Edwina Dumm, Dog Lady

Comic Con has announced new inductees to the Will Eisner Hall of Fame this year, including Edwina Dumm (1893-1990), one of the earliest women in the field of American cartooning. The Graphical History Tour highlighted Dumm in our Women's History Month episode a few years ago; since she is about to be enshrined in a hall of fame, let's highlight her again.

Dumm started out drawing editorial cartoons (among other things), as reported in the May 7, 1921 edition of The Fourth Estate, a publishing industry journal: "Edwina started her career at the Columbus (Ohio) Monitor, a weekly at that time and later a daily, now defunct. At that time she drew political cartoons."

I have not been able to find any on-line archive of the Columbus Monitor, but I have found two of her editorial cartoons in Cartoons Magazine. She was the all-purpose cartoonist for the Monitor from its first edition in August, 1915, (her editorial cartoons went unsigned until that November).

This is from an article in Cartoons Magazine's January, 1916 edition introducing her to her colleagues.

"Adrift and Handicapped" by Edwina Dumm in Columbus Saturday Monitor, ca. Dec., 1915

"It is not often that the ladies make a success of political cartooning, but Miss Edwina Dunn [sic.] of the Columbus Saturday Monitor, refuses to be handicapped by precedent. No subject is too big for her to wrestle with, and she interprets world events in real masculine cartoons."

In a feature article one year later, Cartoons Magazine got her name right.

"Father, Dear Father, Come Home with Me Now" by Edwina Dumm in Columbus Daily Monitor, ca. Dec., 1916

"She had always wanted to be a cartoonist, so she went to work to pay for an art education, thus showing a lot of spunk and independence. She is quite old, being in her early twenties, and is the daughter of a newspaper man."

According to her biography at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum, at the start of her cartooning at the Monitor, Dumm relied on her father — the paper's editor — for political information. After he suffered a stroke, she found inspiration from her friends, including some serving in the military. She later told an interviewer, "I thought you had to know a lot about the politics of the past... [but] all you had to know at that time — and possibly today — was what was going on that day and the policy of the paper."

The Monitor ceased publication in 1917, whereupon she moved to New York City and pitched a comic strip she had drawn for the Monitor to the George Matthew Adams Syndicate. "The Meanderings of Minnie" was about a tomboy and her dog; she and the editors agreed to change the girl to a boy, and "'Cap' Stubbs and Tippie" was born.

"'Cap' Stubbs" by Edwina Dunn for George Matthew Adams Service, March 4, 1918

ibid.

A Local Girl Makes Good article in Marion [OH] Daily Star on Feb. 20, 1918, states that "now she will have a daily comic strip in some of the leading newspapers of the country, including the Boston Globe and the Pittsburgh Post. ... It deals with kid life, humor, thrills, action and human nature." The earliest examples of the strip I can find were in neither of those two newspapers, but both published on March 4, 1918: the top one in Rock Island [IL] Argus, the lower one in Beaumont [TX] Journal. 

(This was not at all unusual for comic strips when the cartoonist didn't write a date in the cartoon. Editors received a bundle of cartoons at once, perhaps a week's worth, and printed them in whatever order they wanted.)

Advertisement in Morning Post, Camden NJ, March 8, 1926 (also in Camden Courier, March 6, 1926)

100 years ago this month, her comic strip, "'Cap' Stubbs and Tippie," was finding a new home in the Morning Post of Camden, New Jersey. In a note to Morning Post readers, Cap, the boy starring in the strip, explained, "You know, we useta live there at the Currier [sic.] about 4 (four) yrs. ago. Well, we come back today, but we ain't gonna live at the Currier, but at the Mornin' Post, which I hears is a New Brother to the Currier, or something."

Women cartoonists being very much a rarity in the 1920's, The copy headlined "Meet Edwina, Too" leaned into her gender as a selling feature:

"You can regard this as confidential or not, as you please. Edwina, who draws ‘Cap’ Stubbs, is a girl.

"The male members of the comic profession are falling over flat on their backs to see a MERE girl running off with the honor of what is undoubtedly the truest-to-life humorous strip depicting the every-minute experiences of a boy and his dog.

"When we reveal Edwina's identity to anybody who has studied her comic strip for several weeks, the usual comment is, 'Impossible! A girl couldn't draw such a good strip about boys and dogs!'

"All we can say is, 'Well, she does.'

"And how Edwina can draw dogs! Your ordinary newspaper cartoonist can only draw one side of a dog, and that's all. Most of them can draw a dog going South. But Edwina can draw the ANATOMY of a dog.

"And so there is real drawing in 'Cap' Stubbs, and in the other people in Edwina's pictures. None of the tricks and short cuts of conventional comic art are evident in her work."

I have no idea what ordinary newspapers cartoonist Ms. Dumm (a "MERE girl" of 32 years) or her publicist were dissing. 

"'Cap' Stubbs" by Edwina Dumm for Geo. Matthew Adams Service, March 1, 1926

Dumm's strip occasionally spread a story arc over several days, as in a series of strips in which Cap's mother and grandmother had been planning a tea party. In these cases, it did make a difference in what order they were printed.

"'Cap Stubbs" by Edwina Dumm for Geo. Matthew Adams Service, March 2, 1926

Other times, the day's strip was a one-off. Either way, it's unlikely that the Cap Stubbs fans in Camden New Jersey needed much time catching up with the four years of Cap Stubbs strips that they had missed after the Courier had dropped the feature.

"'Cap' Stubbs" by Edwina Dumm for Geo. Matthew Adams Svc., March 8, 1926

Cap was a sometimes ornery boy who got into minor trouble every so often, always with his dog by his side. A girl friend of his appeared in the strip from time to time, but Cap was a bit young to have a girlfriend. The women in his house figured more prominently than his father, mostly because they were around the house most of the time and Milt Stubbs had a job somewhere.

"'Cap' Stubbs" by Edwina Dumm for Geo. Matthew Adams Service, March 18, 1926

You may have noticed that the credit line for Cap Stubbs was always "By Edwina." That was certainly intentional, and she kept it that way throughout her career. 

Dumm was not the only woman cartoonist in the 1920's, as remarkable as her accomplishment was. Fay King was perhaps the most famous in the day; Juanita Hamel and Nell Brinkley drew stylish panels for newspapers' "Women's Page"; Barbara Shermund achieved fame as the "flapper cartoonist" for several popular magazines; and Virginia Huget would be the artist behind the comic adaptation of  Anita Loos's "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" debuting on June 7, 1926.

"'Cap' Stubbs" by Edwina Dumm for Geo. Matthew Adams Service, March 31, 1926

Tippie didn't have much to do in these strips from 100 years ago. He didn't speak, you can't read his thoughts, and he didn't fantasize about flying a Sopwith Camel in World War I. He pretty much just followed Cap around on his adventures.

"'Cap' Stubbs" by Edwina Dumm for Geo. M. Adams Service, March 29, 1926

Dumm's strip was a Monday-through-Saturday feature to begin with. Once a Sunday color comic was added in 1934, the additional newspaper real estate opened up more opportunities for Tippie to take center stage.

"Tippie and 'Cap' Stubbs" by Edwina Dumm for Geo. M. Adams Service, March 29, 1956

Eventually, Tippie got top billing in Edwina Dumm's strip. Even if the basic gags had similar premises.

"Tippie and 'Cap' Stubbs" by Edwina Dumm for Geo. M. Adams Svc., March 31, 1956

Although apparently the dog wanted to go to Washington D.C. for some reason.

Meanwhile, in 1931, Dumm launched another canine-centric cartoon feature, "Alec the Great," a one-column-wide drawing of a little puppy (very similar to the later, shaggier Tippie) over quaint little couplets written by her brother Robert. The Miami Herald introduced it to readers in 1936: 

"Alec the Great is a puppy. A rollicking happy-go-lucky, awkward pup that steals his way into your heart, and makes you want to cuddle him or give him a piece of hamburger and a pat on the head. Alec is waiting to welcome you on the editorial page of the Herald. He's a regular there."

"Alec the Great" by Edwina & Robert Dumm for Geo. M. Adams Svc., March 29, 1936

The Herald was one of several papers that used "Alec the Great" to break up the type on their otherwise gray editorial page; other papers relegated it to the classified ads for the same purpose.

"Alec the Great" by Edwina & Robert Dumm for Geo. M. Adams Svc., March 30, 1936

As if Tippie and Alec the Great weren't enough, Dumm also contributed cartoons about a dog named Sinbad to Life magazine. If it's Sinbad in this 1929 cartoon, it was before a readers' contest gave him a name.

"Gee, I'm So Hungry, I Could Eat a Sandwich Man" by Edwina Dumm in Life, Jan. 18, 1929

Here's Sinbad, and I have to say he looks mighty familiar. So does Grandma.

"Sinbad/I'm Sorry" by Edwina Dumm in Life, Aug. 8, 1930

Edwina Dumm never married. When she first moved to New York, she roomed with and collaborated with singer-composer Helen Thomas, and you can a make of that (and "The Meanderings of Minnie") what you will. Living in New York has never been inexpensive. 

She retired from cartooning Tippie and Alec in 1966.

The last installment of "Tippie and 'Cap' Stubbs" by Edwina Dunn for Washington Star Syndicate, Sept. 3, 1966

Inducted into the National Cartoonists Society in 1950, she received the Gold Key Award from the NCS Hall of Fame in 1987, the first of only two women to receive this honor. (The other was Bunny Hoest of "The Lockhorns," in 2013.)

Edwina Dumm died in New York on April 27, 1990, at age 96.

The 2-Point Conversion of St. Paul's Sneak Peek

I'm introducing a new character into the Max & Leo series this week. It's a two-parter, and probably not a three-week series, since, as Benjamin Franklin once quoted Jonah's Nineveh hosts, "Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days."

By the way, I've got to take care of a little editorial housekeeping here. In Saturday’s Graphical History post, I asserted that the first cartoon appearance of Uncle Sam was in 1832, and it behooves me to back up that claim in case some artificially intelligent future researcher ever credits me as an authority. 

My reference is The Ungentlemanly Art: The History of American Editorial Cartoons by Stephen Hess and David Kaplan (1968), which in turn cites The Rise and Fall of Cartoon Symbols by William Murrell in The American Scholar, Summer, 1935, pp. 310-311. The text of the Hess-Kaplan book (page 35) says that the cartoon below was published in 1832; the citation in the index (page 178) says it was in 1834.

"Uncle Sam in Danger," cartoonist unknown, 1832 or 1834

I think you'll agree that this is not an Uncle Sam readers today would recognize if he weren't named in the cutline.

Toon: Quite Piggy

A short while ago, I suggested the possibility that perhaps it was time for me to retire drawing Donald Old Major Trump with a pig snout.

And now he goes and snaps "Quiet, Piggy!" at a female reporter for deigning to ask him about his name appearing many, many times in the Epstein e-mails released the other day. To paraphrase something I read in the blogosphere this morning, every time you think his regime has hit rock bottom, a trap door opens.

I decided to use Miss Columbia in my cartoon. She used to be the most common cartoon representation of this country, even before Uncle Sam, although she might not be familiar to any of you who were born after, oh, 1945. Especially drawn from behind like this.

My alternative choices were Lady Liberty and the statue of Justice. But neither represent the U.S. in its entirety, only particular aspects of it, so I went with Columbia.

And the pig snout remains for the foreseeable future.

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This is not this week's Q Toon; I plan to post it somewhat later than usual tomorrow just to give this cartoon a little time to breathe.

This Week's Sneak Peek

I was a bit miffed by how last week's cartoon looked on my phone.

Many of my cartoons consist of four equally-sized panels, but there were five panels of different sizes last week. If you were reading it on a desktop computer, each panel should have shown up equally tall; on my phone, however, they were equally wide. 

I stack the cartoon panels for this blog instead of displaying each cartoon as a single graphic solely for the benefit of those of you who visit here by phone, which seems to be how most people interact with the internet these days. I'm just trying to save phone readers the bother of pinching and expanding. 

We aim to please.

So it was disappointing to see the top panel of my cartoon scrunched down so that folks had to pinch and expand it anyway.

It's even embarrassing, since Blogger tells me I have an uptick in usual readership in the last couple of weeks. (For reasons I can only guess at, the second most frequent referrer to my blog after Google has been a fast food burger chain's website.) To those of you who aren't webcrawlers, welcome. Heck, welcome, you webcrawlers, too. Have it your way.

I'll be back to the four equally-sized panel format this week.

Ding Ding Ding: Late Breaking Correction

"The Comeback" by Ed LeCocq for Des Moines Register, ca. April 26, 1925

In a recent Graphical History Tour of editorial cartoons eulogizing Fighting Bob LaFollette, I had wondered why I couldn't find an example by the Des Moines Register's Jay Norwood "Ding" Darling, a frequent LaFollette critic. Nor could I find a cartoon by him during the Scopes Monkey Trial and the subsequent passing of William Jennings Bryan. Instead, the Register had been running cartoons by Edward C. LeCocq.

I can now report that Darling was laid low for several months in 1925 with peritonitis, according to updates on the Register front page in March and April.

The University of Iowa library identifies the above LeCocq cartoon as having appeared in the Register on Sunday, April 26, 1925, which is the date on the clipping from a Tribune somewhere. I'm not finding it in the Register on that date or any other that month.

Darling's last cartoon before taking sick appeared on March 23, 1925. For a few weeks thereafter, the Register had no editorial cartoon on its front page; its March 24 front page included a boxed notice that "Due to the illness of Jay N. Darling (Ding), the cartoons will be omitted temporarily from the first page of The Register."

After a few weeks, the Register front page sported a few syndicated cartoons by Winsor McCay and Rollin Kirby. It ran the first of LeCocq's cartoons on April 19; he was soon drawing daily editorial cartoons for the front page for the rest of the year.

"If You Don't Think the World Moves, Just Try Stopping for a Year" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, April 5, 1926

Darling finally returned to the Register's front page on April 5, 1926, along with his editor's report that

Jay N. Darling, "Ding," returns to the Register's front page this morning with the first cartoon he has drawn after more than a year's absence. Mr. Darling has completely recovered his health, following the serious illness with peritonitis with which he was stricken March 19, 1925. Ed LeCocq, the young cartoonist who substituted for Mr. Darling, will draw cartoons for the Evening Tribune.

(Side note: the Des Moines Evening Tribune-News would not have been the source of the cartoon at the top of this post; it did not publish on Sundays.)

Everything New Is Old Again

I've been noticing something coming up again and again in some cartoons on the internet. See if you can figure it out.

Exhibit A:

Cut Stone Pizzeria Facebook post, May 2, 2025

Exhibit B:

Unknown on @DOD Rapid Response, May , 2025

Exhibit C:

Devin Duke? on @sirdukedevin, May 4, 2025

Exhibit D:

by "Thorne" on Disobey In Advance, May 1, 2025

Exhibit E:

by Darrin Bell on Disobey in Advance, April 25

Exhibit F:

by Dario Castillejos on Cagle.com, May 3

These are but three examples of a filtering style that I've been seeing on social media platforms over the past couple of weeks. At first, I was sure that they were being created by Artificial Intelligence — as the first two examples, from an area pizzeria and the Pete Hegseth fanboi page most certainly are. (While it wouldn't be unusual for a pen-and-ink or stylus-and-pixel cartoonist to draw a U.S. flag with 12 stripes and 37 stars, I doubt any human would have painted Hegseth's pinky the color of his suitcoat.)

I found Exhibit C on the X page of one Devin Duke, and it may be his work or just some meme he reposted from somewhere else. AI either way? I'll save my internet sleuthing for other things.

Exhibits D through F are the work of actual flesh and blood cartoonists* whose professional colleagues would almost unanimously look down upon them if they were caught resorting to AI. (I will give them the benefit of the doubt that they have not done so.)

"The Modern Arnolds" by J.S. Pughe in Puck, June 17, 1908

Now, I know that filters to give your photo an old-timey look are readily available on Instagram and any two-kilobit photo editing software since the DOS-it-yourself days.

My question is: what is the thinking behind actual flesh-and-blood cartoonists deliberately tinting their work to look like it fell through a hole in time to be published in one of the illustrated magazines of over a century ago? Is it supposed to convey the sense that we have returned to a Second Gilded Age?

Or are the Trump tariffs on Canadian paper forcing cartoonists to draw on old newsprint?

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* I know nothing of this "Thorne" behind the cartoon published on Darrin Bell's Disobey In Advance Substack. I apologize if I am jumping to unwarranted conclusions here: while I can understand why Mr. Bell might wish to have his opinions considered without being tainted by his current legal troubles, a number of us cartoonists are on record as having ridiculed another editorial cartoonist — at the other end of the political spectrum — who published while hiding behind the pseudonym "Rivers."

There is a long history of political cartoonists signing their work with pen names other than their given names, especially out of fear of retaliation by a repressive government (and the current Trump regime qualifies as such). The reasons for adopting a pseudonym might have been much less serious; I think of Wayne Stayskal moonlighting as a sports cartoonist "Trim"; and Tom Curtis drawing for National Review as "Obadiah," perhaps to sidestep an exclusivity arrangement with the Milwaukee Sentinel.

Heck, cartooning under a nickname is an honored tradition in Britain — Poy, Trog, Dyke White, Kem, Tac, Thack, Lees, Wal, Pix, and Hengest, to pseudoname but a few.

But in the case of "Rivers," the man had cartooned for years using his own name before deciding to pretend to be someone else. Frankly, it had the faint odor of dishonesty about it, which lingered over everything he drew. It's not as if the rest of us ink/pixel slingers couldn't recognize his handiwork.

Alias at your own risk.

Q Toon: A Message from Don Trumpleone

Just when I hoped I could take a break from drawing cartoons criticizing the Trump regime, they pull me back in...

In the spirit of March Madness, the Trump Maladministration has been doing a full-court press against academia, arresting and deporting students and faculty.

Of particular interest to LGBTQ+ collegians (and perhaps my readers at Philadelphia Gay News), the Trumpsters also successfully pressured the University of Pennsylvania to reverse its policy allowing a transgender athlete to compete as her true self.

WASHINGTON -- The Trump administration has suspended approximately $175 million in federal funding for the University of Pennsylvania over the participation of a transgender athlete in its swimming program, the White House said Wednesday. [17.5% of UPenn's total federal funding]

The Ivy League school has been facing an Education Department investigation focusing on in its swimming program. That inquiry was announced last month immediately after President Donald Trump signed an executive order intended to ban transgender athletes from competing in girls' and women's sports.

But the federal money was suspended in a separate review of discretionary federal money going to universities, the White House said. The money that was paused came from the Defense Department and the Department of Health and Human Services.

The Education Department, or what little is left of it, has also opened reviews of San Jose State University volleyball and the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association.

UPenn is the alma mater of swimmer Lia Thomas, who won a Division I title for the school in 2022. Having begun the process of gender reassignment after the onset of puberty, she has since been barred from further athletic competition by World Aquatics, and has been ineligible to compete in  trials for next year's Olympic games. Trump maladministration diktat will, of course, force all transgender youth to wait until adulthood to align their outer gender with their inner one.

Another Trumpster offer UPenn couldn't refuse resulted in the firing of Lecturer Dwayne Booth, who draws under the nom de toon Mr. Fish. Booth has incurred right-wing ire for publishing cartoons critical of the Netanyahu government's wholesale slaughter of Palestinians — especially the one in this blog post. (Nota bene: If one is going to draw Israeli government officials drinking wine, it had better be Chablis or Pinot Grigio.)

The above is only a hint of the authoritarian police state that the U.S. has now become under Trump. His ICE is now disappearing legal residents of this country who have deigned to speak up on behalf of the Palestinian people: Khalil Mahmoud at Columbia, Badar Khan Suri at Georgetown, and Rumeysa Ozturk at Tufts for just three examples (Mahmoud for organizing campus protests; Suri because of his father-in-law's former association with Hamas; Ozturk merely for co-authoring an op-ed). 

The Trumpsters promise more such extra-judicial arrests, and want universities to ban the wearing of masks in order for police surveillance to identify anyone else attempting to exercise their right of free speech. Only the arresting agents from Homeland Security are entitled to keep their faces hidden.

For now, they have been disappearing foreign-born protesters and op-editorialists who mistook the United States for a free country. But at some point, the shadowy, masked government goons jumping out of black vans will be abducting native-born citizens for daring to voice thoughtcrime, too.

Churchill: A Life in Cartoons

This week's Graphical History Tour is yet another book report: just in time for the 150th anniversary of Winston Churchill's birth, cartoon historian Tim Benson offers over 300 editorial cartoons from the British wartime leader's career in Churchill: A Life in Cartoons.

Back in October, I was curious about an Arthur G. Racey cartoon from 1924 that held up Churchill's propensity for wearing hats as something out of the ordinary, even though just about everybody wore hats in those days. The mystery is explained in Benson's introduction to the book: at the dawn of Churchill's career, cartoonists thought that unlike his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, he lacked "the features which lent themselves to easily recognisable conventional treatment" (— cartoonist Francis Carruthers Gould, August, 1904). 

Benson writes that heeding the advice of Gould and other cartoonists,

"Churchill started wearing a variety of hats, all of which were distinctive in that they were too small for his head. Churchill once claimed that this was a deliberate strategy, beginning in 1910 when he caused a stir by donning a felt cap several sizes too small in front of photographers."

"Our Choice of Political Leaders" by Victor Weisz in News Chronicle, London, Nov. 23, 1945

He later adopted the cigar (never smoked down more than an inch) and the V symbol for the same reasons, although by then cartoonists had sufficiently honed their caricatures of the man that they really didn't need the extra clues. But, as Donald Trump is always drawn with an extra-long red tie, the cigar was de rigueur in any Churchill cartoon.

When I ordered this book, I expected it to be full of David Low cartoons (like the one on the cover), but Benson has deliberately sought out cartoons which, according to the back page, "have not seen the light of day since they were first published." Low is not overlooked entirely, but you'll find many more cartoons by George Whitelaw, Victor "Vicky" Weisz, Clive Uptton, and Leslie Illingworth.

There are also plenty of cartoons from the United States, Germany, Italy, Australia, and the U.S.S.R.; even a few from Brazil, India, South Africa, Netherlands, and Mexico. What struck me, having just read and reviewed a book about Canadian editorial cartoonists, is that there is only one cartoon in this book from Canada. (The book has no index; if anyone finds a second Canadian cartoon in there, please let me know.)

"Das Alte Lied" ("The Old Song") by Arthur Johnson in Kladderadatsch, Berlin, Sept. 12, 1943

The cartoons published in nations that were Britain's enemies, such as this one by Arthur Johnson (sadly, not in color in Benson's book) in which it's the U.S. flag that Churchill is obliged to carry, serve as a welcome counterpoint to the patriotic wartime cartoons from the homeland. Benson notes as an aside that this is one of the few German cartoons that alluded to Franklin Roosevelt's polio — an absolute no-no in U.S. and allied cartoons, photographs, and reportage. 

If I have any complaint about the book, it is that there are a few cartoons that, when printed two per page, include print that is too small for these old eyes to read. Typically, that involves labels identifying politicians who are long forgotten or simply unknown this side of the pond. Since the text accompanying every cartoon does a more than adequate job of explaining their context and external references, my not being able to identify the Labour councilman from Westgloughingham is a very small point.

Churchill: A Life in Cartoons helps greatly in the understanding of the two World Wars from a British point of view (especially as distinct from the U.S. perspective). With a half century of cartoons dating from 1904 to 1954, including a number drawn by cartoonists who have graced our Graphical History Tour over the years, Benson's is a remarkable and praiseworthy contribution to the celebration of Churchill's sesquicentennial.

Now, I'm not one to tell you to run right out and buy this book. But Christmas is right around the corner and you might have someone in your life who is interested in cartooning, or history, or England; and perhaps that is something they would tell you.

Toon: Who Laughs Last

I left this cartoon as somewhat of a rough sketch because the idea reminded me too much of a cartoon Pat Oliphant once did of House Speaker Tip O'Neil in the 1980's. In the last month, I've posted extra cartoons aping the great cartoonists David Low and Thomas Nast. Did I really need to add another update of someone else's work?

Well, as I commented when I thanked Mike Peterson for citing yesterday's Matt Gaetz cartoon, Gaetz might be a thoroughly reprehensible excuse for a human being, but he is kind of fun to draw — so here's the cartoon anyway.

With apologies to Pat Oliphant, and to any of my colleagues who had the same idea this morning.

This Week's Sneak Peek

This guy gave me a host of problems this week.

Leo the Lib and MAGA Max make a return this week, and the first problem I ran into was that I haven't drawn Leo from this angle before. Trying to make him recognizable, I cluttered my drawing board with an awful lot of eraser dust. Eventually, I had a face that was acceptable.

But I wasn't getting having him slumped in his chair right. I'm still not satisfied with this.

Then, when I had the cartoon scanned and transferred to my computer screen, I realized that he was way, way out of perspective. I clipped the image above and moved it to a better location in the cartoon, then erased the portions that would be covered by the people in the foreground.

So far, so good.

But the setting required lots of people in the background, too, and now there was a big gap in the space where Leo used to be. The rest of a table needed to be filled in, as well.

Photoshop does a lot of things really well, from filling in colors, shading, and centering text. But it's not designed for drawing lines, especially straight ones. It's like performing surgery with a bowling ball and oven mitts.

So I'm not happy with what went out for syndication today, but deadlines are deadlines. I'm going to try fixing what I can the old-fashioned way this week, though.

This Week's Sneak Peek

This panel may look familiar if you've been following my humble blog for at least the summer. Maybe not if you were among the sudden spike of visitors looking at last week's Harley-Davidson cartoon.

Since the publications currently running my cartoons publish either bi-weekly or monthly, it's not easy for me to maintain running characters. Most of my past characters have gone by the wayside: Democratic Congressman Luke Warmish got tossed out of office in the Gingrich Wave of 1994; his Republican counterpart Charles Snollygoster IV probably got primaried by a Tea Bagger in the 2010's. Podcasters Buzz and Killer didn't last, only partly because I didn't like how much Buzz resembled a gay gym rat version of Zippy the Pinhead. (Besides, there was less and less for him to be cheerful about during the Corrupt Donald Berzelius Trump administration.)

I've been thinking that Million Moms Cat Lady ought to make a reappearance. She ought to be a fan of Hillbilly Vanilli Vance, though, and I haven't decided what she makes of him now.

This Week's Sneak Peek

One side note that I hadn't been able to work into Saturday's round-up of cartoons about the second week of the Democrats' 1924 national convention was that President Coolidge's 16-year-old son, Calvin Jr., died that Monday. While playing tennis on the White House lawn, young Calvin contracted blood poisoning from a blister and succumbed to a staph infection.

I could have included any of the cartoons commiserating the president's sorrow, but the post already had more cartoons than usual. None of the sympathy cartoons really stood out from the others, anyway.

During a political convention, cartoonists' attention tends to focus on the party throwing the party. The death of Coolidge's son tended to dissuade cartoonists from drawing cartoons of the president either enjoying the Democrats' difficulties, or of Coolidge and Davis facing off immediately upon the nomination being finally settled.

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In the aftermath of last week's gawdawful presidential (for lack of a better word) debate (ditto), I'm somewhat in a bind. I draw my cartoons days before they get published, in newspapers and magazines that will be on their newsstands for a week or more after that. With the mainstream media drumbeat that Democrats may or may not pressure President Biden to drop out, I'm finding it hazardous to come up with any cartoon about the presidential race that might not have any shelf life to it.

We'll see how this week's cartoon holds up.

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By the way, the cartoon I posted on Friday seems to be unusually popular. Maybe. Blogger reports to me that it has about six times the number of hits of the average cartoon I post, although Blogger only tells me that those extra hits are coming from "Other."

Could just be those thousands of bots that used to be in Singapore but have lately moved to Hong Kong.

This Week's Sneak Peek, and Update

First of all, here's a snippet from this week's upcoming cartoon:

Secondly, thank you to reader Bob Harris for uncovering the background information of caricaturist Alberto Barreto, whose rendition of Fighting Bob LaFollette headlined my post here on Saturday.

The Washington (DC) Times Herald devoted an entire page to wunderkind Barreto on Sunday, March 25, 1923:

"Peruvian Boy Artist Clever As Caricaturist" in Washington Times-Herald, March 25, 1923

According to the article by Victor Flambeau (caricatured to the right of Thomas Edison above), Barreto had already achieved "very remarkable success in his native city, where he was already recognized as a leading illustrator," before coming to New York in 1917 at the age of 18. He apparently came to the attention of the Times-Herald when he exhibited a collection of his political caricatures in D.C. in 1922.

"I had always been very much interested in art since I was a kid," Barreto told Flambeau, "and I was reading many books in artistic anatomy, color, perspective, and so forth." He took a single art class with Julio Malaga Grenet, the Peruvian cartoonist who was Director of Art at the weekly magazine Caras y Caretas in Buenos Aires. His cartoons were published in La Prensa of Lima even though he thought his work wasn't yet fit for publication.

Photo of Alberto Barreto at work, with his sister, in Washington Times-Herald, March 25, 1923

His mother and sister followed him to New York in 1919 after the death of his father. He had by then set up his own art school.

Barreto was enthusiastic about life in the U.S. according to the Times-Herald article. "All my success, I believe, has been due to the great artistic spirit and kindness of the Washington people. It makes me feel very happy, the great understanding that exists among people here.... 

"I also feel very much obliged to the Times-Herald and other newspapers that have contributed so much to my success by the wonderful way they have criticized my work. Art critics might say, 'They are so crude,' but that has not been the case. They have been wonderfully nice to me."

It will take some further digging to find out whatever became of him. Was he the Alfredo Barreto who managed the Washington Herald Bridge League in 1934? Was he the Alfredo Barreto who launched Neighbors, a "Magazine of the Americas," at a party attended by several Latin American diplomats in D.C., in 1937?

This Week's Sneak Peek

Yeah, it's another multi-panel toon coming off the drawing board this week.

Four panels worth of trying to make characters look like the same person wearing the same outfit and hairstyle and jewelry from frame to frame without making them utterly static by copying and pasting like some editorial cartoonists who shall remain nameless but you know who they are do.

"The Berrys" by Carl Grubert, June 25, 1967

There used to be a comic strip in the local Sunday paper when I was growing up, "The Berrys" by Carl Grubert, in which the facial expressions of the characters always appeared to be cut and pasted from some master file of grins and smiles. Looking back on it, one imagines a factory full of junior cartoonists in South Korea or some such gluing bits of the cartoon together every week, a la "The Simpsons" animators.

I don't care to wade through every Sunday strip today, but I'm fairly certain that there were occasions when a everything in an old panel but the dialogue was copied into a new strip (if not the entire strip itself). But compare the last panels of these next two, a month apart:

"The Berrys" by Carl Grubert, July 16, 1967

The family was the antithesis of much of early comic fare of bickering couples, henpecked husbands,  ditsy wives and trouble-making children. Mrs. Berry didn't call Peter a nut every Sunday, but whatever arguments they had, they could laugh all the way through them.

"The Berrys" by Carl Grubert, June 18, 1967

Yet somehow, their incessant smiling was ... creepy.

"The Berrys" by Carl Grubert, October 29, 1967

Even in silhouette!

Q Toon: Florida Man Yells at Rainbow

Let me preface today's commentary by saying that I generally don't check the weather forecast for my cartoon's locale before sitting down at my drawing board. So I just want to make it clear that Governor DeSantis here is not rooting for this week's torrential rains to continue pummeling Florida. This cartoon is not about the weather.

Okay, now that that's out of the way:

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Florida Republicans didn't want to see rainbow-colored lights illuminating their state's bridges in celebration of Pride Month in June. So they passed a law last month decreeing that Florida's bridges be lit up exclusively in red, white, and blue from Memorial Day to Labor Day.

They thus were able to pretend that the purpose of the law was a patriotic celebration — of the colors of the American flag. Or, if y'all'd rather, the Stars 'n' Bars. (Le tricolore? Mais non!) 

The diktat from Tallahassee is part of what Governor Ron DeSantis calls, without a trace of irony, "Freedom Summer." 

I suppose the rednecks up in Niceville are enjoying their freedom to tell the gays down in Key West how to decorate.

We'll see whether Key West gets its freedom back in time for LGBTQ History Month in October. 

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Earlier this week, prolific editorial cartoonist Clay Jones shared a comment left under one of his cartoons at GoComics, from a reader chastising him for using — stealing, even — popular cultural references in his work.

The rest of us editorial cartoonists shared — stole, even — a good chuckle over that one. Most of us reference popular cultural stuff all the time. This isn't the first time I've resorted to a Simpsons meme; and I've also based cartoons on Calvin and Hobbes, Rocky & Bullwinkle, Peanuts, Monty Python, Dr. Seuss, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, All About Eve, Sunset Boulevard, It's a Wonderful Life, The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, Oliver Twist, and The Three Musketeers.

On the other side of the pond, editorial cartoonists can get away with aping Serious Art that would go over the heads of many readers stateside; Dave Brown of the Independent signals his readers that he has redrawn someone else's classic by showcasing the cartoon in a fancy gilt-edged frame. The rest of us could do that, too, except that it would be stealing the idea from Mr. Brown.

Down under, David Rowe redrew Manet and David paintings on successive days this week; Financial Times readers may have caught the references without spying the obligatory apologies in the corner of the cartoons. American readers would likely have missed the parodies unless published in the student newspaper of the School of Art Institute of Chicago.

Elsewhere, references to artwork are rife in editorial cartoons in other countries where keeping the cartoon wordless makes it saleable outside of the cartoonist's native language.

My own thought on all of this is that one shouldn't make the same reference over and over. Once one has parodied Edvard Munch's "The Scream" for Topic A (another choice I could have made for this week's cartoon), one should seriously consider not parodying "The Scream" again for a good long time. Unless you want to be known as That Guy Who Keeps Drawing The Scream.

Which, if you can pull it off, isn't ipso facto a bad thing. At least you won't have to worry whether readers will think your cartoons are about the weather when they're not.

Just make sure that someone else isn't already That Guy.

Something Old, Something New

Today's Graphical History Tour returns to some of my own cartoons celebrating their decennaries this month, but I'm going to shake things up a bit this time and not take them in chronological order.

I'll start with this cartoon drawn for one of the more liberal of the student newspapers at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee.*

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., March 3, 1994

UWM has long had two vocal student groups advocating against each other for Palestine and Israel. The pro-Palestine group posted an inflamatory poster in the student union atrium in response to the Cave of the Patriarch's Massacre, in which American-Israeli physician Baruch Goldstein opened fire on Palestinians worshiping in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, killing 29 and wounding 125.

The Palestinian Human Rights Campaign's poster depicted a sequential cartoon of a Star of David morphing into a swastika. The Jewish student group complained to the chancellor of UWM, John Schroeder, that the poster was antisemitic and should be taken down.

It's an argument reflected in graphic discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at large, and never moreso than today.

If I were to draw a cartoon like this today, I would add a rule that any reference to blood is also out of bounds. You can draw Vladimir Putin as a bloodthirsty monster in Ukraine, or George W. Bush spilling blood in Iraq, or Slobodan Milošević dripping blood in Bosnia. But the moment you try any of that with Bibi Netanyahu, you're trafficking in Blood Libel against all Jews everywhere.

Cartoons by Dwayne "Mr. Fish" Booth and Serge Chapleau

A number of cartoonists have stumbled into the Blood Libel trap since the Netanyahu government's scorched earth campaign to push Palestinians in Gaza into the sea — most recently Dwayne Booth, who draws under the nom de plume "Mr. Fish," and Serge Chapleau of La Presse in Montréal, Québec. Chapleau's cartoon of Netanyahu as "Nosferatu en route to Rafah" was yanked off-line by La Presse this month after howls of protest from the Usual Quarters. The Association of Canadian Cartoonists issued a statement in support of M. Chapleau; he stands behind his cartoon, and La Presse stands behind dumping it.

Mr. Fish's cartoon from last November was singled out as anti-semitic by the right-wing Washington Free Beacon and then criticized by the Interim President of the University of Pennsylvania, Larry Jameson. Mr. Fish has not been fired from teaching his course on cartooning at U-Penn, and no journal that posted "Who Invited That Lousy Anti-Semite" on line has 404ed it with apologies; so I haven't heard any push for the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists to leap to his defense.

for Q Syndicate, March 2004

Moving on: This was a cartoon I drew as a reserve for Q Syndicate, to be released at some later date when I might be on vacation, laid up, or for some other reason fail to get a cartoon in on time. For that reason, the cartoon did not deal with any actual news story; it's not about any particular cartoon syndicate rejecting the work of any particular lesbian cartoonist.

I bring it up today because within cartooning circles here in 2024, some of us are more concerned with the decision by the major newspaper publishing conglomerates to standardize their newspapers' comic pages, because of which decision just about every comic strip currently drawn by a woman has disappeared from print.

Lynn Johnston’s “For Better Or Worse" has survived the purge, but it has been in reruns since 2008. Two other sort-of exceptions are "Luann" by Greg Evans with his daughter Karen as co-author, and "Shoe" currently drawn by Gary Brookins and Susie MacNelly, widow of the strip's original creator.

As Georgia Dunn noted in her strip "Breaking Cat News," "There are more dead men than living women in the funny pages."

Well, it's Holy Week in the Western Christian calendar, so let us open now our hymnals to page ax².

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., March 22, 1984

Back in the 1980's, conservatives upset by the separation of church and school and encouraged by the presidency of Ronald Reagan, were eager to impose prayer on public school students. Not mandatory, of course, but voluntary. 

Fair enough, I suppose. Turnabout, however, is fair play.

Who could have foreseen that forty years later, some tawdry huckster would be hawking Bibles with the Constitution as Apocrypha?

I wonder how many Corinthians it has.

for Q Syndicate, March, 2014

Speaking of turnabout as fair play, it's been ten years since Mr. Fred Phelps shuffled off his fetid coil. Since he based his entire career on speaking ill of the dead — loudly, through a bullhorn, at funerals — it was only fitting to dyslogize him in like manner.

He is risible indeed.

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* The other main newspapers were the right-wing Times and the Black American Invictus.