2018 in Headlines

I've been taking photos of the year in newspaper front pages and magazine covers every December 31 for some 45 years now. These days, it's harder to get a comprehensive sampling, now that the local papers have ceded national news to the internet and hardly any newspapers play up international events.

So I have no banner headlines reporting the deadly tsunami in Indonesia, fascist victories in Brazil and elsewhere, the cock-up of Brexit, or the Saudi-Iranian proxy war in Yemen. There were devastating hurricanes, typhoons, and fires; was any one of them more important than the others?

Instead, this year's photo is dominated by the mercurial president of the United States and those "I hire the best people" in his cabinet discovering that he can't hear their advice over the rumblings of his gut.

Here, too, is a collage of my favorites of the cartoons I drew this year. I don't pretend for them to be a comprehensive review of the year, either. They're just the ones I happen to like right now. And since I didn't put them in a slide show, embiggenation is necessitatified.

Q Toon: The Importance of Bert and Ernie

This keeps coming up again and again, but I couldn't leave alone the latest report that a former writer for Sesame Street says he based Bert and Ernie scripts on his and his life partner's relationship.

So I don’t think I’d know how else to write them, but as a loving couple. I wrote sketches…Arnie’s OCD would create friction with how chaotic I was. And that’s the Bert & Ernie dynamic. ... How could it not permeate? The things that would tick off Arnie would be the things that would tick off Bert. How could it not?

The folks at Children's Television Workshop have protested that Bert and Ernie have no sexual orientation, because they're puppets. They just happen to have framed portraits of themselves in every room of their apartment.

It's not like they're Teletubbies, after all.

As I was hashing out this cartoon idea, the first decision came down to whether I would make reference to the 1968 Walter Matthau-Jack Lemmon movie version of the Neil Simon play, or the Jack Klugman-Tony Randall television show that ran from 1970 to 1975.

Only the next morning, after I had sent the cartoon off to my syndicate editors did I remember that there was a 2015-17 TV remake starring Matthew Perry (Friends) and Thomas Lennon (Reno 911!).  And until I went to look up Lennon's name a moment ago, I had completely forgotten that there was a 1982 TV version starring Ron Glass (WKRP in Cincinnati) and Desmond Morris (Sanford & Son), and even a 1998 Odd Couple II with Matthau and Lemmon.

None of those other versions used the voice-over explanation of the premise given in the opening credits of the '70s TV show, so I suppose the scene parodied in the cartoon is lost on a whole lot of readers.

As Freud once said, sometimes a cigar is just a rubber duckie.

The character of Felix Unger emits something of a gay vibe in most of Odd Couple's iterations, even though Neil Simon didn't conceive of him that way, and in spite of all the TV episodes in which Felix tries to date women even though he still pines for his ex-wife. A few years ago, we went to see a Milwaukee production of the play starring a local out gay celebrity, and I was a little surprised to see him in the Oscar Madison role. (But yes, some of us gays can be slobs, too, you know.)

Meanwhile, what's this thing going on between Rocky and Bulwinkle?

Q Toon: One of These Things Is Not Like the Other

This week's cartoon is for those queer readers who believe that marriage is an outdated social construct and who get upset with other gays and lesbians who want to buy into it. Some of those latter gays suggested last week that now that New York state sanctions same-sex marriage, it was time for Sesame Street's Bert and Ernie to make honest puppets of each other.

I was originally going to put Barbie's pal Ken into the cartoon -- an idea reinforced when my partner, Chris, ran across "Ken's Buddy, Allan" at a rummage sale last weekend.

Had I heard in time about Earring Magic Ken and Jewel Secrets Ken, I might have gone ahead with that plan. But it occurred to me that the folks at Mattel can be mighty protective of their trademarks, so I swapped out Ken for a fictional character who is half of a better known duo. Ken really isn't all that committed to Allan anyway, and is rarely seen with him in public any more.

And while Robin is a cartoon, not a puppet or doll, at least he lives in Gotham City, fairly near to Sesame Street -- unlike Ken, who lives way down in Malibu, I think.

So now I'm bracing for the blowback from DC Comics fans. I still remember getting an angry reaction from an "Laverne and Shirley" fan upset with a 1999 cartoon imagining that those two Milwaukeeans were still roommates nearly 40 years after the events of their TV show supposedly took place.