By Hal Brown
You’ve no doubt seen caricatures by DonkeyHotey.
I’ve used them to illustrate some my diaries as have others on Daily Kos. They are also used to great effect on many other websites. These are all available for use under Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Political cartoons have always been powerful dating back to Thomas Nast, considered the father of the Americans cartoon.
Here’ s what I wrote about him in June, 2016. It should go without saying that he’d probably put Trump’s face on the fat rat.
What DonkeyHotey does is send a message by capturing the essence of the subjects, oftentimes with a focus just on a single aspects of their personality. This is what great portrait painters and photographers do.
DonkeyHotey captures Trump’s smugness (as above) and his rage (below) for example.
Some DonkeyHotey caricatures also send a political message and are basically political cartoons. This one from 2016 is one of the best known:
Here is the blogroll (note Daily Kos is included): Alternet | The American Prospect | Bloomberg | Boing Boing | BuzzFeed | Campaign for America’s Future | CBS MoneyWatch | Common Dreams | Crooks and Liars | The Daily Dot | Daily Kos | Dandelion Salad | Eclectablog | Esquire.com | Forbes | The Good Men Project | The Guardian | The Huffington Post | In These Times | Life of the Law | Matt Wuerker | Majority Report | Mother Jones | Neon Tommy | Raw Story | RH Reality Check | In These Times | IPS | The Jimmy Dore Show | Kiko's House | Like the Dew | Mother Jones | The Motley Fool | Neon Tommy | New Civil Rights Movement | NewsHounds | Other Words | patheos | The Progressive | Truthdig | Truth-out | Vice | WhoWhatWhy | Wired
The artist’s name seems to be closely guarded secret. I wasn’t able to determine where the name DonkeyHotey came from because I was pronouncing it donkey and hotey.
(UPDATE) A commenter, neonomad (meaning new nomad I assume) noted that it is probably a reference to Don Quixote. The phonetic pronunciation of Don Quixote is more or less don-key-hoh-tee (or technically (/ˌdɒn kiːˈhoʊti/, US: /-teɪ/;) so this could easily turn into DonkeyHotey. I was so certain this is the derivation I added the famous drawing of Don Quixote tilting at the windmill to the illustration for this story.
I failed to scroll down Google far enough to see that a search for DonkeyHotey included a link to the Wiki page for Don Quixote and this from the Urban Dictionary:
I used the DonkeyHotey caricature from this story in a tweet this morning hoping it will encourage people to retweet it. I thought it perfectly captured the world class smug pathological denial of Donald Trump. (I’ll let readers know how many impressions it gets during the day.)
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You can learn more about DonkeyHotey and see more caricatures not only of Trump but other political “characters” from the official DonkeyHotey website here.
You can also find a large selection of caricatures on Flickr here. It has 3180 illustrations.
Of particular interest is the breakdown into albums.
Lots of people in the media did a great service in helping Joe Biden win the election. I think we can include DonkeyHotey as one of them.
DonkeyHotey on Twitter, some (like below) but not too many caricatures. There is lots of commentary and retweets.
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