'Twas the Noughts Before Christmas

December, 1980

In honor of Monday's Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, Spaceback Saturday opens today with a cartoon I drew 40 years ago this month to mark Voyager 1 having passed beyond Saturn. The probe sent back our first pictures of the dark side of the planet on its way out of of our solar system.

And we did indeed come again; Voyager 2 made a more extensive visit the following August, and the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft reached Saturn in 2004

in Manitou Messenger, St. Olaf College, MN, Dec. 5, 1980

My Saturn cartoon was just something I drew in my sketchbook and never published. This was the only cartoon I drew for publication in December; it featured Utah's brand new Senator-elect Orrin Hatch, of whom I didn't have a wealth of photos to draw from. Republicans won a majority in the Senate that year, but not in the House, so Hatch's proposal for a less-than-minimum wage didn't get very far.

It didn't go very far away, either. Republicans have kept hauling the idea out of storage again and again ever since.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, WI, Dec. 6, 1990

Jumping ahead ten years, we find leaders of the U.S. and Iraq heading inexorably toward Gulf War I. 

in UWM Post, Milwaukee, WI, December 13, 1990

Back in September, I posted a poster I had drawn for the UWM Post for which I had left the colorization to someone else — with dubious results. Here's a cover drawing I made for their Winter Sports issue three months later, for which I took care of the colorization myself. 

Having only two colors to work with, black and blue, simplified matters a bit; but unlike today, I didn't have a graphics program and computer to work with. The specific shades of black and blue were accomplished with halftone sheets, very thin plastic with a dot pattern on one side and adhesive on the other. Placing the larger pieces onto the drawing without any folds or wrinkles was one of the more challenging aspects of this drawing.

An advantage of this process over the easier Duoshade is that the originals created with their chemical process discolor over time. I still have the original drawing with the black halftone sheets on it (but not the separate blue overlay), and it hasn't discolored at all. 

I suppose if its artist portfolio were more heavily trafficked, the halftone plastic could have torn or come loose — and who knows what might have happened if I had hung this on a wall and exposed it to light for 30 years.

Okay, let's jump ahead another decade.

Q Syndicate, December, 2000

Setting aside some of the more dominant issues of December, 2000, we have this: the management of the Gospel Rescue Mission in Tucson issued an apology to their Republican Congressman for turning away his help at their homeless shelter over the Thanksgiving holiday.

TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) - Rep. Jim Kolbe was asked not to volunteer at a Tucson homeless shelter's Thanksgiving dinner because he's a homosexual.

"This decision is based on your publicly announced sexual orientation that is diametrically opposite to admonitions in the Bible,'' Gospel Rescue Mission board member Evelyn H. Haugh wrote in a faxed memo. ``This mission is founded on biblical principles, and we cannot give a public forum to a public official who is blatantly flaunting those principles."

Kolbe, the only openly homosexual Republican congressman, downplayed the snub but said biblical teaching "tells us that no people should be made to feel smaller than others.''

"It would undermine the very essence of Thanksgiving if the good works of the Gospel Rescue Mission and others were eclipsed in controversy,'' Kolbe said. ``The mission has provided noble service to (the) community and I wish it only the best in its efforts to feed and clothe the downtrodden.''

Kolbe, a seven-term congressman who acknowledged his sexual orientation in 1996, helped serve meals at the shelter's Thanksgiving dinner last year.

Skip Woodward, board vice president, said Kolbe had been allowed to serve because "he just showed up and took us by surprise.''

"Kolbe's very public stand on homosexuality is inconsistent with our beliefs,'' Woodward said. ``We wouldn't want anyone who advocated adultery to serve either.''

Arizona Gov. Jane Hull expressed disappointment at the mission's revoked invitation to Kolbe, saying "hunger sees no sexual preference.''

in Milwaukee Business Journal, Dec. 14, 2000

The other day, NPR had a story about the death of the shopping mall. I don't remember the editorial I drew this cartoon to accompany, but apparently it had something to do with one shopping mall being pretty much like every other.

Which was pretty much the point, wasn't it? You could go shopping secure in the knowledge that there would be a Nordstroms, an Orange Julius, a WaldenBooks, a J. Crew, a Kay Jeweler, and a Sam Goody in whatever mall you went to, in whatever town you lived in. All in the comfort of the great indoors! What could possibly be more convenient?

Alas, the only constant is change. Adapt or die. Evolution is inevitable.

Q Syndicate, December, 2010

Which brings us to a cartoon from the waning days of 2010. Say, I hear this fellow has been back in the news again lately.

What Is So Rare As a Cartoon in June?

For Smatteringback Saturday today, I'm rehashing a handful of my own cartoons from Junes of ten, twenty, thirty, and omigod forty years ago.

June, 1980

Back in 1980, I didn't have cartoons published outside of the regular school year, so this cartoon never saw print; but I've run it twice on this here blog, so all its tedious shading hasn't been for naught. A college student's youthful idealism allowed me to imagine that independent presidential candidate John Anderson had any chance of being sworn into office on January 20.

In Racine, WI Journal Times, June 17, 1990

Ten years later, I was drawing local issue cartoons for the Racine Journal Times and cartoons on more general topics for a couple University of Wisconsin newspapers. The local issue above concerned Racine's major shopping center, Regency Mall, and its developers' insistence that there not be a bus stop at any of its doors. In their thinking, convenient bus stops would invite riff-raff from the inner city (oh but don't you dare think they were talking about persons of color); shoppers and employees complained of having to walk — especially in winter — from the roadway that circles the perimeter of the parking lot.

In those days, Regency Mall bustled year 'round, with shoe stores; specialty clothing shops for men, women, and children; half a dozen jewelry stores; a couple of bookstores and two music stores; and anchors J.C. Penney's, Sears, Boston Store, and Prange's.

Today, almost all of that is gone. The remaining jewelry stores, discount clothing shops, exercise gym, and fast food joints are widely separated by vacancies covered over with mural-sized historical photographs of Racine.

The failure of the mall had nothing to do with moving the bus stops to the inner ring drive.

In UW-M Post, Milwaukee, June 20, 1990

A huge issue for Republicans in 1990 was stopping protesters from burning the U.S. flag — which only made protesters want to do it more often. Upholding a similar decision the previous year, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in U.S. v. Eichmann on June 11, 1990 that flag-burning was protected by the First Amendment. "Punishing desecration of the flag dilutes the very freedom that makes this emblem so revered, and worth revering," wrote archliberal Justice William Brennan in opinion, joined by archconservative Justice Antonin Scalia. Republicans campaigned to amend the constitution to overturn the court's decision. Congress voted on the proposed amendment six times between 1995 and 2006, but it has always fallen short of the necessary 67 votes in the Senate.

Q Syndicate, June, 2000

Let us now jump ahead to 2000, by which time I had begun drawing LGBTQ-centric cartoons for Q Syndicate. I had a few particular members of the clergy in mind when I drew this June cartoon about the way certain liberal religious folk were trying to ride their camel through the eye of the needle between accepting same-sex marriage and being "welcoming." But this pastor does not physically resemble any of them.

Q Syndicate, June, 2000

Also in June, 2000, there was speculation that Reform Party presidential candidate Pat Buchanan might tap talk show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger to be his running mate. I'm not sure what "Dr. Laura," who called homosexuality "a biological error" and claimed that "a huge portion of the male homosexual populace is predatory on young boys," would have added to the ticket when Buchanan's antigay animus was already firmly established. In the end, she wasn't interested in running for Vice President anyway, but I certainly enjoyed drawing this cartoon.

If you can name Pat Buchanan's 2000 running mate without looking it up, congratulations. You are either the world's wonkiest politics geek, or you've been dead for two years.

Meanwhile, one of the other candidates that year decided that the United States just doesn't have enough federal Christian holidays.

I can't remember whether I drew that cartoon for Q Syndicate, or if it only ever appeared on my old GeoCities page. At this point, it's difficult to check which; although, since there isn't any explicitly L, G, B, T, or Q subject matter, it's probably the latter. It certainly wasn't in the Milwaukee Business Journal.

Q Syndicate, June, 2010

Finally, here's a cartoon from June of 2010 just for schitzengigels and because it didn't make the cut for my look back at Pride cartoons a couple weeks ago.

Remembering John B. Anderson

SimonSezback Saturday today pays tribute to John B. Anderson, who died this week in Washington, D.C. at the age of 95. The Republican Congressman from Illinois was the first person I voted for in a presidential election, first in the 1980 Minnesota Republican caucuses, then in his Independent candidacy for the presidency.

We college students for Anderson were a devoted bunch, and I've seen a lot of Facebook comments from people my age who are still proud to have voted for him, and have never voted for a Republican candidate since. In the small town where I went to college, we vastly outnumbered supporters of all the other candidates —put together!— at the local caucuses, held on the same day as the New Hampshire primary.

John Anderson campaigning at UW-Parkside, March 27, 1980.

But by the time of the Minnesota Republican Convention to select the state's actual delegates to the National Convention, representatives from non-college districts had the votes to send a delegation committed entirely to the presumptive nominee, Ronald Reagan.

What endeared Anderson to us brand new voters was his earnestness and his willingness to go against a politician's instinct to say exactly what the people in the room might want to hear. From his New York Times obituary:

Mr. Anderson refused to pander, telling voters in Iowa that he favored President Jimmy Carter’s embargo on grain sales to the Soviet Union after it had invaded Afghanistan. He called for a gasoline tax of 50 cents per gallon — when a gallon cost $1.15 — to save energy.
Early on, when all six of his rivals for the Republican nomination assured the Gun Owners of New Hampshire that they firmly opposed gun control legislation, Mr. Anderson said, “I don’t understand why.”
“When in this country we license people to drive automobiles,” he added, “what is so wrong about proposing that we license guns to make sure that felons and mental incompetents don’t get a hold of them?”
He was roundly booed.

My cartoons of John Anderson in 1980 betray the humorless earnestness of a dewy-eyed supporter of a doomed cause (and the difficulty I've always had with drawing hands). My characters were stiff and two-dimensional in more ways than one.

Anderson's campaign left me with a lasting dislike of media coverage that focuses on the poll du jour. But for third-party candidates like Anderson, popularity polls have a real and practical effect on whether the League of Women Voters allow them to participate in televised debates, or even whether they can get on the ballot at all.

So too election rules crafted by the two major parties to safeguard their own interests. Anderson had to fight to get on the ballot in Ohio, where the deadline for an independent candidate to get on the November ballot was in March, well before either major party's nominee had been decided. In Anderson v. Celebrezze, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Anderson's favor, reasoning that

"Not only does the challenged Ohio statute totally exclude any candidate who makes the decision to run for President as an independent after the March deadline, it also burdens the signature-gathering efforts of independents who decide to run in time to meet the deadline. When the primary campaigns are far in the future and the election itself is even more remote, the obstacles facing an independent candidate's organizing efforts are compounded. Volunteers are more difficult to recruit and retain, media publicity and campaign contributions are more difficult to secure, and voters are less interested in the campaign. It is clear, then, that the March filing deadline places a particular burden on an identifiable segment of Ohio's independent-minded voters."

Mainstream cartoonists who had welcomed Anderson as a breath of fresh air in February were dismissing him as a quixotic kook in October. Still, I desperately clung to the prospect that The Issues were more important than The Polls. I even let the candidate of the Libertarian Party (which had a small but vocal presence on campus) in on the act.

President Carter in the above cartoon alludes to the brand spanking new Stealth Fighter planes (the F-117 and B-2 Spirit) announced by the Carter administration earlier that year.

This last cartoon was an extra wide oeuvre which you probably need to beclickify to embiggen to eulegibilitous size. I expect most readers to recognize the poem (itself a parody) and the song parodied by Ronald Reagan and John Anderson in this cartoon; the James Russell Lowell hymn parodied in the Jimmy Carter panel is more obscure today (my Lutheran denomination dropped it from its hymnals after 1978).

Ah, the zeal of youth! Been there. Voted that. Bought the t-shirt.

Thought I still had the bumper sticker, too.