New to My Comic Book Collection

Today's installment of Sketchback Saturday takes the form of a book report.

A few months ago, I pre-ordered Bill Sanders's forthcoming retrospective of his editorial cartooning career. I have both of the books published while he was the cartoonist for The Milwaukee Journal. Head for the Oval Room deals primarily the Nixon administration, some of which is also repeated in The Sanders Book. The latter book includes cartoons not only about the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations, but about Wisconsin and Milwaukee issues as well.

I'm looking forward to receiving the new book, which promises cartoons from his retiree years, but also examples of Sanders's early career with Stars and Stripes, The Greensboro Daily News, and The Kansas City Star. Given how different in style his Milwaukee cartoons are from his earlier work, it should be interesting to see how that evolution took place.

"How Much Are We Really Involved Here" by Bill Sanders in Greensboro Daily News, ca. March, 1962

When I pre-ordered Against the Grain, I browsed around amazon.com to see if there was anything else I'd be interested in, finding Jim Morin's 2016 collection from his 40+ years with The Miami Herald. I've long been fascinated by his distinctive cross-hatch style, which I'd describe as David Levine meets "Ding" Darling.

One of the more intriguing facets of Morin's book is how its date of publication influenced his choice of cartoons. In particular, there are a handful of cartoons about Donald Trump's brief campaign in 1999 for the presidential nomination of H. Ross Perot's Reform Party. Editorial cartoon books take up two and a half shelves of my bookcase, and although three or four of those books deal specifically with the year 1999, Jim Morin's World is the first book I've seen to devote any ink to Trump's short-lived flirtation with presidential politics that year.

I have to say that I barely took any notice of Candidate Trump at the time, myself; my editors at Q Syndicate, the Milwaukee Business Journal, and the Racine Journal Times probably wouldn't have been interested in cartoons about him anyway. Had Jim Morin published his book a year earlier, I suspect none of his Donald Trump cartoons would have made the cut for this book, so it's fortuitous that he had a chance to dig up his material about a nearly forgotten episode from when the current president first dipped his toes into political waters.

"Looks Like His Last Trip to Moscow Just Backfired" by Jim Morin in Miami Herald, June, 1985.

As another example of how the date of publication influences choice of material, the above cartoon is not in Morin's book. I'm not advocating for this particular cartoon, merely noting that it might have been included if this were a book about the Reagan years, since Nicaragua was a BFD in the 1980s. The Iran-Contra scandal, which hinged in part on a White House scheme to circumvent Congress to send arms to right-wing guerrillas in the Central American country, threatened to bring down the Reagan administration, but rates only two cartoons in this book. Nowadays, we only hear about Nicaragua when it gets hit by an earthquake or hurricane, so it's of less interest today.

Besides, there was so much else going on in the 1980s, even without a president tweeting all his brain farts every morning. If anyone is still publishing editorial cartoon memoirs thirty years from now, there will be an awful lot that seems of tremendous import today that will end up on the cutting room floor tomorrow.

Another cartooning memoir recent to my collection is The First and Only Book of Sack (only available from the Star Tribune and currently only on back order) by Steve Sack, featuring the best of his cartoons for the Minneapolis Star Tribune from 1981 to 2017. It's too bad that he didn't also include his older cartoons for The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, such as the one below. Mr. Sack is not a packrat, however, and it's extremely unlikely that foraging through his Indiana cartoons would have turned up any early drawings of Mike Pence, who, after all, was still in college at the time.

"Jump!" by Steve Sack in Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, August, 1980

From a cartoonist's standpoint, one of the joys of this book is to watch how Sack has adapted his style to evolving technologies. Sack has been an early adopter of computerized drawing techniques, ditching the extensive pen and ink crosshatching of his early work in favor of a succession of various media: charcoal, sharpie, watercolor, digital tablet, and iPad. Through it all remains a distinctive touch unlike that of anyone else in the biz.

Due to its publication date, Sack's book includes a handful of cartoons about Senator Al Franken (who also wrote the first of the book's four forewords) and one of Garrison Keillor, but none which reflect either man's #TimesUp fall from grace. The Keillor cartoon is especially unintentionally ironic, depicting the Prairie Home Companion host hiding out from a horde of sex-crazed women. The original context of the cartoon was that Keillor had been named one of Playgirl's Sexiest Men Alive in 1986. (Sack observes that one of the other men on that year's list was Donald Trump).

Such is the risk in any collection of topical writing; editorial cartoons almost always have an ephemeral quality to them. (Just check out any cartoon about Herbert Hoover before October, 1929.) I don't imagine that Sack's book is on back order because he's slipping in some hasty updates, because he'd just have to do it again in a matter of months.

We'll just have to wait until The First and Only Book's sequel.

Q Toon: Last Man Standing

Adding Matt Lauer and Garrison Keillor to the list of disgraced sexual shenanigangsters, I believe we're getting dangerously close to witnessing any more allegations just becoming so much background noise.

Either that, or unless women suddenly decide to adopt the chador or habit as everyday dress, men are going to be forced to wear thick woolen mittens at all times. And pants which sound an alarm whenever dropped below the waist.

No, I'm pretty sure this will all blow over and everything will go back to status quo ante.

You don't think so?

I caught part of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor celebration of David Letterman on PBS last week. Senator Al Franken had been the first presenter in the ceremony, but because of the recent accusations against him of sexually improper behavior, the telecast edited out his appearance and the part of Letterman's acceptance speech in which he paid tribute to Franken. Franken is also missing from the list on the Kennedy Center's web site of the evening's featured speakers.

I couldn't help thinking how ironic it was that Letterman was publicly humiliated by a sexual impropriety scandal of his own only eight years ago.

Q Toon: Leahy Amendment

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) last week introduced an amendment to the immigration reform bill which would recognize the relationships between American and non-American same-sex couples. While marriage to Mark Sanford would automatically make his Argentinian girlfriend eligible for U.S. citizenship, the same is not now afforded to the foreign nationals who marry a person of the same sex in any of the twelve states where such marriages are recognized.

Republicans -- notably closet case Lindsey Graham (R-SC) -- quickly announced that they couldn't support the bill with the Leahy amendment in it, and erstwhile Democratic LGBT allies from Diane Feinstein to Al Franken to Chuck Schumer immediately signaled that they wouldn't support the amendment, either. With President Obama reportedly also urging him to drop the issue, Senator Leahy withdrew his amendment.

“It’s hard for me to look at two couples in Vermont, both legally married, [and] say to one, ‘We can help you with your immigration problems,’ but to the other one, ‘Sorry, the law requires us to discriminate against you.’ But the Republicans made very clear that they would defeat the whole immigration bill if that amendment was in there,” Leahy said. 

Republican opposition to LGBT couples is hardly surprising -- breaking up our families is a longstanding priority of their party -- but the utter lack of any support from Leahy's fellow Democrats is more than disappointing:

Steve Rawls, spokesman for Immigration Equality, a Washington-based group that has been pushing the issue, had high praise for Leahy on Friday, but the opposite for other Democrats.
“We expected Republican opposition, but we also expected other Democrats to stand with Senator Leahy and pledge their support for our families,” Rawls said. “And the fact they didn’t was just disgraceful.”

I don't often have occasion to draw cartoons critical of Democrats these days, the alternative to them being so thoroughly, horrifically offensive. So make a note of this week's cartoon. I am unlikely to draw many more like it.

When I Met Al Franken

Now that Minnesota's senatorial election has at long last been settled, the truth can finally be told.

I met Al Franken in 1980, when we were both supporting a Republican candidate for President. I was a junior at St. Olaf College, a Lutheran liberal arts college across Northfield, Minnesota from Carleton College. Minnesota's presidential caucuses that year would be held on the same day as the New Hampshire primary; then as now, New Hampshire got the overwhelming majority of the media and candidates' attention. After all, local party members around Minnesota were only electing delegates to the next round of state caucuses.

Like many college students that winter, I supported John Anderson for president. Canvassing for the Republican party, I found very few Republicans who supported the eventual nominee, Ronald Reagan; in fact, some Republicans told me they were horrified at the prospect of his nomination. College students, particularly St. Olaf students, overwhelmed the Northfield caucus on election day, producing a lopsided supermajority for Anderson. (George H.W. Bush came in second, Reagan a distant third.) By the time the state caucus was held, Republicans who didn't live in college towns turned the state delegation solidly for Reagan, but that's getting way afield of this story.

Back to preparing for the caucuses. While Anderson, Bush, Reagan, John Connally, Howard Baker and Phil Crane were busily campaigning in New Hampshire, they sent surrogates to Minnesota. Anderson's surrogate to college campuses was Al Franken, a Minnesota-bred writer on Saturday Night Live. He appeared on the show in a deconstruction of comedy team conventions, playing Costello/Lewis/Tom to the Abbott/Martin/Dick of Tom Davis. The bit would open with an animated caricature of the Franken and Davis duo.

The guys running the St. Olaf campaign for John Anderson approached me in advance of a visit to the campus by Al Franken to ask me to draw a poster advertising the event. The obvious idea to me was to draw a take-off of the Franken & Davis cartoon, substituting John Anderson's head on the lankier Tom Davis body. My problem was that when Saturday Night Live was broadcast that weekend, there was no Franken & Davis bit on the show. And with no internet, Hulu, or even video casette to refer to, I had to draw the cartoon completely (except for the easily found pictures of Anderson) from memory.


My fellow students thought my cartoon was just swell anyway, and got the idea that when Franken came to campus, I should present the poster to him. They arranged for the presentation to take place at lunch in the school cafeteria. What any of us thought Mr. Franken would want with the black marker drawing on 3.5' by 2' blue poster board is anybody's guess. What happened was this.

Franken took a look at the poster and made a comment that it was almost, but not quite right. With a magic marker, he then drew an e-NORRRRRRR-mous phallus protruding from his crotch, right across John Anderson and into the advertising copy.

I'm pretty sure he didn't keep the poster. I know I didn't. Maybe somebody in the Students for Anderson group held onto it for a semester or so. We certainly didn't bring it to the caucus.