Two By Two by Two

It's time to stop being so stingy with these dusty old cartoons every Saturday! This week, I've got a whole bunch of my own February cartoons from years ending in "2" for your nostalgic pleasure. Let's start with this valentine from February, 1982:

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers, Wis., Feb. 11, 1982

I had forgotten about this cartoon until seeing it in the Ranger's on-line archives a few weeks ago. I guess I don't have the original any more; I may have drawn it expressly to fill a hole on page one, the original cartoon instead of a copy getting glued into position on the master sheet.

I'm pretty sure I never gave it away to anyone in hopes that they would be my valentine.

in UW-P Ranger, Somers, Wis., Feb. 25, 1982

As you can tell from the Valentine cartoon, I did a lot of cross-hatch shading in those days. A different technique that I dabbled with was rubbing a charcoal pencil over portions of the cartoon with a textured book cover behind it. I abandoned that approach when I switched over from drawing on plain old typing paper to sturdier bristol board.

in Journal Times, Racine, Wis., Feb. 5, 1992

Goose stepping ahead to 1992, I drew the above homage to Sir David Low's classic cartoon, in which Adolph Hitler and Josef Stalin meet over Poland. Low's cartoon comes to mind any time two vehement opponents find common cause. In this case, the stand-in for Hitler was a bona fide Nazi David Duke, then a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives, who had put himself forward as a presidential candidate in the Republican primaries despite having run as a Democrat just four years earlier. 

Wisconsin law at the time put on the ballot any candidate recognized by national news media, while allowing the bipartisan Election Commission the final say. The Commission denied Duke a spot on the ballot, albeit along party lines. Ordinarily, Duke would have condemned the American Civil Liberties Union as a bunch of criminal-coddling commies, but he welcomed their help in getting on the ballot in Wisconsin and other states.

The courts ruled in favor of Duke and the ACLU, but no matter. Pat Buchanan, with a longer record of Republican Party activity, won the lion's share of the white racist vote.

in UW-Milwaukee Post, Feb. 13, 1992

With the Olympics just getting underway and the Soviet Reunion set to invade Ukraine any day now, I couldn't resist revisiting this cartoon about the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville, France. This was the last time that the winter games would be held in the same year as the summer games, and these were the first Olympics held after the break-up of the USSR slightly over one month earlier.

Athletes who had trained to represent the USSR now found themselves without a country — or at least, in many cases, without a country that had an Olympic Committee. Athletes from Russia, Ukraine, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan participated as representatives of "Unified Team" (Объединённая команда, or, officially, "Équipe unifiée"). The team won 54 gold medals among them, the winners standing on the podium as the Olympic flag was raised to the tune of the Olympic Hymn.

in The Biz, Milwaukee, 2002

2002 finds me drawing cartoons for The Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee and its effort to spin off a flashy youth-oriented monthly supplement called The Biz. The Biz cartoons are my first works in full color. The version of Photoshop that I had at the time didn't have CMYK capability, but I did get to see The Biz in print, and I don't think the RGB files printed badly.

As with almost every other of my cartoons for The Business Journal, I was sent an article in need of an illustration. I have no recollection of what this article was about. Teamwork, I suppose.

for Q Syndicate, February, 2002

I wasn't even using computer-generated grayscale shading yet. There's quite a lot of cross-hatching in the above cartoon, much more than you're likely to find in anything I draw these days.

for Q Syndicate, February, 2012

Ten years later, I hadn't started sending colorized cartoons to Q Syndicate, but I saw that Dallas Voice was colorizing them on their own. This cartoon, about the outing of a closeted Arizona sheriff who had starred in John McCain's "Build The Dang Fence" commercial, was syndicated only in grayscale and bitmap versions. Figuring, however, that I needed to start offering a color option to syndicate subscribers, I upgraded my Photoshop and started playing around with it. 

The difference between RGB and CMYK formats is difficult to show on-line; but essentially, RGB format uses the red, green, and blue pixels on your screen to create 256 colors, whereas CMYK format is designed to use Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and blacK ink on paper. An RGB image doesn't contain any true black per se, so CMYK is a better format for printing cartoons that do.

February, 2012

I had already colorized several cartoons for the on-line publications The Racine Post and the Racine iteration of Patch.com, AOL's foray in the late '00's to sponsor local news content. Likewise with the occasional cartoon that was published only on this blog, such as the above cartoon about right-wing advocacy for an amorphous religious exemption to Obamacare.

The cartoon started as a doodle while I spent an afternoon in a hospital waiting room. After I got home, I went ahead and committed it to ink and thence to computer screen and the interwebs.

A few months after this, I began sending colorized cartoons to Q Syndicate. It would be three years before I ever got to see how my CMYK formatted files actually turned out in print, when I attended the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists convention in Columbus. I still also send a grayscale cartoon to the syndicate, although to my knowledge, Philadelphia Gay News is the only newspaper that prints them that way.

The Hazard of Duke

It's Schutzstaffelback Saturday again, so let's travel back in time to the late 20th Century. Because this is not the first time former Klan leader David Duke has been an embarrassment to the Republican Party.

In 1988, Duke actually did run for president as a Democrat, then as a Populist, switching his party affiliation to Republican that December. It was as a Republican that Duke was elected to the Louisiana legislature in a special election in 1989 (my cartoon about that is here). The next year, he ran for Louisiana's seat in the U.S. Senate and polled ahead of Republican Party-endorsed Ben Bagert; to avoid a run-off between Duke and the Democratic incumbent J. Bennett Johnston Jr., the GOP pressured Bagert into withdrawing from the race. Johnston won reelection.

Duke was back again in 1991, running this time for Governor. This time, he beat incumbent Republican Buddy Roemer in the primary, forcing a run-off between Duke and the ethically challenged Democrat, former Governor Edwin Edwards.

The most compelling argument in Edwards' favor was a bumper sticker that read, "Vote for the crook. It's Important." Edwards joked that the only thing he and Duke had in common "is that we both have been wizards beneath the sheets" and that being around so many burning crosses must have been bad for Duke's health.

Polls predicted an Edwards victory, but Duke countered that his supporters were merely reluctant to be honest to pollsters. In the end, a record 1 million votes were cast for the twice-indicted former Governor, versus only 671,000 for the klansman.

Duke tried running for President in 1992, this time as a Republican; but the GOP fought to keep him off the ballot, and there was already a much more prominent national figure who could appeal to the Duke Voter.

The high point of Duke's career was already behind him. Duke would later join the Reform Party to work on Pat Buchanan's 2000 presidential campaign. (Donald Trump explored running for the Reform Party nomination that year as well, but dropped out to host "The Apprentice" instead.) Since then, he has offered his support to various fascist and anti-Semitic politicians in Europe and the Near East.

Donald Drumpf Carries a Toon

Now, if only I could have worked P.T. "There's A Sucker Born Every Minute" Barnum into this cartoon, I'd have a trifecta.

This past week, Donald Trump, whose mouth charges headlong into all sorts of rash statements, had a hard time deciding whether to renounce the support of David Duke. Duke is a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and former state representative from Metairie, Louisiana; he ran unsuccessfully for Congress and the governorship. (I'll have more on him in this blog tomorrow.)

Trump supporters have been desperately trying to tie the KKK to the Democratic Party lately. The KKK certainly was part of the Democratic coalition back in the days of buggy whips and flivvers -- even though that coalition also included Jews, Catholics and labor unions, groups the KKK has always been dead set against.

But as Democrats began to embrace the civil rights movement from the 1940s on, racists like Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms started to leave the party, bringing the KKK along with them. That exodus grew from a trickle to a flood as Democrats became the party of Civil Rights and Republicans became the party of Southern Strategy. The Republican Party doesn't like to talk openly about their racist supporters, but has been happy to have their votes.

And now the Donald has gained the support of another erstwhile embarrassment to the Democratic Party, Louis Farrakhan. And to think I doubted Republicans' talk of having a "big tent."

Q Toon: Dukes to Watch Out For

This summer, Duke University recommended to its incoming freshmen that they ought to read Fun Home, a graphic memoir by cartoonist Alison Bechdel, eponym of the Bechdel Test. The book is about Bechdel's coming out, and her dad's closeted homosexuality. Duke recommends some summer reading every year to promote discussion when the school year starts, which seems like a reasonable enough thing for a liberal arts institution to do.

Upon learning that the book contains women masturbating and engaging in oral sex, one student, Brian Grasso, posted on Facebook that he refused to read Bechdel's book. Somehow, it turned into such a big deal that the Washington Post printed his explanation for himself.

[I]n the Bible, Jesus forbids his followers from exposing themselves to anything pornographic. “But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart,” he says in Matthew 5:28-29. “If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away.” This theme is reiterated by Paul who warns, “flee from sexual immorality.” ... 

I will avoid any titillating content and encourage like-minded students to do the same. And I believe professors should warn me about such material...

Certainly, Grasso and any others worried about looking lustily at lesbians have every right not to read books they don't want to, and at no point was reading Fun Home required. On the other hand, as has been pointed out by everyone from Jerry Seinfeld to Chris Rock to a growing list of university professors, we seem to be raising a generation of extremely delicate hothouse flowers.

And Grasso should have warned his readers that he was going to use the word "titillate."

The Race Card Canard

I try very hard not to ascribe racism as the motivation of people with whom I disagree. But when a woman who "can't stand to look at" President Obama is upset because Michelle Obama "doesn't look like a first lady," what else is one to think?

"I just - I don't like him. Can't stand to look at him. I don't like his wife. She's far from the First Lady. It's about time we get a first lady in there that acts like a First Lady and looks like a First Lady." --Bobbie Lucier, interviewed at the American Legion Convention in Indianapolis

Put Mrs. Obama next to either Laura Bush or Ann Romney and tell me what about her doesn't look like a First Lady. Her sleeve length?

Puh. Leeze.

Add to that the incident in which two white men at the Republican convention threw peanuts at a black female CNN cameraman and shouted "This is what we feed animals!" at her. It is not known whether they were delegates or alternates; to the Republican Party's credit, they were escorted from the floor.

The racists in these two incidents are white and around retirement age. Mrs. Lucier is from Manassas, Virginia; and while we don't know where the peanut throwers are from, cameraman Patricia Carroll seems to assume they were from the Deep South:

Carroll said that as an Alabama native, she was not surprised. "This is Florida, and I'm from the Deep South," she said. "You come to places like this, you can count the black people on your hand. They see us doing things they don't think I should do."

February, 1989: Klansman David Duke wins the Republican
 primary for a seat in Louisiana's House of Representatives

Retirement-age white southerners are perhaps the most resistant group that President Obama has notoriously failed to win over in the four years since he ran for president. (I can think of several retirement-age white northerners who have been equally skeptical of him from the get-go, too. And young white southerners, for that matter. You can picture the Venn diagram for yourself.) Clearly, the election of Barack Obama as President did not herald the arrival of the long-awaited "Post-Racial America" some were celebrating at the time.

Patricia Carroll is not giving interviews. She's there to record the news, not be the news. But immediately after the peanut incident, she did say this:

"I can't change these people's hearts and minds. No, it doesn't feel good. But I know who I am. I'm a proud black woman. A lot of black people are upset. This should be a wake-up call to black people. . . . People were living in euphoria for a while. People think we're gone further than we have."