2022 in Review

My Saturday History Tour and year-end retrospective collide today (often a risk you take when looking behind you). So here's a collage of a few of my favorite cartoons from 2022:

(I would have liked to include this week's cartoon, too. But I felt I needed to limit myself to six cartoons.)

Here also is my annual snapshot of the year's biggest headlines.

I've been taking these front-page headline photos for 50 years now, and I don't know how much longer this habit will be possible. Many newspapers have surrendered blaring headlines about national and international news to the immediacy of the internet. The local newspaper here is still likely to give prominent placement to news of the end of U.S. involvement in a long war, or a vice presidential resignation; but for the most part, front page coverage is reserved for local features.

Even the regional papers (e.g.: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Chicago Tribune) tend to highlight features of local and state interest over, say, a congressional hearing, or a coup in South America. National papers such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal reserve huge bold headlines for singularly monumental events — but on the other hand, I have a much better camera now. No way would you have been able to read the Boris Johnson headline if I were still taking pictures with my Kodak Instamatic.

__________

P.S.: Had I waited until tomorrow to post this, I might have been able to add a newspaper headline about Pope Benedict's death this morning. Well, perhaps. Tomorrow's local newspapers had probably been put to bed Friday night.

Q Toon: Reach Out

The impetus for drawing this week's cartoon was the suicide of Henry Berg-Brousseau, a young trans man who had testified courageously before the Kentucky state legislature while still a teenager as it was poised to pass a mean-spirited, punitive, anti-transgender bill. (Which, having a Republican majority, they passed anyway.)

His testimony was featured on John Oliver's "Last Week Tonight"; his death has received international attention.

I became aware of him through his uncle David Brousseau, a fellow cartoonist for Q Syndicate and my editor for a time. I hadn't realized that Henry's mother, Karen Berg, is a Kentucky State Senator.

I will not presume to guess what made Henry decide life wasn't worth living. He had a promising future, having been hired as deputy press secretary for Human Rights Campaign. I know nothing of his personal life; a press release from his mother noted that he had "long struggled with mental illness, not because he was trans but born from his difficulty finding acceptance."

To paraphrase Tolstoy, every happy person is alike; every unhappy person is unhappy in their own way.

So this cartoon is not specifically about Henry Berg-Brousseau. It fails to encompass all the difficulties that transgender persons face. I don't have the expertise giving me the right to recommend any particular therapy or medication. 

But I hope that somehow, someone somewhere sees this in time to decide to stick it out one more day. To reach out to people who do know what to say, and more importantly, are there to listen.

If you or someone you know is in emotional distress or suicidal crisis, call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 988 or 1-800-273-TALK (8255).

_________________________

P.S.: To find this cartoon in one piece, visit one of my client publications, such as Q Salt Lake.

One More Holiday Wish

 

In the spirit of the season.

One Last Sneak Peek for 2022

 It's a cartoon that has kept me up nights.

Then, when all the drawing and scanning and formatting and shading the grayscale version was done, it turned out that our internet service was down.

So I rebooted the router a couple times; and when that didn't work, unplugged and replugged the modem as well. Then my better half called Spectrum's three-digit help line, and was put on hold until he got tired of the muzak and hung up. So we rebooted the router and unplugged the modem again.

By then, I was mostly finished with the colorized versions, so I tried calling Spectrum again. The automated voice assured me there were no outages in our area, and advised us to reboot the router and unplug the modem. With a predictable lack of results.

Then I got through to a human. Let's call him Ron.

Ron asked our account information, then wanted to know how many units were affected. One, I told him. We don't have a bunch of modems and routers in the house. Oh, said Ron, do you have a business account with us? And since we have a residential account, not a business account, Ron said he would transfer me to residential services.

After I sat through a recording touting Spectrum's new voice-identification security plan, a guy I'll call Rick picked up the line. The conversation was nearly the same as that with Ron, including the point where Rick said that he was on the business account side of things. Then he told me the phone number to call for residential services.

So I hung up and called the ten-digit number, where the same automated voice as before went through the same automated advice as before — although this time, she did say that there were reports of intermittent service outages in our area, and technicians were already working on the problem.

I put my cartoon files on a USB drive, drove over to my Dad's house and sent them from there.

Four hours later, still no internet at home; so my better half tried calling Spectrum again.

This time, whoever he talked to wanted us not only to reboot the modem and unplug the router, but to turn off the computer as well.

Good thing that worked.

Because the next step would have been to reboot the modem, unplug the router, turn off the computer, and shut off power to the whole house.

Last Christmas

Rather than resurrect yuletide editorial cartoons from 1922 today, I thought I'd reach back 20 years further for the Christmas cartoons that would be Minneapolis Tribune cartoonist R.C. Bowman's last for the holiday.

Of course, Bowman couldn't have known it would be his last Christmas. His death the following June at age 32 would be an accident; he would be overcome by gas in his home.

Bowman's Christmas Eve cartoon concerns the chief foreign affairs news of the day. Seeking to force the Venezuelan government of Cipriano Castro to repay debts incurred prior to his country's 1892 civil war, Germany and Great Britain (joined by Italy) placed a naval blockade against Venezuela. Castro responded by arresting 200 German and British citizens in Caracas. Seeking to avoid having the U.S. navy come to Venezuela's defense, Britain invited the U.S. to arbitrate the dispute.

Bowman's Christmas Day cartoon refers to Rudyard Kipling's poetic screed against Great Britain allying its interests with Germany, "The Rowers," published in London Times Dec. 22. The actual poem is longer than I care to repeat here, but these stanzas show that Bowman's paraphrase didn't exaggerate its sentiment much:

"Our dead they mocked are scarcely cold,
  Our wounds are bleeding yet—
And you tell us now that our strength is sold
 To help them press for a debt!

"'Neath all the flags of all mankind
 That use upon the seas,
Was there no other fleet to find
 That you strike bands with these?"

🎄

Since Bowman's Christmas Day cartoon wasn't particularly Christmasy, let's check over at the Minneapolis Journal, where Charles "Bart" Bartholomew was taking a more festive approach to the holiday.

"An Old Fashioned Christmas" by Charles "Bart" Bartholomew in Minneapolis Journal, Dec. 24, 1902

Alert readers may recall that the Wright brothers had not yet flown their air-ship at Kitty Hawk as of Christmas Eve, 1902. Lighter-than-air balloons had been in use for half a century, however, and by this time had incorporated engines and steering mechanisms (and been involved in a fatal aeronautic accident). 

Like air-ships, automobiles were principally a plaything of the rich and indolent, although they were beginning to catch on with the general public. You'll find the more common modes of transportation referenced in Bartholomew's cartoon for Christmas Day:

"Papa's Christmas" by Charles "Bart" Bartholomew in Minneapolis Journal, Dec. 25, 1902

A third daily newspaper in town, the Daily Times, ran this front page cartoon beneath an editorial promising to publish "the names and addresses of any suffering poor in Minneapolis and St. Paul whose destitution is unknown to the general public."

"The Poor Ye Have Always with You," unsigned, in Minneapolis Daily Times, Dec. 24, 1902

By the way, I don't know what was meant by the "Don't Let This Happen to You" cut line. Surely the Daily Times wasn't advising its readers to pull the shades.

Anyway, the Daily Times, true to its word, printed the names and addresses of some two dozen destitute Minneapolitans (plus one from Minnetonka) "described by acquaintances or observers as needful of aid on this Christmas Day, it having been impossible to separately investigate the accuracy of the description in each case." I can't say how those people reacted to having their situation above the fold on page one, but the Times itself noted that only 5% of the total number of reports to them of destitution (in addition to those 25 there were others to whom the Times brought food and fuel) came from the destitute persons themselves.

"What Has He in the Pouch" by P.J. Carter in Minneapolis Daily Times,  December 25, 1902

P.J. Carter's Christmas Day cartoon for the Times again references the situation in Venezuela, while still keeping a Christmasy theme to his commentary. Carter favored pen and ink for his editorial cartoons, so I'm not prepared to conclude that the previous day's cartoon was his work.

"Sad News for the Trusts" by Tom Thurlby in St. Paul Globe, Dec. 24, 1902

Across the river in St. Paul, I had expected to find more cartoons by Frank Wing. Instead, I found these by a Tom Thurlby and O.C. Holt in the St. Paul Globe. Thurlby's Christmas Eve cartoon jumps past the present holiday to suggest to Mr. Consumer some new year's resolutions.

"When Yet a Farmer Boy" by O.C. Holt in St. Paul Globe, December 24, 1902

By the way, all four newspapers in today's post published on Christmas Day, 1902, a Thursday, although the December 25 Globe didn't happen to have any cartoons in it.

But there were two cartoons in the Christmas Eve edition; this poem and illustration hailing the true bringers of Christmas presents was on an inside page. You know it's hard work when you're sweating like that outdoors in St. Paul, Minnesota, on December the twenty-fourth.

At least someone was kind enough to gift the man a toy whatever-that-critter-is beneath his sack of goodies.

And with that, I wish you a merry little Christmas, eighth night of Hanukkah, Kwanzaa Eve, and any other holiday of your choice. 

Qapla'!

Q Toon: At the Independents' Table

Democrats did not even get 24 hours to savor their 51-vote majority in the U.S. Senate before Senator Kyrsten Sinema decided to upstage Rev. Raphael Warnock and announce that she was bolting the party.

She joins Socialist Bernie Sanders (a Democrat in Presidential Politics Only) of Vermont and true Independent Angus King of Maine as the kids at the table in the corner. Both of them came to the Senate without pretending to be Democrats, and their voters elected them with full knowledge of where they stand on the key issues.

Sinema, on the other hand, an erstwhile Green Party activist from Arizona, has been a difficult member of the Democratic caucus, especially in the last two years. She stubbornly defended the chamber's filibuster rules that allow Republicans to block much of President Biden's agenda. Liberal activists have been suspicious that she has allowed herself to become beholden to big-money right-wing donors. 

Given how radically the Republican Party has lurched to the extreme right, I don't expect Sinema to stray far from Democratic Party stands on personal liberties. Fiscal and border issues seem likely to be another story. If the Republican House starts impeaching Biden administration officials willy-nilly, who the hell knows what Sinema would do?

She's up for reelection in 2024, and had been facing a strong challenger in the Democratic primary. By declaring herself an Independent, she sets up a three-way general election; and since Arizona does not have Georgia-style run-offs, even a Requblican who would make Kari Lake look reasonable could take the seat with a measly 34% of the vote.

Hold onto your tater tots.

These Eight Nights' Sneak Peek

 You knew I had to get around to drawing a cartoon about her sooner or later.

There's a Trumpster Born Every Minute

 With apologies to the spirit of Thomas Nast.

In Respect to Defense

With the passage and signing into law of the Respect for Marriage Act, the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act outlawing same-sex marriage has been overturned. I would like to have looked back at the passage of that earlier antigay legislation, but I didn't start drawing for the LGBTQ+ press until shortly after it was passed.

in InStep Magazine, Milwaukee Wis. Dec. 11, 1996

DOMA was passed in anticipation of a gay-friendly ruling by the Hawai'ian Supreme Court. Three same-sex couples had sued the state of Hawai'i in 1990 to respect their weddings in a case that became Baehr v. Miike. The court sent the case back to trial court with the state bearing the burden of proof that prohibiting same-sex couples from marrying "furthers compelling state interests and is narrowly drawn to avoid unnecessary abridgments of constitutional rights." In December of 1996, Hawai'ian Judge Kevin S.C. Chang ruled in favor of plaintiffs, but stayed his ruling in case it were reversed on appeal.

in InStep Magazine, Milwaukee, Wis., Sept. 18, 1996. My first cartoon for the LGBTQ press before I started drawing for them on a regular basis.

The U.S. Congress had already passed, and President Bill Clinton had signed, DOMA in September, guaranteeing that if same-sex marriage were legal in Hawai'i, it would not be recognized by the federal government or any state on the mainland. Then, in 1998, Hawai'i voters approved a constitutional amendment barring same-sex couples from marrying.

in InStep Magazine, Milwaukee Wis., January 8, 1998

The religious right pushed similar "Definition/Defense of Marriage Amendments" in state after state, a crusade supported enthusiastically by Republicans and acquiesced to by not a few Democrats.

A flyer I put together as Wisconsin legislature passed its DOMA in 1997

As a consolation prize, some people suggested that same-sex couples settle for "domestic partnerships." 

for Q Syndicate, April/August, 1998

But even that was anathema to the religious right. In Wisconsin and elsewhere, state legislatures passed laws to prevent municipalities (and in some cases, even private corporations) from offering domestic partnership benefits to same-sex couples.

for Q Syndicate, April/December, 1998

These last three cartoons are examples of ideas I originally drew for InStep Magazine of Milwaukee, but redrew when brought on to Q Syndicate for national distribution. The then-owner of the syndicate, David (Bianco) Benkof, wanted a portfolio of six cartoons he could show to potential customers; most of them were released for publication later on.

"And They Say We Threaten Their Families" above is my original version for InStep; the other two are the retreads. The "Special Rights" cartoon recast a local TV newsman and a fictional politician as ABC "Nightline" host Ted Koppel and Family Research Council head Gary Bauer.

for Q Syndicate, August, 1999

At weeks such as this one, when there doesn't seem to be enough time to handle all the tasks that pile up on top of each other, it would be nice to have a half dozen cartoons in reserve. But now more than ever before, it's hard to imagine what I could possibly draw in April that would still be fresh and relevant in August, let alone December.

It's All Connected Somehow

Thursday morning, news broke  the Biden administration had secured the release from Russian prison of Olympic medalist and WNBA star Brittney Griner. As you surely know, last February, Griner had been arrested at a Moscow area airport arriving with a tiny amount of cannabis oil in her luggage, for which she was sentenced to nine years in a labor camp.

Given Russia's invasion of Ukraine very shortly after Griner's arrest, relations between the U.S. and Russia have been at their lowest point since what, the Vietnam War? The Cuban Missile Crisis? The Berlin airlift? The only two things President Biden had to offer in exchange for freeing Griner were looking the other way as Russia pummeled Ukraine, and/or handing over a Russian arms merchant convicted in U.S. courts in 2011 for his role in supplying weaponry to various revolutionary and terrorist groups around the world.

Biden traded the latter for Griner, and quickly Monday morning quarterbacks (power forwards?) here lambasted the administration for not also securing the freedom of Paul Whelan, a Marine imprisoned by Russia since 2018 on accusations of being a U.S. spy. 

Lost in the criticism of President Biden for not winning Whelan's freedom is the fact that his administration at least tried to include Whelan in the deal, whereas there was no indication that Donald Trump, who happened to be president in 2018, ever gave one bit of thought to Whelan before last Thursday.

He has, of course, had plenty to say about him since, taking some time away from his obsession with the idea that the 2020 election was somehow stolen from him. At the moment, his story is that it was stolen by Twitter, because it didn't cooperate with right-wingers' efforts to whip up a scandal around Biden's son Hunter. 

You may recall that the New York Post published an exposé concerning a laptop containing compromising material Hunter Biden had supposedly left at a repair shop and never picked up.

The compromising information dealt with Hunter trading on his father's name in business (Don Jr., Eric, and Ivanka must be shocked, shocked!), his drug use, and, we are now told, dick pics. If Papa Biden wasn't eager for this stuff to be spread across the internets, and if the folks then in charge of running Twitter thought it was tawdry, sketchy bullcrap, the incoming Republican majority in the House plans to make every effort to make daily headlines of this stuff from the moment the 118th Congress arrives in D.C.

Struggling to make the Hunter Biden laptop story seem relevant to anything going on today, the Republican conspiracy manufacturing mill is grinding away at full speed. Congressboob James Comer (R-KY) postulated on the GOP propaganda channel that there was somehow a direct link between Hunter and (did you ever imagine that I'd ever get back to the topic of today's cartoon?) Brittney Griner's release:

 “[W]e fear that this administration’s compromised because of the millions of dollars that Hunter Biden and Joe Biden have received from Russia and China. You look at just what happened yesterday. This bizarre prisoner swap that clearly was in the benefit of Russia, is another example of why we need to investigate to see if, in fact, this administration is compromised.”

You may rest assured that the Republican Truther squad will not rest until they have found how Hunter Biden fast-tracked the trademarking of Ivanka Trump-Kushner's couture line in China, authorized Don Jr. and Eric's tax cheating at the Trump Organization, and masterminded the fraud at the Donald J. Trump Foundation.

All part of a plot to cover up Barack Obama's birthplace in Kenya.

Speaking of Derangement

I'm wondering how long it will be once the 118th Congress is gaveled into session before Eric Allie changes the cartoon on GoComics's link to his work.

Nuestra Sneak Peek de Guadalupe

I'm not complaining about this week's embarrassment of riches topic-wise, but couldn't we have saved one of these LGBTQ+ news stories until between the holidays when there's nothing to draw about?

Whatchamacallitude

My syndicated cartoon this week offered "trans derangement syndrome" as an alternative to the term "transphobia" to describe the near-pathological animus right-wing Republicans have toward transgender persons.

Ten Decembers ago, I offered this cartoon after the Associated Press stylebook decreed that the similar commonly used compound "homophobia" was off-limits to its reporters:

December, 2012

The AP's viewpoint was that a "phobia" is a clinical term that ought not to be applied to persons who have not been diagnosed as such by a professionally licensed psychologist. That a given antigay legislation, gay-bashing attack, or religious belief might be attributed to fear of homosexuals or homosexuality, moreover, is not an independently verifiable fact without an admission by the legislator, attacker, or believer responsible.

I rather liked "gaytred" and "lesbianimus," but I've never had any illusion that they would ever catch on. Meanwhile, the ever-expanding acronym on beyond LGBTQ+ will prevent any neologism devised to be inclusive about any attitude toward LGBTQ+ness. I guess "bigotry" will have to do.

April, 2016

The Supreme Court has taken up an astroturf "religious liberty" case this season. 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis concerns a webpage designer who doesn't want to abide by Colorado's non-discrimination law in case a same-sex couple should ever approach them to design a wedding webpage for them. 

Just to be clear: 303 Creative LLC has not ever been asked to design a wedding webpage for a same-sex couple. No same-sex couple is currently interested in having 303 Creative LLC design a wedding webpage for them. 303 Creative LLC had not been advertising itself as a Christian-based heterosexuals-only webpage design company. In fact, 303 Creative LLC has not yet designed any wedding webpages for anybody.

But the owner, Lorie Smith, wants to discriminate against same-sex couples, and has been encouraged by a right-wing Christianist legal group, Alliance Defending Freedom, to go to court to establish a right to Christian bigotry.

And it appears from their questions that the right-wing Christianist majority on the Court is predisposed to agree with them.

June, 2000

Oh, but how dare I impugn the motives of anyone who just want to impose their religious liberties on everybody else! Away with this talk of phobias, derangement syndromes, and bigotry! The Crusading Right has nothing but love for us heau-meau-sekshuls.

April, 2007

Q Toon: Tedious

It seems like eons ago that we coined the term "Obama Derangement Syndrome" to describe Republicans' irrational, virulent response to anything and everything about Barack Obama: from their embrace of birtherism even in the face of overwhelming evidence that our 44th President was indeed born in Hawaii, to their revulsion against his wife planting a vegetable garden, to their howls of shock and horror that time he wore a tan suit.

When the electoral college elected as president Donald Berzelius Trump, the most prominent flogger of birtherism's dead horse, right-wingers quickly purloined the idea of "Trump Derangement Syndrome" — as if there were something pathological about Americans being upset over having our country run by a solipsistic, self-serving, lying, cheating, boorish grifter who was using the presidency as a Keep Out Of Jail Free card while billing taxpayers to put up the Secret Service in his own personal hotel chain.

So, now that the party that was just fine and dandy with all that is now falling all over itself proclaiming transgender folks to be the biggest danger to the republic since affordable health care, I'm stealing "Derangement Syndrome" back.

This Week's Sneak Peek

There should (I hope) be some familiar faces in this week's syndicated cartoon.

I don't think they're singing Christmas carols.

Happy St. Nicholas's Eve!

Christmas Covers

Well, the weatherperson says it's now meteorological winter — and we can argue about just how much meteorology is affected by flipping to the last page of the calendar — so it's time for cartoonists great and small to crank out those holiday cartoons.

And that includes, somewhere on the scale, yours truly. If you've been following this here blog, you know that I've already drawn a Lauren Boebert Christmas card and Mike Lee on Santa's lap — and it was still meteorological autumn when I drew those.

Since it's Saturday, I've dug into the box of treasured holiday ornaments and to see what cartoons may be found, and I'm happy to report that there are some beloved old baubles in there. Chief among them are the full-page cartoons for the university newspapers for which I drew 30 and 40 years ago.

in UW-P Ranger, Dec. 9, 1982

This front page cartoon for the Ranger at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside was a great deal of fun to draw. All that lettering was considerably less fun (ditto for Mike Lee's wish list in this week's syndicated cartoon).

This was my second Christmas cover for the Ranger; the first, a parody of "Deck the Halls" the year before, didn't have quite as much calligraphy, or, for that matter, cross hatching.

in UWM Post, Nov. 23, 1992

Ten years thence, I drew the occasional cover illustration for the Post at University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Their Holiday Shopper issues came out in November rather than December, but who needs to rush the season, eh?

I've discussed before how any color in these Ranger and Post cartoons back in the pre-Photoshop stone ages was achieved with separate overlays for each color. In this case, some Post staffer, not me, cut acetate sheets to the shapes of the red and green spaces (and another for the gray tone in the little girl's hair; I'd have suggested a red halftone to keep things relatively simple). Kudos to whomever that person was for leaving the mortar between the bricks uncolored, and I've come to appreciate what a pain colorizing evergreen trees can be.

But that's some heavy lipstick on The King.

🎄

Normally, I'd continue here to post at least one cartoon each from Decembers of 2002 and 2012, but I don't have anything to continue today's theme. I didn't happen to have any commissions for holiday covers in those years.

Here's a regular-sized cartoon from 2002 anyway — even if, like that UWM Post cover, it was actually drawn in November.

Some of my clients only publish monthly, you know.

Q Toon: All He Wants for Christmas

The Respect for Marriage Act passed the U.S. Senate on Tuesday by a vote of  61 to 36. The Act, protecting same-sex and interracial marriages from being nullified by today's activist Supreme Court, won the support of twelve Republicans and all 49 of the Democrats present. (Sen. Rafael Warnock was home in Georgia campaigning in next week's run-off election. Two Republicans also did not vote.)

The bill now returns to the House, which passed it months ago but will need to reconcile with some differences between their version of the bill and the Senate's.

You may have thought that marriage equality was a settled issue. But you're not Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

“In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” Thomas wrote. “Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous’ … we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents.”

Thomas’s opinion set off alarm bells among proponents of marriage equality, who pointed out that if the Supreme Court were to overturn Obergefell, as it did Roe, then the right to same-sex marriage would similarly fall to the states. Currently 35 states have statutes or constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage that would go into effect if Obergefell were overturned, according to the Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit that advocates for LGBTQ equality.

So Senator Tammy Baldwin put together a bill that will require that even if the Supremes reverse Obergefell, if a same-sex or interracial couple were legally married in one state, their marriage doesn't magically disappear any time they happen to be in one of those 35 states.

In order to garner bipartisan support, the Senate version of the bill already had religious liberty guarantees. Baptist homeless shelters can still put lesbian couples back out on the street. Islamic food pantries can still refuse to admit gay couples. Ku Klux Kathedrals can still preach against miscegenation. Heck, if they want to, Catholic adoption agencies can still discriminate against legally married couples when one of them has been divorced.

But that wasn't enough for the 38 Senate Republicans who voted against the bill. Utah's Mike Lee was one of several Republicans arguing that antigay laypersons ought to be able to discriminate against same-sex and interracial couples, too, even in a completely secular capacity.

Who else is going to stand up for the rights of the Kim Davises of the world who think God is telling them to treat someone else's marriage as if it doesn't exist?

Requiring the state to recognize your marriage doesn't mean much if the people in charge can just make a cross with their fingers at you and now pronounce you single and stranger.

Fortunately, Lee's amendment, and the other poison pills were voted down. Yet I suspect they signal to Clarence Thomas and the others of his ilk how to argue that the Respect for Marriage Act is unconstitutional.

Stay tuned.