March Times On

This week's Graphical History Tour takes a hop, skip, and a jump through 40 Marches' worth of my cartoons.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., March 3, 1983

Your social media was no doubt littered with notices that the final episode of M*A*S*H aired 40 years ago this week. 

The two-hour broadcast broke records for viewership, but I didn't get to see the show that night. I was in the cast of the local Theater Guild's production of George Bernard Shaw's "You Never Can Tell" at the time, and "Goodbye, Farewell and Amen" aired during one of our performances. The crew had it on a small television backstage, so I did get a few passing glances at it; but in the absence of On Demand technology, I had to wait until CBS got around to airing the rerun to see the whole episode. 

(If I remember correctly, as a rerun, it was broken up into four half-hour episodes.)

CBS did try to hang on to M*A*S*H fans by concocting a spin-off about Col. Potter, Father Mulcahy, and Cpl. Klinger working at a Veterans Administration hospital stateside. It lasted two seasons; I'm pretty sure I never watched the second one.

unpublished, March, 1993

Two of the cartoons that I drew for the Racine Journal Times in March of 1993 never got published, and this is one of them.

The Racine Unified School Board's personnel committee had recommended a policy of automatic suspension lasting 20 weeks or a full semester for any student found to have brought any dangerous weapon into a school. The suspension would last an entire year if the student threatened another person with the weapon, and permanent expulsion if the weapon were used.

This was before Columbine and a host of other mass shootings at schools, but there had been the occasional rumor of somebody bringing a knife or a gun to school at least as far back as my own high school days. How many of those rumors were true I couldn't tell you.

Nowadays, Wisconsin law mandates that "school boards of common or union high school districts shall expel a pupil from school for not less than one year whenever it finds that the pupil, while at school or while under the supervision of a school authority, possessed a firearm" (per Giffords Law Center). It is likewise illegal to carry a knife of any kind into a school building; but otherwise, state law prohibits local knife and gun regulations from being stricter than the lax standards Republicans passed in 2016.

Speaking of unpublished cartoons...

unpublished, March 2003

Ten Marches later, the Dubya administration was determined to go to war with Iraq, and absent a gay angle or a Business Journal editorial coinciding with my point of view, I didn't have a publication interested in paying me for cartoons about a topic addressed by every syndicated editorial cartoonist already. So I went ahead and drew this one for my own amusement (and the amusement of anyone who happened upon my old GeoCities page).

I used it as an exercise in exploring colorizing the cartoon. In black-and-white, little Prime Minister Tony Blair and his British flag didn't stand out enough to be noticed; it helped to have him seated among colored chairs. Colorizing the cartoon also allowed the movie screen to be in grayscale, like an old movie.

But you may have noticed that I have largely given up crosshatching, and colorizing this cartoon had a lot to do with that.

for Q Syndicate, March, 2013

Which is not to say that I never give myself a lot of tiny detail work to paint on Monday morning. This wedding bower, for example.

No doubt that's why I decided to leave the chairs white.