Marching Across the Decades

We've all been dealing with news of COVID-19, the War in Ukraine, inflation, the high price of gas, and Kanye West's feud with Pete Davidson for so, so, long now. How about looking back on my salad days for cartoons about something a little more pleasant?

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers WI, March 11, 1982

Er, maybe the heightened tensions between the two nations with the world's largest arsenals of nuclear weapons 40 years ago doesn't quite qualify as "something a little more pleasant."

Most of this cartoon was drawn with india ink on typing paper, but some of the shading utilizes that charcoal technique I described last month. In this case, the surface behind the paper had parallel ridges; it might have been a book cover or the back of a clipboard. I liked the effect, particularly with whatever that background was; other backboards with dotted and pebbled patterns came in handy from time to time. But india ink remained my primary medium.

In retrospect, I think shading the foreground characters — and, for that matter, the foreground ground — in charcoal instead of with straight ballpoint pen lines would have yielded a more effective drawing.

I couldn't get the same effect when I switched over to drawing on bristol board not long after this; smooth finish seems more accommodating to pen and ink than vellum finish as far as I'm concerned, but less useful for charcoal. So I still had the same charcoal pencil ten years later when the editors of the UW-Milwaukee Post asked me for some cover art for their "Adventures in Buying" issue. 

As I joked earlier this week, I really dislike drawing architecture; but the "Adventures in Buying" issue was the Post's way of thanking its advertisers, and my approach was to draw a street scene featuring some of the advertisers the editors were especially keen to highlight.

in UWM Post, March 23, 1992

By the way, if there's one thing I dislike drawing even more than architecture, it's bicycles.

Charcoal is a particularly unforgiving medium. For one thing, you can't go back and erase any of the pencil marks left showing. And if you make any mistakes, india ink's problems drawing over white-out are minuscule compared with charcoal's, because the surface area won't match the rest of the drawing. (I had to paste a revision over the film titles on the Oriental Theater's marquee — probably to fix a perspective problem.)

One does acquire a true appreciation for the "Ashcan School" of cartoonists who used grease pencil or charcoal for their entire careers.

Here's how the drawing looked after a no-doubt unhappy colorist on the Post staff added some blue to it. The original, drawn full size to the page dimensions, was too wide for the office photocopier, so the sides got cropped off.

That was not one of my favorite drawings, but this is:

for Q Syndicate, March, 2002

If I had published a book of my own cartoons in the 'aughts, this would have been on the cover.

Since Roy and Silo, the same-sex penguin couple at the Central Park Zoo in New York City, were featured in national news reports, numerous other examples of same-sex coupling in the animal kingdom have come to light. In fact, homosexual behavior is well documented in many species, putting the lie to the old chestnut that same-sex attraction is "against nature."

It's so well documented that the Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus' and Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church preaches that the Russian military must stop the animal kingdom from achieving world domination. And the Florida legislature is crafting a bill to criminalize teaching about biology in their public schools.

Speaking of schools,

for Q Syndicate, March, 2012

I drew this cartoon after some pseudo-sincere apology from Rush Limbaugh in which he had excused whatever it was he had said that week — and I'm not interested in dredging it up again — by claiming to be an "entertainer."

What I'm interested in pointing out is that I used the map in the background as one of the cues to signal that the setting of the cartoon was set some 40 or 50 years earlier. I'm not sure whether a lot of people caught that, so dammit, I'm letting you know it was there on purpose.

Well, in light of current events, and boy oh boy do I detest drawing architecture, I'm going to wrap things up today by stepping outside of the Years Ending In 2 shtick. This 2014 cartoon showed up in my Facebook "Hey! Remember This? We do!" feed on Thursday.

for Q Syndicate, March 2014

Aw, heck, St. Patrick's Day falls on a weekend in two years, so I might just bring this one back for another Saturday retrospective post in 2024.

Who knows what Putin might be invading by then?