Dog Day After Toon

Siriusback Saturday rummages through my boxes of old cartoons and plucks out some random stuff from August, 1989.

Except that this first one's actually from June.

In Young at Heart, June, 1989

This trifle ran in the Vol. 3, No. 6 issue of Young At Heart, a local newsprint magazine targeted at the AARP demographic. I drew cartoons for them for a year or so. I don't have the original of the cartoon in my files, so perhaps the office closed before any Vol. 3, No. 7. (In those primitive days before the internet came along, I delivered and picked up my cartoons in person.)

I hadn't celebrated my 30th birthday yet (as hadn't most of the Young at Heart staff), so it was a stretch for me to figure out what people twice my age would consider funny. I guessed that they probably caught a fair amount of daytime television.

"Win, Lose, or Draw" was a TV game show hosted by Bert Convy, in which contestants were teamed with celebrity guests. One team member would have to illustrate some phrase on a flip chart while the others tried to guess what the phrase was.

In Racine Wis. Journal Times, August 11, 1989

Attorney General William Barr has put capital punishment into the news again. Capital punishment was controversial even before the Supreme Court ruled it "cruel and unusual" in Furman v. Georgia (1972). But civil libertarians have never been able to drive a stake through the heart of capital punishment; the Supremes reversed themselves only four years later in Gregg v. Georgia.

In Journal Times, September 3, 1989

The Journal Times solicited reader opinions on legalizing marijuana for its September 3 editorial page, even though anything approaching legalization was still decades in the future. The Bush administration Attorney General, Richard Thornburgh, in fact advocated sending U.S. troops to Colombia to fight the Medellin drug cartel. JT responders opposed legalization by a ratio of 4 to 1.

Unpublished?

Spike Jones's film, "Do the Right Thing," was released in the U.S. on July 21, 1989 to stellar reviews, but some people worried that the riot scene at the film's climax would incite Black audiences to riot. It was slow to arrive to Racine's movie theatres, both owned by Marcus Theatres, but "Do the Right Thing" was eventually shown in the fall at the Rapids Plaza Cinema, across a busy street from Horlick High School, without incident.

The theatre was not so fortunate after a cancelled screening of "Boys 'n the Hood" two years later and was shuttered months after that. The public explanation for the closing was that the Rapids Cinema had only two screens, whereas the Westgate Cinema had six; both are gone now, replaced by the 13-screen Marcus Renaissance Cinema four miles outside city limits.

Let's close on a lighter note.

Judging from the absence of a date on it, I must have drawn this cartoon for Young at Heart. My usual notation of the date in the margin of the paper is also missing, but the cartoon was filed between the August and September cartoons. If Young at Heart ever published a Vol. 3 No. 7 or 8, I don't have a hard copy of it.