Trump toon goes global
Cartoonist thanks ‘aligning of planets’ for work’s impact
Rod Emmerson reckons the global impact of his cartoon on Tuesday is thanks to “an aligning of the planets”.
The Herald editorial cartoonist found his illustration thrust into the limelight after a cheeky play on three events — the Football World Cup final, the men’s Wimbledon final and the summit in Finland between United States President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Since the cartoon was posted on Twitter on Tuesday, after being published in that day’s Herald, it has been viewed 352,000 times, liked nearly 4000 times and shared nearly 2000 times. He said an average number of views would be 20,000.
“For me it was a bit of an aligning of the planets because you had three really big events within 24-48 hours of each other,” Emmerson said.
“I wanted to try and pull them all together but I couldn’t find something in common. [But] when you look at photographs of Wimbledon finals and World Cup finals, everyone is holding up trophies — so it was a shoo-in.”
The cartoon features a French footballer holding the World Cup, Novak Djokovic with the Wimbledon trophy and Putin lifting Trump in a nod to their Helsinki summit.
Emmerson said he got the “shock of his life” seeing his cartoon on French TV, on the France 24 news channel. “It was a bit of a laugh. There were four cartoons profiled; one American, one from the Netherlands, one from France, and myself.
“I was a bit chuffed to have my stuff thrown in with that mix,” he said.
“You never know whether it is going to work or not. Some days they fire and some days they don’t. This was just one of those days where it did take off and it is still going.”
Emmerson thought the success of the cartoon came down to timing and appealability. “You are getting three areas of passionate followers and the chances of it being fairly popular are good,” he said.
The drawing took Emmerson seven hours to produce — with the hardest part being drawing Djokovic. “He is a difficult person to draw.” Due to New Zealand’s time zone being ahead of the rest of the world, Emmerson also had to predict the Helsinki summit before it happened. “[But] you could predict the outcome pretty well given Trump’s history.”