The Cartoons of Chuck Asay

Chuck Asay is currently my favorite editorial cartoonist; I must admit it. He's got a loose, energetic line and a fine way with facial expressions, and he never draws the same cartoon as everyone else.

Of course, that's because Asay is working on Bizarro World, where everything is the opposite of Earth.

Take today's cartoon, for example -- which I've copied in here for reference. Only Chuck Asay, out of all of the editorial cartoonists in the universe, would have the balls to do a pro-CEO cartoon this week. But he does it laughingly, as if to say "Yes, I do think CEOs are better than people like you and me, and they deserve to make tens of millions of dollars when their companies fail."

(OK, so the message here is more "we're all sinners," but work with me, people.)

If you read Asay's cartoons regularly, you can start to play this game: try to figure out, halfway through, how the answer to this problem will be drilling for oil. It doesn't matter what the problem is -- unwed mothers, international terrorism, uppity Democrats -- drilling for oil will make everything better.

I will say that he draws a great anthropomorphic donkey -- usually with a stunned, quizzical expression -- and his anthropomorphic elephants aren't far behind. He's a wonderful artist, and I could probably find one or two of his cartoons that don't utterly miss the point if I really looked. And, most importantly, his work is splendidly entertaining as long as you can avoid taking it seriously.