Thursday, November 29, 2018

Q Toon: Judge for Yourself


In among all the stuff in the Corrupt Trump Administration's news dump over the extended Thanksgiving weekend was a request to the Supreme Court to overrule a lower court injunction against Trump's executive order banning transgender service members in the U.S. military.

The move would bypass federal appeals courts, which is highly unusual but not absolutely unheard of in the case of a national emergency. If preventing transgender patriots from serving their country sounds to you like something that calls for the combined forces of Agent Bauer, the Impossible Missions Force, and the DC Comics line-up, Mr. Trump has an opening in the Justice Department for you.

Even more highly unusual was the response by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to Trump's complaining about another lower court ruling (this time on his draconian asylum policy) because it was delivered by an "Obama judge."
"We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges," Roberts said in a statement. "What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them."
"That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for."
This direct rebuke of a president goes well beyond anything we have witnessed before. Justice Alito silently mouthed "not true" during a paragraph about campaign financing reform in one of President Obama's State of the Union addresses; but you didn't see him issuing an official statement defending corporations' and foreign entities' right to bankroll our elections. Unless you count his having signed on to the Citizens United majority opinion.

For the purposes of this week's cartoon, I'm conflating the transgender service member and immigrant asylum cases. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who blocked Trump's anti-trans policy, was appointed to  the United States District Court for the District of Columbia  in 1997 by Bill Clinton, not by Barack Obama.

Well, it's not as if Mr. Trump is a stickler for factual accuracy.

I might also point out that the humans and buildings in this cartoon are not drawn to scale, in case anyone was wondering.

Wednesday, November 28, 2018

Intelligence Report


"So I’m doing deals, and I’m not being accommodated by the Fed. I’m not happy with the Fed. They’re making a mistake because I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me."

"...a lot of people like myself — we have very high levels of intelligence..."
—Donald Joffrey Trump, to The Washington Post

Monday, November 26, 2018

This Week's Sneak Peek


Thanksgiving weekend is over, so it's time for all us editorial cartoonists to try to catch up on the news that happened while we were busy drawing cartoons about pardoning turkeys and Black Friday madness. We've fallen a full week behind King Joffrey's twitter feed already!

Saturday, November 24, 2018

Stayskalback Saturday

I learned through Daily Cartoonist this week that editorial cartoonist Wayne Stayskal died on Tuesday at the age of 86.

The Daily Cartoonist, in turn, had learned of Mr. Stayskal's passing from arch-conservative newspaper columnist Cal Thomas, who had collaborated with Stayskal on their book Liberals for Lunch in 1985 and had written the forward to Till Euthanasia Do You Part in 1993. As an obituary, Thomas's column has that bitchy bathos of how conservatives are so persecuted and that must be why Stayskal didn't achieve the exalted status of the giants of the editorial cartoonist pantheon.

I'm afraid there are plenty of editorial cartoonists from all across the ideological spectrum who have not achieved that status. Most of us don't and never will; heck, I don't even have a Wikipedia entry. But count me as a longtime fan of Mr. Stayskal from back when he drew for the Chicago Today.
Stayskal's cartoon for the final edition of Chicago Today, September 13, 1974
When I was a kid, I used to have a collection of Stayskal's cartoons pinned to the bulletin board in my bedroom. That was no way to preserve newspaper clippings for posterity, and they haven't been; I can still see in my mind's eye, however, his seemingly casual caricatures of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Richard J. Daley. (And, for some reason, a particular three-panel cartoon that parodied Crest's "Look, Ma, no cavities!" ads, with the punch line "Sugar's so darned high we stopped buying it!") He had a rough drawing style that suggested spontaneity, even hastiness, and brought to mind the scratchings of Ronald Searle or Gerald Scarfe.
Or perhaps Gahan Wilson, along with whose opera the above cartoon would comfortably sit cheek by jowl.

Stayskal was a protégé of cartoonist Vaughn Shoemaker, coming in 1962 to work with and eventually succeed him at the Chicago American (later Chicago Today). As the Chicago Tribune swallowed up the afternoon paper over the course of 1974, he joined Daniel Holland, Dick Locher, and Jeff MacNelly on the Trib's editorial pages. Before long, the Tribune scaled back its cartooning staff, and Stayskal moved to the Tampa Tribune in 1984 but continued national syndication through Tribune Media Services. Even after retiring in 2005 and returning from Florida to Illinois (now there's a contrarian for you), he contributed cartoons to townhall.com until 2010 or so.

He also drew for the comics pages: he wasn't able to make a success of Balderdash or Ralph; but his Trim's Arena, drawn under a pseudonym, appeared in several newspapers' sports pages in the 1970's and 80's.

To Mr. Thomas's complaint, it is true that Wayne Stayskal is absent from such cartooning reference books as Syd Hoff's Editorial and Political Cartooning (1976) and Maurice Horn's The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons (1980), and his Wikipedia entry is all of four sentences long. [Update: the entry has been expanded considerably since I wrote this post.]
But if my blog is dedicated to anything, it is to the proposition that the work of editorial cartoonists should be appreciated beyond the daily deadline, whether the artists reach the pinnacle with Thomas Nast, rub shoulders with the vast majority of quotidian scribblers, or toil in unwikipediated obscurity.

So here's to you, Wayne Stayskal. Rest in peace, and may you bring a daily chuckle to the readers of the Celestial Tribune.

Thursday, November 22, 2018

Monday, November 19, 2018

This Week's Sneak Peek

There's no place like home for the holidays.

I guess some folks find that comforting.

Saturday, November 17, 2018

It Ain't Over Till It's Over Over There

As promised, Siegback Saturday focuses this week on European cartoonists' response to the end of World War I.
"Zwischen Krieg und Frieden" by Wilhelm Schulz in Simplicissimus, November 19, 1918
Most of these cartoons appeared in weekly publications, and since I don't know the dating conventions of each of the journals, there might be some cartoons that were drawn before the armistice was signed and others drawn well afterward. "Zwischen Krieg und Frieden" illustrates the point noted last week that the killing continued right up to 10:59:59.99 a.m. Paris Time on the last day of hostilities.
"Aufwärts" by J.D. (?) in Ulk, Berlin, November 15, 1918
"Völkersehnsucht" by Otto Lendecke in Simplicissimus, November 26, 1918
I was a little surprised to find so few cartoons that expressed relief at the war finally being over. As the † next to Otto Lendecke's name above the Simplicissimus cover illustration indicates, the Austrian painter had died a month before the end of the war, so "Völkersehnsucht" is obviously not a response to the armistice except on the part of the magazine editors.
"Die Waffenstilstandsbedingungen" by Thomas Theodor Heine in Simplicissimus, November 26, 1918
Judging from the rest of the cartoons I've seen, the end of hostilities on the battlefield clearly did not extend to an end of hostilities on the drawing boards — on either side of the conflict.
"The 'Victorious' Hun" by David Wilson in The Passing Show, November, 1918
From Great Britain, David Wilson gloats over Supreme Allied Commander General Ferdinand Foch forcing Chief of the German General Staff Paul von Hindenburg to sign an unconditional surrender.
"Il Trionfo della Giustizia" by Giove "Tony" Toppi in Il 420, Florence, November 24, 1918
What the triumph of justice looked like depended upon which side you were on.
"So Also Sieht ein Gerechtigkeitsfriede Aus" by Gustave Brandt in Kladderadatsch, Berlin, November 24, 1918
The pediment in Gustav Brandt's cartoon reads "The Justice Peace Group of the Entente Sculptors."
"Le Kaiser" by C. Léandre in Le Rire, Paris, November 16, 1918
From the Allies, there was no shortage of scorn to heap upon the abdicated Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm Viktor Albert Hohenzollern. And since I'm not going to write a separate post about Australian cartoons, here's one from the Sydney Bulletin.
"Take My Seat" (perhaps by one of the Lindsay brothers?) in Sydney Bulletin, November, 1918
Returning to Europe, neither was the Kaiser's fall mourned in neutral Spain:
"Su Debida Recompensa" in Esquella, Barcelona, ca. November, 1918
Another Catalan cartoonist observes that Armistice Day fell on the Feast Day of St. Martin, traditionally a day for slaughtering pigs. The caption is a common saying which is pretty much the flip side of "every dog has its day."
"A Cada Porc Li Arriba el seu Sant Martí" by Josep «Picarol» Costa Ferrer in Campana de Gràcia, Barcelona, November 16, 1918
Of course, Mr. Hohenzollern was not the only guy suddenly unemployed at the end of the war:
"La Salle des Trônes de la Quadruplice" by L.M. in Le Rire, November 16, 1918
The other members of the Quadruplice were Austrian Emperor Karl, the Ottoman Sultan and the Bulgarian Tsar. In fact, the Entente allowed Ottoman Sultan Mehmet VI (who had acceded to the throne in July after the death of his brother, Mehmet V) to retain his title and position; but he would be overthrown four years later. Bulgaria's Tsar Ferdinand I abdicated in October as one of the terms of his country's surrender; he was succeeded by his son, Boris III, whose reign — in name — lasted into World War II. (Mainly in the plain.)
"La Fine degli Imperatori" by Gabriele "Rata Langa" Galanta in L'Asino, Rome, November 24, 1918
If cartoonists living on the winning side of the war could joke about how the Kaisers had fallen, German cartoonists had to find someone among the allies that they could poke fun at. They chose the king of Italy, whose government had forsaken the country's erstwhile alliance with the Central Powers in a gamble for attaining Italian territories of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
"Der Treppenwitz der Weltgeschichte" by Arthur Johnson in Kladderadatsch, Berlin, November 17, 1918

My translation of the Arthur Johnson's German is rather inexact and requires a little explanation.  "Treppenwitz" is a literal translation of the French "l'esprit d'escalier," referring to that perfect rejoinder one thinks of only after it's too late (on the way down the staircase while leaving the party). In German, however, the word has come to mean a joke that ends up with unintended unfortunate consequences — those Baraboo high school seniors taking a group photo doing a Nazi salute, for example.

In this case, Johnson pushes the idea that Italy's King Victor Emmanuel III is the joke, and the unfortunate consequence is the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I'm curious why Johnson, whose father was American but who was born and raised in Germany, wrote "Austria" on the shield instead of "Österreich"; perhaps he just didn't have enough room.
"Der Unersättliche" by Olav Gulbrandsson in Simplicissimus, Munich, November 26, 1918

Olav Gulbrandsson portrays Victor Emmanuel's victory parade boasting the names of Italy's 1917 defeats in battle. Twitting the 5' tall Italian king seems to have been the last resort of Germany's cartoonists wishing to find someone among the conquerors of the Central Powers who could be portrayed as a buffoon; I assume that punning the name Vittorio with the German sieg was purely intentional.
"S. Wilson" by "Tonv" in Il 420, Florence, November 17, 1918
I've been given conflicting translations of the dialogue in this little cartoon by the Italian cartoonist who signed his work "Tonv"; I believe the mother is telling her son that she is hanging a hagiographic portrait of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson in place of whatever saint it is that she's taking down, on account of his having performed a true miracle. This blog gets hundreds of visits from people in Italy, so if any of you cittadini would care to leave a good translation in the comments, I'd be happy to replace this paragraph with it. (Having used several of his cartoons in this series, I've also been repeatedly frustrated in my efforts to find out who "Tonv" was; qualcuno può aiutarmi?)
"Da Beim Tod" by Fritz Boscovits in Nebelspalter, Zurich, November, 1918
Not everyone shared that Italian mother's adoration of Mr. Wilson. At the German-sympathetic Swiss journal Nebelspalter, cartoonist JFB holds Wilson responsible for the slaying of the Central Powers (Mittelmächte), while his allies are depicted as dogs barking over the sad remains of such a handsome, noble creature.
"John Bull's Fourteen Points" by Frank Holland in John Bull, London, ca. Oct./Nov., 1918
America's allies had their differences with Wilson as well. As far as Britain and France were concerned, his 14 Points may have been a useful propaganda ploy against Germany while hostilities raged, but now that it was time to implement the peace, exacting punishment upon the vanquished was going to take precedence over the namby-pamby head-in-the-clouds idealism of that egghead professor from Princeton.
"Gli Effetti di un' Indigestione" by "GiToppi" in Il 420, Florence, November 17, 1918
As I mentioned earlier, Italy had also joined the Entente eager to claim territory from Austria. Caporetto is the present-day Slovenian city of Kobarid on the Italian border; Hemmingway recounted the disastrous 1917 rout of the Italian army at the then-Austrian village in A Farewell to Arms. At the end of the war, the Italian army occupied the town, and it was annexed to Italy from 1919 until being turned over to Yugoslavia under the Paris Treaties of 1947.
"La Resa dei Conti" by RIV in Il 420, Florence, November 17, 1918
As depicted in "The Rendering of Accounts," none of Germany and Austria's neighbors were about to let bygones be bygones. And we know how that turned out.

...Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!
We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.
No soldier's paid to kick against his powers.
We laughed, knowing that better men would come,
And greater wars...
(From Wilfred Owen's "The Next War")

Thursday, November 15, 2018

Q Toon: Sinema Vérité

I wanted to draw a cartoon this week about the Senate race in Arizona between Kyrsten Sinema and Martha McSally, which had yet to be decided when I sat down at my drawing board. Sinema was leading at the time, and has since been declared the winner, making her the first out bisexual elected to the Senate.

Reading a Huffington Post story about LGBTQ candidates elected to office convinced me to expand the scope of the cartoon to include Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), who coasted to reelection in my home state, and three newly elected members of the House of Representatives: Angie Craig (D-MN), Sharice Davids (D-KS), and Chris Pappas (D-NH). Cramming them all into one cartoon, I barely had enough room to squeeze in my signature.

And as soon as I thought I was finished inking the toon, I realized that I had completely forgotten about Congressman Mark Pocan (D-WI). It turns out that Pocan had no opponent in his Madison-area district, so he wasn't even in the local coverage of election results.

For that matter, I also neglected to include David Cicilline (D-RI), Sean Maloney (D-NY), and Mark Takano (D-HI).  Shame on me for not fact-checking HuffPo! My Spidey sense should have been tingling, if only because when I originally read their story, the lead photo at the top of the page was of Representative-elect Ilhan Omar (D-MN), who has not been identified as L, G, B, T, Q, or any of the other letters of the rainbow alphabet.

As for the Congresspersons who did make it into this week's cartoon, Sinema flips a Senate seat that has been Republican for three decades. She has been a member of the House's Blue Dog caucus of moderate and conservative Democrats, even winning the endorsement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 2014. That didn't stop Republican opponent Martha McSally from trying to paint Sinema as a radical left winger, based on Sinema's having entered local politics as a candidate of the Green Party.

Baldwin is in fact well to the left of most Senators, but ran a finely tuned and savvy campaign for her third term. Unopposed in the primary while two Republicans duked it out for their party's nominations, she established herself in early television ads as having stood up for small towns hurt when their major employer pulls up stakes; for the cheese-making industry; and for favoring American-made products in military contracts. When ALEC stooge Leah Vukmir won the Republican nomination, Baldwin's ads attacked her relentlessly for acting to restrict access to and affordability of health insurance.

Craig, in a rematch of a race she lost in 2016, beat a militant libertarian who equated marriage equality with slavery and complained that calling a woman who has had more than one or two love interests in her life a "slut" just isn't acceptable any more. A former health care executive, she joined many others in her party in focusing her campaign on health care issues.

Davids makes history as the first out LGBTQ Representative from Kansas and one of the two first Native American women elected to Congress. A member of the Ho-Chunk nation, she unseated four-term Congressman David Yoder in the only swing district in a solidly red state. Another likely Blue Dog, she campaigned on working within the current health care system rather than promising Medicare for All, and she supported modest immigration reforms rather than abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Pappas was elected to succeed fellow Democrat Carol Shea Porter in what has been described as a bitter election from primary to general. The general election was as much a referendum on Donald Trump as anything else; in their first debate, Republican Eddie Edwards attacked Pappas over a photo taken at an LGBTQ pride parade of Pappas wearing a rainbow t-shirt with the word "Resist" across the chest. "I'm proud of who I am," Pappas replied, "and I'm proud to stand up against hate and bigotry and intolerance."

Tuesday, November 13, 2018

Environmental Stewardship: Expanded Extinction

Once a month, I turn the blog over to my dad, who writes an "Environmental Stewardship" column for his church's newsletter. Here's his missive for December:

As was recently pointed out in a sermon, economics is all about making choices. The same thing can be said about ecology, which comes from the same Greek root. The choices that we, that is modern homo sapiens, have made have had dire effects upon virtually all other living beings on this earth. These effects are adding up to what many scientists have called the “sixth great extinction,” as disastrous as that which wiped out the dinosaurs and very many other species.

I am sure that each of us can say that our individual acts have not caused any endangered or threatened species to go extinct. Yet collectively, that is what is happening … as many as several species every day.

One piece of federal legislation that is working to stop extinctions in the USA is the Endangered Species Act. It may not be perfect, but it has worked for the Bald Eagle and other less famous species. In protecting certain species, it has protected critical habitat that is beneficial to many other species.

But the Endangered Species Act is itself in danger. There are those in government, both elected and appointed, who would restrict the ESA by such amendments as would allow “economic or other impacts” to override listing of endangered or threatened species. Other changes would restrict actions on threatened species (one step down from endangered) and critical habitat. A series of nine amendments, already or soon to be introduced, would permit insecticides that are harmful to bees and other beneficial insects, and lead to less consistent and reliable protection of species. Although the amendments are labeled “ESA Modernization Package,” environmental organizations have called them the “Expanded Extinction Package” or “Poisoned Pollinators Provision.”

I encourage all environmental stewards to let their elected officials know what they think of any efforts to weaken the Endangered Species Act.

—John Berge

Monday, November 12, 2018

This Week's Sneak Peek

Thank you to D.D. Degg for linking to my collection of World War I blog posts on The Daily Cartoonist today.

I hadn't really intended to make a full-scale project of it at the outset, or I certainly would have been more meticulous about the first several posts in the series. Anyway, I'm very flattered at the attention. Much appreciated!

And so here's a snippet from the cartoon I've sent to my editors for later this week. And now I wait to see if they notice what's missing.

Saturday, November 10, 2018

At the End of the War to End All Wars


Surrenderback Saturday today observes the centennial of the end of World War I with a quick survey of the editorial cartoons that appeared in America's newspapers on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918.
"Licked" by Nelson Harding in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, November 11, 1918
Kaiser Wilhelm Hohenzollern having abdicated days earlier, Germany surrendered to the Entente powers effective at 11:00 a.m. Paris Time, November 11. It accepted Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points as the basis for the post-war world and agreed to pay heavy reparations to the victorious allies.
"Humanity's Greatest Day" by John McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, November 11, 1918
The Austro-Hungarian Empire, which had launched the war in 1914, no longer existed; Vienna looked on, spent and helpless, as its various Slavic groups established break-away republics and Hungary divorced in the "Aster Revolution" of October 31. On November 11 Emperor Karl I stepped away from active participation in Austria's affairs of state (although he did not officially abdicate).
"Thank God!" by John H. Cassel in New York Evening World, November 11, 1918
Most of the American cartoons I have found, however, focused on Kaiser Wilhelm's fate.
"How the Mighty Fall" by Winsor McCay in New York Journal, November 11, 1918
World War I marked the last gasp of royalty as the basis of government in most of Europe. Leftist revolutions took over in Berlin and Vienna, and republics of various stripes took root throughout Mitteleuropa where Kaiser Wilhelm had planned to crown Germanic monarchs, as well as in the former Viennese vassal lands. In most remaining countries with a crowned head of state, elected legislatures would do the actual governing.

"A Mute Inglorious End" by C.F. Naughton in Duluth Evening Herald, November 11, 1918
Yet monarchy was not the only institution to take a beating. Military technology had progressed greatly in the few years since the 19th Century. For the first time, war could be fought in the air (essentially by amateurs and hobbyists) and underwater, and with a long-range gun located nearly 100 kilometers from its target. Chemical weapons killed and maimed even those sheltering in their trenches. Most deadly, however, were the rapid-fire machine guns and the improved accuracy of artillery, many times more fatal than the blunderbusses and cannons of old; yet the generals on both sides insisted on the outdated tactic of sending wave after wave of soldiers "over the top" into the line of fire.
"Germany Does Not Regret the Kaiser's Ghastly Murders..." by Charles Morgan in Philadelphia Inquirer, November 11, 1918
Those soldiers who managed against the odds not to be mowed down by enemy fire returned home disillusioned by the incompetence and stubbornness of their commanding officers. As a result, in stark contrast with those of earlier wars, the memorials and statues to World War I (and our observance of Veterans' Day) celebrate the common soldier and not the commanding general.
"On Their Way," unsigned (Harry Murphy, perhaps?) in Washington (DC) Times, November 11, 1918
A poem by British soldier Wilfred Owens, included in Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, twists the biblical account of Abraham and Isaac:
So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenched there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! and angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so,
but slew his son, —
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
"Get a New Chauffeur, I Resign!" by "Bill" Sykes in Philadelphia Evening Ledger, November 11, 1918
Even though the allies' victory was assured several days before Germany surrendered, the fighting continued right up to the stroke of 11:00 November 11. As a final tribute to the ghastly pointlessness of the military strategy of those "old men," some 2,000 sons on both sides were killed in those final eleven hours of the war.
"The Goth and the Flame" by Daniel Fitzpatrick in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November, 1918
The victorious allies sowed the seeds for the end of their colonial empires. Asian and African people who had seldom or never known popular rule saw the Entente powers grant self-determination to the people of eastern Europe and saw no reason why their fate should be any different. But Germany's colonies and the Ottoman Empire were divvied up among the European victors instead, without regard to their subjects' ethnic, religious and tribal identities — with repercussions that continue to echo a century later.
"Across No-Man's Land" by Rollin Kirby in New York World, November, 1918
Punishing terms imposed upon Germany by the Treaty of Versailles led to the Nazi's "Make Germany Great Again" nationalism, and to the Great War's sequel in 1939-45.

"When a Feller Needs a Friend" by Clare Briggs in New York Tribune, November, 1918
Emerging from the war relatively unscathed, the United States took over from London as the seat of global finance, launching a robust economy for the next decade. For many, this was a time for optimism that the cause of democracy was on the ascendancy around the world (by which we meant Europe).
"From the Ashes of Despotism" by Sidney Greene in New York Evening Telegram, November 11, 1918
Further to the left, the world socialist movement saw the end of the war as their chance to overthrow the forces of capitalism and plutocracy. A mutiny by German sailors at Wilhelmshaven at the end of October spread, fueled by socialist unrest, and sent Kaiser Wilhelm fleeing into exile on November 9.

It's unfortunate that The Masses had been shut down, scattering its cartoonists to the winds; but I still have an example for you of a radical left-wing cartoon from the socialist New York Call. (Ryan Walker's cartoon in the November 11 issue had no relevance to war or peace, so here's his cartoon from the next day.)
"My Place Is in the Sun!" by Ryan Walker in New York Call, November 12, 1918
Walker's cartoon depicts the "Worker" demanding his place in the sun from human figures Capitalism, Militarism, Profiteer (plus two others I can't read) and a snake labeled "Reactionary Press." Under his feet are the ruins of Russian, German and Austrian autocracy. And since I relaxed the deadline to include Ryan Walker, here's the November 12 cartoon by Clifford Berryman, who didn't get a cartoon in his paper the previous day.
"Me Und—Napoleon" by Clifford Berryman in Washington (DC) Times, November 12, 1918
While cartoonists across the United States were celebrating the fall of the Kaiser and the triumph of democracy, readers of the Des Moines Register's front page on November 11 were treated to a more somber message from the pen of John "Ding" Darling. Every party needs its pooper.
"Now All She Has to Do..." by Jay N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, November 11, 1918
Tune in again next week for a look at what European cartoonists were up to in the immediate aftermath of the war.