Almost This Week's Q Cartoon

This is the cartoon I was drawing for Q Syndicate last week in hopes of being able to send it to Q Syndicate before the July 4 weekend. My preference was to have something about Rhode Island's new civil partnership law, but I wasn't happy with the ideas I had been working with. Eventually, of course, I came up with the idea for the cartoon I posted yesterday; that idea was more relevant to LGBT issues than this one, so I put this cartoon aside.

I've commented before that I find women harder to caricature than men. Beyond the age of, say, 25, men don't change their hairstyles as often as women do (except insofar as nature forces change upon us); and women wear make-up to alter the perception of their facial contours.

So far, the best caricatures of Michele Bachmann I've seen have been by John Branch, Taylor Jones, and, not surprisingly, Minneapolis Star Tribune cartoonist Steve Sack, who has had the most experience drawing her. (The June 16 cartoon linked to above, however, isn't a great example, but she has not been inspiring him much lately, I guess.) The rest of us cartoonists are still flailing about trying to fit her features together.

Meanwhile, there is this bizarre cartoon from Terry Wise, trying to nominate himself for a Pulitzer. (It would run counter to the conservatives-get-no-respect meme to remember that doctrinaire conservative cartoonist Michael Ramirez is a two-time Pulitzer winner, as are Steve Breen and the late Jeff MacNelly.) His point, aside from Any Two Things Make a Cartoon, seems to be that it's sexist for liberals to point out the ditzy things that come out of the mouths of Michele Bachman and Sarah Palin.

Conservatives, as you will all remember, have been perfect gentlemen about female politicians. Conservatives in the media have never said a sexist thing about Hilary Clinton, Janet Reno, Sonya Sotomayor or Nancy Pelosi, have they?