June Toons, Goons, and Honeymoons

Today's Graphical History Tour whisks us through four decades worth of my editorial cartoons in Junes.

Bergetoons.com Exclusive! June, 1985

Since I was drawing exclusively for the UW-Parkside Ranger in 1985, and they didn't publish during the summer, it appears that this is the the one and only cartoon I committed to bristol board in the first month of their summer vacation.

I had taken a second-shift job to pay the bills, but it didn't pay enough for me to afford a vacation myself. For that matter, it wasn't great at paying the bills, either.

At any rate, for the benefit of any editor and publisher types who have difficulty understanding editorial cartoons, I was commenting on the impotence of the U.S. nuclear arsenal when faced with a terrorist action — in this case, the hijacking of TWA flight 847.

On June 14, Shi'ite terrorists hijacked the Cairo-to-San Diego flight during its Athens-to-Rome leg, forcing it to land in Beirut. They held passengers and crew hostage for 17 days, while forcing the plane to fly back and forth from there to Algiers. The hijackers separated hostages with Jewish-sounding names and sent them to a Shia-controlled prison in Beirut. They also executed U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem, throwing his body onto the tarmac and shooting his corpse some more.

The ordeal was immensely frustrating for the Ronald Reagan administration, which had come to office largely thanks to portraying Jimmy Carter's response to the Iran hostage crisis as ineffective. The crisis ended only after Israel agreed to release some Lebanese prisoners.

One of the hijackers, Mohammed ali Hammadi, was arrested in West Germany two years later, tried, and sentenced to life in prison, but released on parole in 2005. He was fatally shot outside his home in the Beqaa Valley by unknown gunmen this past January. The remaining hijackers have been at large for the past four decades.

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Jumping ahead to June of 1995, I feel like the local newscaster tasked with segueing from a tragic news story of death and destruction to a feel-good feature item about cute puppies delighting residents of an assisted living home. 

But it is Pride Month, after all.

"Consider the Source" in Lavender Lifestyles, Minneapolis, June 27, 1995

My very dear friend from college days, Jeff, asked me to draw this illustration in June of 1995. His friend Julie Daffyd wrote a regular gossip/dish/advice/humor column, "Consider the Source," in one of the Twin Cities' LGBTQ+ publications; if I recall correctly, she wanted a caricature of herself on the publication's Pride float surrounded by a bevy of pulchritudinous hunks.

Commissioning for a caricature of yourself is a risky move, especially for publication. She must not have been terribly upset at how I drew her, however, as she had Jeff ask me for one more later on. But only once more.

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Setting the WABAC machine for June of  2005:

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, June 17, 2005

Here's one I have always been pleased with, mostly on account of how the light and shade worked out.

The Northridge Mall was a failed shopping center on Milwaukee's far north side; and what is astonishing here is that, in spite of becoming a target for graffiti, drug use, and arson, it has taken twenty more years after I drew this cartoon to get Northridge Mall torn down. It closed for good in 2003; a home goods store and a grocery store opened on the property for a while, but proposals to revitalize the mall itself went nowhere.

The mall was bought in 2014 by an investment company in China, U.S. Black Spruce Enterprise Group, which then spent years fighting the City of Milwaukee's efforts to condemn the building (and has refused to pay for Milwaukee Fire Department responses to arson fires there). In 2023, Governor Tony Evers authorized a $15 million grant to the city for Northridge's demolition, which is scheduled to be completed by the end of this year.

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Last but not least, our Tour makes one of  our most popular stops, June of 2015.

for Q Syndicate and on Fusion.net, June/July, 2015

On June 26, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of marriage equality in the landmark case Obergefell v. Hodges. Each of the four dissenting justices, pictured in my cartoon, published his own dissenting opinion, a rather unusual move. While it is not uncommon for a justice to issue a concurring or a separate dissenting opinion, seldom have we ever seen four dissenting opinions on the same case.

Justices John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito basically agreed in their contention that the Court majority was overstepping jurisprudence because the U.S. Constitution does not specifically mention a right to marry one's sweetheart. Scalia, citing the precedent of Jiggery v. Pokery, and Alito protested that defining marriage is the purview of state legislatures, not the federal government. Thomas wrote that marriage equality for same-sex couples violated homophobes' First Amendment right of religious freedom.

This serves as a reminder that there is a right-wing Republican supermajority on the Court now, and this is the month to expect a flurry of rulings on everything from health care for transgender youth, to religious liberties, to voting rights, to gun control, to environmental protection. The three Justices elevated by the Blatantly Corrupt Trump Maladministration since I drew this cartoon have moved the Court so far to the right that Amy Comey Barrett passes for the Court's "swing vote."

Under cover of the daily Trumpster fire these days, who knows what draconian, puritan mischief the current Supreme Court will be able to get away with?