Let me preface today's commentary by saying that I generally don't check the weather forecast for my cartoon's locale before sitting down at my drawing board. So I just want to make it clear that Governor DeSantis here is not rooting for this week's torrential rains to continue pummeling Florida. This cartoon is not about the weather.
Okay, now that that's out of the way:
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Florida Republicans didn't want to see rainbow-colored lights illuminating their state's bridges in celebration of Pride Month in June. So they passed a law last month decreeing that Florida's bridges be lit up exclusively in red, white, and blue from Memorial Day to Labor Day.
They thus were able to pretend that the purpose of the law was a patriotic celebration — of the colors of the American flag. Or, if y'all'd rather, the Stars 'n' Bars. (Le tricolore? Mais non!)
The diktat from Tallahassee is part of what Governor Ron DeSantis calls, without a trace of irony, "Freedom Summer."
I suppose the rednecks up in Niceville are enjoying their freedom to tell the gays down in Key West how to decorate.
We'll see whether Key West gets its freedom back in time for LGBTQ History Month in October.
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Earlier this week, prolific editorial cartoonist Clay Jones shared a comment left under one of his cartoons at GoComics, from a reader chastising him for using — stealing, even — popular cultural references in his work.
The rest of us editorial cartoonists shared — stole, even — a good chuckle over that one. Most of us reference popular cultural stuff all the time. This isn't the first time I've resorted to a Simpsons meme; and I've also based cartoons on Calvin and Hobbes, Rocky & Bullwinkle, Peanuts, Monty Python, Dr. Seuss, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, All About Eve, Sunset Boulevard, It's a Wonderful Life, The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, Oliver Twist, and The Three Musketeers.
On the other side of the pond, editorial cartoonists can get away with aping Serious Art that would go over the heads of many readers stateside; Dave Brown of the Independent signals his readers that he has redrawn someone else's classic by showcasing the cartoon in a fancy gilt-edged frame. The rest of us could do that, too, except that it would be stealing the idea from Mr. Brown.
Down under, David Rowe redrew Manet and David paintings on successive days this week; Financial Times readers may have caught the references without spying the obligatory apologies in the corner of the cartoons. American readers would likely have missed the parodies unless published in the student newspaper of the School of Art Institute of Chicago.
Elsewhere, references to artwork are rife in editorial cartoons in other countries where keeping the cartoon wordless makes it saleable outside of the cartoonist's native language.
My own thought on all of this is that one shouldn't make the same reference over and over. Once one has parodied Edvard Munch's "The Scream" for Topic A (another choice I could have made for this week's cartoon), one should seriously consider not parodying "The Scream" again for a good long time. Unless you want to be known as That Guy Who Keeps Drawing The Scream.
Which, if you can pull it off, isn't ipso facto a bad thing. At least you won't have to worry whether readers will think your cartoons are about the weather when they're not.
Just make sure that someone else isn't already That Guy.
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