Until 1925, when Michael Tays launched Kannas al-Shawari (The Road Sweeper), a humorous newspaper in Iraq, most cartoons in the Arab world were printed in Egypt.
In 1929, pioneering cartoonist Khalid Kahhala's work emerged as he launched the satirical gazette Al Mudhik al-Mubki (The Weeping Joker) in Syria.
For instance, in order to put a stop to unwanted rumors about a military coup in Turkey in July 1997, an Islamist prime minister, Necmettin Erbakan, demanded an inquiry into the activities of ten intellectuals, among whom was the political cartoonist, Salih Memecan.
Algerian political cartoons were unique in that they were largely bilingual, and that served to convey the diametrical opposition of European and Arabic television during the Gulf War.
For example, a cartoon published in March 1991 in Sinsar, a weekly newspaper, an Algerian viewer channel-hops between a French-language television program that proclaims the Coalition victory and an Arabic-language Iraqi one that announces Saddam Hussein's supremacy.
For example, a cartoon published in March 1991 in Al-Aqrab shows an American female soldier and a Saudi male at her feet, saying: "We thank you, you have sexually excited us, sorry, I mean you have liberated us".