April Generations

It's almost time for April showers to yield to May flowers, so I get around herewith to resurrecting a generation's worth of my cartoons from Aprils 1983, 1993, 2003, and 2013.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., May 12, 1983

I dated this cartoon in April, although it wasn't printed until well into the month of May, in the University of Wisconsin at Parkside student newspaper's last issue before summer break. 

A 1981 college graduate would typically be someone at the the tail end of the Baby Boom generation, depending on whether you draw the line at persons born in 1960, 1963, or 1965. If this fellow didn't have a job lined up straight out of college, he soon ran up against the recession that was only just beginning to fade away in 1983.

Such was also the fate also of Generation X (a term not yet coined) who bypassed college to head straight into manufacturing jobs — just as the manufacturing sector began to slip away, first to the anti-union South and then overseas. It was a good time to know how to program computers, but not a good time to follow your father to the foundry.

For the blue-collar middle class, "Morning in America" meant it was time to wake up from the American dream.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., April 19, 1993

Vaulting ahead ten years, I've got a Gen-Xer (or is he a Millennial?) leading off a local issue cartoon for another University of Wisconsin student paper. That spring, tap water in Milwaukee was contaminated with cryptosporidium, a microscopic, chlorine-resistant parasite that caused respiratory disease and diarrhea in some 403,000 Milwaukeeans. City government warned residents to boil water used for drinking, bathing, and dishwashing.

The contamination was caused by snow melt and storm run-off in the city's sewer system, and is the reason Milwaukee invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in a new big tunnel sewer system and water treatment plants.

References made by the two characters in the cartoon to safe sex practices should, I hope, still be obvious. The guy in quasi-military get-up is Alderman Michael McGee, a firebrand who was not above threatening — or excusing — violence in the streets. (Note that this was one year after the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, and just as the nation was bracing for reaction to whatever verdict came down in the trial of the officers who had beaten him.)

And then, once more, some product placement for Old Milwaukee beer. Because you can't draw a cartoon about beverages of any kind in Milwaukee without bringing beer into it.

in The Biz, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, spring 2003

This cartoon accompanied an article generalizing about the respective attitudes of Boomers, Gen Xers, and Gen Y in The Biz, the glossy, full-color supplement to The Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee.

The oldest Baby Boomers were still a decade away from retirement, but according to the article, impatient Gen Xers were complaining that we were old and in the way. Given that the leading presidential contenders 20 years later are the incumbent Silent Generationer and the most self-absorbed, spoiled Baby Boomer on the planet, perhaps they had a point.

Meanwhile, another generation was coming up inexorably behind GenX. I was hoping I could dig up a copy of the Biz this cartoon was in so I could pass along whatever it was the columnist had to say about Generation Y, but no such luck.

Chances are, however, that droopy drawers had nothing to do with it.

for Q Syndicate, April, 2013

Finally, I'll toss in this cartoon as a tribute to Louise Fletcher, who passed away last year. Fletcher is best known for her role as the authoritarian Head Administrative Nurse Mildred Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975). I referenced Nurse Ratched for this cartoon about an incident in which Research Medical Facility in Kansas City, Missouri, had a man arrested for refusing to leave the bedside of his civilly unionized partner (marriage not being an option in Missouri at the time).

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By the way, I could have put together a post of April cartoons from 1983, 1993, 2003 and 2013 on a military theme. If I had, the 2013 cartoon would have posed a conundrum, given my cartoon earlier this week touching on the issue of deadnaming transgender persons.

I drew a cartoon in April, 2013, about a soldier who has since become transgender. The person doesn't appear in the cartoon, but their deadname does.

To what degree is it deadnaming to refer to a transgender person's pre-transition past if they were on magazine covers, cereal boxes, or their parents' variety TV show at the time? It isn't as if I'd be outing them. One can't entirely pretend that they had no existence and no effect on reality during their pre-transition years. 

On the other hand, it probably isn't exactly polite. So this time around, I'm giving them a pass.

But if that cartoon turns out to be perfect for some future Saturday History Tour, I won't promise that it will never, ever, show up here.