Yet Another Luxembourg-Themed Post?

Having devoted three posts this month to the late U.S. Ambassador to Luxembourg James C. Hormel, imagine my surprise when President Joe Biden named Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett to that same post this week.

Why, I just happen to have drawn a bunch of cartoons featuring Tom Barrett, mostly for the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee back in the early 'aughts. I also wrote a school report on Luxembourg in the sixth grade for which I got somebody in the Grand Duchy to send me a very nice package of informational materials. But I don't know where that school report is any more, so let's take a look at the cartoons, shall we?

in Journal Times, Racine, Wis. Oct. 20, 1992

I thought I might have drawn at least one cartoon featuring Barrett while he was a member of Congress, but I'm only finding two in which he appears, and only as an extra. He had not yet been elected (although he was a shoo-in) in this first cartoon, in which Wisconsin's incumbent Republican Senator horns in on an imagined Democratic campaign event.

in Business Journal, Milwaukee, February, 1997

Here, Barrett is standing behind Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig during a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Milwaukee Brewers' new stadium.

(Clearly, I had no pictures handy showing what the Brewers' new baseball stadium looked like. I later drew a pencil sketch in the margin of this cartoon so I would know how to properly cartoon the building and Miller Park logo.)

in Business Journal, Milwaukee, June 4, 2004

Once Barrett left Congress and was elected Mayor of Milwaukee in 2004, I naturally had many more opportunities to draw him. These are only a few of them.

in Business Journal, Milwaukee, August 13, 2004

A politician can throw cartoonists a curve by changing their look; Barrett wore a more business-like hairdo as Mayor than he had as Congressman...

in Business Journal, Milwaukee, August 27, 2004

...And then he went and shaved off his moustache, which changed his look dramatically. Removal of his most noticeable facial feature meant having to rethink how to represent him in two-dimensional black and white.

Before long, however, I hit upon what would become my go-to caricature of him. Except for the nose. The nose is wrong here.

in Business Journal, Milwaukee, July 1, 2005

It's a good thing that it didn't take long to settle on my mayoral caricature, because by the end of the year, the Business Journal had decided that it didn't need an editorial cartoonist any more. Milwaukee's mayoral politics hasn't impacted LGBTQ+ news a whole lot in the meantime, so I haven't drawn Mr. Barrett for Q Syndicate.

But I did put him in a cartoon for the on-line Racine Post when he ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2010.

for Racine Post, July, 2010

The cartoon is based on a campaign commercial from the Republican Party that told voters that Milwaukee was going down the toilet. Of course, the Milwaukee County Executive running for governor on the Republican ticket, or the national Great Recession, had nothing to do with it.

By the way, the original GOP ad didn't portray outgoing Governor Jim Doyle and Mayor Barrett as Nosferatu and the Joker. It just ain't easy to depict the grainy black-and-white images of television/video political attack ads in a cartoon that's in grayscale to begin with, so I had to come up with something else.

Creating the third and fourth panels in color would have been a good choice; I didn't start using color until some months later, though. A missed opportunity, really.

So anyway, if there are any Luxembourger cartoonists looking for tips on how to draw the new ambassador from the United States, here you go. Check out whether Stuart Carlson or Phil Hands have any Qwantable examples out there, and have fun.