Remembering Gorbachev

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last President of the Soviet Union, died this week, age 91; so for today's Saturday History Tour, here are some of my cartoons of one of the most transformative leaders of the latter half of the 20th Century.

in UW-Milwaukee Post, Nov. 14, 1989

With his election by the Politburo in March of 1985, Gorbachev became the USSR's fourth leader in as many years. Leonid Brezhnev's ill health had been kept secret for years before his death in 1982; his successor, Yuri Andropov, was felled by kidney failure after 15 months in office, aged 69. Konstantin Chernenko, a heavy smoker, was at death's door almost from the start of his 13-month administration, and died of emphysema and complications at the age of 73.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, March 21, 1985

Gorbachev came to power eager to make his mark. He signaled his willingness to negotiate arms limitations with the United States, a topic whose progress had ground to a halt after Ronald Reagan scrapped the talks begun under Brezhnev with Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, April 10, 1986

The West added two Russian words to our vocabulary under Mikhail Gorbachev: perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness). The former was actually a policy begun under Brezhnev in 1979, but to which Gorbachev announced a renewed and firm commitment. His reforms decentralized governance and economic controls while lifting some of the secrecy enjoyed by Kremlin bureaucrats.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Sept. 7, 1989

What Gorbachev hadn't factored in was the desire of the citizens of Soviet client states and some non-Russian S.S.R.'s to break away from Moscow entirely. It's not as if independence movements were unknown; Poland's Solidarność movement had been a headache for the government in Warsaw since 1980, and memories lingered of Moscow's brutal suppression of revolts in Czechoslovakia (1968),  Hungary (1956), and East Germany (1953).

in UW-Milwaukee Post, Nov. 9, 1989

When the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe completely collapsed in November and December of 1989, there were too many dominoes falling at once for Gorbachev to seriously consider sending the Russian military into every countries quitting the Warsaw Pact.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Nov. 16, 1989

Rough seas for Gorbachev's Mediterranean summit meeting with U.S. President George H.W. Bush were the perfect metaphor for the Soviet leader's predicament.

in UW-Milwaukee Post, Dec. 5, 1989

(This was months before Bush would throw up into the lap of the Japanese Prime Minister, by the way.)

in UW-Milwaukee Post, Feb. 20, 1990

I still like this take-off on a scene from Pee Wee Herman's Big Adventure, even though you could plug just about any politician going through a rough patch into this scenario. Similarly with this next cartoon. 

May, 1990. Unpublished?

Reunification of Germany certainly horrified the elder members of the politburo; Gorbachev was also old enough to remember World War II. This, as much as any other single factor, led to the hardliners' attempted coup in the summer of 1991.

August, 1991. Unpublished?

The coup met sturdy resistance from their own citizens. Moscow Mayor Boris Yeltsin emerged as the hero of the moment, representing liberalization beyond what Gorbachev had ever intended.

in UW-Milwaukee Post, Sept. 9, 1991

The end of the Soviet Union happened over Christmas break at the UW-M Post, and I don't have any cartoons about Gorbachev after that.

The memorial cartoons I've seen this week have all credited Gorbachev with bringing his country out of the oppression of the communist regime. Many have contrasted him favorably with Vladimir Putin, who has imposed a new oppressive regime of деконструкция and закрытость, and clearly believes that Gorbachev's administration was a disaster. 

I have not yet seen how any Russian cartoonists have responded to Gorbachev's passing. Are memorial cartoons even a thing there? If so, was Mikhail Gorbachev someone you can praise under Putin's regime without buying a one-way ticket out a sixth-story hospital window?

R.I.P. F.W. de K.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers, WI, Feb. 8, 1990

Frederik Willem de Klerk, the last Apartheid Prime Minister of South Africa: March 18, 1936 - November 11, 2021

'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.

I'm Just a Soul Whose Intentions Are Good

Earlier this month, I chimed in on a conversation about someone else's cartoon that was widely misunderstood. For that post, I redrew one of my own cartoons in a way that intentionally defeated its own point. For SayWhatBack Saturday, I dredge up a few of my own cartoons that, at least as far as some readers were concerned, missed the mark unintentionally.

I drew the above cartoon for the parody edition of the University of Wisconsin at Parkside student newspaper as a follow-up to an earlier cartoon that, I was told, many readers didn't understand.

UW-Parkside Ranger, January 17, 1985

The cartoon was about the New York "subway vigilante" Bernard Goetz, who had shot some African-American youths on the subway because he had felt threatened by them. There are many reasons, however, that this cartoon didn't work. The guns, for one thing, were terribly drawn and barely recognizable as such. Some cartoonists can get away with oversimplifying objects, but things still have to be drawn so that the reader can't mistake them for something else.

The composition of the cartoon risks confusing the reader as to whether there are two separate panels or four. 

Perhaps most importantly, the racist imagery in the thought balloons is likely to offend readers before they get around to seeing the men below them. While intended to be grossly exaggerated misconceptions of whatever the facts of the subway incident were, they could have left the false impression that I was advocating one or the other.

UW-Milwaukee Post, April 16, 1991

I remember worrying that this 1991 cartoon (I must have been still writing 1990 on my checks) featuring two Republican Congressmen from Wisconsin would be taken the wrong way, but I never did hear any feedback about it. When I went to the UW-M Post office with the the cartoon for the next issue, nobody could find the original of this one — the only cartoon original I never got back in several years drawing for the Post — so I guess somebody did take it, the wrong way, after all.

Manitou Messenger, Oct. 4, 1979

Way back in 1979, I drew a cartoon for my college newspaper about John Paul II's first visit to the United States as pope. In it, I likened his crowds to those surrounding the title character in Monty Python's Life of Brian― to which end I had people quoting lines from the film.

I thought that the film reference made the cartoon funny, but somebody wrote the paper the next week to accuse me of plagiarism. I suppose I should have written "Apologies to Monty Python" on the cartoon to explain that I was making a cultural reference. (And to Playboy for the reference to their 1976 Jimmy Carter interview.) 

 

Cartooning rules on plagiarism and cultural references are somewhat hazy. Perhaps I should also have added an apology to DC Comics or Todd Phillips or Joaquin Phoenix to this past week's cartoon just in case Brad Hendricks is still monitoring me for plagiarism.

Anyway, my response to Mr. Hendricks's letter included 17 reference footnotes and hardly a single original thought in it.

Just to be clear about one thing, I didn't remember Mr. Hendricks's name after all these years. I no longer have the original of this cartoon, so I had to hunt it up in the Messenger's on-line archives, and Hendricks's letter to the editor came up in the search first.

UW-Milwaukee Post, Dec. 8, 1994

We cartoonists don't mind people writing in to voice their disagreement with a cartoon ― we invite it. What really hurts is when someone tells us they didn't "get" the cartoon. Readers tend not to write "I don't get it" letters to the editor, though, probably for fear of appearing stupid in case everyone else thought the cartoon was hilarious.

I did hear from readers, however, including staffers at the Post, who didn't get this cartoon about House Speaker-elect Newt Gingrich claiming to have the names of drug users among Bill Clinton's White House staff.

UW-Milwaukee Post, Dec. 12, 1994

So I followed up in the next issue with this cartoon explaining the Gingrich cartoon point by tedious point.

Q Syndicate, April, 2009

Here's another example of bad execution. Acting New York Governor David Paterson took marriage equality advocates by surprise when he proposed legalizing same-sex marriage in his state. I wanted to point out how unprepared for this marriage equality advocates were; but by my featuring not them but Gov. Paterson in the cartoon, several readers were rightly outraged by an apparent joke knocking Paterson for being legally blind. I lost some newspapers over this one, and it was my bad.

Q Syndicate, December, 2012

Finally, returning to the topic of appropriating cultural references: please note that I was careful to include the proper apologies to all the original creators of the characters in this 2012 Christmastime cartoon. 

 

There used to be a weblog called "Editorial Explanations" whose author, Andrew Wheeler, called out confusing and snarkworthy editorial cartoons, and this was one of nearly a dozen of my cartoons that had him befuddled. Well, no wonder. Christmas and marriage equality have nothing to do with each other; but it was December, so I forced them into an unhappy marriage anyway. For that matter, all of the folks in the cartoon happen to be single, adding another layer of non-sequiturity.

There's a good chance of Hermey the Elf being gay, though.

By the way, even though I can recite just about any Monty Python routine verbatim, I have somehow still not actually seen Life of Brian. 

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.

Non, Je Ne Remets Rien

in UW-Milwaukee Post, April 5, 1990

Souvenirback Saturday is taking a week off from addressing Americans' historical illiteracy today, and just tossing together a handful of my cartoons from April, 1990. Aside from their being 30 years old, there's no particular theme or moral here. I just happen to like them.

in UW-Milwaukee Post, April 10, 1990

Rummaging through my files, I thought this cartoon was about Dennis Franz's butt on NYPD Blue. In case you were too young to watch NYPD Blue back in the day, the show broke network TV ground by having its central character go full dorsal, paving the way for more conventionally handsome buttcheeks to grace the boob tube in the decades since.

But NYPD Blue didn't premiere until 1993, so it wasn't that. Perhaps it was about Robert Mapplethorpe — although, to the best of my knowledge, he never had a television show.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, April 19, 1990

Russia didn't want to let go of its Baltic SSRs, and NATO leaders were reluctant to appear too eager for their independence. I like this cartoon because it gave me an opportunity to draw several world leaders together, including some, like the Prime Minister of Spain, whom I never drew before or since.

I drew this for the Racine Journal Times, but since I don't see it in the scrapbook my mother kept of my cartoons, I think they must not have used it. David was the mayor of Burlington, Wisconsin, who got caught having included a little white lie in his campaign autobiography. Sure, it didn't measure up to misappropriating Neil Kinnock's father's life story, but I thought it made for a funny cartoon.

Once upon a time, children, being caught in a lie — any lie at all, no matter how inconsequential — could spell the end of one's political career. Believe it or not.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, April 26, 1990

Speaking of stealing things: I wasn't going to include this cartoon, since even as an homage to Walt Kelly's Pogo, it wasn't particularly original. But having just made an oblique reference to a Pogo character earlier this week, it's probably a good idea to remind myself not to keep going to that well too often.

in UW-Milwaukee Post, May 1, 1990

And finally, proof that not every cartoon I drew of President George H.W. Bush was critical of him.

UWM POSTer Child

A couple weeks ago, Supersizeback Saturday featured some cartoons I'd drawn in Augusts of years ending in -8. In digging through my archives for that post, I came across the oversize drawing for this UWM Post outerfold (like a centerfold, but wrapped around the outside of the newspaper) and considered including it.

I was thinking that I might have drawn it right after the 1988 Republican National Convention, but since the cartoon's publication date was the day after Labor Day, 1989, I realized that I had drawn it a year later and I'd have to leave it for another day.

Like today. I suppose I should have held it for a post next year of September cartoons in years ending in -9, but what the heck.

When I call this cartoon oversize, I mean that this "UWM POSTer," as the UWM Post called it, was printed on a sheet of newsprint larger than a typical newspaper page today. I had to make four scans of the newspaper and piece them together to end up with the above image.

My original pen-and-ink drawing is the same size as the printed cartoon. I generally prefer to draw my cartoons larger than they will be printed, but this drawing took up an entire sheet of the largest chunk of bristol board I could find. (The original was badly stained when our basement flooded several years ago, but the newspaper was in a box on a shelf and not in the artist portfolio standing in danger's way on the floor.)

Now, I get that my caricature of Dan Quayle cum Alfred E. Neumann might have needed to be identified for some college-age readers. Quayle had a bland, Wonder-bread average-ness to it, and giving him the missing tooth, orange hair, and aileron ears made him even less recognizable. What gets me about this cartoon is that  the editors of the Post felt that the headline needed the parenthetical "vice-president" for the benefit of readers who apparently wouldn't know who Dan Quayle was even given his full name.

(Note: his full name is actually J. Danforth Quayle; but what, me, quibble?)

The following year's back-to-school POSTer section served as a sort of voters' guide and includes a mention on the calliope wagon of my generic Democratic Congressman in those days, Luke Warmish. It appeared on campus one week before Wisconsin's partisan Primary Election Day; the most hotly contested contest that year was the Democratic race to challenge the Republican incumbent State Attorney General.

I have no idea why the African-American "Issues" guy is blue. There are three African-Americans in the crowd with reasonably rendered skin tones; but whoever got stuck with the task of colorizing all those people clearly got fed up with the process of cutting halftone sheets for the red, blue and yellow overlays. (Witness the Blue Man Group at the base of the light pole.)

In addition to the POSTer, the Post ran five of my illustrations and cartoons for articles inside the paper. (I have notes on all of these that they were drawn in August, so I must have had several days' lead time.) Issues ranged from cuts in student financial aid — the article it accompanied used as an example a student loan of $2,500, which would cover less than 10% of the estimated cost for a Wisconsin resident undergraduate taking six course credits in Fall, 2018  — to reproductive choice and Native American treaty rights.

The treaties were a hot-button issue in Wisconsin at the time, involving Euro-American complaints over Native American spear-fishing rights guaranteed in those treaties. At some point, I'll probably devote a blog post to that episode in Wisconsin history in order to give it the attention it deserves.

I had actually drawn this cartoon in May, but it made its way into the "Stop the Parade" issue anyway. Incumbent Republican Governor Tommy Thompson had attempted to give himself a little wiggle room on the abortion issue with his reelection campaign coming up. If the pro-life camp, here personified by activist Randall Terry, had any misgivings about Thompson's position, they never let on. They were leagues away from Democratic challenger Tom Loftus's position.

And then there was this sketch for an article about expectations for Women Trying To Have It All.

Finally, there were two editorial cartoons. This one was included in the Stop the Parade section; I blogged this cartoon not so long ago, but since it ran in the issue of the UWM Post at hand, here it is again, just in time for the reworked reboot of the Roseanne-free Roseanne show (and bitching about football players and the national anthem):

And, as another example of how everything old is new again, while also bringing this blog post around full circle, here's my cartoon for the editorial page of that September 4, 1990 edition of the Post.