February Shorten Suite

Today's Graphical History Tour steps back forty, thirty, twenty, and ten Februaries ago to check out what I was drawing back then.

1986

in NorthCountry Journal, Poynette Wis., February, 1986

I can't remember the exact point of the editorial that accompanied this cartoon in the environmentally-focused NorthCountry Journal, but it's not difficult to guess the general drift. 

Drawing architecture is not one of my favorite pastimes; I must have used a straightedge to draw so many parallel lines, and somehow managed not to smear any wet india ink. There is, miraculously, no white-out on the original of this particular cartoon.

1996

Rummaging through my cartoon files from 30 Februaries ago, I first found a cartoon likening reactionary GOP presidential contender Pat Buchanan to Nazis — which I still think is valid — but then I came across this one.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee, February 29, 1996

Lamar Alexander, a former Governor of Tennessee and Secretary of Education in the George H.W. Bush administration, was dubbed by the professional punditry one of the moderates in the GOP presidential field.

Which just goes to show how long the positions he espoused in my cartoon have been mainstream in the Republican Party. Abolishing the Department of Education since became GOP platform boilerplate, so the Lawless Trump Regime's destruction of the DOE is no longer anything new or surprising.

Alexander's proposed "new military department responsible for drug enforcement" and "dealing with illegal immigration," put forth more than five years before 9/11, is now the Lawless Trump Regime's Department of Homeland Security.

2006

for Q Syndicate, February 2006

But enough about politics.

Awards season affords a welcome opportunity to step away from the news out of Washington and whatever politician is trying to capitalize on homophobia at the moment. Movies with Oscar nominations in 2006 included Brokeback Mountain, TransAmerica, and Capote, promising one of the most LGBTQ-centric ceremonies since, well, 1960. 

By the way, do I have to explain now where these women are and what they are doing? Naah, not gonna do it. Go ask your mother.

2016

for Q Syndicate, February, 2016

Staying with Hollywood, my cartoon ten Februaries later remarked how straight actors win praise for playing LGBTQ roles, but out LGBTQ actors can get pigeonholed having to play LGBTQ roles exclusively.

There have been some notable exceptions to the practice in the last ten years, notably Jonathan Bailey as Bridgerton heartthrob Anthony, Neil Patrick Harris as How I Met Your Mother's Barney Stinson, Jim Parsons as Big Bang Theory's Sheldon Cooper, and Matt Bomer in role after role after role.

Theater has a long history of white actors playing Parts of Color (from Othello to The Mikado to Apache), but that's decidedly out of fashion these days.

There are some who advocate that only LGBTQ actors should portray LGBTQ characters; but there is little chance of that as long as actors such as Rami Malek, Nick Offerman, Brendan Fraser, and Ewan McGregor keep winning awards for gay roles.

🌈

Rev. Jesse Jackson passed away this week, so I'll close today's Graphical History Tour in his memory with one of the cartoons I drew of him during his 1984 presidential campaign.

January, 1984

My cartoon, drawn after Jackson led a delegation of Black faith leaders who secured the release from Syria of U.S. Navy Lt. Robert Goodman, seems not to have been published. The UW-Parkside Ranger instead printed a cartoon I drew in which a stack of papers on Secretary of State George Schultz listed a number of pending foreign policy issues, including suspended nuclear disarmament talks, yellow rain, a Korean passenger plane shot down by the U.S.S.R., and the 241 Marines killed in a Beirut suicide bombing.

One might argue that the 52 U.S. hostages freed by Iran on Reagan's first hour in office outweigh the one seaman freed by Syria; but I would argue that Reagan was responsible not for achieving but for delaying the Iran hostages' release, so that doesn't count.

In any event, freeing Lt. Goodman, who had been shot down over Lebanon, captured, and taken to Damascus, established Rev. Jackson as more than a special interest candidate in the 1984 Democratic primaries. He was among the front runners for the nomination four years later, then concentrated on leading his PUSH/Rainbow Coalition.

In spite of being visibly afflicted with Parkinson's disease, Jackson came to Kenosha to march in a Black Lives Matter protest a month after the 2020 riot there, and spoke at the church where I was working at the time. I did not get to meet him, but here's a photo of him at Grace Lutheran Church with an assistant and Greater Milwaukee Synod (ELCA) Bishop Paul Erickson, and another of some of the local television coverage.

Q Toon: Off Limits

Never satisfied that there happen to be Democratic and Independent voters out there whose right to vote they haven't taken away, Republicans are pushing yet another plot to throw voters off the rolls.

Calling their scheme the "SAVE Act," the bill as passed by the House "requires individuals to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections," according to www.congress.gov. And by "documentary proof," Republicans mean your birth certificate.

The Senate version of the bill requires voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship not only when registering to vote, but also every time they come to cast their vote. Every time.

What could possibly be the problem?

But one in 10 voting-age American citizens, or an estimated 21.3 million people, either don't have a proof-of-citizenship document like a birth certificate, passport or naturalization certificate, or don't have easy access to one, according to a 2023 survey commissioned by voting rights groups. The survey found people of color are more likely not to have a document proving citizenship.

Obtaining these documents takes time and money. Only about 43% of Americans have passports, according to an analysis by the Voting Rights Lab. The bill says voters can show an ID that indicates citizenship, but currently only five states — Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Vermont and Washington — offer IDs that meet that criteria.

One rather significant group that faces disenfranchisement should the SAVE Act pass the Senate is married women who have taken their husband's surname — whose legal name therefore does not match the name on their birth certificate. A smaller group, but one well-represented in my LGBTQ+ readership, are transgender citizens who have changed their name to match their gender identity.

An even smaller group consists of the Vice President of the United States, Mr. James David Vance, né James Donald Bowman.

SAVE's defenders say that all that married women, transgender persons, and J.D. Vance need is to provide certified documentation of their name change. But there again, those documents cost time and money — and for transgender people in "red" states, dealing with a hostile government bureaucracy.

Side note: As my little form of protest, I've been bringing my passport to the village polling place for identification ever since state Republicans passed photo ID voting into law several years ago. Some poll workers have been taken aback by my showing a passport instead of my driver's license like everybody else. 

Passports do nothing to prove that one resides in the polling district (and I suspect that there are a few owners of summer homes and winter get-aways — a more or less Republican demographic — who have used a driver's license to vote in one location and a passport to vote in another, especially to keep those property taxes down and school levies defeated).

The South American vacation from which I've just returned was within three months of my passport expiring, which meant that I had to apply for a new one before we left. That automatically voided my existing passport, but poll workers here in the village would have had no way of knowing it was invalid had I used it as voter ID in elections last fall or this week's spring primary.

(Lest some Trumpster at DOJ launch any voter fraud investigations against me, my village had no elections in November and no primary races on Tuesday.)

Returning to the topic at hand: The SAVE Act also voids independent voter registration drives. It federalizes elections, demanding that states turn over their voter registration records to the Department of Homeland Security. Mailed ballots from military service members that arrive after Election Day won't count; universal mail-in voting will be outlawed. 

If this SAVE Act slips through the Senate to be signed into law by the Felon In Chief, you can bet your bottom dollar that Republicans won't be satisfied for long. They're sure to pass a SUPERSAVER Act requiring voters to come to their polling place DNA samples from all four grandparents, the deed to their house, and an automobile-dealership-sized American flag.

After all, if Barack Obama's birth certificate wasn't good enough for them, why would they accept yours?

Presidents' Day's Sneak Peek

Keeping it clean this week:

 A propos of nothing, one thing among many that stood out during our recent vacation trip to Brazil, Argentina, and Peru, was the city flag of Cuzco. We saw it flying there and at the town square of Machu Picchu Pueblo, and repeated on scarves, punchus, hats, and so forth sold in the various markets.

Somebody in our travel group asked our tour guide whether the city of Cuzco had somehow infringed on the LGBTQ community's copyright or trademark on the rainbow pride flag; but there are clear differences between the two, starting with the Inca symbol at the center of Cuzco's flag.

Cuzco's flag also has seven stripes instead of the pride flag's six. Remember the mnemonic "Roy G. Biv" for remembering the colors of the spectrum? Cuzco's flag sports red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet stripes.

It's also much older than the flag designed by Gilbert Baker in 1978. One of the cathedrals in Cuzco (where, unfortunately, photography is not allowed) contains a 17th-Century painting commemorating a devastating earthquake that hit Cuzco in 1650. Many Spanish colonial buildings had collapsed and burned, while ancient Inca buildings and walls withstood the 7.5-Richter scale quake.

To represent the community's determination to rebuild, the painting shows a female figure carrying a rainbow banner, evoking the rainbow Noah reportedly saw as God's promise never again to destroy the earth with a flood. 

Well, there was another strong earthquake there in 1950, but the 17th Century painter and the city fathers who chose the rainbow for their civic flag couldn't possibly have foreseen that.

Now, I did happen to see a guy, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 50-60 years old, apparently one of the groundskeepers at Ollantaytambo, an Inca temple site in the Urubamba / Sacred Valley of the Incas, wearing a weather-beaten cap with an up-to-date LGBTQ+ pride flag on it — the flag with the transgender and POC chevrons on the hoist side.

Was he "family"? Maybe. Maybe not. Don't know. Didn't ask.

If You Don't Buy This Magazine

One of my pleasures is finding The Week in my mail. It's a news readers' digest kind of magazine that still respects and honors editorial cartoons — with both an interior spread of choice cartoons (usually across two pages), and on the cover.

Their cover art stable consists of two cartoonists; this recent cover about Trump's covetous obsession with Greenland should strike Boomers as vaguely familiar:

by Jason Seiler in The Week, Jan. 30, 2026

I'm trusting that Seiler didn't create this with Artificial Intelligence, since I don't detect any of the markers that typify most A.I. cartoons. Photoshop? Yeah, who doesn't use Photoshop any more?

The cartoon was spoiled by ICE shooting actual humans in cold blood shortly after this magazine came out, but I still think it was a good cartoon.

Will You Be Mine?

'Tis February 14, and our Graphical History Tour turns lightly to thoughts of love!

Holidays of any sort are a godsend to editorial cartoonists, because we can just check the calendar, and thinking up our cartoon is halfway there. Is it Valentine's Day? Surely there's a job somewhere that would be just perfect for Mr. Cupid. 

Or his understudy.

"Love's Labor Lost" by Sam Hunter in Toronto Daily Star, Feb. 13, 1926

Canada's Conservative Party leader Meighen continued to woo the Progressive Party for enough support to form an improbable coalition government, making for fairly obvious Valentine's Day cartoonistry. Conservatives had won more seats in Parliament than its rivals in the November, 1925 elections, whereas Liberals and Progressives had both lost seats; thanks to a very few minor party members, neither the Conservatives nor the pre-election Liberal-Progressive coalition could muster a governing majority.

"Saint Valentine's Day, 1926" by Arthur Racey in Montreal Star, Feb. 13, 1926

As a fan of the Liberals, Hunter was happy to lampoon the Conservatives' plight. Tory partisan A.G. Racey used the romantic holiday instead to complain about The Kids Today drinking and smoking and wearing rouge.

Who knew that St. Valentine wore glasses?

"Wanted a Valentine" by Clifford Berryman in Washington [DC] Sunday Star Feb. 14, 1926

Down in the States, Congress passed a tax cut bill that was deeper than the Coolidge administration had asked for. Clifford Berryman availed himself of the holiday to depict the bill as a surplus of valentine cards for Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon.

"Valentines" by Gustavo Bronstrup in San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 13, 1926

Gustavo Bronstrup sent a tax cut Valentine to a happy taxpayer, and also drew valentine cards from Californians to their Governor (considering a run for federal office), from a traffic cop to a motorist (admonishing for breezing through red lights yet lingering at green ones), and the U.S. over the Senate's vote in favor of joining the World Court.

"A Hint to the Wise Should Be Sufficient" by Ed LeCocq in Des Moines Register, Feb. 14, 1926

Because of conditions included in that Senate bill, the U.S. never actually joined the World Court — nor the League of Nations — before they were dissolved in 1945. Accordingly, Ed LeCocq's Uncle Sam, despite his valentine to Mlle. League, had not gotten over his commitment issues.

"They Have the Exits and Their Entrances" by Daniel Fitzpatrick in St Louis Post-Dispatch, Feb. 14, 1926

Meanwhile, events were building that would test Uncle Sam's isolationist commitment to bachelorhood. Italy's il Duce was a topic of several Valentine's Day cartoons in 1926, and one that defied any allusion to love notes, flowers, and boxed chocolates.

Whereas editorial cartoonists today liken our modern fascist leaders to Mussolini and Hitler, cartoonists in the 1920's and '30's compared far-right politicians of their day to wartime foes of even earlier times.

"Römischer Karneval" by Oskar Garvens in Kladderadatsch, Berlin, Feb. 14, 1926

Oskar Garvens's allusion to Napoleon rings somewhat more true than Daniel Fitzpatrick's to Kaiser Wilhelm, insofar as the most alarming part of a Mussolini speech to the Chamber of Deputies on February 6 were remarks that stopped just shy of declaring war against Austria and Germany. Denying alarmist complaints from Bavarian leaders that Italy had torn down a statue of a German poet and had also prohibited residents of former Austrian territories from having Christmas trees, Mussolini threatened, "Fascist Italy can, if necessary, carry her flag beyond the Brenner frontier" between Italy and Austria.

"Il re bambino" in Garvens's cartoon is Italy's King Victor Emmanuel III, known during World War I as "il Re Soldato" (the soldier king). At 56 years of age, the king was hardly a "bambino"; but his short stature was exaggerated by German cartoonists, especially after the Italian government broke antebellum agreements with Germany and sided with the Entente powers.

"Diplomacy's Sea Becoming Turbulent" by T.E. Powers for Star Newspapers, Feb. 13, 1926 

A few months earlier, Mussolini had celebrated the Locarno peace accords with a public rant, er, speech glorifying war. Mussolini's tirades full of bluster and bravado against Italy's neighbors alarmed leaders across the continent.

"Showing Off" by Carey Orr in Chicago Tribune, Feb. 14, 1926

Remind you of anyone?

Carey Orr's cartoon includes a laundry list of affronts to European diplomacy in addition to the latest "Insult to Germany": Fascisti defiance of France, Corfu insult to Greece, Threat to take control of Mediterranean from England, and Threat against Balkans. 

"Some of These Days He Will Puncture Himself Doing That" by Wm. Hanny in Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 14, 1926 

Hubris will get you only so far. But that lesson would only come after another nine years and another World War.

Q Toon: Minnesota ICE

I wish I had come across this quotation by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in time to send this cartoon out for publication by the federal holiday (yes, it still is a federal holiday, in spite of the racist Trump regime's refusal to respect it). Instead, it goes public during Black History Month (not a federal holiday, but another observance repudiated by the white supremacists in the White House).

The quotation is certainly not aimed at the good people of the Twin Cities who have literally risked their lives to stand up, speak out, video, and blow whistles against the wicked people and the wicked government that sent them there. We are all, however, at a Which Side Are You On moment in history.

There are still plenty of people who support, defend, and excuse what this government and its hired storm troopers are doing. Many such people are beyond any cartoon's powers of persuasion. (But we keep on trying.) This cartoon is directed to what I believe is the dwindling middle ground of Americans who are yet to face the musical warning of the late Neil Peart that, "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."

I had most of this cartoon inked before leaving on vacation last month, leaving a few spaces in case I needed to acknowledge outrages in addition to ICE's murder of Renée Nicole Good and the dogged persecution of brown-skinned detainees, including those who happen to be LGBTQ, such as Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Elias Perez Zuazo, and Jose Nuñez.

We weren't watching the news down in South America, but our Facebook feeds were flooded with reports and videos of the summary execution of Alex Pretti. I have a lot of college friends who live in the Twin Cities area, including one couple who live on the same block as Pretti's home.

Including Good and Pretti, 40 people have died in ICE custody or at ICE's hands in this first year of the Lawless Trump Regime's ethnic cleansing campaign. 32 in 2025. Eight in the first month of 2026.

So you will excuse me if I don't give a flying frock that somebody couldn't understand the words of Bad Bunny's halftime performance. 

William Henry Harrison's Birthday Sneak Peek

As I mentioned the other day, I've been away on vacation the past couple of weeks.

And it only occurred to me on Saturday, waiting in a foreign airport for the last of the planes to take us home, that I hadn't prepared a third Graphical History Tour to publish here in my absence. For that I apologize.

I had drawn enough editorial cartoons for the weeks I was gone, and, in case flights got delayed or connections missed or the U.S. air traffic control system shut down, most of the one I needed to have finished by last night (plus working ahead on some other stuff that people needed from me). Since I came home to find my white-out had congealed to the consistency of pizza dough, and my ink likewise to fresh tar — and I had a replacement bottle only for the latter — and my computer quite happy to remain on its own vacation, it's a good thing I hadn't left myself a lot to finish up.

Well, anyway, here's the sneak peek for that cartoon.