Now Is the October of Our Recycled Content

It's a gorgeous fall weekend outside, so today's Graphical History Tour will be spent rummaging around the files in my basement, leafing through cartoons I drew ten, twenty, thirty, and forty Octobers ago.

for Q Syndicate, October, 2015

I'll start with a cartoon of Senator Rand Paul that parodies a character in the 1999 film Office Space. 

A cultural reference in a political cartoon is a hit or miss thing. If you're not familiar with the film, you're not going to get the cartoon. (The same is true if you hadn't heard about Sen. Paul opining that LGBTQ people wouldn't face workplace discrimination if we'd just stay in the closet on the job.)

Since Comedy Central showed the movie about a gazillion times in the ‘aughts, give or take a few myriads, I figured this character would be recognizable enough. Besides, I think “That would be great” was a meme once upon a time.

By the way, there's a very obscure Easter egg in the final panel: the graph on the bulletin board forms the shape of a winged ox, the symbol for St. Luke.

All it means is that I was drawing the cartoon on his feast day, October 18.

Moving from movies to television (and back again), we now time travel back to 2005.

Reacting to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's veto of marriage equality legislation, Star Trek actor George Takei gave an interview to Frontiers magazine of Los Angeles, publicly announcing that he is gay and in a long-term relationship with his now husband, Brad Altman. The interview also coincided with National Coming Out Day, but Takei had been out to friends and family for some time, and made no secret of his membership in various LGBTQ+ organizations.

for Q Syndicate, October, 2005

I took the opportunity to draw a silly cartoon of Takei as Sulu charging into a bunch of beefcake aliens. Lt. Hikaru Sulu didn't get much opportunity to battle aliens from Planet Thirst Trap — I don't think he beamed down to the planet where Apollo was cavorting around in a skimpy toga — although he did get to charge shirtless through the corridors of the Enterprise in search of a fencing partner.

2005 was before I started sending colorized cartoons for syndication, but for today's post, I thought it would be fun to color Ensign Expendable's shirt red.

Of course, then I had to colorize Kirk, Sulu, and Spock. And having done that, it didn't make sense for the aliens to be ghostly white... The hard part was knowing where to stop.

Eleven years later, John Cho portrayed Ensign Sulu in the third of the reboot series of Star Trek movies as openly gay, with a husband and daughter. While applauding writers Simon Pegg and Doug Jung  for including LGBTQ+ characters in Star Trek Beyond, George Takei objected to his character getting a gay make-over.

The new post-Shatner movies having started out as a prequel to the original TV show, while involving the complete destruction of Spock's home planet despite it being visited in the original series, I drew another Trek cartoon.

for Q Syndicate, August, 2016

Rather than get one's mind utterly bogged down trying to make sense of Star Trek's multiverses and time travel and warp drives through hyperspace, wouldn't it be easier to accept that in the 23rd Century, humanoid citizens of the United Federation of Planets will not have a problem with a Star Fleet officer being bisexual, ambisexual, pansexual, or gender fluid?

Heck, even in Roddenberry's universe, hardly anyone batted an eye, visor, or antenna at interspecies couples.

In the real world, of course, dozens of stations would have jumped ship if Lt. Uhuru had gotten into a serious relationship with anyone else on the Enterprise bridge.

Moving on to October of 1995:

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., October 26, 1995

Charles Snollygoster III was my stock Republican congresscretin character back in the 1990's: a right-of-center conservative who went along with whatever party orthodoxy was at the moment. The nursing home provision in the budget bill on which Rep. Snollygoster was about to vote passed the House but was rejected in the Senate, both controlled by Republicans that year.

Snollygoster originally had a left-of-center Democrat counterpart, Luke Warmish, who was hesitant to support Bill Clinton's health care plan and got tossed out of office in the 1994 Republican sweep. I never had reason to bring Warmish back, except as one name among many in a cartoon about political attack ads.

I never drew any Snollygoster cartoons after the Clinton presidency; if I had, I believe Snollygoster would have been primaried in the Tea Party elections of 2010 or shortly thereafter.

Jumping back ten more years:

in NorthCountry Journal, Poynette Wis., October, 1985

I've posted in this here blog almost every one of my cartoons from October of 1985, so here's this one again.

It's the first cartoon I drew for NorthCountry Journal, a monthly newspaper out of northern Wisconsin with an emphasis on environmental issues. The editor and publisher, Susie Isaksen, would send me the gist of the next issue’s editorial, and I would mail her a cartoon to fit it.

“Sorry, Charlie" was an advertising campaign for StarKist featuring a tuna longing to be caught and eaten, only to be rejected by the StarKist folks. We don't have tuna in Wisconsin lakes and rivers, but nobody had come up with a catchy, recognizable walleye character in 1985.

Recognizing my allusions was can be a problem from time to time: I based one NorthCountry Journal cartoon on the character Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes, a hugely popular comic strip from the very first strip in November of 1985. Ms. Isaksen, however, had never seen it. To her, my cartoon made no sense.

In the past couple of years, I've drawn cartoons directly parodying a Monty Python sketch, a Saturday Night Live character, an Aesop fable, The Godfather, The Wizard of Oz, Cabaret, one of Sir David Low's most famous cartoons, and two or three internet memes. I guarantee you that not every person who has come across my cartoons has been familiar with each and every one of those references.

Such is the nature of our increasingly fractured culture these days. Once upon a time, it was commonplace for editorial cartoonists to quote Shakespeare, and expected every reader to catch the reference. Not so much any more. I'm not saying I would never base a cartoon on Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, but there aren't many readers nowadays for whom a reference to King Lear or Twelfth Night would instantly ring a bell.

And that's it for today's Graphical History Tour... until tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow!