January ’Sixes

This week's Graphical History Tour opens on a somber note, as we come to January, 1986, and one of those moments where anybody alive them remembers where they were and what they were doing.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., Feb. 6, 1986

On January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded at "throttle up," just over a minute after launch. All aboard were killed, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe, chosen to be the first civilian passenger to fly into space. 

In five years, space shuttle flights had almost become routine, but because of McAuliffe's presence on the crew, millions of schoolchildren across the country were watching the liftoff. It was carried live on all the TV networks. 

We all knew the liftoff was not supposed to look like this. Everyone looked on in stunned silence, hoping against all reason to see the shuttle emerge from the fireball.

But no escape measures available to the crew; ejection seats and full pressure suits used in the first four space shuttle test flights had been removed before operational flights began in 1981. It's highly improbable that they would have been helpful in the event of an explosion, anyway.

A Presidential Commission attributed the explosion to a faulty O-ring made of material vulnerable to changes in temperature (there had been freezing temperatures in Florida overnight). Shuttle flights were suspended until September 29, 1988, after the implementation of new safety measures and stricter design standards.

1996

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., Jan. 25, 1996

We’re now in an even-numbered year, so here’s fair warning that upcoming Graphical History Tours are going to include some presidential election cartoons. Fair warning also that it’s January, and someone is getting ready to harangue a joint session of Congress live on all the TV networks.

President Bill Clinton was all set to run for reelection in January of 1996. While there was a crowded Republican field heading into the year, Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole was the odds-on favorite. 

Multi-millionaire Steve Forbes, Jr., with a fortune at his disposal and a signature issue of replacing the current income tax system with a simple “flat tax” for everybody, had emerged as Dole’s closest rival.

2006 

for Q Syndicate, January, 2006

I have to tell you, when I was thumbing through my cartoons from January of 2006 to decide which one to post today, I had absolutely no recollection of what television show this cartoon was about.

The series might have been an attempt to update “Touched by an Angel” (1994-2003), or to make a faith-based “Harvey”; obviously, it never caught on. 

It was apparently one of the uncounted eminently forgettable January replacement series that come and go like Frosty the Snowman. Facebook Memories just reminded me of another such failed series, “¡Bob!”, a vehicle for Rob Schneider and Cheech Marin. I’m wondering if either of them remember it. I’ll bet you don’t.

2016

for Q Syndicate, January, 2016

Here's a cartoon about a spate of "religious liberty" laws, pushed by Republicans to legalize discrimination against LGBTQ+ persons — special rights for straights.

What I love about this cartoon is how easy winter scenes are to draw. Especially when the object is to set the cartoon in the middle of the most desolate nowhere imaginable. I may have spent more time thinking up the cartoon than drawing it, even considering all that lettering of the dialogue.

Well, here's where the Graphical History Tour ends today. Safe travels, drive carefully, remember to steer into a skid, and always remember to carry a blanket and maybe an extra jacket in the car.

Slip the Surly Bonds of Earth

For our trip in the wayback machine last weekend, I discussed some of the highs and lows of memorial cartoons. Since the 30th anniversary of the Challenger disaster is coming up this week, I thought I'd share the two cartoons I drew for that occasion.

I didn't see the explosion live; I had a second shift job in 1986, and I overslept the launch time. (Some of you may recall that the launch had been postponed from an earlier date, which factored into the ill-considered decision to launch on January 28 in spite of the freezing temperatures overnight.) I had my TV programmed to turn on at a certain time every weekday, forcing me to get out of bed and go into the next room to watch it or turn it off. All channels were on news coverage when the TV came on, as the news anchors were still trying to come to grips with what schoolchildren around the country had just witnessed.

This first was my immediate reaction to the disaster.

This cartoon was drawn entirely in charcoal, except for the material in the text box (which I had to redo because I inadvertently omitted the name of one of the astronauts; thankfully, an editor caught my mistake before it went to press).

A week later, the student newspaper I drew for at the time wanted a drawing for its front page, and I came up with an illustration whose wishful thinking was misinterpreted by some as a sort of denial that the disaster had really happened -- like those people who have insisted all these years that we never landed on the moon.

That misinterpretation was partly because when the cartoon appeared in print, you could see the outline of the space shuttle contrary to my intention. I drew the shuttle only using white-out, but some shadow of the white-out showed up anyway.

The point of the cartoon was to push back against the response from some that the space program should be shut down. Given the chance, I'd have liked to have changed the caption to advocate letting "their dreams live on" or "soar" or something other than "not ... die."

17 years later, February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia broke apart on reentry. I did not draw a memorial cartoon on that occasion, although I did end up having a few seconds on local TV. It was a Saturday morning, and I'd gone to the church where I work to fetch something I'd forgotten there on Friday afternoon. I decided to put an appropriate prayer on the outdoor sign as long as I was there, and was almost finished when a reporter from Milwaukee's channel 6, in Racine because astronaut Laurel Blair Clark had attended the high school two blocks away, stopped to get a comment from me. The reporter mistook me for the church's pastor, but I quickly corrected him; and since he didn't happen upon any other Racine clergy walking the main streets on his way back to Milwaukee, he used the footage of our interview.