October and Ober Again

In lieu of enjoying fresh autumn air and colorful fall foliage, this week's Graphical History Tour rummages through the dank and dusty vaults of Bergetoon Cellars in search of a half century of October scribblings. 

1976

in Park Beacon, Racine WI, Oct. 1, 1976

This week's tour starts off with a bit of genuine juvenilia. (Is there a singular form of that word?) I drew this cartoon for my high school paper to accompany a brief column by another student about her time as a Navy brat in the Philippines four years earlier.

It sounds absolutely dreadful. After a 25-hour flight with stops in Alaska and Japan, she, her mother, and her siblings arrived in the height of monsoon season. Visibility was nil due to rain and fog, her sister was running a fever, and her step-father wasn't there to take them to Sulric (sic) Naval Base. They eventually got onto a bus for a five-hour ride on roads that were all but impassible.

Something might be missing from Brenda's story after the harrowing account of her family's arrival. They finally made it to Sulric (Subic?); her mother phoned the step-father; he arrived and asked if they were ready to go; and all plane reservations were cancelled for another week. The End.

I checked: Brenda had no Part II in the next issue.

1986

in NorthCountry Journal, Poynette WI, October, 1986

I think I may have already posted in this blog every cartoon I ever drew in October of 1986, including this one.

My cartoons for the NorthCountry Journal were meant to complement each month's editorial. This one had to do with erosion control efforts for Wisconsin farmland, most of which is in the Mississippi River watershed.

1996

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, Oct. 3, 1996

People (usually Republicans) used to talk about needing to run government like a business. Well, before Trump started running it like one of his businesses, anyway.

Pabst Brewery was once a premier powerhouse in the Milwaukee beer industry, but was falling on hard times by the late 1990's. The corporate solution was to renege on their commitments to retirees who had devoted a lifetime to the firm.

It took another generation before Pabst became, if not popular, trendy again in Wisconsin, and it didn't last long.

The lesson to be learned is: the folks who have done the actual work are expendable. That is how business is run nowadays, and how Republicans who want government run like a business run government.

2006

Q Syndicate, October, 2006

With yet another school shooting in the news this week, and Republicans campaigning against the LGBTQ community for lack of anything positive to say about their own record, I think it's worth bringing this cartoon back today.

It's not a perfect analogy, but it has proven nearly impossible to get through to those devotees of the second half of the Second Amendment. I thought this was worth a try.

Now, for you ammosexuals out there, I will readily admit that the latest slaughter at Bend, Oregon, was stopped by one of those fabled, if ever-elusive, Good Guys With a Gun. But only if you will also admit that a sixteen-year-old who is too young to drink alcohol responsibly is also too young to have a high-powered rifle of his very own.

2016

for Q Syndicate, October, 2016

Finally, we are just about up to the moment of Donald Berzilius Trump's first election, thanks to the Electoral College, of the presidency of the United States.

His most fervent supporters, then as now, were the religious right, neoconservatives, urban-hating rednecks, alt-right neo-Nazis, and Russia Russia Russia. There were also Log Cabin Republicans and the even more right-wing GOProud gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and Caitlyn Jenner, enthusiastically shilling for Trump in spite of the palpable contempt for them from all the folks in the first sentence of this paragraph.

Conventional wisdom even in the final weeks of the campaign was that Hillary Clinton was going to trounce Trump handily. There was even talk of her winning in perennially Republican Utah and Arizona.

Which I bring up a propos of, oh, nothing ... just the excited talk of flipping House and Senate seats in Texas, Kansas, Alaska, Iowa, Maine, and my own back yard in a couple of weeks from now.