The Year I Almost Broke Up Max and Leo

This week's Graphical History Tour looks back on the year 2025. You may have heard of it.

I was going to post enough of my cartoons to give a more-or-less thorough overview of the year; but, gosh, there was a lot of news these past twelve months ! Most of it bad. You know something? It's just too damn soon to relive the whole damned year.

Instead, I'm pulling together the story line that developed after I drew characters Max and Leo getting swept up into the Absolutely Corrupt Trump Administration's ethnic cleansing spree.

February

MAGA Max and Liberal Leo first appeared in 2024 as my way of commenting on the widening political divide in the U.S.: a same-sex couple with widely divergent opinions on issues not exclusively of LGBTQ+ concern.

I initially thought I could wrap this story line up after a few episodes, but I had no idea that the reality was going to be much worse than anything I had in mind.

March

Max's first step to try finding out what the thugs and goons at ICE had done with Leo was to contact the deep state a government agency, only to find that Elon Musk's Dogeketeers were busy destroying government's ability to function. I purposely left vague what government department this fellow worked in, save that it was apparently not Homeland Security.

April

I never specified where the prison holding Leo was; I called it Trumplinka in my blog, but not in the cartoons. Early reports were that the U.S. was flying detainees to remote locations in Columbia and releasing them with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. Originally, I thought Leo would end up being dumped with other prisoners somewhere in South America, then contacting Max to come bring him his passport.

Then we learned that the Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime was sending its hapless victims to CECOT, a Dante-esque concentration camp in El Salvador, without even those clothes. 

April

I had no plan for breaking Leo out of that hell, so I had to think of something else.

Having him deported to the Heard and McDonald Islands wasn't going to work out, either.

I could have involved Leo with either of two LGBTQ whose kidnapping by ICE made news in 2025 (statistically, there must be others), but the Trumpsters have consistently lied or feigned ignorance of their status. One was Georgia barber Rodney Taylor, a double amputee seized because of a past juvenile offense for which he had been pardoned. Born in Liberia, his mother had brought him to the U.S. for medical treatment; his pending application for U.S. residence has been put on hold while he remains incarcerated.

May

The other was Angelo Hernandez, a gay Venezuelan stylist wrongly accused of gang affiliation due to tattoos and deported to CECOT.

Tattoos were the supposedly incriminating evidence against another man the Trumpsters sent to CECOT, Kilmar Abrego Garcia. While the State Department tried to prevent Democratic members of Congress from meeting with Abrego Garcia, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Cruella deNoem got herself a photo op with overcrowded CECOT prisoners behind bars as her backdrop, and the White House resorted to PhotoShopping tattoos onto Abrego Garcia's hands.

July

By summer, the Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime was flying deportees off to foreign countries, to which the deportees seldom had any ties, including Guatemala, Honduras, Uganda, Belize, and Paraguay — with little or no notice, in order to stymie any legal effort to get them their day in court. So I decided that I had better get Leo out of the Trumpsters' clutches one way or another. 

August

You don't hear much about last summer's catch phrase, "Trump Always Chickens Out" (TACO) any more. He's been doubling down on riveting his name onto everything from the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts to his latest fantasy of gold-plated coal-powered Trump Classy  battleships.

July

In a movie, TV series, or adventure comic strip, there would have been exciting scenes of the American plane attempting to escape the crossfire only to crash in a huge explosion. The deportees would have wrested the keys to their shackles from that stranded ICE agent. Then, during a ceasefire negotiated by the Canadians and the E.U. long enough to evacuate their embassy personnel — oh, I'll let Leo pick up the story from there:

August

I draw a weekly cartoon, however, which runs in some newspapers and magazines that publish biweekly or monthly. And some of them may have elected to run cartoons I had drawn on other topics during the seven months when this story line dragged on.

In any case, my Better Half and I were taking a road trip to an out-of-town wedding in August, meaning that I'd be away from my drawing board for a while. There was no better reason to wrap the story up in a cartoon I could draw ahead of time — provided Trump didn't declare war on Canada in the meantime. (Especially since our return trip took us through southern Ontario.)

August

So now I have to figure out where Max and Leo go from here.

Assuming Max continues his loyalty to the Trumpreich, how does Leo not end every argument with "Don't you remember, your fascist Trump bastards arrested me without charge, held me in prison for months without due process, and sent me to some third world hellhole in the middle of a civil war?"

Maybe, to borrow a phrase, the problems of two little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. But if this couple can stick it out together in spite of everything around them, maybe there is still hope for the rest of us.

Q Toon: Kennedy-nial of Care

During Donald Joffrey Trump's first term, I drew a cartoon about his transphobic policies that suggested that he was only pursuing them to satisfy his supporters on the religious right. They are hardly a factor in his second term, so I have to conclude that his persecution of the transgender community is central to his psyche.

Somewhere along the line, there's a girl in his past who turned out to have a little something extra downstairs, and the experience haunts him like Freddy Krueger.

Trump has found a kindred spirit in Robert Felcher Kennedy. The erstwhile environmentalist readily forsook advocacy for renewable energy and fuel efficiency in favor of feels-based health care.

Don't like pills and needles? You're in luck. Newly revised Health & Human Services protocols recommend against vaccines in favor of poultices, whale blubber, and burning some parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. 

Suffering from gender dysphoria? You're in luck, too. Kennedy and the Republican establishment have declared that it doesn't exist any more. If you're unhappy looking in the mirror, botox, lip injections, and rhinoplasty are all hunky-dory, but everything below the chin has gotta stay just as God made it.

And they have ways of making you get used to it.

The ban takes the form of two new proposed rules from Medicaid and Medicare. The first prohibits doctors and hospitals from receiving federal Medicaid reimbursement for gender-affirming care provided to transgender patients younger than age 18. Medicaid is the health care program that covers low-income Americans.

The second rule blocks all Medicaid and Medicare funding for any services at hospitals that provide pediatric gender-affirming care. Virtually every hospital in the country takes Medicare, which covers older Americans and the disabled. Because hospitals rely on Medicare, the rule would have a wide-ranging effect.

Supporters and opponents of transgender rights agree that, taken together, the forthcoming hospital rules could make access to pediatric gender-affirming care across the country extremely difficult, if not impossible.

Even non-chemical, non-surgical approaches are verboten. The Trump Food & Drug Administration has sent warning letters to companies that manufacture and sell chest binders, used by transgender men and some nonbinary people to flatten their chests, claiming that the companies had failed to register their products as Class I medical devices with the FDA, in violation of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.  “Failure to adequately address this matter may result in regulatory action being initiated by the FDA without further notice. These actions include, but are not limited to, seizure and injunction.”

I don't imagine that the FDA is going to send that same letter to the makers and sellers of girdles and brassieres.

FDA Commissioner Marty Makary claimed that the brands were guilty of “illegal marketing of breast binders for children, for the purposes of treating gender dysphoria.”....

Makary did not cite evidence that any of the brands market their binders to children; Them found no such marketing copy supporting Makary’s claim on the brands’ websites. Conservatives have claimed for years that discussions of gender identity alone are harmful to children, and their rhetoric has escalated over time; during the HHS press conference, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz falsely claimed that trans youth regularly receive vaginoplasties and phalloplasties costing up to $150,000; in fact, the vast majority of gender-affirming surgeries performed on minors are breast reduction procedures offered to cisgender boys.

The House has also passed bills this month making it a crime to provide gender-affirming care to transgender minors and prohibiting Medicaid reimbursement for gender-affirming care for youth. Neither bill has much chance of passing the Senate unless tucked into other must-pass legislation ― such as the next temporary government funding bill.

All of which will be worth remembering every time Republicans try to tell you that they are not the party of big, obtrusive, over-regulating government.

P.S.: Merry Christmas, and Happy Miscellaneous Holidays!

Christmas Week's Sneak Peek

Y'know, I considered adding a brain worm to this caricature to make sure it would be recognizable to even the most casual follower of current events.

But it's almost Christmas.

So I gave the worm the week off.

Christmas 1925

Welcome to our Graphical History Tour Christmas Special! We're just about through with the year 1925, when peace, goodwill, and sobriety reigned, and all was right with the world.

"Merry Christmas" by William Hanny in Philadelphia Inquirer, Dec. 25, 1925

I'm going to let Bill Hanny represent all the cartoonists who updated their Thanksgiving for General Prosperity cartoon for the next holiday on the calendar. The happy recipient of an overstuffed stocking here was Father Penn, the cartoon personification of the state of Pennsylvania, and not the guy on the Quaker Oats canister.

"Uncle Sam's Dream of Christmas" by Edward G. McCandlish in Washington Post, Dec. 25, 1925

McCandlish at the Washington Post expands on Hanny's theme, depicting a serving of Plenty, a Christmas tree festooned with Peace, Security, and No Foreign Entanglements; and, at lower right, an agreement between labor and management averting a coal miners' strike. That agreement hadn't actually materialized yet when this cartoon was drawn, however.

"The Very Thing He Wanted Most" by Clifford Berryman in Washington Evening Star, Dec. 25, 1925

Up the road at the Star, Clifford Berryman's Everyman had a more limited wish list. To his delight, Congress had passed the Coolidge administration's tax cut, to take effect in 1926.

"Good Will to Men" by Gustavo Bronstrup in San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 24, 1925

Gustavo Brunstrup shared the San Francisco Chronicle's optimism that the U.S. Senate would overcome three years of obstruction by its "irreconcilables" and join Europe in agreeing to participate in the World Court.

"Christmas Bells" by Daniel Fitzpatrick in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dec. 24, 1925

Critics of the Coolidge administration such as Daniel Fitzpatrick might begrudge Republicans their peace and prosperity; they could still celebrate the Locarno agreements among the major European powers putting an end to war (offer not valid in Morocco, Syria, and Iraq), and the Geneva Protocol, drafted in June, banning chemical and biological weapons.

"The Face at the Window" by Ed LeCocq in Des Moines Register, Dec. 24, 1925

Ed LeCocq used the celebration of "the new spirit of mutual cooperation" and "comforts of capital and trade intercourse" in Europe to point out one country that was left out: Russia. 

"The Face at the Window" used to be a common cartoon theme in the Christmas season. In most such cartoons I've seen, that Face is a pitiable, sympathetic figure, left out of the warmth, feasting, and bonhomie inside, reminding readers of the plight of the poor. The cultural references that Google up for this forgotten cliché, however, are tales of criminals, murderers, and ghosts plotting their way in.

Perhaps that's why cartoonists stopped using "The Face at the Window" as a caption.

"Besorgnis" by Arthur Krüger in Kladderadatsch, Berlin, Dec. 13, 1925

A pair of German cartoons took skeptical views in varying degrees of Europe's newfound international comity. In Arthur Krüger's cartoon, Germany, France, Britain, Belgium, and Italy merrily dance around their Christmas tree, with its "Peace on Earth" topper, but Not-So-Jolly St. Nicholas worries that they are about to carelessly kick the whole thing over. In an age when candles, not LED lights, lit up the Christmas tree, knocking the tree over was liable to get it considerably too lit up.

"Der Untaugliche Nussknacker" by Werner Hahmann in Kladderadatsch, Berlin, Dec. 27, 1925

Werner Hahmann's Angel of Peace found the League of Nations (Völker Bund) not up to the task of cracking Disarmament (Abrüstung). 

These German cartoonists in the 1920's really were a bunch of sour pusses. It's as if they knew they were between the Wars.

"In the Hollow of His Hand" by Jesse Cargill for King Features Syndicate, ca. Dec. 24, 1925

Returning to America, I'm not sure what to make of Santa Claus holding the globe in the hollow of his hand. Does Jesse Cargill's Santa Claus look as annoyed to you as he does to me? He almost looks like he's getting ready to throw it at someone.

"Aw-w, There Ain't No Santa Claus" by Leslie Rogers in Chicago Defender, Dec. 26, 1925

There's no mistaking Leslie Rogers's intentions. Rogers's cartoon for the African-American newspaper the Chicago Defender ran alongside an editorial decrying the lynching in Clarksdale, Mississippi of Lindsey Coleman after a jury had acquitted him of murder charges. This while southern Senators were successfully filibustering the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill for the third consecutive Congress.

"The Night Before Christmas" by Sam Hunter in Toronto Star, Dec. 24, 1925

Meanwhile, in Canada, the Progressive and Liberal Parties had both lost seats to the Conservatives in October elections, but not enough of them for the Conservatives to have a majority. Robert Forke's third-place Progressives had lost 36 of their previous 58 seats in Parliament, but held the balance of power between William Mackenzie King's Liberals, with whom they were more ideologically inclined, and Arthur Meighen's Conservatives.

"The Spirit of a White Christmas" by James Fitzmaurice in Vancouver Daily Province, Dec. 24, 1925

Shunting politics aside, James Fitzmaurice gets us back to some Christmas Spirit. The cartoon's "Mr. Citizen" had finished his shopping, subscribed to the newspaper's charitable fund (charity drives were a common newspaper practice at Christmastime), and apparently had a couple of libations he doesn't want to talk about. 

"Minus Whiskers and Reindeer" by Roy James in St. Louis Star, Dec. 24, 1925

Roy James noted that Santa was not the only one doing the heavy lifting for the holiday. 

"The Annual Daze" by Chester Gould in Chicago Evening American, ca. Dec. 25, 1925

The editorial cartoons of Chester Gould, later creator of "Dick Tracy," have appeared here before. This cartoon predates the pointy-chinned copper by about five years, and seems at first glance to be a light-hearted little gag about office employees not having their minds on their work between Christmas and New Year's.

Then one notices the little dingbat in the lower left corner. What Lincoln getting shot has to do with anything else in Gould's cartoon is completely beyond me.

So let us wrap up this week's Graphical Holiday Tour with a simple Christmas card with no weirdness, politics, faces at windows, or diareses

"Merry Christmas to Our Readers" by J.T. Alley in Commercial Appeal, Memphis Tenn., Dec. 25, 1925

And likewise to mine.

Q Toon: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Few of us editorial cartoonists are known for drawing cartoons that second what a politician has said, but given the distressing events of the past week, I decided to go ahead and give it a try.

Former President Joe Biden gave a brief speech, from which today’s cartoon is excerpted, to the annual International LGBTQ+ Leadership Conference last week. The LGBTQ+ Victory Institute, an organization of elected LGBTQ+ officials, had invited Mr. Biden to attend, the first former president to do so, to present him with their Chris Abele Impact Award for his contributions to the LGBTQ+ community.

The Victory Institute emphasized that Biden’s administration set records for LGBTQ+ inclusion. Nearly 15 percent of Biden’s appointees identified as LGBTQ+, far surpassing any prior administration. They include former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, Human Rights Campaign Senior Vice President for Campaigns and Communications Jonathan Lovitz, who was a Biden appointee in the Department of Commerce, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Admiral Rachel Levine, and Ambassador Chantale Wong. Beyond representation, the administration reinstated and expanded federal civil rights protections, reversed the ban on transgender military service that Trump has now reinstated, strengthened antidiscrimination rules in employment and health care, and expanded protections for LGBTQ+ youth and families.

In his speech, Mr. Biden noted that as Vice President, he had gotten out in front of the Obama administration in publicly advocating for marriage equality. “I just couldn’t remain silent anymore,” he said. “I expressed my support for gay marriage a little earlier than some folks had been expecting.”

“America is the only country founded on an idea,” he told his audience. “We hold these truths to be self-evident … all are created equal, all deserve to be treated with dignity throughout their lives.” Though the country has not always met that ideal, he said, “we’ve never walked away from it.”

His remarks stand in stark contrast to the wildly offensive, divisive, and disgraceful ravings that are the stock in trade of the current occupant of the Oval Office.

“Folks, Donald Trump and his Republicans are trying to derail and distort our fight for equality. They’re trying to turn it into something scary, something sinister. But folks, it’s not really about anything that’s all that complicated. At its core, it’s about giving every American an opportunity to be treated with the basic decency, dignity and respect they all deserve.”

Biden closed his speech by audience members currently serving in elected office to stand up (that's one way to get oneself a standing ovation). “We just have to get up. Remember who in the hell we are. We’re the United States of America … and there is nothing beyond our capacity when we act together.” 

I'm not quite ready to draw a "Miss Him Yet?" cartoon, but I sure do miss an administration that embodies everything — dammit, anything — Mr. Biden said.

This Week's Sneak Peek

After the events of this past weekend — hell, this entire godforsaken year — I think we could use a few words of hope and encouragement.

Will the rest of this cartoon spoil the mood? Tune in again later this week and find out.

I Guano Wish You a Merry Christmas

Hi there! You're just in time to join another Graphical History Tour through the archives of your humble scribbler's December cartoons, carefully aged in our ancient wine cellar, each evidencing floral legs with notes of winter stone leather and an earthy finish.

2015

First off, let's get into the spirit of the season with a couple of classic Christmas movies.

We watch a fair number of classic movies in this household, especially at this time of year. After a while, the plots do seem to get mixed up in my head. Did we just witness a miracle on 34th Street, or did it happen on Fifth Avenue?

One thing that I've always liked about parodying old movies like this is that I don't have to spend the usual time making separate grayscale and full-color versions for syndication. Nope, just save the grayscale version, convert it to CMYK, fill in the pink triangle, and voilá! The colorized version is already finished!

Which reminds me, I think tonight we're watching Dudley the Angel show up to help Charlie Brown find the true meaning of Christmas in Frosty, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

2005

Speaking of whom...

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, Dec. 9, 2005

Do I remember the point of the editorial this cartoon was meant to illustrate? No way. It had something to do with corporations securing "air rights" above ground level for such things as skyways connecting buildings on opposite sides of a street. 

That was the fourth-to-last cartoon of mine in the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee. At the end of the year, they decided that they didn't want to run cartoons on the editorial page any more, in favor of a weekly thumbs-up / thumbs-down listicle.

I got more appreciation from the Chicago Free Press that December, which used a cartoon of mine on the front page of their year-in-review edition.

in Chicago Free Press, December, 2005

The Chicago Free Press was a client of my cartoons for their entire run, from 1999 to 2010; this caricature of Dubya Bush was actually from a cartoon I had drawn in August, 2003.

1995

in Journal Times, Racine Wis., Dec. 21, 1995

Christmas week does generally not suit itself to cartoons about the beach hereabouts.  

The city had hired an expert from the National Water Research Institute to determine the source of  fecal coliform bacteria that had forced the city to close North Beach several times during the summer. Human feces were the prime suspect, but in December, the expert reported that preliminary studies pointed instead to gull droppings.

Dad was on the Racine Board of Health back then, and still is, so I get the inside poop on any matters related to public health here. And yes, gull droppings have been a factor in beach closings: they crap on the sand, and that stuff washes into Lake Michigan when it rains.

But human shit was also a major part of the problem. As a result, Racine extended its sewage outflow further out into the lake. The study cast much of the blame on Milwaukee's sewage system; during heavy rains, untreated sewage had to be released into the lake in order to minimize it backing up into everyone's basements.

Since then, Milwaukee's Big Tunnel project has largely addressed that particular problem. This past summer, Racine only had to close North Beach one time (but did have to issue advisories on two other occasions).

1985

I had drawn a couple Christmas issue cover cartoons for the University of Wisconsin at Parkside student newspaper by 1985, making oversized editorial cartoons for them. With the 1985 edition, I decided to make a simple, straightforward holiday greeting.

in UW-P Ranger, Somers Wis., Dec. 12, 1985

I also departed from usual by drawing exclusively in charcoal. This meant I couldn't erase anything if I didn't like it, and having to be extremely careful not to smudge the drawing. The original drawing is too large for my scanner; if I could have posted the original drawing here, you would be able to see all the blue pencil underneath the charcoal.

The medium of charcoal did not afford the Ranger editors much opportunity to add color to the drawing. This was well before PhotoShop and other quick and easy artistic tools; to add color, someone would have had to lay a halftone transfer sheet over the drawing and cut with an Exacto knife the desired shapes for each area where the color should print.

I  had created the Ranger flag that year, and every shape you see in green, I made using that same halftone cutting process. (Ignore the yellow; that's just the discoloring of 40-year-old newsprint, or however old it was when the UW-P library scanned it. I Photoshopped out the yellowing from the Peace on Earth drawing for this post, but not from the flag.)

Well, heck, why don't we go back yet another ten Decembers just for gits and shiggles?

1975

in Park Beacon, Dec. 19, 1975

That takes us all the way back to my high school days. This cartoon was something I drew to illustrate someone else's (possibly Executive Editor Joel Krein's) Twelve Days of Christmas list.

The principal surrounded by garbage, and the school nurse, by the way, were caricatures of real persons. And I'm quite sure that none of my fellow students caught the reference to a running gag in "Fibber McGee & Molly," a radio comedy that was well before our time. Before Assistant Principal McKee's time, too.

Somehow, the school administration let us get away with this cartoon. If I remember correctly, the Park Beacon had to yield to administration censorship once in the two years that I was on staff. An installment of Kevin Cacciotti's "Being Cool in School" comic strip included advice to "destroy school property," and Principal Thompson made us black the cartoon out of every copy with magic markers.

Except for the copies we saved for ourselves.

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Well, that's the Graphical History Tour for this week. Thanks for coming along, and have a Merry St. Lucy's Day!

Q Toon: Driven to Distraction

I was halfway through inking last week's cartoon when I came up with this idea, which is not how things generally work inside this old noggin. I liked this idea better, so I held onto it and hoped that the Trumpian firehose of outrageous fuckery this week would not include something I couldn't possibly not draw about.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, his pet legislature, and Transportation Secretary Sean "Road Rules Real World" Duffy have all been on a tear this year destroying rainbow crosswalks and anything else painted on pavement that doesn't celebrate heterosexual cisgender white Christian males. They assure us that it has nothing whatsoever to do with discriminating against LGBTQ POC DEI FAFABs; oh, my heavens, no.

Rather, it's a matter of roadway safety. How are drivers supposed to keep their eyes on the road when they come across a blinding splash of color or a reminder that Black Lives Matter?

So over the course of several weeks in September, the Florida Department of Transportation came in the middle of the night, again and again, to sandblast painted pavement, tear up colored bricks, and leave municipalities with unsightly messes where public art once graced the roads. The state further threatened to withhold funding from any municipality that dared to repair those defaced rainbow crosswalks.

The rainbow designs may be gone, but Equality Florida sees a pattern, "This isn’t about safety. It’s a cowardly abuse of power and the latest in his campaign to ban books, whitewash history, and attack LGBTQ people."

Anyway, have yourself a happy little holiday, whatever distractions bedazzle you along your travels.

But please, unlike the drivers in today's cartoon, do try to stay on the correct side of the road.

This Week's Sneak Peek

From the pencil rough that eventually became this week's cartoon:

It bothered me that most of the editorial cartoons about the My Lai massacre that I had selected for last Saturday's Graphical History Tour seemed to excuse Lt. William Calley's role in it; so yesterday, I dug up one more cartoon taking a contrary position and added it to the others. It goes against the rules of blogging, but apparently rules don't mean anything any more.

War Crimes Edition

With self-styled Secretary of War Pete HIC!seth's Leave No Survivors rules of engagement in the present regime's gratuitous War in the Caribbean, Graphical History Tour takes a look at war crimes of the past.

"Das Ende" by Dorman H. Smith for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., ca. Dec. 1, 1945

80 years ago on November 30, a German U-boat commander and two of his subordinate officers were executed for war crimes.

It was during World War II, in the South Atlantic. The German submarine U-852 under the command of Captain Heinz-Wilhelm Eck torpedoed the Greek-flagged ship Peleus on March 13, 1944.

The submarine commander Eck feared the steamer’s debris would be observed by a passing airplane, and give enough information to Allied reconnaissance to enable it to find his ship. He therefore surfaced and attempted to have the debris field eliminated by machine-gunning and grenading it into the watery deep.

Per German rules of engagement:

No attempt of any kind should be made at rescuing members of ships sunk, and this includes picking up persons in the water and putting them in lifeboats, righting capsized lifeboats and handing over food and water. Rescue runs counter to the rudimentary demands of warfare for the destruction of enemy ships and crews … Be harsh, having in mind that the enemy takes no regard of women and children in his bombing attacks of German cities.

"Spectator" by Daniel Fitzpatrick in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dec. 3, 1945

The execution of Captain Heinz-Wilhelm Eck, August Hoffmann, and Walter Weisspfennig, was overshadowed by the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi high command, accused of the systematic murder of 6 million Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and Socialists.

"Nuernberg" by David Low in London Spectator, ca. Dec. 2, 1945

The Nuremberg trials came to pass because the Allies were triumphant in the War. Germans did not bring the Nazis to trial. 

Nobody was put on trial for the carpet bombing of Dresden. Or for immolating the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The rules of war were followed there.

"My Lai?" by Paul Conrad in Los Angeles Times, March 31, 1971

A generation later, in another war, the world was shocked by the March 16, 1968 massacre of hundreds of unarmed civilians by U.S. soldiers in the Vietnamese villages of My Lai and My Khe. Expecting to find a Viet Cong battalion there, two Companies of U.S. Army soldiers gang-raped, mutilated, and slaughtered women and children when they couldn't find any men of military age in the town, then burned their homes to the ground. It was the largest confirmed massacre of civilians by U.S. ground forces in the 20th Century.

"Another Victim of My Lai" by William Roberts in Cleveland Press, March 30, 1971

The massacre had been documented in horrific photographs which were printed in national newsmagazines and on television.

The My Lai Massacre was an egregious, but not isolated case, according to an October, 1968 letter from Tom Glen, a 21-year-old soldier of the 11th Light Infantry Brigade, to General Creighton Abrams:

"What has been outlined here I have seen not only in my own unit, but also in others we have worked with, and I fear it is universal. If this is indeed the case, it is a problem which cannot be overlooked, but can through a more firm implementation of the codes of MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) and the Geneva Conventions, perhaps be eradicated."

"Guilty" by Don Wright in Miami News, March 30, 1971

The responsibility for the massacre was taken all the way up to an Army Lieutenant, William Calley, Jr.. Calley's court martial became national news after a whistle-blower's letter prompted Congress to open an investigation. Calley testified that he had been following orders from his superior, Captain Ernest Medina. One witness testified that Medina's orders were that "anybody that was running from us, hiding from us" was to be shot. 

"Murderer" by Leonard Borozinski in Wisconsin State Journal, March 31, 1971

Calley received a guilty verdict in March of 1971 and sentenced to life in prison; yet, as the above cartoons suggest, emerged as a sympathetic figure. He was paroled in 1974 to very little public outcry.

"Time to Come Out of Hiding" by Wally "Trog" Fawkes in Punch, London, April, 1971

Meanwhile, in separate courts martial, Captain Medina and Captain Eugene M. Kotouc were acquitted of all charges. Commanding officer of Americal Division, Major General Samuel W. Koster was charged with covering up the massacre and acquitted, but demoted to Brigadier General.

"It's Not So Difficult Once You Get the Hang of It" by Bill Sanders in Milwaukee Journal, March 31, 1971

Before moving on, we would be remiss if we did not also remember U.S. Army pilot Hugh Thompson, Jr., who landed his helicopter between the villagers and the soldiers, interrupting the slaughter and evacuating some survivors to safety.

"This in a Land Where One Humiliation Is Worth a Thousand Retributions" by Mark Streeter in Savannah Morning News, May 3, 2004

In 2004, the U.S. was embarrassed by its soldiers staffing the military prison at Abu Ghraib torturing prisoners of war. The soldiers had even posted photos on the internet of themselves humiliating naked Iraqi prisoners, chaining them like dogs, and piling them up on top of each other. The most widely circulated photo was of one hooded prisoner standing on a box with arms outstretched while hooked up to electrical wires.

Punishment was limited to the lowest level grunts.

"Chain of Command" by John Sherffius in Boulder Daily Camera, August 20, 2004

What the Dubya Bush administration learned from this fiasco was to rely more and more on outside contractors, like Blackwater, whose civilian paramilitary employees massacred 17 Iraqis at a traffic roundabout in 2007. Said employees were not invited to the Blackwater annual Christmas party that year.

Two years later, the outside firm was ArmorGroup, hired by the U.S. State Department to provide security at the American embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. CBS broke the story that ArmorGroup guards and supervisors engaging in what can only be described as a combination of the worst fraternity hazing with spring break at Fort Lauderdale.

for Q Syndicate, Sept., 2009

Hazing victims included Afghan nationals employed at the base, according to a Sept. 1, 2009 letter from Project on Government Oversight (POGO) to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: 

"There is also evidence that members of the guard force and their supervisors have drawn Afghan nationals into behavior forbidden for Muslims. For example, photographs show guards posing with Afghan nationals at the U.S. facility at Camp Sullivan as both the guards and nationals consume alcoholic beverages in scenes that suggest drunkenness, and one photo shows a near-naked U.S. guard who appears to have urinated on himself and splashed an Afghan national."

And again, there were plenty of photos, posted to the unit's social media page. It's always the pictures that get people into trouble.

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War crimes have been committed by many countries other than the United States. Is it even possible to have a crime-free war, fought strictly according to the Geneva Accords? 

Seemingly not. That, however, takes us into Current Events, which are not in our Graphical History Tour's itinerary.

Not yet, anyway.