Drawing political cartoons can often land you in hot water, which is something our own Zapiro knows from his legal battles with Jacob Zuma.

He’s still ticking along, though, whereas Canadian cartoonist Michael de Adder has lost his job.

De Adder posted the image on Twitter last Wednesday, and it wasn’t long before it blew up.

Dealing with the heartbreaking photo of a father and daughter found dead on the banks of the Rio Grande, the cartoonist sought to draw attention to the crisis at America’s southern border.

Here’s the jarring cartoon:

Wonder what the right-wing free speech brigade have to say about de Adder’s firing?

CBS News reporting below:

…de Adder explained his thinking behind the illustration: “I tried less polite Trump and felt ‘do you mind if I play through’ to be more delusional and dismissive of reality. It was a cartoon choice. Of course he’d be more rude in real life.”

Soon after, however, de Adder said he was let go. “The highs and lows of cartooning. Today I was just let go from all newspapers in New Brunswick,” he tweeted on Friday.

In a series of tweets, de Adder implied the cartoon may have been the final straw, but that he was often fearful of submitting anything Trump-related since his cartoons in the past depicting the president had all been rejected: “Does it matter if I was fired over one Donald Trump cartoon when every Donald Trump cartoon I submitted in the past year was axed?”

“It got to the point where I didn’t submit any Donald Trump cartoons for fear that I might be fired,” he added.

The company that owns the newspapers he was let go from, Brunswick News Inc., disputed de Adder’s version of events, saying that they had been negotiating with another cartoonist to return for a number of weeks, and the decision was taken before de Adder shared his cartoon.

De Adder isn’t buying it:

He also spoke with the Washinton Post about why he fails to believe his firing, at an outlet he has worked with for 17 years, had been in the works before the cartoon:

…he received a call from his editor late last week to inform the cartoonist that his contract had been canceled. He said that he was not given a reason for the cancellation, and that he doesn’t believe it was a coincidence…

“It was the highest of highs for 24 hours and then I get a phone call: ‘I’m sorry, we’re letting you go.’ “

“I had a good relationship with my editors just four days previous,” de Adder said. “I had supplied my cartoons and there were no issues. I replaced [spiked] cartoons whenever they wanted. . . . So what normal human being wouldn’t think [the timing] was more than a coincidence?”

…“The only subject I was told that was taboo was Trump,” de Adder told The Post, in characterizing his working relationship with Brunswick News editors.

Thankfully for de Adder and his bank balance, he is still working with a number of other Canadian newspapers, as well as the American cartoon outlet, Counterpoint.

Something tells me he’s going to be etching a few more Trump cartoons in the near future.

[source:cbsnews&washingtonpost]