Embracing AI in Cartooning

Saturday July 5, 2025 | Substack Newsletter 34

In this week’s newsletter, I’m taking a break from my regular review of editorial cartoon news. I’ve always seen the first week of July as a time to celebrate national holidays and a great chance to step back from cartooning. This year, however, I’ve decided to dedicate my focus exclusively to honouring my home country, with a playful thumb of the nose to the neighbour to the south—an attitude I clarify further through this link.

This week, I want to share my thoughts on AI and how it’s prompting me to explore the potential for animating my drawings.

Throughout my lifespan, whether I was 6 or taking my 6-year-old kids to Walt Disney World, there was only one attraction that truly grabbed my full attention: The Hall of the Presidents. I was the one who made my siblings watch it. I was the one nerding out who dragged my kids in to see those wondrous animatronic Presidential robots nodding, smiling, and looking as real as 1970s technology could muster. I distinctly recall training my eyes on Andrew Jackson, poised with his arms crossed and leaning toward another President, whispering something in his ear. What could he possibly be saying, “check out the idiot at the end of row 5?” Just last week, news broke that the current President's figure has been added to the stage. One can only imagine the thoughts swirling in the Casio calculator brains of the other leaders with this particular new arrival.

Though I’ll never witness animatronic Trump delivering whatever speech he has on that stage—thanks to my travel boycott—the Hall of Presidents will forever hold a fascination for me.

My stab at creating my fantasy Canadian version of the H.O.Ps just after Justin Trudeau arrived on the scene in 2015 with his tenure as Canada’s 23rd Prime Minister. A lot painstaking digitized cell animation taking hours upon hours made this possible.

While I’ll never be a Disney imagineer creating my own animatronic wonders, Artificial Intelligence is enabling me to animate my static drawings like never before.

Animating is a pursuit many editorial cartoonists have dabbled in over the years. My journey as a kid began with penciled stick figure drawings in the margins of my mother’s massive collection of Barbara Cartland novels. Flip those pages rapidly, and voilà—a custom cartoon lasting three seconds. Pure fun.

Digital cartooning entered my life in the early 2000s when a friend at an editing studio in Toronto animated one of my editorial cartoons on the seal hunt using a pricey computer. I don’t know how much time he spent putting it together, but it shows how out of reach animation was just 20 years ago for any novice. The clip is still there on YouTube, showing a bit of age and some snarky comments left from long ago.

GIF animation came on the scene allowing us to create moving cartoons on an endless loop. Here’s a link to one I drew of Justin Trudeau as a Pez dispenser & here’s the endless Trump trial clock. Various editorial cartoonists became pros at it. Super star cartoonist and Pulitzer Prize winner Ann Telnaes gave a GIF 101 course while attending a convention I hosted here in Hamilton in 2010. By the way, for what it’s worth, gif is pronounced beginning with a ‘guh’ sound, not like the peanut butter brand as people still commonly call them. I made a few, despite the time-consuming process—hours spent for mere seconds of entertainment. This was the alternative to Flash animation, which required costly software and a steep learning curve, plus countless hours for just a few moments of animation.

For the past year, I’ve been making use of the feature that comes with my tablet that records a sped up video version of whatever I‘ve drawn. These 30 second clips add a new dimension to my regular printed versions when sound, narration and video effects are added. I’ve archived them all here on my YouTube channel.

Now, it takes just a minute to transform hours of work on a static image into an generative AI animated clip lasting, say, six seconds. The movement is smooth, and the results can be impressive—though some generated pieces can be quite lacklustre too.

We editorial cartoonists spend vast, solitary slices of our lives developing, staring at, and refining single scenes that culminate in a daily product consuming mere milliseconds of your attention. I suppose animation adds potential for capturing more of that attention. We’re drawing people into our drawings, I guess.

My hope is this might inspire a spark of interest in youth to take a stab at it. While there still are a lot of editorial cartoonists plying the trade, we’re getting greyer and greyer and there’s a concerning lack of youth wanting to do and picking up what we do, but that’s another topic for another day.

Back to the subject of the moment, once someone uploads a photo, an idea, a string of words, a thought, or a song, it enters the wild west of intellectual property crimes. I’ve been on the receiving end of this quite a bit. AI is soaking up all sorts of material online, regurgitating and repurposing it for human use. It emulates the part of the brain we humans use to convert inspiration from our senses into creative output. Inspiration is born out of emulation. One can either shake their fists at it, refrain from uploading anything online, or embrace the opportunity to make productive use of it.

I’m experimenting with the latter by blending my creative products with technology. Let’s face it: visual artists have come a long way since smearing their own blood with yak fat on cave walls and calling it art.

What AI offers is the ability to make what was once impossible, possible. No studio in South Korea would ever animate my Thomas Jefferson caricature as I just did this week in a few minutes. Are the AI-generated voices I use for my videos lifted from human voice actors? I can’t say for sure. Are the fonts I incorporate in my shorts properly licensed from whatever creative farm they hail from? Again, I don’t know. Below is another I created for my Teddy Roosevelt design:

Using AI to make history fun

My latest obsession is to marry my interest in political history while shamelessly plugging my merch sold through my print-on demand-marketplace.

In the above promotion featuring Canada's short lasting 1890's Prime Minister, Mackenzie Bowell, I make use of generative AI to give the real life feel of a doc featuring an interview, entirely fake of course, using a pretty convincing Bowell and interviewer to help promote a design that leans on primary school grade humour urging viewers to "Join the Bowell Movement." I know… har-de-har.

Last week, I spent the first part of my July vacation visiting Ottawa. One of the evenings was spent having a beer on the patio outside D'Arcy McGee’s on Sparks Street. The pub is aptly named given its location not so far from the site of the assassination of Thomas D'Arcy McGee, an MP representing a Montreal riding, who was murdered in 1868. I had designed a caricature and made it available in my online store some years ago and thought hmmm... an interesting story that's not well known, lets whip up an entertaining reenactment and marry it with my design.

Are Canadians getting over their loathing of past Prime Ministers due to horrible policies and practices they presided over in the times in which they lived? I’m guessing a few years of self-reflection have helped better the understanding of how flawed these so-called leaders actually were and that it is important to know the ugly but also the good they did in building the nation. Above is a short feature blending Macdonald and Laurier in promoting a double design of the two.

Visiting the Diefenbunker outside of Ottawa this past week inspired me to whip up this one focusing on the cranky Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. My design of Dief has been available in my shop for more than 10 years. Generative AI gives me the ability to upload frozen images to an AI website and with a few written prompts it magically animates my caricatures. There were several clips that were modified and rejected before being stitched together with other software to create a complete animation requiring voice overs, music and sound affects. This is my actual voice used to imitate the late PM's voice. I'm no Rich Little when it comes to voice impressions, but wait 'til I unveil my John Turner promo using my own voice!

I'm finding that AI does a very good job responding to prompts requesting dance moves. In this clip, I excerpt actual audio recording from Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's famous "just watch me" response to a reporter’s question about how far he would go in enforcing law and order during invocation of the war measures act during the 1970 October Crisis. Is this insensitive? Am I violating copyright by using actual audio? Does CapCut, the editing software I used to make the hiphop background beat actually hold the rights to allow me to use it?

What I know for certain is that I have less than ten years until I reach "retirement age," and I can’t afford to wait for courts or public opinion to decide whether AI is beneficial or detrimental. As Cal Newport writes in a recent article in the New Yorker, generative Artificial Intelligence definitely has its shortcomings, and may not necessarily provide time saving strategies for creators, however, it does seem to “reduce the maximum mental effort demanded of me.”

Some say it’s making us dumber. But I suggest it’s a tool that can broaden our minds and free up more time to help us think, and to help creative people be even more creative.

At the same time, if I dare to be a bit provocative, it’s allowing non-creative people to churn out so called slop that makes them appear creative. One only has to peruse the reels now filling the social media scrolls to see some of the over-the-top computerized stuff that you’ll see me in the flesh reacting to here.

Renowned editorial cartoonists are losing their long-standing positions at legacy newspapers. Kevin Kallaugher, known as KAL, was recently let go from the Baltimore Sun after 31 years. Fortunately, I think he still maintains his long running position as cartoonist with The Economist magazine. A Harvard graduate, KAL is not only one of the smartest and hardest-working professionals in the field, but he is also incredibly passionate about promoting editorial cartooning. He is eager to experiment with animation and is keenly aware of the need to keep our form of satire relevant. On top of that, he’s one of the kindest individuals you could ever meet, and he has a unique flair for wearing flashy vests.

I have no doubt that KAL will land on his feet, just like many others have. They serve as my inspiration. If traditional drawing alone won't ensure my livelihood, then perhaps animation through generative AI can add value and hope to my work. While many may dismiss AI—an opinion they are entitled to—I’m ready to seize the opportunity and make something meaningful out of it. So far, I believe I’m on the right track.

What do you think? Send me your thoughts.

Thank you to everyone who subscribes to my weekly newsletter! I aim to deliver a recap of the week with my editorial cartoons every Saturday morning, while keeping notifications low. Apologies for the spelling mistakes that always come with my writings and only get corrected long after they’ve been emailed out to subscribers. Throughout the week, I share extra insights on Substack, including animated versions of my cartoons. This past week for instance, I officially became a member of Aislin’s Skull Ring. Read about it here.

Substack is a lifeline for me, given the unpredictable nature of being a staff cartoonist. While I’m hopeful, I know many talented colleagues face layoffs and closures. As long as I keep my job at a traditional newspaper, subscriptions will stay free. Huge thanks to the Hamilton Spectator and to all of you for your support!