Tales of Future Past Pluperfect

Is it time for my weekly Graphical History Tour again already? Oh, shoot! Looking back at my February cartoons from decades ago, I find that I don't have much to say today about many of them.

But since I did set this one up last month, here's one starring then-House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) from 1995, after he had made a slip of the tongue calling Congressman Barney Frank an antigay slur during a radio interview:

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., Feb. 6, 1995

How an inadvertent slip of the pen made it into my homage to George Cruikshank I have no idea. I'm sure it was purely unintentional.

for Q Syndicate, February, 2015

For decades now, Republicans have labored tirelessly to deprive the poor of sustenance and children of free school lunches. To atone for such unChristian attitudes, they demand that public schools post the Ten Commandments in every classroom so that children know which Lord Thy God the government has decreed for them.

They like the Ten Commandments rather than those woke Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount.  Especially not the version from the Gospel According to Luke read in "Lutheran" (and Episcopal and Catholic) churches last Sunday, which include some verses not in Matthew's account:

24 “But woe to you who are rich,
    for you have already received your comfort.
25 Woe to you who are well fed now,
    for you will go hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now,
    for you will mourn and weep.
26 Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you,
    for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets."

Hey, I don't mean to cut this post short, but, well, it is a holiday weekend, after all.

for Q Syndicate, Jan./Feb., 2005

Happy Presidents' Day!

The Night Before Christmas 1982

For Santaback Saturday this Nochebuena, I've dug up a front-page cartoon a very much younger me drew for the UW-Parkside Ranger for Christmas of 1982.

I drew it on the back of a 14"x22" student activity poster advertising a past event. The original drawing is way too large to fit on my scanner, so I've broken the cartoon up into three pieces. If you're reading this on computer, you can embiggenify the images; if you're reading this on your phone, what the focaccia! You can't read cartoons on an itty bitty phone screen!

The cartoon ended up in a cardboard art portfolio with the rest of my oversize college works, which was standing on the floor when our basement flooded a couple years ago. There's considerable water damage to this one, including highlighter ink bleeding through from the other side.

If you're too young to remember 1982, I apologize for not offering context for this cartoon. Explaining the joke would spoil what little humor there is in this parody.

I wish you a Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, Content Kwanzaa, Serene Solstice, or the Seasons Greetings of your choice.

Q Toon: Christmas Spirit

To be perfectly frank, the news this week has been so scary and depressing that I was glad it was time to crank out a cartoon on a holiday theme. I just needed to lighten things up.

And since I overslept Monday morning, when I usually scan my ink drawing and do all the computer-generated adjustments, it was a good thing that I had the option of not going through the usual practice of creating the grayscale version of the cartoon and then starting over to create the color versions. (Coloring the cartoon and then converting it to grayscale often creates an unsatisfactory result: for example, vivid color areas turning dark.)

I apologize to my editors who were expecting something more LGBT-centric; I did try sketching out some gayer angles to the general idea here, but none of them appealed to me. I guess I'm settling for something for the old theatre queens this week -- those wonderful people out there in the dark.

Q Toon: The Christmas Court

It's customary among editorial cartoonists when stealing borrowing other cartoonists' creations to credit the other cartoonists with "apologies to..." or a similar note. We're not usually so assiduous about apologizing to film makers or 19th Century authors -- think of any of the myriad cartoons that use whatever current movie is out to draw some parallel to political or social events (my own from last week, for example). But it would have seemed discriminatory to have left Charles Dickens and Frank Capra out of this week's credits, so in they go.

Besides, I wasn't confident that everyone would recognize Mr. Potter.