W.'s map

We had a post some time ago showing a Ted Rall play on the Steinberg classic. Here's another in a very similar vein by Lalo Alcaraz. This "view of the world" gag for geographically-oriented cartoons is still one of the most common to the form.

7 billion -fer

So last week there was the advent of the birth of the 7 billionth human. So this week we'll do a round-up of map-related comics on that theme:

Signe Wilkinson here combines the topic of the 7 billionth human on the planet with the Occupy Wall Street movement (which has been going on for the last month or so).

  Next we have one by a cartoonist named Garrincha  out of Miami.

 Keeping with the theme of associating the population topic with another current event, there's this one by Ken Catalino who makes a play on the fact that the Duggar family is expecting their 20th child. 

By the way, Mrs. Duggar is nowhere near the record-holder for most number of children born to one woman. That, believe it or not, is a tie, at 69:

• Mrs. Fyodor Vassilet was born in Russia in 1707. . During her lifetime, she gave birth to 16 sets of twins, seven sets of triplets, and four sets of quadruplets, for a total of 69 children. 
• The second woman who gave birth to 69 children was Mrs. Bernard Scheinberg, who lived in Austria in the late 1800s. 
• When she died in 1911, at the age of 56 (so even if she started giving birth at age 16, that's over 1.7 kids per year), her husband remarried and had 18 more children with his second wife, for a total of 87 children!
• But Genghis Khan may have fathered far more children than that, with estimates possibly in the thousands.

 Here's one by Danish artist Van Dam Landmeer.  You'd think the Earth there depicted would be glad to be growing a fuller head of hair, no?

Here's one by Hajjaj out of Jordon.  I'm actually not entirely sure that it's about population.  It almost looks like it could be about constipation.

Tom Toles

And finally, Lalo Alcaraz, with each baby there representing 7 billion people.

Actually, the rate of population growth appears to be leveling off.  We should peak around 9 or 10 billion by 2050 and then either level off or start dropping... unless medical technology cures everything by then and people stop dying... which actually isn't all that unlikely.

Osama bin Laden

Steve Benson

Lalo Alcaraz

I didn't think there'd be that much in the way of map-related comics pertaining to last weekend's dramatic turn of events, and for the most part there wasn't.  I've only seen these two by Benson and Alcaraz.  But that doesn't mean Osama bin Laden hasn't made appearances in map-related comics before.

Speaking of current events, ya think Mr. Alcaraz here was using survey markers?