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James Gillray
Born
Often called the father of editorial cartooning, and the place to start. Gillray's Georgian London prints set the template: grotesque, crowded with funny details, yet built on properly drawn anatomy. His targets were the biggest names of the age. George III squints at a portrait of Cromwell, Fox flogs Pitt the Younger, and Napoleon becomes a tiny man in a preposterously large hat, cutting up the world. That little-Corsican image outlived both men. Napoleon is reported to have said the prints did him more damage than a dozen generals, which may be legend, but it tells you how seriously they were taken.
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Honoré Daumier
Born
The proof that a caricature could frighten a king. Daumier drew for Charles Philipon's La Caricature, and his drawing of Louis-Philippe as the gluttonous giant Gargantua so offended the king that Daumier was prosecuted and sentenced to six months in prison, which he began serving in August 1832. When La Caricature was forced to stop in 1835, Philipon's team carried on at Le Charivari and steered clear of the king, and Daumier's commentary widened to French social and political life as a whole. He left more than 4,000 lithographs, with heavy, sculptural figures, and graphic artists are still learning from him; Van Gogh was among those he inspired.
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John Tenniel
Born
Victorian Britain's voice of measured authority. Tenniel drew for Punch for more than half a century and produced over 2,300 political cartoons and illustrations. His style was clean, statuesque and dignified rather than grotesque, which made his rare cruelties land harder. His best-known cartoon, Dropping the Pilot, shows Bismarck leaving the ship of state he had steered for almost 20 years, and Bismarck himself thought it a fine one. The same hand fixed the public image of Alice and the other characters of Lewis Carroll's books, and in 1893 Tenniel became the first illustrator or cartoonist to be knighted.
More about John Tenniel4
Thomas Nast
Born
Often called the father of the American cartoon. Nast drew about 2,200 cartoons for Harper's Weekly between 1859 and 1896, and his Civil War work was so effective for the Union that Lincoln reportedly called him its best recruiter. His biting campaign against New York's Boss Tweed, with Tammany Hall drawn as a prowling tiger, helped bring Tweed down in 1871. Nast also gave Americans the Republican elephant and shaped the popular images of Uncle Sam and Santa Claus, symbols cartoonists still reach for every week. His dense, crowded compositions repay a slow look.
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David Low (cartoonist)
Born
The cartoonist who mocked the dictators of the 1930s from London. Born in Dunedin, New Zealand, and first published at 11, Low joined the Evening Standard in 1927 and drew Hitler and Mussolini so sharply that his work was banned in Italy and Germany, and his name went into the Nazi Black Book of prominent Britons. At home he invented Colonel Blimp, a pompous caricature of the British establishment whose name outlived the cartoons. His bold brush line still looks modern, and Steve Bell is among the many later cartoonists he influenced.
More about David Low (cartoonist)6
John Heartfield
Born
Proof that a political cartoon does not need a pencil. Heartfield, born Helmut Herzfeld, anglicized his name during World War I in protest at anti-British fervor, then turned photomontage into a weapon for the communist weekly Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung. He cut Hitler out of press photographs and rebuilt him: in Adolf the Superman, from July 1932, an X-ray shows gold coins running down the Nazi leader's throat, the caption adding that he swallows gold and spouts junk. The covers were funny, frightening and instantly readable on a newsstand. He reached number five on the Gestapo's most-wanted list and fled over the mountains to Czechoslovakia.
More about John Heartfield7
Boris Yefimov
The view from inside the state. Yefimov, also spelled Efimov, drew for Pravda and was known as Stalin's favorite cartoonist, which makes him a very different case from the dissidents elsewhere on this list. His withering portrayals of Hitler and the Nazi leadership shaped how Soviet readers saw the war, and after it he went to the Nuremberg trials to caricature the defendants. Afterwards the same pen turned on the West. He died in Moscow in 2008, reportedly aged 108, so his career spans almost the whole Soviet story. Read him for the craft and for what official satire looks like.
More about Boris Yefimov8
Herblock
Born
The conscience of the Washington Post for 58 years. Herblock drew there from 1943 until 2001, after 14 years at the Chicago Daily News, and he gave the English language the word McCarthyism. Richard Nixon was his longest-running target: he drew Vice President Nixon climbing out of a sewer, his smear tactics made literal, and his Watergate cartoons later put him on Nixon's enemies list. Even his early drawings showed a complete mastery of the political cartoon's conventions, and the plain, readable style let the argument do the work. He is one of only five cartoonists to win the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning three times, in 1942, 1954 and 1979.
More about Herblock9
Victor Weisz
A left-wing cartoonist whose best joke backfired. Born in Berlin to Hungarian-Jewish parents, Victor Weisz reached London in October 1935 and, signing himself Vicky, drew for the News Chronicle, the Daily Mirror from 1954 and the Evening Standard from 1958, with work for the New Statesman alongside; by the 1940s he was one of Britain's leading left-wing cartoonists. At the Standard he invented Supermac, Harold Macmillan as a comic-book superhero, meant as mockery. The name worked in Macmillan's favor instead, and he increased his majority at the 1959 election. Vicky died in 1966, and Supermac is still how many people picture Macmillan.
More about Victor Weisz10
Bill Mauldin
Born
The cartoonist of the ordinary soldier. Drawing for the Army paper Stars and Stripes in World War II, Mauldin perfected Willie and Joe, two muddy, weary dogfaces whose tired jokes showed home the drabness of a foot soldier's life. The cartoons won him a Pulitzer in 1945, and he later won a second. His best-known postwar drawing shows the statue in the Lincoln Memorial weeping behind its hands, drawn after President Kennedy's assassination. The wartime panels are scruffy and unheroic on purpose, which is why they still read as true.
More about Bill Mauldin11
R. K. Laxman
Born
India's daily mirror for half a century. In his single-panel You Said It cartoon in The Times of India, Laxman lampooned the powerful from corrupt politicians down to potholed roads, watched by the Common Man: a bald, bespectacled figure in a checked coat who never speaks. That silent witness became one of the best-known images of independent Indian democracy. Laxman's clean, economical line made the cartoons readable at a glance over breakfast, and the state that he mocked awarded him the Padma Vibhushan in 2005. He died in 2015, aged 93.
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Duncan Macpherson
Born
Canada's defining editorial cartoonist. After illustrating for the Montreal Standard and Maclean's, Macpherson joined the Toronto Star, and his acid portraits of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker made him famous; the best known casts Diefenbaker as Marie Antoinette after the cancellation of the Avro Arrow fighter. He was a brilliant draftsman whose caricatures could be wicked, mischievous and sometimes cruel, and he won six National Newspaper Awards for his Star work. If you know Canadian politics only from the Trudeau years onward, his Diefenbaker era is the place to catch up.
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Gerald Scarfe
Born
The most violent line in British cartooning. Scarfe began under the influence of Ronald Searle but at Private Eye developed a visceral style of grotesquely distorted bodies, faces stretched and split until the politician's character seems to burst through the skin. He went on to a long run at the Sunday Times, and Margaret Thatcher's arrival in 1979 gave him his great subject; he later said she was a big thing in his life. Outside politics his work reached millions through Pink Floyd's The Wall, for the album and the 1982 film. Expect discomfort, not gentle wit.
More about Gerald Scarfe14
Cabu
Born
The gentle-looking draftsman at the heart of French satire. Jean Cabut, known as Cabu, drew for Le Canard enchaîné and Charlie Hebdo, mocking politicians and the beauf, his racist, sexist, vulgar caricature of the average Frenchman, whose name passed into everyday French. His quick, rounded line looked almost childlike, which made the bite harder to see coming. In 2006 he drew the Charlie Hebdo cover of the Prophet Muhammad with his eyes covered, lamenting that it is hard to be loved by idiots, and it drew condemnation and a lawsuit. On January 7, 2015, he was murdered with his colleagues in the attack on the magazine's Paris offices, aged 76.
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Pat Oliphant
Born
The cartoonist other cartoonists studied. Born in Adelaide in 1935, Oliphant joined The Denver Post in 1964 and won the Pulitzer three years later, then went on to be widely considered the most syndicated editorial cartoonist in the United States. His fluid, energetic line skewered presidents from Lyndon Johnson to Donald Trump, and in the corner of many panels sits Punk, a small penguin who adds a muttered second joke. That sidekick device was copied by a whole postwar generation of American cartoonists. Oliphant died in July 2026, aged 90, which makes now a good time to go back through his archive.
More about Pat Oliphant16
Naji al-Ali
The Arab world's most beloved political cartoonist, and one of its most fearless. Naji al-Ali's signature is Handala, a barefoot ten-year-old refugee boy who stands with his back to the reader, watching. Through him al-Ali criticized Arab rulers, the Israeli state and the Palestine Liberation Organization alike, which left him with enemies on every side. On July 22, 1987, he was shot in the neck as he walked to the London office of the Kuwaiti paper Al-Qabas, and he died on August 29 without regaining consciousness. The killing has never been solved. Handala remains a symbol across the region.
More about Naji al-Ali17
Garry Trudeau
Born
The comic strip that crashed the editorial page. Doonesbury launched on October 26, 1970, and in 1975 Trudeau became the first comic strip artist to win the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. His method is the long game: a large recurring cast followed over decades, so readers watch whole administrations unfold through ordinary lives rather than single gags. Donald Trump has been one of his favorite and most frequent targets. Trudeau stopped the daily strip in 2013 and has kept the Sunday page going since, which leaves more than five decades to read.
More about Garry Trudeau18
Jeff MacNelly
A draftsman other cartoonists copied for a generation. MacNelly won the first of his three Pulitzer Prizes in 1972 at the Richmond News Leader in Virginia, and the third at the Chicago Tribune, which he joined in 1982. His loose, exuberant penwork shaped artists from American newspaper cartoonists to South Africa's Zapiro. He also created the comic strip Shoe, about wisecracking birds at a newspaper called The Treetop Tattler, which outlived him. He died in 2000, aged 52.
More about Jeff MacNelly19
Ali Farzat
Born
The cartoonist whose hands were broken for drawing Bashar al-Assad. Farzat, also spelled Ferzat, is Syria's best-known political cartoonist, with more than 15,000 caricatures in Syrian, Arab and international papers, and he has led the Arab Cartoonists Association. As the 2011 uprising grew, his cartoons turned directly on Assad, including one comparing him to Moammar Gadhafi. In August 2011 masked men abducted and beat him and broke both his hands as a warning to stop drawing. He kept drawing, and that year he was one of five people awarded the European Parliament's Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.
More about Ali Farzat20
Steve Bell (cartoonist)
The modern heir to Gillray. Bell's If... strip first appeared in The Guardian in November 1981 and ran for four decades, and from 1990 he was also one of the paper's editorial and political cartoonists. His caricatures became the way many Britons pictured their leaders: John Major as a crap Superman wearing his underpants over his trousers, Tony Blair with sticky-out ears, a flabby lower lip and starry eyes. He calls cartooning an attacking medium, and he draws like it. In 2023 The Guardian declined to renew his contract after pulling his cartoon of Benjamin Netanyahu preparing to operate on his own stomach, marked with an outline of Gaza.
More about Steve Bell (cartoonist)21
Zapiro
Born
South Africa's sharpest post-apartheid pen. Jonathan Shapiro, signing as Zapiro, fixed Jacob Zuma's public image with a single prop: a shower head sprouting from his skull, after Zuma testified at his 2006 rape trial, at which he was acquitted, that he had showered afterwards to reduce the risk of HIV. Zapiro kept the shower on Zuma for years through his rise to the presidency, despite defamation suits worth millions of rand, and told reporters he would not take it off. His busy, colorful panels are packed with background gags worth a second look.
More about Zapiro22
Michael Ramirez
Born
The leading conservative voice in American editorial cartooning today. Ramirez won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 at The Commercial Appeal in Memphis and again in 2008 at Investor's Business Daily, and in 2018 he joined the staff of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His cartoons usually rest on one big visual metaphor built to be read in a second, and they come at the news from the right, which makes him the essential counterweight on a list where many of the great names drew from the left. Pair him with Telnaes or Trudeau to see the same week through the other lens.
More about Michael Ramirez23
Ann Telnaes
Born
The cartoonist who walked out over one drawing. Telnaes works in animation, visual essays, live sketches and print, with a spare, elegant line. She joined The Washington Post in 2008 and resigned in January 2025 after the paper killed her sketch of owner Jeff Bezos and other tech and media leaders kneeling before Donald Trump with bags of money. She wrote that she had never had a cartoon killed because of who or what she chose to aim her pen at, until then. Months later she won the Pulitzer Prize, with the board recognizing her fearlessness. Few careers show more plainly what the job can cost.
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