This Week's Sneak Peek

Surprise, surprise. I'm finally getting around to a wedding cake cartoon. I'd have put this out sooner, but the Supreme Court hasn't been cooperating with my deadline schedule.

Timing can really trip a cartoonist up. A couple Saturdays ago, I pointed out an episode of Dick Tracy that struck people as being in bad taste when it appeared within a week of Robert Kennedy's assassination. I followed that up with a bizarre choice by the Cuero (TX) Record to publish a cartoon by Alfred Buescher of Robert Kennedy playing marbles, entitled "Good Shooting" —after Kennedy died.

Fault for the Buescher cartoon gaffe belongs entirely to the Cuero Record editors. Buescher's syndicated cartoons were the only editorial cartoons the Record ran in 1968, and I can imagine the editors deciding to find some cartoon — any cartoon — about Kennedy to run that day, and perhaps Buescher's take on the assassination hadn't arrived over the wire yet. Why they chose a cartoon that was at least two weeks old (judging from its reference to the Nebraska primary), let alone one with that unfortunate title, is simply baffling.

Just last week, Francesco Marciuliano, the cartoonist who draws Judge Parker, felt a need to address his introducing a plot twist involving the sudden death of a celebrity, appearing shortly after two real-life prominent celebrity suicides.

Many of you who read newspaper comics know that strips are written months in advance. Well, at the very least weeks in advance. But I completely understand why this is not common knowledge. And I bring this up to stress that because of such publication deadlines today’s Judge Parker is in no way a reaction to the utterly tragic, untimely deaths of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain this week. To do so would be a complete dismissal of what it means to be human and humane.

Coincidentalism can run in the opposite direction, of course. Over The Hedge recently anticipated Rosanne Barr's fall from grace, for example. But every time I like a particularly pointed cartoon I've drawn criticizing Mercurial American President Donald Trump, I have to cross my fingers in hopes that nothing terrible happens to him in the four days to a week while my cartoon is waiting to hit the newsstands.

Well, I hope nothing terrible happens to him even when I haven't drawn a particularly pointed anti-Trump cartoon.

I really, really can't imagine anything nice I might conceivably draw about him if it did.

 ✍

For the, er, record, the Record did print Alfred Buescher's post-assassination cartoon in its June 11, 1968 edition.

"A Tale of Three Cities" by Alfred Buescher for King Features, June, 1968