A Is For Avionics

While we're waiting for this week's cartoon, let's check in again with A Bird's Eye Look at the Postwar World and see who's parachuting in now.

In this cartoon (you can embiggen it before going on to read the rest of this sentence if you like) by Marvin Townsend, it's Junior coming home from school.

This is a long shot, but perhaps if baby boomers had indeed gotten to and from school in B-52s, there wouldn't have been such a fuss about busing back in the 1960s and 70s. Part of the argument against it, as I recall, hinged on what inordinate amounts of time kids ended up spending riding the bus across town and back again. Air bus flights would have drastically cut those travel times.

Of course, nowadays, the kids would have to arrive at the air bus station at least two hours before their scheduled flight in order to check their bookbags, be prescreened against no-fly lists, and line up to empty their pockets into the gray plastic tray and go through the body scanner.

By the way, check out the urban sprawl in this cartoon!

Q Toon: Q Wait

Kuwait has announced that it and other gulf emirates will institute medical test procedures to stop gays from entering their countries.

"Health centers conduct the routine medical check to assess the health of the expatriates when they come into the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] countries; however, we will take stricter measures that will help us detect gays who will be then barred from entering Kuwait or any of the GCC member states." -- Yousouf Mindkar, Director of Public Health at the Kuwaiti Health Ministry

Aside from Kuwait, the GCC member states are Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Bahrain, and 2022 World Cup host Qatar. There is already pressure to move the World Cup over this issue.

Meanwhile, how exactly the Kuwaitis intend to screen for The Gay has yet to be revealed. Those intrepid animators at Taiwanese News depict these medical test procedures as being even more invasive than I dared to.

This Week's Sneak Peek

It's the return of Airport Dude!

He's done a little manscaping, apparently.

Q Toon: Security Measures

There is an old saying that any two separate items constitute an editorial cartoon.

This week, I try for three.

This Week's Sneak Peek

I guess this week's cartoon has nothing to do with New York Congressman Anthony Weiner.

But if it did, it would probably be captioned "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dick."

Q Toon: Bon Voyage, with Benefits

This week's cartoon imagines how Tom of Finland's Kake would cope with U.S. airport security this Thanksgiving weekend.

I had considered casting in this cartoon the unnamed character who has appeared in two previous cartoons I drew for Q Syndicate on airport security -- last January and originally back in 2002. I had also thought about putting disgraced former New York Congressman Eric Massa in this cartoon, except that a.) it would be funnier to have him working as the TSA screener, if not for b.) hardly anybody remembers him any more.

Surely among those people who pick up the LGBT newspapers which carry my cartoons there will be some readers who recognize this Tom of Finland character and can imagine how the rest of this episode plays out.

Back to the airport

Eight years on, it's time to revisit airport security.

Sneak peek of the week

Eight years ago, I had this frivolous response to the Shoe Bomber Terrorist. ...