Two By Two by Two

It's time to stop being so stingy with these dusty old cartoons every Saturday! This week, I've got a whole bunch of my own February cartoons from years ending in "2" for your nostalgic pleasure. Let's start with this valentine from February, 1982:

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers, Wis., Feb. 11, 1982

I had forgotten about this cartoon until seeing it in the Ranger's on-line archives a few weeks ago. I guess I don't have the original any more; I may have drawn it expressly to fill a hole on page one, the original cartoon instead of a copy getting glued into position on the master sheet.

I'm pretty sure I never gave it away to anyone in hopes that they would be my valentine.

in UW-P Ranger, Somers, Wis., Feb. 25, 1982

As you can tell from the Valentine cartoon, I did a lot of cross-hatch shading in those days. A different technique that I dabbled with was rubbing a charcoal pencil over portions of the cartoon with a textured book cover behind it. I abandoned that approach when I switched over from drawing on plain old typing paper to sturdier bristol board.

in Journal Times, Racine, Wis., Feb. 5, 1992

Goose stepping ahead to 1992, I drew the above homage to Sir David Low's classic cartoon, in which Adolph Hitler and Josef Stalin meet over Poland. Low's cartoon comes to mind any time two vehement opponents find common cause. In this case, the stand-in for Hitler was a bona fide Nazi David Duke, then a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives, who had put himself forward as a presidential candidate in the Republican primaries despite having run as a Democrat just four years earlier. 

Wisconsin law at the time put on the ballot any candidate recognized by national news media, while allowing the bipartisan Election Commission the final say. The Commission denied Duke a spot on the ballot, albeit along party lines. Ordinarily, Duke would have condemned the American Civil Liberties Union as a bunch of criminal-coddling commies, but he welcomed their help in getting on the ballot in Wisconsin and other states.

The courts ruled in favor of Duke and the ACLU, but no matter. Pat Buchanan, with a longer record of Republican Party activity, won the lion's share of the white racist vote.

in UW-Milwaukee Post, Feb. 13, 1992

With the Olympics just getting underway and the Soviet Reunion set to invade Ukraine any day now, I couldn't resist revisiting this cartoon about the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville, France. This was the last time that the winter games would be held in the same year as the summer games, and these were the first Olympics held after the break-up of the USSR slightly over one month earlier.

Athletes who had trained to represent the USSR now found themselves without a country — or at least, in many cases, without a country that had an Olympic Committee. Athletes from Russia, Ukraine, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan participated as representatives of "Unified Team" (Объединённая команда, or, officially, "Équipe unifiée"). The team won 54 gold medals among them, the winners standing on the podium as the Olympic flag was raised to the tune of the Olympic Hymn.

in The Biz, Milwaukee, 2002

2002 finds me drawing cartoons for The Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee and its effort to spin off a flashy youth-oriented monthly supplement called The Biz. The Biz cartoons are my first works in full color. The version of Photoshop that I had at the time didn't have CMYK capability, but I did get to see The Biz in print, and I don't think the RGB files printed badly.

As with almost every other of my cartoons for The Business Journal, I was sent an article in need of an illustration. I have no recollection of what this article was about. Teamwork, I suppose.

for Q Syndicate, February, 2002

I wasn't even using computer-generated grayscale shading yet. There's quite a lot of cross-hatching in the above cartoon, much more than you're likely to find in anything I draw these days.

for Q Syndicate, February, 2012

Ten years later, I hadn't started sending colorized cartoons to Q Syndicate, but I saw that Dallas Voice was colorizing them on their own. This cartoon, about the outing of a closeted Arizona sheriff who had starred in John McCain's "Build The Dang Fence" commercial, was syndicated only in grayscale and bitmap versions. Figuring, however, that I needed to start offering a color option to syndicate subscribers, I upgraded my Photoshop and started playing around with it. 

The difference between RGB and CMYK formats is difficult to show on-line; but essentially, RGB format uses the red, green, and blue pixels on your screen to create 256 colors, whereas CMYK format is designed to use Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and blacK ink on paper. An RGB image doesn't contain any true black per se, so CMYK is a better format for printing cartoons that do.

February, 2012

I had already colorized several cartoons for the on-line publications The Racine Post and the Racine iteration of Patch.com, AOL's foray in the late '00's to sponsor local news content. Likewise with the occasional cartoon that was published only on this blog, such as the above cartoon about right-wing advocacy for an amorphous religious exemption to Obamacare.

The cartoon started as a doodle while I spent an afternoon in a hospital waiting room. After I got home, I went ahead and committed it to ink and thence to computer screen and the interwebs.

A few months after this, I began sending colorized cartoons to Q Syndicate. It would be three years before I ever got to see how my CMYK formatted files actually turned out in print, when I attended the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists convention in Columbus. I still also send a grayscale cartoon to the syndicate, although to my knowledge, Philadelphia Gay News is the only newspaper that prints them that way.