This Week's Sneak Peek

While we still have the liberty, we editorial cartoonists are having a little fun with that Time magazine cover photo of Donald Trump that has so upset him. Your humble scribbler included:

Jack Ohman, for example, has been drawing Trump with no face this past week, just that vulviform neck wattle. How long he can keep that up only time (not the magazine) will tell; we humans rely on observing facial expression to determine someone's meaning and intention. Not including the face can open up a cartoon to misinterpretation.

By the way, I've been seriously considering forgoing the pig snout in my caricature of Lord Trump for much the same reason. It gets in the way of some facial expressions, as I kept butting up against in this week's cartoon.

But I wouldn't want to end up drawing a "This Shop Gives to Every New President of the United States a Free Rhinoplasty" cartoon, so I'd have to replace the snout with some other visual symbol.

I tried drawing him with Mussolini's cap once, which might have been too obscure a reference these days. It also got in the way of drawing his bizarre hairdo, one of his most recognizable features. A crown or a MAGA cap present the same problem (and could also get in the way of dialogue balloons).

I guess there is some point at which one might as well let Trump symbolize himself. Cartoonists got along just fine drawing Nixon as Nixon and Hitler as Hitler. Future cartoonists (assuming there will be any) are likely to draw future authoritarians with Trumpiform features as a way to signal how crooked, corrupt, dictatorial, delusional, or mendacious they are.

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By the way, when my copy of Time arrived in the mail on Friday, the cover was not that under-the-chin photo of Trump's wattle. The cover story of my issue was the account of one of the Israeli hostages released last week. The alternative covers shown in thumbnails on page six were for a Best Inventions listicle and a feature piece on Stranger Things. 

By the time the next Time comes out, ceasefire violations could well have rendered "His Triumph," "The Leader Israel Needed," and "How Gaza Heals" moot.