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 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...
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| 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 their front page of their year-in-review edition.
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| 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
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| 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.
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| 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
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| 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!
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