that's.
Was then Prime Minister Shimon Perez.
And I guess this must have been very early in the papacy before Perez was,
don't quote me on this, but I think, uh, Perez was prime Minister more than
once and one time in between sandwiched in between Netanyahu, but here an
so why are they all praying together?
Well, Francis was always.
Trying to find, try to bring people to peace.
And here, so he's, I guess he was, he probably was in the Middle East at
the time and met with both of them.
Maybe not Netanyahu was prime minister at the time, but Perez met with him anyway.
And so here he's wanting 'em all pray together, but they're
looking at him suspiciously.
You know, we just had this slideshow 125 Pope Francis cartoons and I didn't
select cartoons like this, that would require explanation for that slideshow.
So a number of years that you're explaining are just all new to the people
that have been sitting around long enough to get to this point in the podcast.
Well, I did not draw a tribute Pope Cartoon, which I said,
uh, of course, here's Pope.
I'm looking kind of ill here, but, uh, maybe he was sick at the time with Raul
Castro, and this is one I had written in Spanish and translated to English.
You do the reading.
Daryl,
have you been a good boy saying your prayers like you said you would?
Well, Raul had had sort of said that he was, you know, gonna be
that good boy and maybe not so much
so here is the Pope with Putin,
I'm kind Okay.
Kind of who,
who am I to judge gay people and Putin says, "Leave that to me.".
Yes.
Now, when this was, when, when, when, uh, when I posted this,
wherever it appeared, I got a, an email from, uh, a woman who was both
angered and confused by the cartoon.
Doesn't that happen all the time?
Well, I mean, those are the only emails we get angered or confused.
It's sometimes both angered and confused.
But she thought I was wanting to judge gay people harshly, but at
the time, and I explained to her, of course, as you know, if you have
to explain a cartoon that kind of.
Ruins the humor and the insight.
But of course, Putin, and this was a more spelt Putin than he is now, but the
idea that they, the Russian Duma Putin was pushing legislation to make it more
and more difficult for gay people in Russia to just get by with their lives.
And at that point, you know, at that time, hope Francis
was saying, who am I to judge?
Well,
Russia is pretty terrible for that.
and, you know what I think.
That he watches all of these right wing politicians in the west who
make much of their career out of bashing gay people and says,
that's
what a good idea, I'll do that
too.
Yeah, right.
Well.
That's right.
It's hard being gay in Russian.
So here he is as a gaucho running through all of the cardinal cattle.
Well, first I wanna kind of pay a little tribute to Pat Oliphant.
This was a little bit inspired by Oliphant.
He drew many, many, many scenes with this or that, whether it was Popes or
whether it was Cardinals being rounded up, or generals or bur bureaucrats.
I don't know if he ever did as a guch, whoever subject he was.
Depicting as a gaucho.
I don't know that, but, uh, this was kind of, I've think I was thinking
of Oliphant when I, when I, uh, drew this, and of course this was Pope
Francis was, he wanted to be the reformist pope and he did his best.
And a lot of cardinals weren't too amused.
Having gone to U. C. Santa Barbara, I am myself a Gaucho.
So here he is sweeping his modest little room.
Yes, Eddie Cartoonist, who, who concentrates on caricature.
Sometimes it takes a while to become well acquainted with the
personality, to start really drawing, getting a, a, a good likeness and
one you can kind of work with.
And this, this was probably one of the first cartoons I drew, maybe the second
or third cartoon I drew of Pope Francis.
And then they were making a point that he was shunning he was not going
to live in the palatial, uh, as I kept, I forget where it is, the exact
name of it, uh, where popes usually stay, that he was gonna instead
stay in a little wait to the room.
Well, how good of him,
if anything, we've learned from Trump.
That showmanship works and for better or worse, and Pope Francis was definitely
a showman, but for the better.
So here he is.
This looks like Bibi Netanyahu at the Wailing Wall.
Yes.
So I have, uh, Francis putting a note of peace, Shalom into the wall, his
message and Bibi with his brass knuckles.
So the only color in this is the brass knuckles and the necklace.
Yes.
Well, let me explain the pieces.
I drew, drew for El Nuevo Dia.
Uh, this was for their Perspectiva column.
Which is basically just Spanish for like op-ed page.
And I was drawing these often at high speed.
I wouldn't get the, often wouldn't get the, my editor wouldn't settle
on the idea till maybe 10 30 in the morning and I had to be done
with these by three 30 deadlines.
So sometimes I script on the color.
I wanted to do them color all in full color.
But often I think some of the best ones were done in half, you know,
gray scale, half tones with a. Little dash of color here and there.
I thought you might've been making some sophisticated point about the brass
knuckles and the cross around his neck.
Well, not particularly but, but, but obviously had this
been a full color piece, I think brass knuckles really show up.
Just if I'm, if I was making any point sort of unintentionally,
it was that the gold of the violence and the gold of the cross.
So here you have, uh, Pope Francis with Vice President Biden and the House Speaker
John Boehner with Pope Francis giving a speech to the joint session of Congress.
This is about 15 years ago.
Would've, what's going on here, Taylor?
Well, this would've been after the Tea Party when as Obama put it,
the Democrats took a shellacking.
So, uh, the, the Republicans were in charged in the house, and I don't
remember about the Senate, but it was a joint session of Congress and
they invited Pope Francis to speak.
You can read
very good Uhhuh.
And here he is blowing out the past two popes.
Well, this was canonization, so I thought I'd use a, I thought I'd use a,
that that went over my head.
I, I needed to hear that.
So I thought I'd use, uh, circus cannons.
Uh, Daryl, uh, the other cartoon I wanted to point out that, uh.
Uh, Boener was wondering about the Sermon on the Mount and hoping that,
why was he wondering about that?
He didn't wanna be brought up.
At least, at least my John Boener didn't wanna be brought up because
that's about, that's about charity and forgiveness and tolerance.
Therefore, oh,
and Republicans don't do that.
You said it not.
I,
I like this canonization.
That's funny.
I wonder, here you have Trump and the Pope and Trump says, it's all about readings.
Am I right?
Your eminence, by the way, climate
change is a hoax invented by the Chinese, and the Pope thinks.
God, why has thou forsaken us?
Well, I brought back my, uh, sloth and toucan, and of course, oh, Mr.
Trump's got a little hand.
He's not wearing a red tie though.
But
what's up with that?
I, you know, I don't know.
You know, I think sometimes you forget Once in a while.
Once in a while.
I, once in a while, he wears, doesn't wear a red tie.
And I think once in a while I decide not to give him one.
He's got a cartoon costume though.
He does, uh, paper.
Well, that is, that's your last one, Taylor.
Well, papal vestments are also very fun to draw.
You know, the clothing,
the pointy hats.
Well, the pointy hats, the lovely, uh, white robes with the shoulder, whatever.
There's a name for all of these pieces.
You got a, you got a moment for, uh, some Benedict cartoons?
I've got, uh, some right.
Handy.
I can just hold them up.
All right.
Show us a couple of Benedict cartoons that you hold
just for comparison.
Well, here was one.
Let's see, let's, okay, I gotta have to position myself.
Is this the original?
It's the original.
Very fancy.
All right.
Of course.
See no evil speak no evil.
Hear no evil.
Or at least I, I probably not in that order.
But this of course, was dealing with the scandal with the pedophile priest.
That's, and for the longest time, that's a beautiful piece to hang on the wall.
Thank you for, uh, for the, um, like I said, uh, Benedict did
apologize, but it took a while.
Very good.
And, uh, more show and tell here.
You know, Benedict is not the favorite pope of many people.
No, I know.
But he was great fun to draw.
And one of the reasons, and this, and I wanna make the point
of this because I'll, uh, okay.
Now is it, oh, that's a good one of Vampire Pope right now.
Can you, I mean, is it, is it such You can read it.
Anglicans thou are tasty.
Yes.
Anglicans thou are tasty.
This, this was due to some of the ecumenism where the, uh, the Catholic
church at the highest level was beginning, beginning to talk to the,
was beginning to talk to other churches to see what they can bring together.
And of course, the Anglicans are probably the closest to the Catholic.
That's the, that's the church that broke off from England.
Henry the 8th, I wanted to show the Benedict things because
you mentioned Vampire Pope.
Of course.
That's a terrible thing to say about a pope.
Well, we had Vampire Abraham Lincoln.
Well, yes, but the thing is that the thing about the difference
in a way between Benedict
Oh he was a vampire hunter.
Oh, that's right.
Yes, that's true.
It was very different than being a vampire.
Forgive me for going on and on here, but I wanna make a point between
Benedict and Francis in that with Benedict, a lot of the cartoons You
may, I made fun of Pope Benedict.
I made fun of Catholic of, you know, arch conservative
Catholicism and, and, uh, Benedict.
Just the way he looked and the way he liked.
He very much, unlike Francis, loved the finery that went with being Pope.
It was very easy to make Francis however unfair, to make
him kind of the, the target.
But with, with Francis, you could make others the target.
So in the cartoon back a few ago with Trump, you could
make Trump the target of that.
So you could draw these cartoons about Francis with caricatures of him.
Well really you were criticizing or making fun of something else, some other person.
And that's the difference between the two.
So who knows what the next Pope will bring?
Well, Taylor, this was lots of fun and I enjoy all your popes
as you can see.
Thank you.
Our Luna Moth is, uh, there he is,
he looks
quite comfortable there.
Yeah, he actually looks like a fishing hat
and it's a, she and her, uh, intent.
Her wings are fully inflated, so she's got her tails there.
And these tails serve no purpose but to be bitten off by birds or bats.
Anything that's pursuing them.
So the moths can escape.
These moths, when they emerge from their cocoons, they can't feed, they, they
did all their eating as caterpillars.
They're just to, uh, mate and die to mate and to serve as meals for
predators, for birds and bats.
So she's gonna call in a mate, she's gonna call a mate, and if she releases
pheromones from her hind end and male moths can come from miles away.
Track the molecules.
I hope you'll leave this.
I tell ya', Taylor.
We've moved to that stage of life where, uh, we used to be
in the mate and die stage, but now we're just in the die stage.
Right.
Yes.
Fact eating, baby food, waiting to talk.
Alright, Taylor, on that fine note, I will leave you and, uh, thank you
for all your lovely popes tonight.
Well, thank you for in inviting me.
Uh, do I really appreciate it.
All right, I'll see you Taylor.
So thank you so much for, uh, watching our.
Big long Caglecast today, and I hope that you'll go to Cagle.com
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And Taylor, thank you too.
That's the end.
Goodbye folks.