his privates like Adam and Eve, and at times making the "Victory" sign. Oliphant regularly portrayed the accident-prone Gerald Ford with a bandaid on his forehead. His fondness for Ronald Reagan did not protect that president, who is often portrayed as an oblivious buffoon in a parody of one of his films, while George H. W. Bush sometimes appears clutching a handbag and at other times is swathed in cloth as "Bush of Arabia." During the Clinton administration, he regularly used Socks the cat and Buddy the dog as a sort of "Greek chorus" to comment upon the happenings. He famously portrayed Barack Obama as an Easter Island head worshiped by voters. Oliphant found that it took time to find the right look for a new president, noting, "I hate changes of Administrations. It takes six months to 'get' a new man." "Punk" Early in his career, Oliphant began to include a small penguin in almost every one of his political cartoons. This character, which he named Punk, joined a tradition of such secondary figures, which cartoonist R. C. Harvey has termed "dingbats". They appear in the work of earlier cartoonists such as Fred O. Seibel of the Richmond Times Dispatch, whose cartoons featured a small, ironic crow, and earlier by W.K. (William Keevil) Patrick of the New Orleans Times-Democrat and then Times-Picayune, who had a signature duck character. Punk was created after a colleague visiting South Australia's south coast brought back a penguin in a paper bag. The penguin was delivered to the zoo, and Oliphant decided to include him in a cartoon. Punk began as an easily identifiable Adelie Penguin, but swiftly became stylized and remained so for the rest of Oliphant's career. Punk adds a second layer of commentary to the subject of the panel. He is often placed in conversation with another tiny figure. Punk was popular with both adults and children, who could make a game of finding him in each cartoon. In 1980, Oliphant briefly drew a full-color comic strip featuring the penguin for the Sunday funny pages, titled Sunday Punk, but found the work too laborious and soon gave up the strip. Oliphant originally created Punk as a space for subversion in the conservative editorial environment of the Adelaide Advertiser. Punk was a space for the cartoonist's own opinion, while the overall cartoon needed to hew to the views of the paper's editors.