Christmas Covers

Well, the weatherperson says it's now meteorological winter — and we can argue about just how much meteorology is affected by flipping to the last page of the calendar — so it's time for cartoonists great and small to crank out those holiday cartoons.

And that includes, somewhere on the scale, yours truly. If you've been following this here blog, you know that I've already drawn a Lauren Boebert Christmas card and Mike Lee on Santa's lap — and it was still meteorological autumn when I drew those.

Since it's Saturday, I've dug into the box of treasured holiday ornaments and to see what cartoons may be found, and I'm happy to report that there are some beloved old baubles in there. Chief among them are the full-page cartoons for the university newspapers for which I drew 30 and 40 years ago.

in UW-P Ranger, Dec. 9, 1982

This front page cartoon for the Ranger at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside was a great deal of fun to draw. All that lettering was considerably less fun (ditto for Mike Lee's wish list in this week's syndicated cartoon).

This was my second Christmas cover for the Ranger; the first, a parody of "Deck the Halls" the year before, didn't have quite as much calligraphy, or, for that matter, cross hatching.

in UWM Post, Nov. 23, 1992

Ten years thence, I drew the occasional cover illustration for the Post at University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Their Holiday Shopper issues came out in November rather than December, but who needs to rush the season, eh?

I've discussed before how any color in these Ranger and Post cartoons back in the pre-Photoshop stone ages was achieved with separate overlays for each color. In this case, some Post staffer, not me, cut acetate sheets to the shapes of the red and green spaces (and another for the gray tone in the little girl's hair; I'd have suggested a red halftone to keep things relatively simple). Kudos to whomever that person was for leaving the mortar between the bricks uncolored, and I've come to appreciate what a pain colorizing evergreen trees can be.

But that's some heavy lipstick on The King.

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Normally, I'd continue here to post at least one cartoon each from Decembers of 2002 and 2012, but I don't have anything to continue today's theme. I didn't happen to have any commissions for holiday covers in those years.

Here's a regular-sized cartoon from 2002 anyway — even if, like that UWM Post cover, it was actually drawn in November.

Some of my clients only publish monthly, you know.

A Strange Feeling of '92

It's that strange feeling you sometime....mmmms get ... that you've drawn something thirty years before.

in UW-Milwaukee Post, Jan. 21, 1992

When that election year started out, the sheen was wearing off from Operation Desert Storm, Bush the Elder's splendid little war to liberate the Emirate of Kuwait from the evil clutches of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Drawn, apparently, for a January 16, 1992 issue that wasn't published

Bush entered that election year dealing with renewed concern over the state of the economy, in part due to worries that the balance of trade between the U.S. and Japan had begun to tilt in Tokyo's favor. His highly publicized trip to Japan would be remembered, however, for an unfortunate bout of intestinal flu during a state dinner with Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa. 

in UWM Post, January 27, 1992

Dozens of Democrats, meanwhile, were vying for the nomination to run against Bush in November. Leading the pack was one William Jefferson Clinton, a former Governor of Arkansas. When his campaign was rocked by an accusation of an extramarital affair, it seemed to be a replay of the scandal that scuttled Gary Hart's run for the Democrats' 1988 presidential nomination.

in Milwaukee Journal, "Taking Names" column, February 4, 1992

I've rerun that cartoon before, and whenever I do, I have to accompany it with this clipping — the only time I've ever appeared in the Milwaukee Journal and/or Sentinel.

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Okay now, today's post seems to be running a bit short. Christmas was kind of hectic and I topped it off with a mild case of the 'rona — thanks to my being fully vaccinated and boosted, it wasn't any worse, and I'm pretty sure I'm over it. (Although it keeps trying to flare up again after I think it's gone.)  I haven't had the energy to do the kind of research you, dear reader, deserve, so I end up today posting three cartoons from a month when I only drew four.

And I don't have anything to say about that fourth cartoon, so here's one from January, 1982, instead.

in UW-Parkside Ranger,  Somers, WI, Jan. 21, 1982

For those of you not old enough to remember Ronald Reagan's first Secretary of State, General Al Haig, you really missed a master of military syntax. It actually earned the neologism "Haigspeak," defined as "Language characterized by pompous obscurity resulting from redundancy, the semantically strained use of words, and verbosity," or "not using one syllable when five would do." 

It's kind of a shame he only lasted in office a little over a year, because satirizing his brusque demeanor and linguistic legerdemain was actually rather fun.

Some Children See Him (1992)

This is a front-page cartoon I drew for the UWM Post back in 1992. Sadly, this oversized sheet (slightly larger than the actual front page of the newspaper) is one of the pieces which suffered water damage when our basement flooded this spring. But I present it as another example of Messing With Santa:

Merry Christmas -- Season's Greetings -- Are You Lonesome Tonight?

Happy Birthday, Elvis!

In honor of Elvis Pressley's natal day, here's the one and only cartoon I've ever drawn him in (from the earliest days of the Bill Clinton's first run for the presidency, after he and Hillary had gone on TV to talk about whether he had a proclivity for extramarital affairs):

This paragraph in the page 2 feature, Spivak and Bice, is as close as I've ever gotten to having a cartoon in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Another Toon: Michele Bachmann Brings It to the Party

Opening a rally in Iowa on Tuesday, Michele Bachmann told the crowd, "Before we get started, let's all say 'Happy Birthday' to Elvis Presley today!"

As any true Elvis fan knows, Elvis was born on January 8, 1935. August 16 was the 34th anniversary of his death at age 42.

I'm still searching for my Bachmann caricature, as you can see. Drawing her fairly small in this cartoon -- her head is a little more than an inch tall in the original drawing -- I just couldn't get those crazy eyes right.