UWM POSTer Child

A couple weeks ago, Supersizeback Saturday featured some cartoons I'd drawn in Augusts of years ending in -8. In digging through my archives for that post, I came across the oversize drawing for this UWM Post outerfold (like a centerfold, but wrapped around the outside of the newspaper) and considered including it.

I was thinking that I might have drawn it right after the 1988 Republican National Convention, but since the cartoon's publication date was the day after Labor Day, 1989, I realized that I had drawn it a year later and I'd have to leave it for another day.

Like today. I suppose I should have held it for a post next year of September cartoons in years ending in -9, but what the heck.

When I call this cartoon oversize, I mean that this "UWM POSTer," as the UWM Post called it, was printed on a sheet of newsprint larger than a typical newspaper page today. I had to make four scans of the newspaper and piece them together to end up with the above image.

My original pen-and-ink drawing is the same size as the printed cartoon. I generally prefer to draw my cartoons larger than they will be printed, but this drawing took up an entire sheet of the largest chunk of bristol board I could find. (The original was badly stained when our basement flooded several years ago, but the newspaper was in a box on a shelf and not in the artist portfolio standing in danger's way on the floor.)

Now, I get that my caricature of Dan Quayle cum Alfred E. Neumann might have needed to be identified for some college-age readers. Quayle had a bland, Wonder-bread average-ness to it, and giving him the missing tooth, orange hair, and aileron ears made him even less recognizable. What gets me about this cartoon is that  the editors of the Post felt that the headline needed the parenthetical "vice-president" for the benefit of readers who apparently wouldn't know who Dan Quayle was even given his full name.

(Note: his full name is actually J. Danforth Quayle; but what, me, quibble?)

The following year's back-to-school POSTer section served as a sort of voters' guide and includes a mention on the calliope wagon of my generic Democratic Congressman in those days, Luke Warmish. It appeared on campus one week before Wisconsin's partisan Primary Election Day; the most hotly contested contest that year was the Democratic race to challenge the Republican incumbent State Attorney General.

I have no idea why the African-American "Issues" guy is blue. There are three African-Americans in the crowd with reasonably rendered skin tones; but whoever got stuck with the task of colorizing all those people clearly got fed up with the process of cutting halftone sheets for the red, blue and yellow overlays. (Witness the Blue Man Group at the base of the light pole.)

In addition to the POSTer, the Post ran five of my illustrations and cartoons for articles inside the paper. (I have notes on all of these that they were drawn in August, so I must have had several days' lead time.) Issues ranged from cuts in student financial aid — the article it accompanied used as an example a student loan of $2,500, which would cover less than 10% of the estimated cost for a Wisconsin resident undergraduate taking six course credits in Fall, 2018  — to reproductive choice and Native American treaty rights.

The treaties were a hot-button issue in Wisconsin at the time, involving Euro-American complaints over Native American spear-fishing rights guaranteed in those treaties. At some point, I'll probably devote a blog post to that episode in Wisconsin history in order to give it the attention it deserves.

I had actually drawn this cartoon in May, but it made its way into the "Stop the Parade" issue anyway. Incumbent Republican Governor Tommy Thompson had attempted to give himself a little wiggle room on the abortion issue with his reelection campaign coming up. If the pro-life camp, here personified by activist Randall Terry, had any misgivings about Thompson's position, they never let on. They were leagues away from Democratic challenger Tom Loftus's position.

And then there was this sketch for an article about expectations for Women Trying To Have It All.

Finally, there were two editorial cartoons. This one was included in the Stop the Parade section; I blogged this cartoon not so long ago, but since it ran in the issue of the UWM Post at hand, here it is again, just in time for the reworked reboot of the Roseanne-free Roseanne show (and bitching about football players and the national anthem):

And, as another example of how everything old is new again, while also bringing this blog post around full circle, here's my cartoon for the editorial page of that September 4, 1990 edition of the Post.