Q Toon: Avant la Deluge, Quoi?

As some of you may know, I draw my syndicated cartoons over the weekend to be released to LGBTQ newspapers and magazines, and the weekly ones hit the newsstands the following Wednesday, Thursday or Friday. Has anyone else noticed how often these days last weekend's news seems like it happened ages ago?

Before Hurricane Harvey decided to park itself over Houston for most of this week, Donald Joffrey Trump issued a memorandum aimed at ridding the U.S. military of transgender service members. Before that, he held one of his campaign rallies in Phoenix, Arizona to tease his pardon of Joe Arpaio, the sadistic anti-Latino former sheriff of Maricopa County, convicted of contempt of court.

Stealing that particular show was a guy placed prominently in the audience standing behind Trump; he wore a white t-shirt proclaiming that Trump and the GOP are not racist and repeatedly holding up a hand-made "Blacks for Trump" sign. He certainly caught social media's attention, and people checking out the web site advertised on his t-shirt discovered that he also believes that Hillary Clinton was colluding with ISIS to wipe out all black and white women, and that Cherokee Indians are "the real KKK slave masters."

So while I'm usually hesitant to joke about the mentally ill, I still worry about a nation where seemingly insane ideas are cherished as gospel by astonishing numbers of Americans. The man at the podium and his loyal fans are particularly susceptible, believing that thousands of invisible Americans swelled the crowd at Trump's inauguration, Mexican rapists are hurling 60-lb. bundles of marijuana over our border fences, and transgender soldiers are bankrupting the Pentagon. We've got anti-vaxxers, birthers, Jade Helmsters, and people who actually buy the powdered bone drink mix hawked by Alex Jones.

There are people who firmly believe, all evidence to the contrary, that tax cuts will balance the budget. People still believe that shifting the cost of society from the people who make the money to the people who do the work is a recipe for properity. Wisconsin is betting that a $3 billion subsidy to lure Foxconn here will be worth the investment, even though the state is unlikely to break even for another 25-40 years — even if you believe Foxconn will still be around in 2058.

But people believe that stuff, because they desperately want to.

Heck, a full third of respondents to a Fox News poll released yesterday believe Trump is "drawing the county together."

So, yeah, I totally made up that transgender Latino soldiers for Trump guy for this cartoon.

Only because I've completely lost faith that such a person couldn't possibly exist.

Comic Caper: Installment VI

Here's an extra special Whaddayaknow Wednesday installment in our continuing retrospective of a comic strip I drew in 1983-84 for the UW-Parkside Ranger, "The Funny Paper Caper." I've usually presented four strips at a time, but now we have come to the episodes which ran in April. The end of the school year was just around the corner, and I needed several more than the usual three or four panels per week if I wanted to get to the end of the story before the Ranger suspended publication for the summer.

When we left off on Saturday, the Yellow Geezer had been shot just as he was about to tell our detective-cum-narrator what evil mastermind was looking for the Maltese Pelican, and who may have killed Rufus T. Pornapple in a foiled effort to get it.

Whenever the investigator goes out on a call without back-up, you know something bad is going to happen. It's a cliché, yes, but it's an essential climax to Act III in any police procedural.

This Week's Sneak Peek

I bet he's spilling the beans about the secret handshake he and Ben Carson have.

Comic Caper, Caibidil a Cúig

Sagaback Saturday returns yet again to the thrilling days of yesteryear and the gripping serial "The Funny Paper Caper." If you've been keeping up with the story but only check this blog on Saturdays, there was a fourth installment on Tuesday that you missed. It introduces the series macguffin, in case you want to go back and read it. I'll wait right here.

Moving on, The Funny Paper Caper throws in a passing reference to Jeff MacNelly's "Shoe."

In the next couple of episodes, I gave myself the challenge of imagining what a cartoon character who was a child when his cartoon originally ran might look like as a wizened old man. I also took over more space on the UW-Parkside Ranger page. Those old comics were granted more newspaper real estate than cartoons nowadays; and besides, this character's dialogue, instead of appearing in balloons, appeared on his shirt.

The next week referred to above was spring break already, so time was running out to get this story wrapped up.

The Yellow Kid was not, in fact, oriental, but Irish. The original character's name was Mickey Dugan. Richard Outcault was the cartoonist who created "The Yellow Kid" for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World in 1895; George Luks continued the strip in the World when Outcault took it to William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal the following year. "Yellow" referred to the color of Mickey's shirt (color being a resource I didn't have on the Ranger comics page), and is where the term "yellow journalism" comes from.

With the characters crouched beside a dumpster, it was possible for the strip to return to regular size. For one week.

Condemned to Repeat It

Trump's address to the nation on Monday night, in which he sort of announced that he was going to do something about the war in Afghanistan. He didn't say he was sending more troops (although he is doing exactly that); mostly he talked about what he would not do. "One way or another," he promised, "these problems will be solved."

He would not withdraw troops from Afghanistan. He would not discuss any change in strategy. He would not describe our military goals. He would not engage in "nation-building." He would not mind if Afghanistan were a kleptocratic autocracy.

Most pointedly, he would not set any date by which the U.S. would turn responsibility for the fighting over to the Afghans.

I'm reminded of a cartoon I drew back in 2008. The George W. Bush administration had steadfastly refused to offer a timetable to withdraw troops from his war in Iraq. Saddam Hussein had been quickly deposed, but extinguishing the insurgency was proving considerably more difficult. In the summer of 2008, Bush announced a "time horizon" for the end of U.S. troop involvement.

“In the area of security cooperation, the President and the Prime Minister agreed that improving conditions should allow for the agreements now under negotiation to include a general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals–such as the resumption of Iraqi security control in their cities and provinces and the further reduction of U.S. combat forces from Iraq.”

According to NPR, an unnamed senior U.S. official — which usually means cabinet-level — was reminded of another war from the past-as-prologue:

When asked before [Trump's] speech how long the U.S. presence could remain in Afghanistan, a senior U.S. official responded, rhetorically, "How long have we been in Korea?"

Q Toon: Great Is Thy Cravenness

Led by Merck's Kenneth Frazier, eight business and labor leaders resigned from Donald Trump's Manuafacturers' Jobs Initiative Council over Donald Trump's tardy, begrudging, and muddled condemnation of Nazis, Klansmen and unspecified radicals "on both sides, on both sides." Leaders of another council, the Strategic and Policy Forum, announced it was disbanding because Charlottesville had become "a distraction" to their purpose.

"As our members have expressed individually over the past several days, intolerance, racism and violence have absolutely no place in this country and are an affront to core American values. We believe the debate over Forum participation has become a distraction from our well-intentioned and sincere desire to aid vital policy discussions on how to improve the lives of everyday Americans."

A pouting Trump seized his ball and flounced home. (Or, rather, to a campaign rally in Arizona.)

Before he could disband them himself, the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities  resigned en masse in a letter crafted so that the first letter of each paragraph spelled out the word "resist."

State Department Science Envoy Daniel M. Kammen followed suit with his own acrostic letter of resignation. At this point, the only reason the rest of the career bureaucrats and Obama holdovers are still in Washington is that they're still working on how to hide clever messages in their resignation letters.

The only resulting resignation from Trump's Evangelical Advisory Board, on the other hand, was New York City pastor Rev. A.R. Barnard. If his resignation letter contained any secret message, it has not yet been found. (A Chicago area pastor had resigned from the board last year over the Billy Bush interview tape.)

Prior to Rev. Barnard leaving the 24-member board, Matthew Dowd, a strategist on George W. Bush's 2004 reelection campaign, tweeted "Not a single member of Trump's Evangelical Council has resigned. We have learned corporate America has a greater moral compass.  So so sad."

The remaining members of the commission, the most prominent of whom had had no hesitation to criticize Democratic presidents, crept to the defense of Mr. Trump.

Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University, praised the president for his "bold truthful statement" about Charlottesville. Mark Burns, pastor of Harvest Praise and Worship Center in South Carolina, retweeted a link to a television interview in which he declared his support for Trump and criticized the counterprotesters. Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, blamed the news media for misrepresenting Trump's comments.

The Evangelical Board hold-outs have defended standing by their man by claiming that it's their Christian duty to give Trump their aid and counsel. By contrast, that Chicago pastor who quit the board last year, Rev. James MacDonald, posted this Facebook message to his congregation:

"The greater your influence the greater your complicity if you don't call the Charlottesville rally and attack what it really is: a heinous act of domestic terrorism entirely rooted in racial hatred.
"It is the height of hypocrisy to demand that people use the proper term 'Islamic terrorism' ... then turn around and refuse to use similarly candid terms when referring to racial hate crimes."

Comic Caper: Kapitel Fire

In the interest of getting through this story, today is now Turnback Tuesday. This is the fourth batch of  comic strips that I drew in 1983 and 1984 for the UW-Parkside Ranger and have been rerunning here purely because I didn't have another topic handy for a Saturday retrospective back on July 29.

In case you're just joining the story, our nameless Lieutenant-cum-narrator is investigating the murder of Rufus T. Pornapple, whose son has just identified a burglary suspect, only to have the suspect's wife suddenly burst onto the scene. The month's worth of episodes presented here don't introduce any new characters, so suffice it to say our murder mystery's milieu is the comics page of your daily newspaper.

I promise that something is going to happen to nudge the plot forward very soon.

I really ought to have made that bird bigger.

This Week's Sneak Peek

We're headed down south this week for the return of Colonel Angus!

Comic Caper, Holiday Edition

For this Swipeback Saturday wallow down memory lane, I need to explain that when these next episodes of "The Funny Paper Caper" appeared in December and January of 1983-1984, Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury" was in the middle of a 22-month hiatus. At the time, it wasn't clear whether the comic strip, having been moved to the editorial page of some newspapers, was going to come back.

Fed up with drawing all those soundproofing dimples in the wall of the interrogation room, I switched to one of Trudeau's tricks and set the next episode outside the building its characters were in. It was the last episode of the year, and ran on a little longer than the previous thirteen had. If you're not in the habit yet, you'll definitely want to Click To Embiggen.

In the new year, it became increasingly clear that I would need to move the plot along in order to complete the story by the end of the school year. Kind of like Davos rushing to fetch Gendry from King's Landing so they could join Jon Snow's Magnificent Seven racing north from Dragonstone to the Wall while, presumably, Daenerys, Cersei and the Dothraki paused to get their hair done.

A purely technical note here: in the Ranger's Christmas gift exchange, news editor Bob Kiesling gave me a Koh-i-noor rapidograph set, which I began using for some of the drawing of this strip in the new year. The technical pens produce a steady, uniform line in india ink, but they clog up and become useless if you're not assiduous about cleaning them. I did find them superior to felt-tip pens for lettering; but sometimes a uniform line is not what you want, so I have never given up on hawk and crow tip pens.

On the topic of moving the plot along, I gotta post some of these midweek, or I'll have to cancel some retrospectives of other people's work I've had planned. Stay tuned.

Q Toon: Loaded Response

I settled down in front of my drawing board last weekend after one of those weeks when LGBTQ issues just seemed insignificant relative to all the other news.

The week started with Donald Joffrey Trump responding to North Korean threats of nuclear attacks against the U.S. with overheated "fire and fury" rhetoric of his own. Nuclear war seemed so likely that even Wall Street suddenly snapped out of its giddy response to Trump's lazy faire economic policies.

Then fascists wielding semi-automatic rifles, swastikas, Ku Klux Klan banners and tiki torches marched on Charlottesville, Virginia, where one of their number ran over a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one and injuring 19. Trump blurted out that "many sides, many sides" were responsible, driving the Korea story right off the front page (to the relief of Wall Street).

After two days, Trump begrudgingly read a statement assigning blame to the Nazis and Klansmen, but then stunningly revoked that statement at an unhinged press conference the next day. Beggaring credulity, Trump insisted that some participants in the march organized by the website The Daily Stormer, the Neo-Confederate League of the South, the National Policy Institute, and the National Socialist Movement are actually "very fine people." Perhaps those people were only Nazi sympathizers.

Why would Trump leap to the defense of the indefensible?

With his approval ratings down to 33% of the electorate, Trump can't afford to piss off Nazis and the Klan. As the sane, reasonable portion of the minority of voters who elected him slowly develop buyer's remorse, Nazis, Klansmen and their ilk become an evermore significant part of Trump's remaining base.

He is losing support among previously sympathetic corporate and labor leaders. Led by Merck chief executive Ken Frazier,  eight members of Trump's Strategy & Policy Forum and his Manufacturing Council resigned from them over his inability to distinguish a moral difference between his fascist base and anti-fascist protesters; Trump then disbanded the councils before any more businessmen could defect.

At this point, however, not a single member of Trump's Evangelical Council has resigned. They have no problem associating themselves with a Nazi sympathizer sympathizer.

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As long as I've brought up Bathroom Bills, let's pause for a moment to celebrate one gleam in the sh¡tstorm: the Texas legislature adjourned its special session without passing Senate Bill 6. A legislative priority for Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and the theocratic right, the Texas Bathroom Bill was opposed by the Republican House Speaker Joe Straus, as well as by the Texas business community and the state's professional sports teams.

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On Monday, I invited you to guess who that was kibitzing over my shoulder in this week's cartoon. For the answer, look through the list of keywords at the end of this post.

And should you wish to share or link directly to this week's cartoon, throw some traffic to the news outlets which run my cartoon. Try here, here, or here.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Who's that kibbitzing over my shoulder? Any guesses?

Comic Caper, Chapter Drei

For this week's Sleuthback Saturday feature, I dredge up the November installments of a comic strip I drew for the UW-Parkside Ranger back in 1983-84. "The Funny Paper Caper" told the story of  the murder investigation of one Rufus T. Pornapple, who was also the victim of an unreported burglary, and romantically linked with more than one comic strip female. As we rejoin the story, the investigation turns to a little lady whose name was McGill, and who called herself Lil, but everyone knew her by another name.

One characteristic of "Nancy" in those days was that cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller avoided use of any and all punctuation, save for the occasional dash or unavoidable question mark. It may have been part of Bushmiller's minimalist approach to cartooning overall. He put nothing in the cartoon that wasn't essential to the gag du jour. I like Wally Wood's observation about the strip that "By the time you decided not to read it, you already had."

This tenth installment, however, requires considerably more commitment.

There's an inside joke in the first panel of strip #11. John Kovalic was a cartoonist colleague at the Ranger that year, drawing a comic strip which appeared just below mine every week. Carson the Muskrat in his current "Dork Tower" is a survivor of his earlier "Wild Life."

As promised earlier this week, Dick Tracy — er, Thelma — has entered the story line. After reading Tuesday's post here, Dave Brousseau reminded me that Dick Locher continued to script Dick Tracy's story line for two years after he stopped drawing the strip in 2009, which I did not explain on Tuesday. He also noted that there was talk on some message boards that perhaps Locher was still drawing some of the strip after 2009. I can't venture an opinion on that; there are signs of Parkinson's impairing his ability to draw in his late editorial cartoons, but comic strips such as Dick Tracy employ support staff (such as Locher himself, early in his career) to polish up, ink, and letter what may only be rudimentary sketches from the person whose name is attached to the cartoon.

You can compare, for example, the rough look of Doonesbury when Garry Trudeau was a student at Yale to its slick production values once the cartoon became a marketing juggernaut a few years later.

Laugh It Up, Fuzzball

So Trumpatine plans to send in a attack squadron of wookiees and ewoks?

Q Toon: Soda Jerk

When I was drawing this cartoon this past Sunday, my chief concern was that before anyone would have a chance to read the cartoon, its subject, Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, would become the latest Trump administration official to go down in history as having had the shortest tenure of anyone in his position.

By Tuesday, that concern was replaced by the prospect of nuclear war breaking out first.

I can't help but be distressed by Mr. Sessions's decree that his Justice Department will not defend the civil rights of LGBTQ citizens; but if Messrs. Trump and Kim goad each other into turning millions of human beings into radioactive ash, civil rights for anyone becomes a largely moot point.

Q Syndicate✍Aug 10, 2017

As for this cartoon, however, I made the conscious decision to keep most of the image in black-and-white, since I associate the pre-civil rights era with black-and-white photography. Googling and checking Time and Life coffee table books for images of Woolworth's lunch counters, my results were almost entirely limited to finding photos of sit-ins or empty counters. Several of the latter were color photos of counters now in museums or in long-closed Woolworth stores now converted to other purposes.

In no photo did I find Woolworth employees behind the counter.

Fifty years after the sit-ins, New Orleans Times-Picayune photographer Bill Minor explained why:

"The people working behind the counter at Woolworth's were afraid to serve anybody," Minor says. "They just let them sit there. They wouldn't serve them. That's what they were ordered to do--not serve any blacks."

It may soon be equally difficult to find photos of  Justice Department officials on the job.

Dick Locher's Presidents

Dick Locher, a long-time editorial cartoonist for the Chicago Tribune, passed away this past Sunday at his home in Naperville, Illinois, at the age of 88. In a career stretching from 1972 to 2013, he won the Pulitzer Prize (1983), Fischetti Award (1987), Overseas Press Club Thomas Nast Award (1982 and 1983) and Sigma Delta Chi Award (1982).

"Shhhh! ... I Think I Hear Someone Coming" by Dick Locher in Chicago Tribune, May 13, 1974

In honor of Mr. Locher, here is a quick sampling of his cartoons of American presidents during his career.

"Bug Spray" by Dick Locher in Chicago Tribune, August 17, 1974

I had wanted to share here a September, 1974 cartoon showing a Chicago road crew filling potholes on the expressway with "marshmallow fluff." It is what I'm referring to with the term "pothole cartoon," meaning an evergreen idea that a cartoonist could leave with an editor for release during the cartoonist's vacation or family emergency. It's a hilarious image that I used to have on my bedroom wall before moving it into a scrapbook. Unfortunately, when I did so, I used rubber cement, which has since seeped through the newsprint, creating dark brown stains that I just can't Photoshop out.

"After All Those Promises You Made" by Dick Locher in Chicago Tribune, February, 1978

Instead of any of Locher's editorial cartoons from the Reagan era, here is an episode of Dick Tracy in which the Gipper makes an appearance. Locher worked as an assistant to Dick Tracy's creator, Chet Gould, from 1957 to 1961, and returned after the death of Rick Fletcher to draw the strip with Max Collins from 1981 to 2009.

"Dick Tracy" by Dick Locher and Max Collins, 1983

Locher's son John also assisted in the drawing of Dick Tracy until the younger Locher's untimely death in 1986 at the age of 25. For the next 30 years, Dick Locher and his wife, Mary, have been at the helm of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists' John Locher Memorial Award for college cartoonists. Eligibility for the award was expanded in 2015 to include graphic journalists and web cartoonists age 17-25.

"But His Lips Aren't Moving" by Dick Locher in Chicago Tribune, May 14, 1990

If you ever find yourself in Naperville, look for the statue of Dick Tracy, down by the river at South Webster Street.

"I'm Here to Arrest Mumbles" by Dick Locher in Chicago Tribune, 1993

Current Chicago Tribune cartoonist Scott Stantis writes:

"In this world of snapchat vulgarity Dick was that rare breed: a courtly gentleman. When I was lucky enough to be named editorial cartoonist here at the Chicago Tribune one of the very first people to reach out and congratulate me was Dick Locher. I first met Dick years earlier at an Association of American Editorial Cartoonists convention. As a wet-behind-the-ears cartoonist I was in awe of this giant of our industry but, like a true gentleman, he put me at ease and we became fast friends. Dick has always been a font of encouragement, advice and good humor."

Read more encomiums of Dick Locher from his fellow cartoonists here. Then look up the word "encomium."

"We're Going to Hand Him His Lunch" by Dick Locher in Chicago Tribune, 2002

Parkinson's disease persuaded Locher to retire from cartooning in 2013. He is survived by his wife of 60 years, Mary; a daughter, Jan Evans; a son, Stephen, a brother, Bob; a sister, Carolyn Holubar; five grandchildren; and one great-grandson.

"Obama Care" by Dick Locher for Tribune Media Services, 2012

P.S.: Totally by coincidence, I've got more Dick Tracy coming here this Saturday. Do tune in.

This Week's Sneak Peek

I may be accused
Of being confused,
But I'm average weight for my height.
My philosophy,
Like color TV,
Is all there in black and white.

-- Neil Innes, "Protest Song"

Comic Caper, Part Dos

Stripback Saturday returns to an old comic strip I drew about a murder mystery in the funny pages. I drew The Funny Paper Caper over the course of the 1983-84 school year for the UW-Parkside Ranger (that's four years before Who Framed Roger Rabbit... but I'm not actively considering suing Disney Corporation at this point in time).

When we left our story, our police lieutenant narrator had begun his investigation of the murder of Rufus T. Pornapple. Having just talked to Mrs. Pornapple, who thought he had arrived to take report of a burglary at their home, our intrepid detective is about to meet the neighbors.

In addition to the occasional picture on the wall of some bit of cartoon history, I mimicked the balloons and printing of the cartoon characters. I somehow failed to incorporate a gargantuan sandwich or a bathtub into this part of the story line, however.

I'm going to need to explain here the inside joke that Strollin Bowlin' was a mascot who appeared in UW-P Ranger advertisements for the campus bowling alley.

Mimicking their cartoonists' lettering, it was so much easier to cram a lot of dialogue into Kathy's balloons than Mr. Dumpstead's.

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How the Stephen Millers of the 19th Century Regarded Your Forebears

If I hadn't set the ball rolling on this Comic Caper nostalgia last week, I should probably have taken Trump's announcement of his No-Wretched-Refuse-Allowed immigration bill to present a more scholarly look back at 19th-Century editorial cartoons that warned against allowing your immigrant ancestors into the United States.

It's been done before, however. Here's an example that takes on almost every immigrant nationality, anyway (plus First Nations) (and even Canadians); and consider this your trigger warning that it's rather offensive.

"Please, Ma'am, May We Come In?" by Grant E. Hamilton in  Judge, 1893.

Q Toon: Playing an Uphill Lie

One of my colleagues posted the other day how much he hates drawing grass. There's a lot of grass in this week's cartoon, and all things considered, I'd rather draw grass than (see last week) buildings.

One thing newspaper editors hate about editorial cartoons is that there's no editing the things once they're drawn. News articles don't get to misstate the facts. Editorial think pieces don't get to distort the truth. If something in the fifth paragraph isn't totally on the up and up, it can be edited out, clarified, or corrected.

Editorial cartoons, on the other hand, constantly misstate and distort, albeit in the interest of getting at a greater truth. I readily admit that I had to do some of that this week. If I had wanted to be a stickler for just the facts, ma'am, the cartoon would be almost all text with a couple tiny little characters tucked into the corner.

You see, it's nearly impossible to come down with a dollars-and-cents figure for either the medical costs of transgender service members or Donald Joffrey Trump's golf trips — last Friday's chart notwithstanding.

Let's start with the medical costs.

[A 2016 RAND Corporation] report says gender transition-related health care—not just surgeries, but also ongoing care such as hormone treatment—sets the US military back between $2.4 and $8.4 million per year. That’s between 0.04% and 0.13% of its total medical budget.

As small a percentage of the Pentagon medical budget as that may be, most of us would consider the difference between $2.4 and $8.4 million huge. It's especially huge if you want to compare it to the cost of one presidential golfing trip. We don't know the cost of that either; the best estimate anyone has been able to come up with is based upon a golf trip President Obama had taken to Florida's Treasure Coast in 2013. With transportation, lodging, advance teams, security and whatnot, Obama's trip cost the federal government $3.6 million.

That's 150% of $2.4 million, but only 42% of $8.4 million. Politifact, moreover, rates using the $3.6 million figure as the cost of any Trump visit to Mar-a-Lago as only "half true," due to any number of variables in the cost of such a trip. Using the higher figure for transgender medical costs and a conservative $2 million for Trump's weekly golf trips, GQ suggests that "allowing trans men and women to serve in the military would cost about the same as four of Trump's weekend trips to Mar-a-Lago. Four!"

That's with the conservative estimate for Trump's trips to his own golf courses. One thing we know, however, is that Trump Inc. does not offer Trump Administration any discounts.

Trump loyalists will allege that their man has promised to reimburse the government for Mar-a-Lago expenses. Yet as we learned last year after he claimed to have raised $6 million for veterans' charities, Trump can be mighty slow to pay out on his promises. Nor can we expect him to suddenly stop fighting to keep his finances out of the public eye.