This Week's Sneak Peek

There's gonna be some mansplaining in this week's cartoon.

I posted a new cartoon at the end of Saturday's Graphical History Tour of cartoons I had drawn decades ago. I suppose I could have posted it separately, especially since I devoted much of that post to pointing out the flaws in the older cartoons. 

On the other hand, I could have used the occasion to discuss why adding boar tusks to my Trump caricature would have detracted and distracted from the facial expression I was going for in the new cartoon. 

The Winter of Our Recycled Content

Daffodil shoots are poking through the slowly melting snow in the garden hereabouts. While Spring hopes eternal outdoors, today's Graphical History Tour parades through four decades of my March cartoons from 1986 to the present. 

Yes, I said "the present."

1986

in UW-P Ranger, Somers Wis., March, 1986

Ronald Reagan had campaigned for the presidency in 1980 promising to rein in spending and to cut the federal deficit. Instead, thanks to tax cuts and increased defense spending, the deficit climbed year by year, topping $220 billion, not quite 5% of gross national product, by 1986.

Republican Senators Phil Gramm and Warren Rudman, joined by South Carolina Democrat Fritz Hollings (left to right in my cartoon), put forth a scheme to force future Congresses to slash spending or face automatic budget cuts beyond their control. Gramm-Rudman-Hollings passed both houses of Congress and was signed into law in 1985, but the Supreme Court found it unconstitutional in 1986.

Gramm, Rudman, and Hollings later came out with a revised bill addressing the Court’s objections to Gramm-Rudman-Hollings I. Coupled with a tax hike, social spending cuts resulted in some reduction of the federal deficit, but it was right back to $221 billion by 1990.

A propos of nothing, $220 billion happens to be the amount Secretary of Special Military Operations Pete Hegseth wants over and above the Pentagon's 2026 budget in order to continue the Excursion in Iran.

1996

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., March 7, 1996

I really liked this cartoon, partly because it was my first truly successful caricature of Pat Buchanan.

Its problem lay in that it relied heavily on references to the 1995 film version of Richard III, which reset Shakespeare's play about England's last Plantagenet king into the late 1930's, depicting Richard as a murderous fascist grasping onto his usurped throne. I took the boar's head banners directly from the film (a white boar having been the actual heraldry emblem adopted by Richard himself).

Had there been more of an audience for updated Shakespeare histories, those references might have worked better. And why wouldn't audiences have flocked to see Ian McKellen, Annette Bening, Robert Downey, Jr., and Dame Maggie Smith bringing the bard from the 1480's into the 20th Century and the murders from offstage onto the screen?

I had been reading all of Shakespeare's history plays at the time, starting with Richard III, spurred on by first reading The Daughter of Time by Dorothy Tey. In her novel, Tey's detective, Alan Grant, is laid up in the hospital recovering from a gunshot wound in a previous adventure, and passes the time investigating the murder, supposedly by Richard III or on his orders, of Edward IV's two sons.

I even bought the DVD.

Which sits unopened on the DVD shelf, still in its plastic wrapping from Barnes & Noble. 

It ain't exactly Date Night material.

2006

for Q Syndicate, March, 2006

Another problem with the cartoon about Buchanan was that the newspaper headline in it was kind of small. It was passable in a university newspaper, read by young adults with generally good vision. I couldn't foresee people reading it on an itty bitty phone screen; nowadays, I would have had to put the newspaper more in the foreground. or the headline in a "News Item" text box.

The church window in this 2006 cartoon has the same flaw. I had plenty of room to make the window much bigger, and I think the cartoon would have been improved if it were at least taller.

I don't think I was intentionally referencing this illustration by Maximino Cerezo Barredo of the biblical story of Jesus's temptation by the devil, although I was aware of and probably influenced by it:

"Cuaresma 1C" by Maximino Cerezo Barredo

The Temptation of Christ is read in Catholic, Lutheran, and Episcopal churches every year on the first Sunday in Lent: after Jesus has fasted in the wilderness for 40 days and nights, the devil tempts him with power and glory. Liberation Catholic theologian Cerezo Barredo depicts the devil in clerical garb, offering Christ cash, a crown, and satellite communications, in what I interpret as a slam against televangelists.

2016

Sadly, this brings us to some 2016 election cartoons, as the tragic trajectory of how we got where we are today begins. Call it Act One, Scene One.

for Q Syndicate, March 2016

In a more recent election cycle, I thought of using the boar's head from Richard III as a leitmotif in my cartoons of Donald Dickon Trump. I was already drawing him with a pig snout by then, so why not just add the boar tusks?

The answer is that I tried it once, and besides being even more obscure than it was in 1996, it just complicated the caricature. Besides, the real Richard III was a capable soldier and commander in battle, in spite of developing scoliosis, whereas Trump claimed bone spurs to avoid the Vietnam draft (when he wasn't playing tennis and squash at Fordham).

I was still developing a caricature of Trump at this point; he has one of those faces with too much of a muchness, defying cartoonists to choose which feature to fixate upon. The pout? The ridiculous comb-all-over? The eyebrows? The wattle? The overlong tie? The tiny hands?

As for Hillary Clinton, considering how long she has been in the public eye — as First Lady, senator, Secretary of State, presidential candidate, and Republican bête noire — it annoys me that I have so few cartoons where I feel I have drawn her successfully. This is not one of them.

2026

Wait, what?

The Graphical History Tour doesn't usually make a stop at Yesterday Afternoon, but you've been such a wonderful tour group, you all deserve a little treat.

Trump's hand-picked Commission of Fine Arts revealed controversial designs for new dime and gold dollar coins to celebrate the nation's semiquincentennial and Trump himself. 

The dime kicks Franklin Roosevelt to the curb; instead, its eagle grasps the arrows of war but has dropped its olive branches of peace. The dollar coin features Donald Render-to-Caesar Trump.

for this blog post, March 21, 2026

This is not the design proposed by the commission, but perhaps you remember this little episode from when Time magazine wanted to get some campaign photographs for a cover story on Trump.

Federal law has long prohibited putting living persons on U.S. currency, but a special exception was made for coins commemorating the nation's 250th anniversary. I'll give you exactly one guess which president signed that legislation into law.

Can you imagine any previous president getting his own mug on golden dollar coins while he was still in office?

Can you imagine Donald Imperator Trump passing up the opportunity?

Q Toon: Ric Rolls with the Punches

Since I had introduced Max's mother Karen during my vacation as someone working at the Donald J. Trump John Fitzgerald Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts (hereinafter referred to as the DJTJFKMC4PA), who better to interact with newly former President of the DJTJFKMC4PA, Ric Grenell?

Gay Republican Grenell has a track record of stirring up opposition wherever he goes. Republican Theocrats were up in arms when presidential candidate Mitt Romney took him on as a foreign policy surrogate; he later repeatedly offended his hosts as Ambassador to Germany in Donald Trump's First Corrupt Presidency.

With the recrudescence of Trump, Grenell came on board to oversee the bastardization of the JFK Center, sending artists and audiences streaming toward the exits. He and a new board of Trump lickspittles and right-wing ideologues rubber stamped Trump’s impetuous response to shut the DJTJFKMC4PA down for so-called renovations for the next two years.

Now, we don't know whether Grenell quit or was fired. Nor do we know what his plans for the future are; New York Times reporter Elizabeth Williamson attempted to ask him that quite reasonable question, only for him to throw a hissy fit back at her, huffing that she is a "left wing hack” manipulating the news.

Not the response of someone who left of her own accord, girl!

I drew my cartoon before Williamson and Grenell’s exchange became public. I suppose I would have had to draw a completely different cartoon otherwise, but Karen is not a New York Times reporter or a left wing hack. I wrote her as a rock-solid Republican. Whether she's a lickspittle or an ideologue — well, you'll have to wait and see.

At any rate, to have Grenell snap at Karen would require him to be even more of an unhinged sissy than I think he is.

But what do I know? I'm just a left-wing hack interested in attacking Republicans and manipulating the news for my own far left agenda.

St. Urho's Day's Salakähmäinen Kurkistus

No, I'm  never gonna give you up.

Our internet, phone, and cable was restored sometime around 8:00 Saturday morning. We don't know whether the power was out at their local satellite headquarters or somewhere between there and our neighborhood; we weren't the only household incommunicado. At least one neighborhood in town had no power until Sunday afternoon.

At which time the snowstorm started sneaking in.

Nor Any Drop to Drink

"He's Off Again" by Dorman H. Smith for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., ca. Mar. 8, 1926

When you think of the 1920's, what comes to mind? A booming stock market? 

Attracting far too many to invest "on margin," the markets were inflated by investors borrowing against future profits. A sharp downturn in March of 1926 should have served as a warning of what was soon to come.

"His Nest Egg Hatches" by J.P. Alley in Memphis Commercial Appeal, Mar. 20, 1926

The market suddenly lost billions of dollars — 1926 dollars, mind you — wiping out the savings of small investors like the one in Alley's cartoon. 

But Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon counseled calm. "The break does not touch fundamental conditions. It was the result of excessive speculation. I would have happened whatever business conditions were at the time. The effect is really wholesome. It provides a sort of 'evening up.'"

"Too Sound to Be Uprooted" by Nelson Harding in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 4, 1926

Nelson Harding accepted the advice of Secretary Mellon, who continued, "If the market goes to far, it will get back again. All such movements go further than they should, until there is a reaction. There is action and reaction until they strike normal."

Harding's choice of a visual metaphor just goes to show how well Mr. Harding understood avalanches.

"Not Shaking the Mountain" by Ted Brown in Chicago Daily News, ca. Mar. 11, 1926

The lessons against stock speculation are much easier to learn in hindsight. I can't claim any stock market expertise, either, so I don't charge these cartoons against Harding and Brown. 

But I can't figure out why Brown chose to label his Bulls and Bears, rather than to give them animal heads like any other cartoonist of the 20th Century would have.

"Dangit" by Ed LeCocq in Des Moines Register, March 13, 1926

Perhaps it's Prohibition that comes to your mind when you think of the 1920's.

Prohibition was a social reform movement that never quite took hold in the places where the social reformers saw the greatest need for social reform.

"Temptations" by Dean O'Dell in Dayton Daily News, March 18, 1926

Wets, as opponents of the Volstead Act were called, proposed in 1926 exempting beer and wine from Prohibition laws, reasoning that the cold turkey approach simply wasn't working. They also argued that the absence of legal liquor unintentionally benefited organized crime as it stepped in to fill the void.

"Now That's an Embarrassing Question" by Billy Ireland in Columbus Dispatch, ca. Mar. 12, 1926

Which brings us to Chicago gangsters.

As Billy Ireland suggested, Chicago's crime syndicates were taking advantage of a market for booze by Americans seeking to escape the enforced sobriety of the Volstead Act.

"Where There's a Will There's a Way" by James North in Washington [DC] Post, March 5, 1926

James North referred in this cartoon to the Chicago city motto, "I Will," adopted after its 1871 fire. His example of California vigilantism as a way to fight back against "lawlessness" seems counterproductive, if you ask me.

"There Was a Young Lady from Niger..." by Carey Orr in Chicago Tribune, March 4, 1926

The limerick Carey Orr cites as the parallel for how Chicago city hall had succumbed to organized crime has fallen out of favor among cartoonists. The suggestion of racism wasn't much of a factor; cartoonists tended to draw the young lady as a white person. Nor was it because nowadays Niger and Tiger don't rhyme; they didn't rhyme in 1926, either.

Nope, it's just one of those tropes that are too cliché.

Speaking of Chicago...

"Baiting Her Hooks for Her" by Carey Orr in Chicago Tribune, March 11, 1926

"I Will" is on Miss Chicago's blouse in this Carey Orr cartoon commending Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover's endorsement of a plan for a nine-foot channel from Chicago to the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. According to Mr. Hoover, the project would make every city on the Great Lakes a seaport.

"A Cheeky Theft" by Sam Hunter in Toronto Star, March 27, 1926

The Graphical History Tour has covered the Chicago waterway controversy before (see here). The project was strongly opposed by communities downstream, especially in Canada, where one rarely found Sam Hunter and Arthur Racey on the same side of an issue.

"Excellent Example" by A.G. Racey in Montreal Star, March 29, 1926

Hoover dismissed concern that diversion of Lake Michigan water south through Chicago would lower water levels in the natural flow of the lake's water to the St. Lawrence Seaway, claiming that five-sixths of the reduction already being experienced was due to a fluctuation in climate. The best way to settle the international lake level dispute, he told a Republican group in Chicago, would be to spend money on concrete and steel to regulate the water passing through Niagara Falls "instead of squandering it on lawyers."

•••

Well, folks, I hadn’t meant to end things right here, but a wind storm has apparently knocked out my internet service provider where I live, going on seven-plus hours as I write this, so I can’t upload any more graphic files to help wrap this up.

So have a pleasant respite between Friday the thirteenth and the Ides of March. Have some pi. See you when this all blows over.

Q Toon: Pillow Talk with Leo & Max

I introduce the characters of Leo and Max as a way of discussing issues that are not necessarily LGBTQ+centric for an LGBTQ+ readership, and also to represent the gulf separating Americans with liberal and MAGA world views.

Today —  or tonight as it happens — they are disagreeing over Trump and Netanyahu's war with Iran.

It's rather curious that after Pete Kegseth spent a year insisting that we return to calling the Department of Defense the Department of War, the Lawless Trump Regime™ doesn't want to call what the Department of War is sending war materiel and soldiers to a "war." Nah, it's a "special military operation," just like the one Russia has been sending war materiel and soldiers to in Ukraine for the past four years.

Whatever. The Department of Special Military Operations vows that unlike previous administrations' special military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, we're not in Iran to execute regime change (only to execute regime leaders). Although in the case of Afghanistan, we've seen Trump's idea of a successful end to a long, drawn out war: bring back the very same people our special military operation was supposed to have gotten rid of.

This time around, our special military operation assassinated Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini, and also, according to Trump himself, "most of the people we had in mind" to succeed him. Trump has expressed his pique at not having had a say in the selection of Iran's new Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba "Dubya" Khameini, who is probably holed up in the safest place from the Trumpster special military operation machine in Tehran: the Russian embassy.

Hardly anyone outside of Iran will shed a tear for the elder Khameini — for the 176 schoolgirls blown to smithereens by an American cruise missile, certainly — but it remains to be seen how his murder will play out within Iran's borders. Tehran's young, urban protesters have been no fans of his; but the poorly educated, rural peasants in the rest of the country were his MIGA faithful. 

To put it in terms Americans might understand: some Liberal Leos might have, at best, mixed feelings were Iran — or North Korea, or Cuba, or Grand Fenwick — to eliminate Trump, Vance, Mike Johnson, and much of the remaining order of succession. But all Leos and Maxes would be united in condemnation of any attack that included wiping out a girls' school and setting Texas oil refineries ablaze.

Nor would any of us ever accept those countries appointing our next head of state.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Before putting last Saturday's Graphical History Tour together, I had never heard the song "Aquarela do Brasil" sung with words.

What I found when looking up its lyrics were what someone wrote for Frank Sinatra to sing; Ary Barroso's original lyrics in Portuguese have nothing to do with S.K. Russell's lyrics about kissing under an amber moon. 

Brasil, meu Brasil Brasileiro,

Meu mulato inzoneiro,

Vou cantar-te nos meus versos:

O Brasil, samba que dá,

Bamboleio, que faz gingar;

O Brasil do meu amor,

Terra de Nosso Senhor. ...

Ô! Esse Brasil lindo e trigueiro,

É o meu Brasil Brasileiro!

Granted, a direct translation would never have sold in the States. I can't quite imagine Sinatra crooning of "This Brazil, beautiful and swarthy."