Christmastoons

Welcome aboard today's Graphical Holiday History Tour, working backward in time through some of my December cartoons from years ending in four.

Our first stop: 2014.

for Q Syndicate, December, 2014

Vlad the Defenestrator has been on his antigay crusade for over a decade now, harnessing the power of the state against any perceived threat from "homosexual propaganda." 

Among the musical sine qua nons of the Christmas season (besides "All I Want for Christmas Is You") is the Nutcracker ballet of Pyotr Illych Tchaikowsky. It no doubt irritates Mr. Putin that Tchaikowsky was gay, although the fact that the composer was miserable about it probably mitigates Putin's pique.

The Nutcracker ballet has not yet been banned in Moscow, but I wouldn't expect to see Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo's rendition of it there any time soon.

for Q Syndicate, December, 2004

In the dawning days of the 21st Century, there was no Grindr, no Scruff, and no Chappy.

What gay men had way back in 2004 were on-line chat rooms. Well, everybody had chat rooms; but as was the case with gay bars before them, specifically gay chat rooms were around for those who knew how to find them. A few operated as places, as one would expect, to chat — about theater, or cartooning, or politics, or drag pageants, what have you. But nearly all were used sooner or later for the same thing as their successor apps: hooking up. 

Early on, chat room users couldn't see what the guys they were chatting up looked like except by asking for a pic to be sent. Nor, unless a hometown were in the chatter's screen name, could they tell how many feet away the other guy was. I imagine that finding out that the other guy was all the way up at the North Pole would have been a deal-breaker for most men.

Santa, however, would have been at an advantage. Not only could he get to your place really, really quickly if he were up for it, he had already seen you while you're sleeping.

✍

Departing momentarily from the Christmas theme, this next cartoon comes with a trigger warning that it's about deadly serious criminal activity and might stir up unpleasant memories for some in the greater Milwaukee area. But it's a propos in light of the lionization — herofication, if you will — of  Luigi Mangione, Daniel Penny, and Kyle Rittenhouse.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., Dec. 1, 1994

On November 28, 1994, a fellow inmate at the maximum security Columbia Correctional Institution attacked and killed notorious serial murderer Jeffrey Dahmer and another inmate, Jesse Anderson. Anderson's case had received much local media attention; he had murdered his wife and sent police and media on a wild goose chase by claiming that two unknown black men had done it.

There were some people who promptly hailed Dahmer's and Anderson's killer, Christopher Scarver, as a hero. He was no such thing, and it surely must have grieved the family of Steven Lohan, the man he was convicted of executing in cold blood during a robbery at the Wisconsin Conservation Corps, to see Scarver lauded as such.

Would I be happier if Dahmer and/or Anderson were still languishing in prison today? No. Nor do I find any pleasure in that Scarver remains in prison, with two more murder convictions added to his sentence.

I had forgotten about this cartoon and only ran across it while trying to find the date of another cartoon I was considering for today's blog post. The original drawing of this cartoon might have gotten lost before I returned to the Post office with the following Tuesday's cartoon; it's not in my files and I can't recall pulling it out since. But since my mother was saving all my printed cartoons in a scrapbook I now have, here it is again.

Okay, folks: the trigger warning is no longer in effect. I'm going back to lighter material and you may resume reading. 

in UW-P Ranger, Somers Wis., Dec. 13, 1984

Here's a cartoon I did for the UW-Parkside student newspaper's last issue of 1984, as printed on its front page. 

The hearth in the cartoon is based on my parents'; in the living room between two bookcases, with a stone Viking ship mounted over the mantle. But that is not our dog.

I'm not sure why there's a teaser for "1982 reviewed" on the top of the page. I don't believe that the Ranger had any AARPgenarians on staff who still couldn't wrap their heads around it being 1984 already, let alone that it was soon not to be.

Well, that brings us to the end of our tour. Please return your tray tables to their upright position, make sure you have all your personal items with you, and have a happy holiday of your choice!