Unique New York

Since New York Governor Andrew Cuomo abruptly announced his resignation this week, I decided I would dig up some of my old cartoons about New York politics for today. 

They say if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. But try telling that to Thomas E. Dewey, Nelson Rockefeller, or this lady from one of Gotham's outer boroughs:

February, 1999

Or, for that matter, this gal from Flatbush:

Q Syndicate, May, 1999

New York politics can be pretty colorful, being so close under the bright lights of the national media as they are. Politicians from Brooklyn to Corning to Hyannisport to Little Rock are all drawn there, like moths to a flame.

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, Nov. 23, 2003

Somehow, I never drew any cartoons about Eliot Spitzer while he was governor of New York, in spite of his failed 2007 proposal to legalize same-sex marriage in the Empire State, or the sex scandal the following year which linked him to a high-priced prostitution organization and brought about his downfall.

The Business Journal, however, enlisted me to illustrate an editorial critical of him when he was New York Attorney General. The Beej had no love for the Democrat investigating Wall Street securities fraud cases that had been dropped by the federal Securities Exchange Commission.

Q Syndicate, April, 2009

This is an example of a cartoon that misfired badly.

Spitzer's successor, David Paterson, also took up the cause of marriage equality; but his proposal to legalize same-sex marriage caught marriage equality advocates unprepared. My cartoon to illustrate that could have used a second panel showing those advocates "scrambling to get into their tuxedoes"; as drawn, however, some readers understandably read it as a knock on the legally blind Paterson.

Marriage equality failed in the New York State Senate that year, eight Democrats joining all 30 Republicans to vote nay.

Q Syndicate, March, 2010

This cartoon came to mind last week when Steve Brodner noted on Facebook that Andrew Cuomo still has a $5.1 million book deal pending; Brodner invited his followers to submit possible book titles, saying that he would illustrate the best one. If I hadn't already drawn this cartoon about New York Congressman Eric Massa, forced to resign over allegations that he sexually harassed male staffers, I might be waiting to see if it would get the Brodner treatment.

Q Syndicate, June, 2011

You may have forgotten Eric Massa, but I'll bet most of you remember fellow Congresscritter Anthony "What's In A Name" Weiner. You might also sense a theme on what it takes to bring a New York politician down.

Q Syndicate, June, 2011

Before my cartoon in last Saturday's post, this was the only cartoon I had ever drawn of Governor Andrew Cuomo. Soon after taking office as Governor, Cuomo was able to succeed where Spitzer and Paterson had failed, signing the Marriage Equality Act into law on June 24, 2011. A certain President of the United States at the time was still reluctant to come that far.

Which would bring us to another recent President of the United States... you know... the one who expected to be reinaugurated yesterday...

But he was never actually a New York politician.

And the less said about him, the better.

August on the Ones

To follow last Saturday's post of cartoons published on August 1, 1921, here are some of my cartoons from August 1991, 2001, and 2011.

I would have liked to start this post with cartoons from August of 1981, but it looks like I didn't draw any. That's probably not entirely true; my best friend and I used to have a game called "Kill the Character" in those days. One of us would draw a person, either a caricature of a real person, comic character, or just some random anybody, and then we would take turns adding bad things happening to him/her on the page.

But I didn't keep any of those sketches, so I'll have to start with a cartoon from August of 1991 instead.

in Journal Times, Racine Wis., August 23, 1991

I've re-run this cartoon before linking the failed Soviet coup against President Mikhail Gorbachev with Milwaukee Police Union displeasure with Police Chief Philip Arreola. The first Latino-American to hold his position, his firing of the three officers who returned a wounded 14-year-old boy, Konerak Sinphantomphone, to Jeffrey Dahmer to finish killing him (and who failed to notice the rotting corpse in the bedroom) rankled the rank and file. Arreola did, however, last five more years as head of the department.

Thirty years later, Milwaukee is just now resolving the demotion of another Latino Chief of Police, Alfonso Morales. I've never quite understood what the Common Council's reasoning was for demoting him to Captain last August; apparently, the courts couldn't understand it, either, and ordered the City to reinstate him as Chief. After a week or so of pushing back the effective date of his reinstatement, Milwaukee agreed to pay him a $627,000 settlement and Morales agreed to move on.

for Q Syndicate, August, 2001

Jumping ahead ten years, I've re-run this cartoon before, too — if not in the current blog, then on my old GeoCities page. It upset some Michigan readers who came to the defense of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, an annual event hystorically limited to womyn-born-womyn.

I don't recall anyone objecting to my use of the word "transgendered" twice in the cartoon, however. That word is officially frowned upon, "transgender" being a noun or an adjective but not a verb.

Once upon a time, "lesbigay" was the term of art for the community; transgender people gradually got the "T" appended to LGBT. But even though more and more letters keep getting added onto our increasingly awkward acronym, the transgender community still finds itself unwelcome in some LGBT-IAA2SQQ+ circles. 

Part of the womyn-born-womyn's objection to having transgender persons at this particular festival is, as I understand it, that people there enjoy the freedom to wear as little clothing and as much body paint as they please. (So I've heard.) What they don't enjoy is having non-womyn-born-womyn genitalia anywhere on display.

I can respect that; yet I have to wonder whether the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival Board is comfortable with the Republican social injustice warriors taking their exclusionary policy cues from them.

August, 2011

Leaping ahead another ten years, we find gaffe-prone Minnesota Congresscritter Michele Bachmann exhorting attendees at a campaign rally to wish Elvis Pressley a happy birthday. It happened to be the anniversary of his death.

The King could not be reached for comment.

✍

Well, since I couldn't dig up anything from August of 1981, here's a cartoon from all the way back on the day before yesterday.

Q Toon: Start Spreading the News

Good news is always hard to draw a cartoon about. Someone slipping on a banana peel on the sidewalk is funny. Someone finding a dollar on the sidewalk is not.

Such was the case with this week's cartoon, following the late-night passage of marriage equality in the state of New York. The obvious cartoon ideas were quickly taken by non-cartoonists: parade goers at New York City's gay pride parade sang all the New York songs, and numerous Facebook users changed their profile picture to the iconic "I (heart) NY" graphic.

So naturally, I was thrilled to come up with an idea well into Sunday evening that would require drawing a big crowd with a cityscape in the background. (As an added challenge, I had mislaid my smooth finish bristol board and had to use some vellum finish board I had once bought by mistake; vellum finish is fine for pencil and charcoal, but not the best surface for quill pen and ink.)

Drawing people is fun, although making them all look like they belong in the same picture can be a challenge -- especially if they're hoisting someone on their shoulders, walking arm in arm, etc. Drawing buildings, however, is flat-out boring. You have to draw lots and lots of identical windows (in perspective), straight lines, flat shading, and maybe even some molding, but not include so much detail that it all overwhelms the foreground.

It shows that it was after midnight when I finished inking all those people and turned my attention to the background. I finally put my pen down around 1:00 a.m., then went to bed and slept like crap for the next five hours, and spent the next day working very hard at not being mean and crabby to people. (I've suffered for my craft; now it's your turn.)

This Week's Sneak Peek

Well, there goes what little modicum of suspense there ever was over what this week's cartoon might possibly be about.