Election season is upon us. Vucic has been voted from office in Serbia, Lula has won in Brazil, Israel’s political future seems unsure (although Palestinians are likely f#*ked whatever happens), and according to the polls, the midterms will not go well for Donald Trump.

In this newsletter: how to fight against AI slop, the winners of the World Press Cartoon, the shortlist of the European Cartoon Award and, as always, the most popular cartoons of the month.

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Fight AI slop with art!

Artists are continuing to speak out against the soulless flood of AI slop that’s appearing in our timelines (and in various other places) these days. And not only artists; even a lot of non-creatives are complaining about the emptiness they feel when looking at a computer-generated image that’s trying to pass itself off as art.

One cartoonist that has decided to fight back is CM-member Piet from France. Using the most powerful tool he has at his disposal, his pencil, Piet has created a series of stickers for people to publicly show what they think about AI ‘art’. Better yet, the stickers are free to download and can be used freely (under a Creative Commons license).

More info

Winners of the World Press Cartoon 2026

World Press Cartoon has announced the 2026 winners; Portuguese cartoonist André Carrilho has won the Grand Prix, while a number of CM cartoonists also received awards, including Joaquín Aldeguer (Spain), who won first prize in the ‘Caricature’ category for an excellent cartoon of Jane Goodall, Toso Borkovic (Serbia), who received first prize in the ‘Gag cartoon’ category and Marilena Nardi (Italy), who won third prize in the ‘Editorial cartoon’ category.

Check out all the winners here.

Shortlist European Cartoon Award 2026

The European Cartoon Award has published the shortlist of 16 cartoons that are still in the running to receive the ECA 2026. Here, we are also proud to see a number of CM cartoonists: Anne Derenne, Asier Sanz, Emad Hajjaj, Gatis Sluka, Sini Pismestrovic, James Mellor and George Riemann all made it into the final 16:

The winner of the ECA will be announced at Cartoons Day 2026 on November 27 at the Central Library in The Hague, the Netherlands. Cartoons Day is a free event packed with cartoon-related activities and special guests, including two-time Pulitzer Prize winning US cartoonist Ann Telnaes. More info here.

Most popular cartoons

Take a look at the most popular cartoons from the last 30 days on our social media channels.

On Facebook: Bolsonaro wins the first round by Vasco Gargalo

On Instagram: Apocalypse intersection by Zez Vaz

On Bluesky: A lesson to the world by Custodio

Since 2024, Dutch cartoonist Martijn van der Wiel has been publishing cartoons under the name ‘more better everything! | meer beter alles!’ in an effort to better understand the world around him. It's not helping.

World Press Cartoon has announced the 2026 winners; Portuguese cartoonist André Carrilho has won the Grand Prix, while a number of CM cartoonists also received awards, including Joaquín Aldeguer (Spain), who won first prize in the ‘Caricature’ category for an excellent cartoon of Jane Goodall, Toso Borkovic (Serbia), who received first prize in the ‘Gag cartoon’ category and Marilena Nardi (Italy), who won third prize in the ‘Editorial cartoon’ category.

Check out all the winners here.

Meanwhile, the European Cartoon Award has published the shortlist of 16 cartoons that are still in the running to receive the ECA 2026. Here, we are also proud to see a number of CM cartoonists: Anne Derenne, Asier Sanz, Emad Hajjaj, Gatis Sluka, Sini Pismestrovic, James Mellor and George Riemann all made it into the final 16:

The winner of the ECA will be announced at Cartoons Day 2026 on November 27 at the Central Library in The Hague, the Netherlands. Cartoons Day is a free event packed with cartoon-related activities and special guests, including two-time Pulitzer Prize winning US cartoonist Ann Telnaes. More info here.

Stefan Tobler (als known as Tobi) is the first cartoonist from Switzerland to join Cartoon Movement. He has worked cartoonists for Swiss magazine Nebelspalter and as a comic artists for German and Dutch publishers. Check out more of his work on his Instagram.

Artists are continuing to speak out against the soulless flood of AI slop that’s appearing in our timelines (and in various other places) these days. And not only artists; even a lot of non-creatives are complaining about the emptiness they feel when looking at a computer-generated image that’s trying to pass itself off as art.

As most of you (hopefully) know, here at Cartoon Movement we do our best to keep everything as AI-free as possible. Why? Because AI-generated visuals are based on the biggest art theft in history, the environmental impact of the wide-spread use of AI is enormous, and the people running the AI companies are the sort of greedy evil bastards that motivated most of us to become political cartoonists in the first place, so we could use our art to fight back with satire.

One cartoonist that has decided to fight back is CM-member Piet from France. Using the most powerful tool he has at his disposal, his pencil, Piet has created a series of stickers for people to publicly show what they think about AI ‘art’. Better yet, the stickers are free to download and can be used freely (under a Creative Commons license).

They are available in English and French; to download them, click the big red button:

Download images

And if you’d rather like to have ready-made stickers, you can purchase them in Piet’s Redbubble shop.

Shop

We hope we’ll see Piet’s stickers in a lot of places! If you decide to download/order them and use them, please send us some photos so we can share them on our socials and get even more people to use these stickers!

Walker Bin Zaman is a cartoonist and comic artist from Bangladesh, where he works for the Dhaka Tribune and satire magazine Unmad, as well as working with World Food Programme as a comic artist.

Hello!

As the lords of chaos (see Monireh’s cartoon here above) continue to wreak havoc, we use the tools at our disposal (pen and paper, or tablet) to keep the chaos at bay.

In this newsletter we share the comic about humor and democracy we’ve been working on for the past couple of months. We also have an upcoming webinar and we show cartoons from the frontlines in Ukraine. Ukrainian cartoonist Ruslan Pikhota serves in the Ukrainian army, and captures the reality of war with pencil on paper as he fights for freedom. And, as our regular feature, we share the most popular cartoons of the month.

You can check out our other, daily newsletter, (featuring our daily editor’s choice) here:

Subscribe to our daily cartoon

Comic: Humour and Democracy

As some of you might know, Cartoon Movement is a consortium partner in Horizon Europe project DELIAH (Democratic Literacy and Humour). In addition to researching humour, part of DELIAH’s mission is to raise awareness about the role of humour in our democracies. We try to do this in various ways: by writing about it, by giving workshops and now also by making a comic about it.

Over the last few months, we have worked with the renowned cartoonist Pedro X. Molina to create a four-page comic that explains what we currently know about how humour works in a democracy.

Depending on your device, you can choose to read the mobile version or the desktop version.

Mobile version

Desktop version

We also have the comic available as a PDF and a slideshow. All formats of the comic are freely available to download and use, provided DELIAH and the artist Pedro X. Molina are credited when the comic is published.

Download comic as PDF

Download comic as a slideshow

Cartoons from the front lines

Ruslan Pikhota is a Ukrainian frontline cartoonist and an active-duty officer in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Before the full-scale invasion, he spent 15 years working in children’s publishing in Kharkiv. He volunteered in February 2022, served as an infantryman on the Donetsk and Kharkiv fronts, and was wounded near Bakhmut. He now serves with an unmanned systems unit.

Since the spring of 2022, he has created more than 550 drawings in trenches, dugouts, ruined buildings, and between military duties. We asked him to select what he considers to be his ten most telling drawings made at the front lines.

See the top 10

Webinar: how can humour inspire action?

Join a webinar led by Dutch cartoonist and CM editor-in-chief Tjeerd Royaards to learn more about how humour works and how it can be used to make people take action. Insights are based on scientific research done by our research project DELIAH.

The webinar is part of the 8th Cartoon Africa International Biennal and will take place via Google Meet; the session is open to all and can be accessed via this link. However, we would appreciate it if you register, so we have an idea how many people will attend:

Register for the online session

Most popular cartoons

Take a look at the most popular cartoons from the last 30 days on our social media channels.

On Facebook: Trump at the UN by Fahd Bahady

On Instagram: Data privacy by Gatis Sluka

On Bluesky: Teaming up by Amorim

Esteban Sterle is a cartoonist from Argentina. He lived in Mexico for 20 years, where he worked for Mexico’s most important newspapers and magazines, creating comic strips, comic books and illustrations. He currently lives in Mar del Plata, Argentina, where he works for various online media.

Ruslan Pikhota is a Ukrainian frontline cartoonist and an active-duty officer in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Before the full-scale invasion, he spent 15 years working in children’s publishing in Kharkiv. He volunteered in February 2022, served as an infantryman on the Donetsk and Kharkiv fronts, and was wounded near Bakhmut. He now serves with an unmanned systems unit.

Since the spring of 2022, he has created more than 550 drawings in trenches, dugouts, ruined buildings, and between military duties. His work documents frontline life, drone warfare, fear, loss, brotherhood, absurdity, and the black humour soldiers use to endure war. His English-language book, Smile under the Roar of Cannon Fire, was published in 2025, and his drawings have been shown in Prishtina, Geneva, and Grenoble. He is now developing this archive into a three-volume visual diary of the war.

We are delighted to welcome Ruslan to Cartoon Movement! As an introduction, we asked him to select what he considers to be his ten most telling drawings made at the front lines.

Drawing No. 519 — FOUR IN THE MORNING

At the front, you constantly feel Death nearby, until it begins to seem like another member of the unit. I imagined the beginning of their day at four in the morning: the soldier starts with coffee, while Death takes a strange pet for a walk.

Drawing No. 393 — WHEN YOU’RE IN A TRENCH

A soldier sitting in a trench always wants more behind him — more artillery, more armour, more aircraft. I drew a very simple infantry feeling: you are one small person in a hole in the ground, and suddenly no amount of support seems excessive.

Drawing No. 533 — WHEN THE SKY FILLS WITH MACHINES

When I first went to war, the sky was mostly empty. A few years later, it had become crowded with reconnaissance drones, FPVs, bomber drones and interceptors. The soldier remained, but the war around him changed.

Drawing No. 564 — WHEN MACHINES BECOME PREDATORS

When two FPV drones suddenly rise in front of a soldier, they stop looking like machines. In that instant, the mind reads them as something alive — predators preparing to strike.

Drawing No. 527 — WHEN DRONES CHANGE THE FOREST

Through drone cameras, I have seen entire battlefields wrapped in fibre-optic cable, birds’ nests made from it, and our own drones caught in cables left by others. The moose is invented, but the new web spreading across the landscape is real.

Drawing No. 541 — THE SEASONS OF WAR: AUTUMN

This drawing is rooted in what happened to my platoon near Kurdiumivka in December 2022. Under fire, we dug shallow shelters in the frozen ground and covered them with plastic, but when the temperature rose to 1°C and rain began, they filled with water while shelling and assaults continued. We remained there for 19 days; when we were finally pulled back to rest, only five of the original twenty-four men were still with the platoon.

Drawing No. 419 — BOTH RIFLES JAMMED

During an assault, Amigo, a soldier of Ukraine’s 3rd Assault Brigade, found his rifle jammed just as the Russian soldier facing him discovered the same thing. Rapira, another soldier from the brigade, intervened and saved Amigo. I later turned the real incident into a short comic: the black humour is invented, but the absurdity that produced it was not.

Drawing No. 562 — PILA: A MODULAR PROBLEM-SOLVING SYSTEM

Pila, a soldier of Ukraine’s 3rd Assault Brigade, lost an arm in the war. I did not want to portray him as a victim, so I imagined his prosthesis as a modular system — a weapon, a bottle, a flower or a fork, whatever the situation requires. Dark humour does not erase trauma; sometimes it gives a person control over it again.

Drawing No. 362 — MOTHER OF GOD: OKHMATDYT

After Russia’s missile strike on the Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital in Kyiv on 8 July 2024, I saw a photograph of a woman comforting a young patient. I redrew the photograph and transformed it into an icon of the Mother of God and Child. Some events leave no room for satire; they can only be witnessed and remembered.

Drawing No. 396 — THE FIRST DAY AFTER THE WAR

I imagined the first day after the war at the Swallow’s Nest in Crimea. Russia’s war against Ukraine began in Crimea, and it will end there; the soldier has put down his weapon, but learning to live after the war will be another long journey.

As some of you might know, Cartoon Movement is a consortium partner in Horizon Europe project DELIAH (Democratic Literacy and Humour). In addition to researching humour, part of DELIAH’s mission is to raise awareness about the role of humour in our democracies. We try to do this in various ways: by writing about it, by giving workshops and now also by making a comic about it.

Over the last few months, we have worked with the renowned cartoonist Pedro X. Molina to create a four-page comic that explains what we currently know about how humour works in a democracy.

Depending on your device, you can choose to read the mobile version (just below) or the desktop version (below the mobile version).

Desktop version

We also have the comic available as a PDF and a slideshow. All formats of the comic are freely available to download and use, provided DELIAH and the artist Pedro X. Molina are credited when the comic is published.

Download comic as PDF

Download comic as a slideshow

Mobile version

Desktop version

If you are reading this post on a laptop, desktop or tablet, here is a version of the comic in the original, more traditional layout:

© Pedro X. Molina/DELIAH 2026

Jason Lutes is a cartoonist from Canada. As a student he started out as a freelance cartoonist for the Ottawa Citizen while also working for college and university newspapers. He still contributes to the Citizen while also working as a graphic designer and an illustrator.

Hi!

We did not have a newsletter last month (we were on summer break), so it’s about time for an update! Below you’ll find our latest news, cartoon collections, and the most popular cartoons of the month. Enjoy! And no newsletter is complete without promoting our other newsletter, our daily editor’s choice.

Subscribe to our daily cartoon

Cartoon Movement at the Dutch Journalism Festival

The Dutch Journalism Festival (Nederlands Journalistiek Festival) is taking place on September 18 and 19 in Deventer, the Netherlands. The two-day festival features panels, workshops, movie screenings and live journalism. Cartoon Movement is also present with the workshop we delevoped for DELIAH: The Importance of Humour for Democracy: Good Humour versus Bad Humour

Unfortunately, the workshop is already fully booked. If you are interested, we did a similar workshop at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia in April, which was recorded:

Also, if you are planning to visit the festival, several Dutch cartoonists will be drawing live on Saturday to see who can make the best cartoon.

Full festival program (in Dutch)

The state of democracy, in cartoons

The Kettering Foundation has published a collection of international cartoons with different perspectives on democracy. The collection, with cartoons from 19 renowned cartoonists, was put together by Tjeerd Royaards (cartoonist and editor-in-chief at Cartoon Movement), Terry Anderson (executive director at Cartoonists Rights), and Patrick Gathara (2026 CFK Global Fellow).

Satire translates complex political realities into stories, images, and jokes that ordinary people can engage with. In doing so, it lowers the barriers to political participation while creating space for critique that is often less threatening to audiences than overt political argument.

Patrick Gathara

You can see all 19 cartoons on the website of the Kettering Foundation:

See the cartoons

New cartoon collections

Flying kites in Gaza

US-Canada trade war

Catering truck

Most popular cartoons

Take a look at the most popular cartoons from the last 30 days on our social media channels.

On Facebook: Trump and Canada by Markus Grolik

On Instagram: Recipe for disaster by José Alberto Rodríguez Avila

On Bluesky: Climate change by George Riemann

We are lucky to add a lot of new cartoonists to our community this year, but it does mean there’s sometimes a backlog of new artists that we still have to introduce. PIQ and Grushnik have joined Cartoon Movement about three months ago. They are a cartoon-creating duo from two different background, based in France and Iceland respectively.

Ricardo Galvão is a cartoonist from Portugal that has recently joined our community. His work is published in Portuguese sports newspaper A Bola, and also in other media around the world.

Steve Jones is a professional cartoonist from the UK. His cartoons have appeared in Private Eye, The Guardian, New Statesman, The Spectator and many other publications. Visit his website to see more of his work.

The Dutch Journalism Festival (Nederlands Journalistiek Festival) is taking place on September 18 and 19 in Deventer, the Netherlands. The two-day festival features panels, workshops, movie screenings and live journalism. Cartoon Movement is also present with the workshop we delevoped for DELIAH: The Importance of Humour for Democracy: Good Humour versus Bad Humour

Unfortunately, the workshop is already fully booked. If you are interested, we did a similar workshop at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia in April, which was recorded:

Also, if you are planning to visit the festival, several Dutch cartoonists will be drawing live on Saturday to see who can make the best cartoon.

Full festival program (in Dutch)

The Kettering Foundation has published a collection of international cartoons with different perspectives on democracy. The collection, with cartoons from 19 renowned cartoonists, was put together by Tjeerd Royaards (cartoonist and editor-in-chief at Cartoon Movement), Terry Anderson (executive director at Cartoonists Rights), and Patrick Gathara (2026 CFK Global Fellow).

Satire translates complex political realities into stories, images, and jokes that ordinary people can engage with. In doing so, it lowers the barriers to political participation while creating space for critique that is often less threatening to audiences than overt political argument.

Patrick Gathara

You can see all 19 cartoons on the website of the Kettering Foundation:

See the cartoons

We are taking our annual break for the summer, which means that for the next few weeks, we will not publish any new editor’s choices, cartoon collections or post on our social media channels. We will back on August 13. See you then!

Mick O’Hara is a topical and gag cartoonist based in Ireland. His work has appeared in publications such as The Phoenix Magazine, In Dublin, RTÉ Guide, Hot Press and The New Cartoonist.

Hello!

This is the last newsletter before we take our annual summer break. In this edition, we talk about AI-tampering with cartoons, we have an interview with legendary comics scholar John A. Lent (who passed away last month), and, as usual, our latest collections and most popular cartoons.

Subscribe to our daily cartoon

AI-tampering with drawings. Can you tell?

A worrying development regarding AI is that drawings cartoonists and illustrators create can be edited without permission to change their meaning. The edited image looks as it could have been made by the artist.

CM editor Tjeerd Royaards writes about one of his recent cartoons that was altered with AI by a user on social media.

Read editorial

Interview with John A. Lent

Mehedi Haque, editorial cartoonist from Bangladesh and member of Cartoon Movement, met with legendary cartoon scholar and teacher Dr. John A. Lent in the summer of 2025, and interviewed him about the past present and future of political cartooning around the world.

Lent passed away last month, and this is one of his last interviews. We have published an excerpt of the interview on our blog, or you can listen to the entire conversation:

Video: Lecture at the University of Göttingen

On June 9, CM editor Tjeerd Royaards gave a lecture about the power of editorial cartoons at the University of Göttingen, as part of the Laughing in times of crisis lecture series. The lecture was recorded, and you can watch it here:

If you’re interested in watching the other lectures in the series, you can see them here.

New cartoon collections

Earthquake in Venezueka

Reflecting pool

FIFA World Cup 2026

Most popular cartoons

Take a look at the most popular cartoons from the last 30 days on our social media channels.

On Facebook: Reflecting pool by James Mellor

On Instagram: is the World Cup really for the world? by Custodio

On Bluesky: Ocean pollution by Kfir Weizman