Something Old, Something New

Today's Graphical History Tour returns to some of my own cartoons celebrating their decennaries this month, but I'm going to shake things up a bit this time and not take them in chronological order.

I'll start with this cartoon drawn for one of the more liberal of the student newspapers at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee.*

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., March 3, 1994

UWM has long had two vocal student groups advocating against each other for Palestine and Israel. The pro-Palestine group posted an inflamatory poster in the student union atrium in response to the Cave of the Patriarch's Massacre, in which American-Israeli physician Baruch Goldstein opened fire on Palestinians worshiping in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, killing 29 and wounding 125.

The Palestinian Human Rights Campaign's poster depicted a sequential cartoon of a Star of David morphing into a swastika. The Jewish student group complained to the chancellor of UWM, John Schroeder, that the poster was antisemitic and should be taken down.

It's an argument reflected in graphic discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at large, and never moreso than today.

If I were to draw a cartoon like this today, I would add a rule that any reference to blood is also out of bounds. You can draw Vladimir Putin as a bloodthirsty monster in Ukraine, or George W. Bush spilling blood in Iraq, or Slobodan Milošević dripping blood in Bosnia. But the moment you try any of that with Bibi Netanyahu, you're trafficking in Blood Libel against all Jews everywhere.

Cartoons by Dwayne "Mr. Fish" Booth and Serge Chapleau

A number of cartoonists have stumbled into the Blood Libel trap since the Netanyahu government's scorched earth campaign to push Palestinians in Gaza into the sea — most recently Dwayne Booth, who draws under the nom de plume "Mr. Fish," and Serge Chapleau of La Presse in Montréal, Québec. Chapleau's cartoon of Netanyahu as "Nosferatu en route to Rafah" was yanked off-line by La Presse this month after howls of protest from the Usual Quarters. The Association of Canadian Cartoonists issued a statement in support of M. Chapleau; he stands behind his cartoon, and La Presse stands behind dumping it.

Mr. Fish's cartoon from last November was singled out as anti-semitic by the right-wing Washington Free Beacon and then criticized by the Interim President of the University of Pennsylvania, Larry Jameson. Mr. Fish has not been fired from teaching his course on cartooning at U-Penn, and no journal that posted "Who Invited That Lousy Anti-Semite" on line has 404ed it with apologies; so I haven't heard any push for the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists to leap to his defense.

for Q Syndicate, March 2004

Moving on: This was a cartoon I drew as a reserve for Q Syndicate, to be released at some later date when I might be on vacation, laid up, or for some other reason fail to get a cartoon in on time. For that reason, the cartoon did not deal with any actual news story; it's not about any particular cartoon syndicate rejecting the work of any particular lesbian cartoonist.

I bring it up today because within cartooning circles here in 2024, some of us are more concerned with the decision by the major newspaper publishing conglomerates to standardize their newspapers' comic pages, because of which decision just about every comic strip currently drawn by a woman has disappeared from print.

Lynn Johnston’s “For Better Or Worse" has survived the purge, but it has been in reruns since 2008. Two other sort-of exceptions are "Luann" by Greg Evans with his daughter Karen as co-author, and "Shoe" currently drawn by Gary Brookins and Susie MacNelly, widow of the strip's original creator.

As Georgia Dunn noted in her strip "Breaking Cat News," "There are more dead men than living women in the funny pages."

Well, it's Holy Week in the Western Christian calendar, so let us open now our hymnals to page ax².

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., March 22, 1984

Back in the 1980's, conservatives upset by the separation of church and school and encouraged by the presidency of Ronald Reagan, were eager to impose prayer on public school students. Not mandatory, of course, but voluntary. 

Fair enough, I suppose. Turnabout, however, is fair play.

Who could have foreseen that forty years later, some tawdry huckster would be hawking Bibles with the Constitution as Apocrypha?

I wonder how many Corinthians it has.

for Q Syndicate, March, 2014

Speaking of turnabout as fair play, it's been ten years since Mr. Fred Phelps shuffled off his fetid coil. Since he based his entire career on speaking ill of the dead — loudly, through a bullhorn, at funerals — it was only fitting to dyslogize him in like manner.

He is risible indeed.

_____________________

* The other main newspapers were the right-wing Times and the Black American Invictus.

Winter of '84

As a tribute to Alex Trebek, Winton Smithback Saturday takes a break from cartoons of a century ago and looks instead to a few of my own from 35 years ago. Although Trebek's iteration of Jeopardy! would not begin until October of 1984, these cartoons date from the first three months of the year. And none are in the form of a question.

So, as a tribute to Alex Trebek, this is kind of lame. But indulge me anyway.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan had campaigned heavily against the federal deficit under the Carter administration: the figure that year was $74 billion. By 1984, it had ballooned to $185 billion.

This balancing act cartoon was the final installment of a short-lived running gag I had going. Reagan never returned to the budget balancing act, either in Washington or in my cartoons.

Since then, the Bill Clinton administration managed to pass a handful of balanced budgets, but this year's deficit is estimated to amount to $984 billion.

Australian media baron Rupert Murdoch bought the Chicago Sun-Times from Field Enterprises in 1984. Up to then, the morning tabloid had a liberal reputation, being home to editorial cartoonists Jacob Burck (who died in 1982) and Bill Mauldin, and columnists Roger Simon, Roger Ebert, and Mike Royko. Under the new owner, the Sun Times editorial voice shifted to the right.

His politics notwithstanding, Murdoch was better known at this point for the sensationalism of his Sydney Daily Telegraph, News of the World, the Sun of London, the New York Post and the supermarket tabloid Star.

Murdoch's ownership of the Sun-Times would be brief. He sold the paper in 1986 for $145 million in order to buy Chicago's unaffiliated television station WFLD channel 32 (also from Field Enterprises), and use it to launch his Fox TV network.

The rest, like Yuri Andropov, is history.

Not quite four months after the bombing of the U.S. Marines' barracks in Beirut in which 299 U.S. and French soldiers were killed, President Reagan announced on February 7 that he was pulling our troops out of the Multinational Force in Lebanon. It was not to be called a "retreat," however; officially, our troops were merely being "redeployed." France, Great Britain, and Italy would redeploy their troops by the end of February.

There were some eight serious candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984, three of whom withdrew immediately after the February 28 New Hampshire primary. (I'm not counting the perennial candidate, wacko fascist Lyndon LaRouche, who died just last month.) Colorado Senator Gary Hart came in second in the Iowa caucuses and first in New Hampshire, establishing himself as the media's Flavor of the Month.

Besides editorial cartoons, I was also drawing comic strips for the student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin at Parkside. But I've already posted "The Funny Paper Caper" series in this blog (starting here), so I'm not going to repeat it today.

I close instead with my commentary on the evergreen controversy over allowing prayer in public schools. The new wrinkle in right-wing evangelicals' push at the time was their proposal to carve out time in the school day for a "voluntary moment of silent prayer."

Comic Caper, Holiday Edition

For this Swipeback Saturday wallow down memory lane, I need to explain that when these next episodes of "The Funny Paper Caper" appeared in December and January of 1983-1984, Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury" was in the middle of a 22-month hiatus. At the time, it wasn't clear whether the comic strip, having been moved to the editorial page of some newspapers, was going to come back.

Fed up with drawing all those soundproofing dimples in the wall of the interrogation room, I switched to one of Trudeau's tricks and set the next episode outside the building its characters were in. It was the last episode of the year, and ran on a little longer than the previous thirteen had. If you're not in the habit yet, you'll definitely want to Click To Embiggen.

In the new year, it became increasingly clear that I would need to move the plot along in order to complete the story by the end of the school year. Kind of like Davos rushing to fetch Gendry from King's Landing so they could join Jon Snow's Magnificent Seven racing north from Dragonstone to the Wall while, presumably, Daenerys, Cersei and the Dothraki paused to get their hair done.

A purely technical note here: in the Ranger's Christmas gift exchange, news editor Bob Kiesling gave me a Koh-i-noor rapidograph set, which I began using for some of the drawing of this strip in the new year. The technical pens produce a steady, uniform line in india ink, but they clog up and become useless if you're not assiduous about cleaning them. I did find them superior to felt-tip pens for lettering; but sometimes a uniform line is not what you want, so I have never given up on hawk and crow tip pens.

On the topic of moving the plot along, I gotta post some of these midweek, or I'll have to cancel some retrospectives of other people's work I've had planned. Stay tuned.

Democratic Conventions Past

Last week, I dusted off a selection of my cartoons about Republican National Conventions. For Stepback Saturday this week, I ought to give the Democrats equal time.

There's just one problem about that. As Hillary Clinton demonstrated yesterday, Democratic nominees' vice-presidential picks are often spectacularly uninspired.

Walter Mondale's choice of New York Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro was surely intended to be bold and ground-breaking. The choice may have come off as such, if not for a perception that Mondale was yielding to feminist demands, or for his too-public "P.R. parade of personalities" (as Jesse Jackson called it) to his home in Minnesota before making his choice known. Besides, rival Jackson had beat Mondale to the punch by promising to name a woman to as his running mate if he had won the nomination.

1988 nominee Michael Dukakis played it too safe with the choice of Texas Senator Lloyd Bentsen to balance the Massachusetts governor's ticket. Jesse Jackson had been the strongest of Dukakis's rivals for the nomination, and his supporters were disappointed that he didn't get the #2 spot.

And that's it.

Nobody got booed off the stage at the Democratic National Conventions of the 1990's, 2000's or (so far) the 2010's. As Veep picks, Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, John Edwards and Joe Biden didn't inspire me to rush to my drawing board to laud them as wonderful choices or to bemoan them as terrible ones. I have been inspired at other times to draw cartoons about each of them (which is more than I can say about Timothy M. Kaine), but not about their vice presidential nominations.

So screw equal time. Here's a cartoon about behavior by the front-row Texas delegation at George W. Bush's 2000 Republican National Convention, even though it was drawn three months later.

Remembering Nancy

At the risk of having Settleback Saturday fall into a rut, I'm hauling a few of my own old cartoons out of the archives yet again -- this time remembering former First Lady Nancy Reagan.

I have seldom drawn cartoons about First Ladies of the United States, except in the cases of Nancy Reagan and Hillary Clinton. (You may recall one of Nancy Reagan's appearances in a Supreme Court cartoon I posted just a couple Saturdays ago.) Mrs. Reagan came to the White House determined to redecorate; she was front and center in the anti-drug "Just Say No" campaign; and was a force for others in the administration to reckon with to a degree not seen since Eleanor Roosevelt or Edith Wilson.

Edith Wilson might be the more relevant example. We now know that President Reagan was showing signs of Alzheimer's Disease as early as 1984. Nancy Reagan may not have been the one taking his calls ... at least not that we know of.

This is a fragment of a never-completed cartoon on an Alice in Wonderland theme. Nancy Reagan was widely considered to be the force behind the firing of President Reagan's longtime friend Donald Regan as White House Chief of Staff in 1987. She felt that he was mishandling the Iran/Contra scandal, and he chafed at her astrology-based demands regarding her husband's schedule. Regan allegedly got the boot after having abruptly hung up on the First Lady.

Regan complained publicly about Nancy and her astrologer, Joan Quigley, in his 1988 memoir, For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington: "Virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House Chief of Staff was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in a favorable alignment for the enterprise."

Except for the one at the top of this post, I've chosen cartoons from the last two years of the Reagan administration. I'll wrap up with this cartoon of the Reagans taking their curtain call with several administration members from the previous eight years. It's not a particularly unique take on the end of the Reagan administration, I'll admit. Had I not drawn this cartoon while away from home and reference sources at an out-of-state family funeral, the cartoon would have worked better if the set had looked more like the Oval Office.

Two More McGovern Cartoons

I finally located the folders with my cartoons from 1983 and before, and found George McGovern in two more cartoons about the early race for the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination.

Fair warning: both cartoons reference death, so I hope people don't find them in bad taste today. The first cartoon is from September, 1983, imagining Democrats' response to the announcement of McGovern's third try for the presidency:

The state of the race at the time was that former Vice President Walter Mondale was the front runner with the support of organized labor and a number of other interest groups. Ohio Senator John Glenn was a more centrist alternative, while California Senator Alan Cranston and civil rights activist Jesse Jackson were competing for the party's far left. Some of the party faithful held out hope that Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy would change his mind and run a second time, and there were Senators from Colorado, and South Carolina and a former Governor of Florida (Gary Hart, Fritz Hollings, and Reuben Askew) who were trying to get some attention.

McGovern's bid for the 1984 nomination was doomed from the start. In recent history, Democrats have shunned any of their candidates for president who had previously run and lost (although Teddy Kennedy could have easily been an exception had he tried in '84).

It hasn't always been this way: Democrats nominated Grover Cleveland for a third time in 1892 after he had been thrown out of office in 1888; and Williams Jennings Bryan won three out of the next four Democratic nominations. Democrats nominated Adlai Stevenson for a rematch against Eisenhower in 1956; and if it weren't for the McGovern rule changes of 1968, Hubert Humphrey might have been a shoo-in for the nomination in 1972 or 1976.

As the nominating process stands since -- and even including -- 1968, the only way for a failed Democratic candidate to win the Democratic nomination is to have served as Vice President in the meantime. The examples of Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale and Al Gore do not bode well for Joe Biden.

Back to George McGovern. He is only an extra in the cartoon below, but it might have some resonance for Republicans today. Democrats felt they had an opening to unseat President Ronald Reagan because the economy had been in recession since 1981. By December of 1983, however, all reports indicated that the recession was over.

If you missed the cartoon from December, 1983 (published in January), my earlier blog post is here.

George McGovern

This morning comes the news that former Senator from South Dakota George McGovern is "coming to the end of his life" and has been entrusted to hospice care.

I don't have any of my own cartoons from his 1972 race for the Presidency, although I do recall having tried to sketch a Time magazine cover image of Richard Nixon only to have my drawing look more like McGovern than Nixon. I do have a college newspaper clipping of a cartoon from December, 1983, when McGovern was making yet another try for the Democratic nomination:

If I remember correctly, I had difficulty drawing McGovern this time around and ended up drawing him on another sheet of paper and pasting that head over the one on the page with the rest of the cartoon. That would account for all those marks around his head on the printed copy, as the exposure here appears quite dark.

By 1984, I had a lot more experience drawing Richard Nixon, so I doubt that it would have helped me to try to draw that Time magazine cover again.

Geraldine Ferraro

Geraldine "Gerry" Ferraro, former congresswoman from New York and Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee in 1984 has died. In memoriam, here's a cartoon of her from my juvenalia file:

I was trying to draw Walter Mondale holding himself rigid and still -- which was a particular challenge, since just about anyone I drew in those days looks rigid and still.