Q Toon: Prevost, Previously

People are, for the most part, applauding the election of Fr. Robert F. Prevost as Pope Leo XIV, the first pope from the United States (or the second one from South America, as he also shares Peruvian citizenship), and the first one from an Augustinian order.

These days, just about everyone leaves their digital footprints all over the place, and that includes the new head honcho at the Vatican. Father Bob/Pope Leo has voiced his opinions on Twitter/X, so we know, for example, that he disagrees with Vice President Shady Vance's views on how to ration out Christian caritas. 

He strongly criticized Trump and El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele for doing nothing to free illegitimately deported and imprisoned Kilmar Abrego Garcia ("Do you not see the suffering? Is your conscience not disturbed? How can you stay quiet?"); he also condemned U.S. policy of family separations during Trump's first term.

He has echoed calls for stronger gun control legislation, and opposed abortion.

It should have nothing to do with his Twitter account, but we even know that he voted in Democratic primary races in 2008 and 2010, and Republican presidential primaries in 2012 and 2016.

Drawing cartoons for LGBTQ+ press as I do, I was obliged to find the queer angle to the election of Pope Leo XIV, and this cartoon is it.

When then-priest Robert Prevost criticized western media for fostering pro-LGBTQ sympathies, unsympathetic Benedict XVI was the Pope. Most (but not all) Catholic priests tend to echo the attitudes emanating from the Vatican or they hold their tongues. If Father Bob had opinions about “the homosexual agenda” or same-sex parenting during the papacy of “Who Am I to Judge” Francis, the western media have yet to discover them.

Perhaps someone will find Facebook Messenger chats between him and his older brother, Louis.

Transgender Catholics may have cause to be wary of the new pontiff, who shared on Twitter a December, 2016 article by a Peruvian archbishop in La República attacking "gender ideology" ("an inaccurate term deployed by opponents to undermine and dehumanize transgender and nonbinary people," according to GLAAD). Benedict XVI was three years into his retirement at that point; Francis has been credited with a more accepting embrace of transgender persons.

Leo XIV's opening remarks as Pope offer some hope to LGBTQ+ Catholics, reiterating his immediate predecessor's goal of recreating the Roman Catholic church as a "missionary" institution, "always open to receiving with open arms for everyone, like this square, open to all, to all who need our charity, our presence, dialogue, love."

✍

Just as I finished inking this cartoon, I noticed a huge, glaring mistake.

I had drawn the cardinal on Leo XIV's right in the first panel and on his left in the second.

During the pencil sketch phase of the drawing, I had been conscious of where Pope Leo and Cardinal Whatsisname had to be in relation to each other when drawn from behind. But somewhere along the line, I got too distracted, trying to figure out what their robes should look like from the rear. And deciding how to draw the hallway that they are walking down.

I've been to the Vatican twice. The first time, our tour group entered by way of a long, slightly sloped hallway with an arched ceiling and decorated with wall tapestries depicting Bible scenes and objets d'art depicting... well, this sort of thing:

The second time, our tour group came up a winding ramp that came to an open arch with a lovely view of Rome. It would have been a much nicer setting for my cartoon.

But I digress.

I stared at my work for a while, trying to decide which panel to redraw. But it was already after midnight, and, after first looking at the cartoon in a mirror, I ultimately to handle the problem in PhotoShop.

This was a mistake I had made once before, in a cartoon depicting a couple watching television on their couch. One panel showed them from behind so the reader could see the TV, and the other showed them from the front  so readers could see their faces. That time, I drew their heads on a separate sheet as they should have been drawn in the second panel, and copied and pasted those heads onto the cartoon in PhotoShop, also redrawing the tail of the dialogue balloon digitally.

For today's cartoon, I decided to flip the first panel, which entailed unflipping the dialogue. Happily, I didn't also have to contend with fixing the part in Pope Leo's hair.

Q Toon: Tattoo Tale

We return to the thrilling saga of Liberal Leo and MAGA Max this week. As you will no doubt recall, Leo got swept up in an Ignoring Constitution Extralegally raid while volunteering at a local food pantry back in February and Max's efforts to find out where he is incarcerated have so far been thwarted.

I've finally had to give Leo a last name, since the faceless ICE agent in the cartoon wouldn't be friends on a first-name basis. I considered giving Leo a last name like Blue (or Teal, as in Stop the Teal), but decided to name him after the author of American democracy (not to mention Sally Hemming's kids).. Max now has initials; I suppose it might be fair to give him the last name of a conservative philosopher such as Burke, now that it has to start with B.

We'll see.

I'm going to have to come up with some reason why Leo does not end up getting on a plane to El Salvador's notorious CECOT concentration camp, insofar as ending up there is supposedly being sentenced to slave labor and death. Rather than head toward a tragic end to this tale, I would rather get Leo home at some point to argue with Max about other policies of the Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime.

I did have a plan when I started this story line, but various real-world news events along the way keep making the original denouement problematic.

So I can't rule out having Max wake up to see Leo stepping out of the shower because it was all a dream.

Q Toon: Where in the World

I introduced Max and Leo as a way of commenting on the deep political divide between the Trump cultists and the rest of us: an odd couple in a relationship who stay together in spite of their profound disagreements.

Had Republicans lost the 2024 election, Max and Leo would still be bickering over fiscal policy or, I dunno, white males being shut out of Kamala Harris's cabinet. But instead, we have been forced to endure the Criminal Trump Regime. It hasn't even been 100 days yet, and there are black vans of Trump's Gestapo disappearing civilians on suspicion of having unauthorized tattoos and opinions.

I figured I could comment on that by having Leo mistakenly caught up in an anti-immigrant sweep. Eventually, I'd have the courts step in, or someone in charge would realize ICE's mistake, and Leo and Max would be reunited, once I had figured out how to make a point with it.

Yet now it turns out that the Criminal Trump Regime doesn't care what the courts rule, or who gets swept up because of whatever mistake made by his minions. They've discovered a fellow tyrant down in El Salvador who's got a tropical gulag where they can ship their victims en masse, where nobody is afforded due process whatsoever. Instead, they are stripped naked, shaved, and put on display crammed together like sardines for Kristi Noem's Zoom background.

One of the real people trapped in this dystopian nightmare from hell is a man named Kilmar Albrego García. He had come here years ago from El Salvador to flee from the MS-13 gang there; a judge here had ruled that if the U.S. government wanted to deport him, it was forbidden to send him to El Salvador. 

ICE knew this, and decided it didn't care about the rule of law. Up and down the chain of command, they decided to just follow orders. The Department of Homeland Security acknowledges that García was the victim of an "administrative error." The Supreme Court has told the Criminal Trump Regime to "facilitate" García's return.

The Criminal Trump Regime's response is to pretend that it can't do a damn thing to rectify its administrative error. They invited El Salvador's self-described "coolest dictator" Nayib Bukele to the White House to claim that he's helpless to bring an innocent man home to his wife and children. After all, if he freed one innocent man, he'd have to free every innocent man, wouldn't he?

LGBTQ+ media have taken interest in Andry Hernandez Romero, a Salvadoran hairdresser and make-up stylist seeking asylum in the U.S. because he is gay and was facing persecution in Venezuela who was deported to the Salvadoran Sağmalcılar. Chicago media have been reporting on the case of Yeison Rodrigo Jaimes-Rincon, whose partner only found out he had been kidnapped to CECOT when she saw him behind bars there on television. 

And there are dozens, if not hundreds of others in their predicament whom you have never heard of.

There is a reason why we all know the tragic story of Anne Frank; only if you pass through a Holocaust museum will you learn of any other individuals among the six million others slaughtered by the Nazis' extermination machine. Nor was Alexei Navalny alone. 

There are photographs of a fraction of the victims of the Khmer Rouge at the Tuol Sleng genocide museum in Phnom Penh, yet they all remain anonymous to most of us. Ditto the victims of Stalin's purges, the Rwandan massacres, the deliberate slaughter of Palestinians...

It can be easy to resign oneself to the idea that it's too hard to care about what happens to uncounted foreigners. 

Until it happens to somebody you know.

In that disgusting Oval Office performance by Trump and Bukele, the tyrant occupying our White House promised that it certainly will. Trump wants to abduct enough U.S. citizens off to El Salvador that Bukele will need to build "about five more" CECOTs to hold them all.

Oh, sure: our Felon-in-chief said that he only wants to suspend the Constitution when it comes to the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Fourteenth Amendment rights of worst of the worst.

You'll just have to overlook the occasional administrative error.

Will I Make It Through the Eighties?

Spandexback Saturday rummages through the attic today and comes down with a handful of my cartoons from the closing weeks of 1989.

"Bless Me, Father" in UW-Milwaukee Post, November 21, 1989

On November 16, 1989, priests on the campus of Central American University in San Salvador opened the doors to their residence to a cadre of El Salvador soldiers. The soldiers assassinated all six priests, as well as their cook and her daughter who had the tragic misfortune to be in the residence at the time.

As they left, the soldiers shot up the outside of the building and scrawled graffiti intended to make it appear as if the murders had been carried out by Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMNL) rebels. But there was a witness.

"Think, Mrs. Cerna" in UWM Post, November 28, 1989

I caught some grief for the UWM Post cartoon at the top of this post. Struggling to understand what editorial cartooning is supposed to be about, reader Gerald Harp wrote in a letter to the editor,

"I'm not quite sure why I objected to the cartoon, but I'm not sure why you printed it, either, so I feel justified in writing to you.
"Why did you print it? My feeling is that the cartoon was not funny, but then that may not be the point. Next, the cartoon had enormous shock potential. I was shocked, but that by itself is not a redeeming value.
"My best guess is that you were attempting to educate your readers of the atrocities in El Salvador. That is a worthy goal, but my next question is, 'are all means equally valuable in presenting a message?'
"After thinking it over, I decided you were not trying to make some kind of statement about the Catholic Church, and the soldier making an obvious mockery of something important to me, namely confession, shouldn't insult me because I'm not supposed to identify with the soldier. Still the cartoon leaves me uneasy and vaguely offended.
"I don't disagree with your sentiments, but I'd ask you to be a bit more careful in the future to separate the statement you are making from any irrelevant theme, especially if people will feel strongly about the secondary theme."

Without any trigger warning, the Post reprinted my vaguely-offending cartoon right next to Mr. Harp's letter. (Did GenX even have trigger warnings in the ’eighties?)

"Well Worth a Look-See" in UWM Post, December 5, 1989

Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President George H.W. Bush held their first summit meeting aboard the TS Maxim Gorky off the coast of Malta on December 2. The summit was beset by gale force winds and choppy seas, inspiring my Post cartoon; navy veteran Bush was not yet known for throwing up in world leaders' laps.

"Dan, You Did a Good Job..." in UW-Parkside Ranger, December 14, 1989

In fact, both Bush and Gorbachev went into the meeting with ambitious sets of proposals and found significant areas of agreement. They declared the Cold War over, but Bush's Vice President was not quite ready to bury the hatchet. Dan Quayle joined a chorus of conservative Republicans warning against "getting caught up in the magnetic personality of Chairman Gorbachev."

A comedian named Julie Brown had recorded a song called "Will I Make It Through the '80's" in 1984. It hadn't garnered the MTV-play that her novelty hit "The Homecoming Queen's Got a Gun" did (humor that really has not aged well), and was largely forgotten five years later or it might have been the basis of this last cartoon.

This was another cartoon about a serious topic. Homicides in the city of Milwaukee that year reached triple digits for the first time ever: 113 homicides in all.

"I Survived 1989" in UWM Post, December 7, 1989

That number would climb even higher, to 155, in 1990.