Sunday morning toons: Special Pre-Thanksgiving Clearance Sale edition

Bob Geiger devotes a lot of his toon review this week to the question of who's lower: Joe Lieberman, for his attempt to blackmail Senate Democrats into forgiving and forgetting his support for McCain and his attacks on Obama? Or Senate Democrats, for knuckling under? And there's the added theme that the Detroit Three might get much the same rough handling as Lieberman.

At Daryl Cagle's round-up this week, they're serving a full platter of the economy (sautéed in Motown Bailout), with a big heaping stack of Hillary for Secretary of State on the side. Mm-mmm! Good eats!

p3 Picks of the Week: Daryl Cagle, Mike Lane, John Darkow, Jimmy Marguilies, Adam Zyglis, and John Cole.

The p3 Award for Best Adaptation from Another Medium goes to this creepy-yet-convincing piece by Jerry Holbert.

If some other site has featured a toon that week I usually don't double-book it here, but this gem by Steve Sack, which also made Geiger's list this week, is worth a second mention. I think Sack did a particularly good job of capturing Joe's smug little smile.

And several toons have recognized that, in the annual whining about a so-called "War on Christmas," no one has noticed that Thanksgiving is already under a lot worse pressure. Tip of the big-buckled pilgrim hat to Eric Devericks, Gary Varvel, Rick McKee, and my favorite, Steve Kelly.

p3 World Toon Review: Cameron Cardow (Ottowa), Victor Ndula (Nairobi, Kenya), Werner Wejp-Olsen (Denmark), Sergei Elkin (Moscow),

Batocchio returns with a special Thanksgiving treat: the overstuffed 33rd installment of the Right-Wing Cartoon Watch. Chart the persistent themes of Republican political humor, starting with "No matter what, it's the Democrats' fault!"


For years, the consensus among paleontologists was that the last words of the dinosaurs before that meteor hit the earth and drove them to extinction, 70 million years ago, were "Uh-oh." Ann Telnaes presents an alternative theory.

It's the end of the world as we know it, and Tom Tomorrow feels fine.


Don’t eat at Joe's. I'm not sure any deliberate attempts at Thanksgiving-related humor this week could top the Sarah Palin pardoning-the-turkey press conference, but we're nothing if not intrepid here at p3. This week's featured animation is a 1945 cornucopia of sight-gags--about one every three or four seconds--from Tex Avery: "Jerky Turkey." A lot of the gags are pegged to the times--a Jimmy Durante turkey, for example, and lots of references to the war and war rationing (the Mayflower has a "C" gas rationing sticker). There's even a thinly stretched Joe Lieberman connection: The pilgrim is voiced in the same style (and possibly by one of the same voice actors) as Droopy the Dog, who's become the toon manqué for Lieberman in satirical circles.

(By the way, my other choice for this week's featured animation was Warner Bros.' "Tom Turk and Daffy," which Susanne at FireDogLake also covered, so you can get a Thanksgiving weekend twofer.)


p3 Bonus Toon: It wasn't that long ago that Phil Gramm--architect of the banking deregulation binge that helped put the economy where it is today, and likely nominee for Treasury Secretary had the election turned out differently--opined that a lot of the problem with America was that the average workers and consumers and homeowners were a bunch of "whiners." Americans were outraged by the remark at the time, but Jesse Springer wonders if he might have been onto something--maybe it really is a state-of-mind thing. (Click to enlarge.)