'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 McLaughlin

Longtime PBS talking head wrangler John McLaughlin died yesterday at the age of 89. Last weekend, he was missing from his eponymous Group for only the first time in its 34-year run.

The often parodied host of "The McLaughlin Group" made one appearance in my cartoons at the end of 1999. The editors of The Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee told me that the editorial for the week would be some sort of look ahead to 2000 for the region; could I draw something to go with that?

No, these were not regulars on his program.

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.

GOP Conventions Past

Since I've already posted about 1916 this week, for today's installment of Swerveback Saturday, I rummage through the dusty crate of my own cartoons.

The topic this week is cartoons about Republican National Conventions. I didn't draw national issue toons for a newspaper that published during the summer until 1988, so that's where we'll start. My George H.W. Bush caricature didn't quite come together until this second one:

My caricature of Vice President Dan Quayle never really came together at all, so I don't miss him as a national figure.

Skipping an entire generation, all I can find from 1992 to 2000 is this never-published one. It might have worked better in a vertical (portrait) orientation, so that I'd have had room to draw George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's with their arms raised.

As you've seen, these convention cartoons are usually about the candidates; but once in a while, the convention itself comes up for discussion. There was never any contest for the Republican nomination when Dubya ran for reelection in 2004...

...so instead I coupled the GOP keeping its LGBT supporters at arms length with its introduction of a "free protest zone" that year.

The party platform always gets a lot of attention at convention time, even if it becomes wide open to interpretation afterward.

Because...

On the Second Day of Christmas...

It's SaintStephenback Saturday, the second day of Christmas, which is swell if you're a big fan of turtledoves. If you're looking for a topic for next week's editorial cartoon, ummm, not so much.

The week after Christmas is usually a pretty slow news period, which wasn't a problem for me during those many years when I aspired to be the world's oldest college cartoonist. The college newspapers all take a long Christmas vacation. Out here in the Real World, the show must go on, even if none of the newsmakers are making news and their spokespersons are resting their voices.

In 1993, we had a certain eccentric rich presidential candidate (formerly and futurely) whose concerns about American jobs getting sucked south of the border provided sufficient fodder for this post-Christmas cartoon.

We now know that if your job didn't end up in Mexico -- or Vietnam, Pakistan, Indonesia, Guatemala or the Dominican Republic -- there is now an app for doing whatever it was that you used to get paid for, and even the reindeer are losing their jobs to Amazon drones.

Most post-Christmas cartoons don't have a Christmas theme, though. TV commercials will have been jamming Christmas down everyone's throats since the end of back-to-school specials, so everyone is sick and tired of Christmas. Even churchgoers who had complained "Why can't we sing familar Christmas carols?" all through the season of Advent have lost interest in "Oh, Come, All Ye Faithful" and "Once in Royal David's City" by the First Sunday of Christmas.

Which is why you never hear anyone talk about "keeping Christmas in our hearts 365 days a year" after December 25.

There are exceptions to the usual news drought after Christmas. Every four years, new cabinet members are named in December, often once Congress has gone home for the holiday. Up through 2012, with LGBT service in the military still a hot-button issue, the views of the nominee for Secretary of Defense were usually worth a cartoon or two.

Or the nominee for Attorney General.

And from that same year, having the 2000 election go into extra innings was a godsend for editorial cartoonists.

If politicians aren't being helpful, Mother Nature doesn't give a hoot about holidays on the calendar. Most years, you can count on a certain contingent of editorial cartoonists drawing someone up to his chest in snow wondering whatever happened to that global warming crap them dang egg-headed climatologists keep warning about. You haven't seen many of those cartoons this year.

On December 26, 2004, an earthquake off the coast of Sumatra sent a devastating tsunami around the entire Indian Ocean. Somewhere between 228,000 and 280,000 people were killed, and millions were left homeless. from Indonesia to South Africa.

Some religious people took it as an opportunity to lend aid and comfort to the afflicted. Others did not.

But you can't count on the weather, and it's ghoulish to count on disaster befalling someone before your deadline. If all else fails, there is still one last holiday on the December calendar. A cartoonist can try summing up the entire year.

Cattle Call Cartooning

I was uncharacteristically terse in discussing this week's Q Syndicate cartoon on Thursday, so let's try expanding on the topic for our Seatback Saturday feature today.

There could have been double the five presidential candidates that were featured in that cartoon, since we are in the phase of the campaign when there is still a wide field (and Citizens United delays the moment when candidates run out of cash well beyond what it used to be). Having a lot of candidates is both a challenge and a benefit to the cartoonist, because one has to quickly develop recognizable caricatures for several politicians at once. On the other hand, it increases the chances that one of them will say something reckless, or offensive, or bizarre; but one can't draw all one's cartoons about Donald Trump.

I've dredged up some cartoons chock full of presidential hopefuls from the last four elections of the 20th Century. Few of these people ever became president, of course, but not all of these people are gone and forgotten.

Let's start in 1988, the first election in a generation in which there was no incumbent president running at any point. There was a crowded field on both sides of the ballot, allowing for this very bipartisan cartoon:

Usually, it's only the party out of power that enters an election season with a clown car full of candidates. As the 1992 caucuses and primaries began, a different candidate won each of the first five contests, it was starting to look like there might not be any front runner at all.

It took a while before Bill Clinton emerged as the definitive front-runner he had been expected to be. Larry Agran, by the way, did not in fact win anywhere, and it's small wonder that you have no idea who he is.

1996 was the Republicans' turn to be the Out party. I'd just like to point out that, the prominent mention of gays notwithstanding, I drew the above cartoon for a straight newspaper, not the LGBT press. It's common to charge that someone is "out of the mainstream" of political discourse by drawing him or her piloting a boat in the desert; I decided to take a different tack on the cliché.

And as the 2000 election approached, I tried yet another nautical approach.

You'll note the absence of GOP presidential candidates John McCain and George W. Bush from the deck of the S.S. Far Starboard. Running as a moderate, McCain met with representatives of the Log Cabin Republicans and won their support, while "compassionate conservative" Bush assiduously avoided public discussion of LGBT issues as much as possible... until after the election.

Long Road to Victory, Part II

Part II: The Democrats Evolve

Happy Independence Day! It's Smackback Saturday here at Bergetoons, and we're reviewing the history of the debate over same-sex marriage. (Part I was this past Wednesday.)

Republicans had no problem forcefully proclaiming that they were four-square against marriage equality from the start, but the issue posed more of a dilemma for Democrats. Gays and lesbians had been shoring up their status within the Democratic party for many years by the time the issue came to prominence; but same-sex marriage did not poll well in the 1990's.

Defense/Definition of Marriage Acts (DOMAs) swept into law across the country; many states passed these as amendments to their constitutions in order to prevent the legal challenges that nearly brought marriage equality to Hawai'i. Fearful for their electoral careers, Democrats went along with this antigay tidal wave. As far as Republicans were concerned, it didn't hurt that these ballot measures brought their right-wing Christian soldiers to the polls in droves.

Having used the issue to electoral benefit in 2002, 2004, and off-year elections, Republicans kept pushing a federal constitutional amendment to limit marriages to one man and one woman This from 2002...

And this from 2004...

In an attempt at compromise, some pro-gay Democrats offered lesbians and gays legal arrangements that were sort of like marriage, but not quite. The state of Vermont was first to pass a Civil Union registry, which made its governor, Howard Dean, a darling to some LGBT Democrats.

"Civil Unions" and "Domestic Partnerships" allowed Democrats to offer some support to gay and lesbian couples while still holding out some hope of not being tarred and feathered in the next election as "destroying the Family." As we'll see in another installment of this series, the religious right and their political allies really had no interest in yielding a millimeter.

Lest we forget, during both of his campaigns for president, Barack Obama was reluctant to voice any support for marriage equality, in spite of a sterling record on other LGBT issues (and in spite of having indicated his "unequivocal" support in a candidate questionnaire for a Chicago LGBT newspaper back when he ran for the Illinois State Senate in 1996). I drew this cartoon in 2011, when he visited the Human Rights Campaign to tout his administration's record.

That changed -- but that's a topic for another day.

Hillary Clinton and the Old Ball and Chain

This week, Hillary Clinton came out in favor of marriage equality. As President, her husband had signed the "Defense of Marriage Act" which made marriage inequality a matter of federal law.

It's not the first time that Hillary has needed to distance herself from antigay legislation enacted during the Bill Clinton administration.

"Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Pursue" was billed as a means of allowing gay and lesbian service members to continue their military service, but it did not have that effect. As Bill learned only too well, keeping one's sexual activity a secret ain't as easily done as said.

(Cartoon drawn in December, 1999, but copyrighted in 2000 according to Q Syndicate dating conventions.)