TDC International (A Roundup)
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Leman No More
From Balkan Insight:
For 40 years the weekly satirical magazine Leman was published in Turkey. But on June 26, a cartoon appeared depicting Gaza under fire and featuring two figures named Muhammed and Musa [Moses].
Five employees were arrested; the editor-in-chief could not be, however, as he was abroad. Meanwhile, prison sentences ranging from four-and-a-half to seven-and-a-half years were requested for all six.
The prosecutor’s office also ordered the confiscation of the magazine’s final issue containing the cartoon, and the magazine ceased publication. Access to its website was blocked from July 1.
The distribution company, which held a monopoly in this field in Turkey, unilaterally terminated its contract. The printing house also unilaterally cancelled its contract. The magazine could no longer be printed or distributed. It has not been published since then.
From the Blog of the European Journal of International Law:
This controversy once again puts the spotlight on the conflict between religious sensitivities and freedom of expression, a matter that has already been the subject of heated global debates in terms of previous depictions of Prophet Muhammad. This post evaluates the Leman controversy in light of European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) judgments on offensive expressions related to religion, and the limited jurisprudence of the Turkish Constitutional Court (TCC). It argues that a possible case would not stand a chance in either Ankara or Strasbourg, even if these courts were to continue their broad interpretation of freedom of religion to encompass the protection of religious feelings.
Cartoon Movement’s Best Cartoons of the Year (2025)
From Cartoon Movement: Top 10 political cartoons of 2025.
One of our traditions is to do a top ten of our favorite cartoons of the year. Not an easy task, given that 11,793 cartoons were published on our website in 2025 (as of the writing of this post). Out of these 11K cartoons, we picked about 200 editor’s choices (the cartoons that appear on our homepage each day).
This top 10 isn’t limited to just editor’s choices, but we did limit our selection to cartoons we featured on our social media channels, and took into account how well they did there. That means this top 10 is subjective, to a certain extent arbitrary and probably influenced by the algorithms of big tech. But since the alternative was to plow trough thousands of cartoons, we can live with it. We hope you can too.
2025 as seen by press cartoonists
As you know, journalism runs at a frantic pace: as soon as one article is published, we jump straight to the next. The weeks fly by, and opportunities to look back on past accomplishments are all too rare. But since press cartoons are part of Voxeurop’s DNA, we make the effort at the end of each year to look back on our favourite drawings.
This is also the message of these press cartoons: don’t give up, keep finding things to amuse, provoke and prod you, and above all, never stop taking an interest in the world – especially when cynicism can seem so tempting. Since these press cartoons are aimed at our readers, over the last few weeks we have given you the opportunity to choose your favourites from among those we published each month. Here is your selection.
Édouard Karali aka Édika – RIP
John Freeman at downthetubes reports the death of cartoonist Édouard Karali:
We’re sorry to report the passing of the cartoonist Édouard Karali, better known by the pen name of Édika, a French comics artist renowned for his distinctively absurd style.
Édika died on 16th December 2025, one day before his 85th birthday.
He was the creator of a non-speaking cat with an otherwise human behaviour, Clarke Gaybeul (deliberately homophone to Clark Gable), and Bronski Proko and sometimes his family.
Edika became the undisputed master of absurdist, often adult humour. Several of his strips have been translated into English, and other European languages.
Cartoonist Profiles – Sir Francis Carruthers Gould
This year marks not only the 50th anniversary of the official inauguration of the British Cartoon Archive (BCA) at the University of Kent, but also the centenary of the death of Sir Francis Carruthers Gould (1844-1925), the first staff political cartoonist to work for a daily newspaper in Britain, the first of his kind to be knighted, and the earliest artist to be represented in the BCA’s collection of some 200,000 British cartoons and caricatures dating from the late 19th Century to the present day.
Though sufficiently famous in 1890 to warrant a caricature in the “Men of the Day” series in the popular society magazine, Vanity Fair, Gould is perhaps not as well known in modern times as his fellow cartoonist knights–Max Beerbohm, Osbert Lancaster, David Low, and John Tenniel–despite that more than 130 drawings by him are held in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London.
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