This Week's Sneak Peek

We ran out of candy for the neighborhood trick-or-treaters on Friday night and had to turn kids away while we put away our table and chairs. Last year, we ended up with several dozen pieces left over at the end of the evening even after giving away fistfuls at a time during the last hour. Someday, we'll do a better job of guesstimating how much candy to buy.

Our jack-o-lanterns we left out overnight. I cut "Pizza Rat" as a tribute to fellow editorial cartoonist Clay Jones (it's a recurring character in his work), who is recovering from a stroke affecting his right side — his drawing side.

Editorial cartooning and self-syndication is Clay's sole source of income, and he won't be able to draw again for some time yet. Given that health care in this country is nothing short of exorbitant, his friends have set up a GoFundMe account to help him out.

Here's a link.

October Jest

Next stop on our Graphical History Tour: October cartoons up from the spooky basement! Ghosts? Goblins? Werewolves and vampires?

No! Worse! Presidential politics!

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., Oct. 11, 1984

We were at the height of the political campaign season forty Octobers ago, so naturally, my cartoons were all about the candidates' debates.

President Ronald Reagan put in a poor performance during his first debate appearance with Democratic nominee Walter "Fritz" Mondale. Unlike President Joe Biden's poor performance this past June, it didn't result in hand-wringing from his side of the aisle urging him to pull out and let his Vice President take the wheel.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., Oct. 18, 1984

And it barely moved his poll numbers.

Walter Mondale tried to spook voters with the zinger, "'Let's tell the truth. Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won't tell you. I just did."

But Reagan had the mic drop moment with "I want you to know also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience."

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in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, Nov. 3, 1994

I drew this cartoon for the Hallowe'en day edition of the student newspaper at the University of Milwaukee in 1994, but their October 31 edition had no editorial page — the entire issue being devoted to campus sports. So they held it for the Thursday issue, after Hallowe'en was past. At least Election Day was still to come.

The incumbent Congressman in my district, Democrat Peter Barca, would be defeated in that year's Republican wave. He's running for that same seat again this year, and the campaign of the current incumbent, Republican Bryan Steil, has one television ad out now featuring a group of veterans complaining about a vote Barca made in favor of cutting veterans' benefits.

One of those veterans, from the look of him, wasn't even born when Barca cast that vote. The tiny print footnote during the ad disappears quickly and refers only to the House Bill Number. I doubt anyone is going to look up whether it was a procedural vote, an omnibus bill, or an amendment. I don't see Politifact weighing in on it.

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In 2004, I was asked to draw a series of sketches about that year's presidential election for Lavender Magazine in Minneapolis. This was the cover drawing for their October issue:

in Lavender Magazine, Minneapolis, October, 2004

I had done color cartoons for the Milwaukee Business Journal the year before, but the cartoons I sent to Lavender Magazine were black-and-white images for their own people to colorize. I somehow don't have a copy of the published magazine, or even a downloaded image of the cover, and their on-line archive doesn't date back to 2004; so the above is how I colored it myself this week.

I'm fairly sure that I did see the published magazine. I just don't know whether I simply can't find it, or if it was among the stuff that had to be thrown out after our basement flooded several years ago.

in Lavender Magazine, Minneapolis, October, 2004

In any event, this is an example of what I sent them, and my recollection is that the illustrations like this one to accompany text of the cover articles appeared in color.

The editors asked for eight illustrations, in each case spelling out what sort of scenario they had in mind for each one.

in Lavender Magazine, Minneapolis, October, 2004

This is my colorization, from an earlier post, of another of the Lavender spot illustrations, of John Kerry getting a make-over from the original Queer Eye for the Straight Guy crew.

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Well, that's enough politics for a Saturday, so I'll close with one of my most popular efforts, from October of 2014, after the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to overrule lower court rulings finding marriage inequality unconstitutional.

for Q Syndicate, October, 2014

The Court's ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges making marriage equality the law of the land would come down the next year.

Three of its dissenting Justices are still on the bench, and share with the three Trump appointees who have since joined them a marked disdain for stare decisis.

Q Toon: GOP House of Terror

Requblican advertising in these late days of the presidential and congressional campaigns is focusing on their policy of persecuting transgender persons. 

The Trump campaign has recently dropped at least 17 million on ads highlighting Harris' support during her 2019 presidential campaign for access to gender affirming-medical treatment for transgender people. It's part of a broader Republican strategy casting the Democratic Party as taking transgender rights to extremes. According to data compiled by AdImpact for NPR, these ads have aired more than 30,000 times, including in all seven swing states, and with a particular focus on NFL and college football broadcast audiences.

Here in the battleground state of Wisconsin, the campaigns of Donald Duce Trump, Eric Hovde, and their ilk are desperately trying to tar Kamala Harris and Tammy Baldwin with anything they've ever said or voted for that treated transgender persons as having any humanity at all. Even if they have to lie outright.

(Hovde and his party's Senate Leadership Fund ads also play up, in sinister tones, that Senator Baldwin has a "girlfriend" who works for Wall Street and lives in a swanky New York apartment. The ads all include a black-and-white photo of the woman, just in case you hit the mute button during commercial breaks.)

Republicans are running the same sort of transphobic ads against Senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Congressman Colin Allred in Texas, Sen. John Tester in Montana, and Sen. Bob Casey in Pennsylvania. The ads whip up fear and hatred against immigrants and the transgender community, using images of visibly gender-nonconforming people such as Queer Eye's Jonathan Van Ness and drag performer Pattie Gonia, neither of whom consented for their likenesses to be used.

Naturally, some GQP operative dug up the trifecta of an undocumented immigrant who had gender correction surgery while in prison for murder. The Trump ads make it sound as if Kamala Harris personally wheeled her into the operating room.

A Trump ad that began heavy air play this week begins with a ten-second video clip from Charlemagne Tha God's radio show on September 30 apparently calling Harris's position on the transgender issue "nuts," surely calculated to drive in the wedge between Harris and black male voters. 

He may have merely complimenting an earlier Trump ad. In any event, if the rights of transgender Americans came up during Harris’s hour-long grilling on Mr. Tha God’s show on Tuesday, I’ve found no mention of it in any news reports.

Harris was asked about transgender surgery for prison inmates at a Fox town hall later that day, and said little more than promising "I will follow the law."

She must have decided that the Trump team had enough material for their transbashing house of terror already.

From Lebanon to Halloween in Order Categorical

Given the newest war in the Holy Land, it is only appropriate to start our Graphical History Tour of my October cartoons with this reminder of the dangers of getting involved in the region.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers, Wis., Oct. 27, 1983

U.S. Marines were in Beirut in 1983 as part of a multinational peacekeeping force during Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war. Those dates should give you a good idea of just how successful those "peacekeeping" efforts were.

On October 23, 1983, a suicide bomber exploded a truck at the Marines' barracks near Beirut International Airport, killing 241 U.S. Marines, sailors, and soldiers. Another suicide bomber blew himself up at the barracks of the French paratroopers, killing another 58. This coordinated attack, for which Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility, was the second deadly attack on Western interests; a suicide bomber had killed 63 at the American embassy in April.

A joint American-French retaliatory strike against Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), believed to be training Hezbollah militants, was proposed; but it never came about because of doubts within the Reagan administration that Iran was behind the October 23 bombings. Instead, most of the U.S. peacekeeping force was moved offshore to transport ships. The following February, President Ronald Reagan authorized withdrawal of U.S. troops from the conflict.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, Wis., Oct. 7, 1993

Ten years later, American lives were lost in another civil war, this time in Somalia. Bill Clinton had inherited Operation Restore Hope from the George H.W. Bush administration. U.S. troops were assisting the United Nations operation providing famine relief there when, on October 3, 1993, soldiers loyal to Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aideed shot down two U.S. Blackhawk helicopters.

Eighteen U.S. soldiers and hundreds Somalis were killed in the crash and ensuing battle. Video of Somali combatants dragging the naked bodies of slain U.S. servicemen through the streets shocked and revolted the nation.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, Wis., Oct. 11, 1993

President Clinton pulled the U.S. forces out of the conflict zone four days later, and from the rest of Somalia the following March. America wanted nothing to do with a distant African nation where all of the warring factions were the bad guys.

The snake imagery in the earlier of these two cartoons echoes two famous cartoons by J.N. "Ding" Darling of a giant German serpent swallowing the world. Darling has not been the only cartoonist to liken war to a giant snake; Pat Oliphant drew at least one cartoon using snake images to represent U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and that country's shape inspired a number of other editorial cartoons.

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Lest today's post get too dark and depressing, let's skip ahead another ten years and sing us Picayune Butler, or something else that's funny.

for Q Syndicate, October, 2003

The U.S. was at war again in October of 2003, but the publications I was drawing for had other priorities. The Business Journal didn't happen to write any editorials about Afghanistan or Iraq that month, and I'd just drawn a cartoon a month earlier for Q Syndicate of religious zealots trying to enlist homophobia in the George W. Bush administration's strategery planning.

My cartoon about the fictional Rock Knuteson was a purely made-up scenario about closeted ball players. We now know of a few bi and gay athletes who were active in professional sports in 2003, but none of them were out to any but their closest friends at the time.

for Q Syndicate, October, 2013

And I couldn't let this post end without a Hallowe'en cartoon.

In 2012, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie had vetoed a marriage equality bill passed by the state legislature and had called instead for a putting a constitutional amendment up for popular vote. The legislature failed to override the veto, but didn't pass the amendment measure, either.

Meanwhile, Garden State Equality v. Dow was making its way through the courts, and New Jersey Superior Court Judge Mary Jacobson ruled that New Jersey "shall permit" same-sex couples to marry, effective October 21, 2013. The state Supreme Court unanimously denied Christie's appeal to delay implementation of Judge Jacobson's decision, and New Jersey's first same-sex nuptials were performed at the stroke of midnight.

Christie has a mixed record on LGBTQ+ issues, but a considerably better one than most Republicans. As governor, he favored civil unions for same-sex couples prior to legalization of marriage equality; he also signed a bill outlawing conversion therapy for minors. 

Now making a second run for the presidency, he spoke out against his party's bans on gender-affirming care, telling Brian Kilmeade on "Fox and Friends" this past June, "It's more of a parent’s decision than a governor's decision for goodness sakes, Brian. You really think that [Arkansas Governor] Sarah Huckabee Sanders should be making this decision for children in Arkansas?"

Q Toon: Goblins, Ghouls, and Grifters

With all that's going to hell in a handbasket in the world today, it may seem frivolous to focus this week's cartoon on the cartoonish Congresscretin from Long Island. And maybe it is.

On the other hand, it's important, at least to his constituents on Long Island, not to overlook the astounding degree of grift and fraud of which George Santos stands accused. According to the federal indictment:

“As alleged, Santos is charged with stealing people’s identities and making charges on his own donors’ credit cards without their authorization, lying to the FEC and, by extension, the public about the financial state of his campaign.  Santos falsely inflated the campaign’s reported receipts with non-existent loans and contributions that were either fabricated or stolen,” stated United States Attorney [Breon] Peace.  “This Office will relentlessly pursue criminal charges against anyone who uses the electoral process as an opportunity to defraud the public and our government institutions.”...

“The defendant — a Congressman — allegedly stole the identities of family members and used the credit card information of political contributors to fraudulently inflate his campaign coffers,” stated District Attorney [Anne T.] Donnelly.  “We thank our partners in the US Attorney’s Office and the FBI as we work together to root out public corruption on Long Island.”

Those of us who did not personally donate to Mr. Santos's 2022 campaign may have to wait until a court of law has judged the case against him, but apparently people who did donate are not granting him the benefit of the doubt. Newsday reports that his 2024 campaign is deep in debt, refunding donors more than it receives.

So let's just say that he certainly appears to regard the leader of his party as a role model. From the indictment:

[B]etween approximately December 2021 and August 2022, Santos devised and executed a fraudulent scheme to steal the personal identity and financial information of contributors to his campaign.  He then charged contributors’ credit cards repeatedly, without their authorization.  Because of these unauthorized transactions, funds were transferred to Santos’s campaign, to the campaigns of other candidates for elected office, and to his own bank account.  To conceal the true source of these funds and to circumvent campaign contribution limits, Santos falsely represented that some of the campaign contributions were made by other persons, such as his relatives or associates, rather than the true cardholders.  Santos did not have authorization to use their names in this way.

For example, in December 2021, one contributor (the “Contributor”) texted Santos and others to make a contribution to his campaign, providing billing information for two credit cards.  In the days after he received the billing information, Santos used the credit card information to make numerous contributions to his campaign and affiliated political committees in amounts exceeding applicable contribution limits, without the Contributor’s knowledge or authorization. To mask the true source of these contributions and thereby circumvent the applicable campaign contribution limits, Santos falsely identified the contributor for one of the charges as one of his relatives.  In the following months, Santos repeatedly charged the Contributor’s credit card without the Contributor’s knowledge or authorization, attempting to make at least $44,800 in charges and repeatedly concealing the true source of funds by falsely listing the source of funds as Santos himself, his relatives and other contributors.  On one occasion, Santos charged $12,000 to the Contributor’s credit card, ultimately transferring the vast majority of that money into his personal bank account.

But unless Santos turns out to be Joe Biden's bastard son, he's likely to remain in Congress until 2025. Even, that is, if he gets found guilty on all charges. Miss Thang knows no shame, and Gym Jordan (or Paul Gosar, or Marginal Taylor Greene, or whomever the MAGAverse vomits up next as its next candidate for Speaker of the House) needs his vote, and Santos knows it.

Q Toon: A Hallowe'en Classic

This week's cartoon goes out especially to my readers in Philadelphia Gay News, where the Republican candidate for governor thinks a local hospital is abducting homeless children to practice gender reassignment surgery on them. (I'm not making this up. He is.) 

It was the latest in a series of extreme and false statements by Doug Mastriano, who made the comments during an interview with a right-wing network that features Steve Bannon and a steady stream QAnon conspiracies. ...

During a program this week the host of a program on the “Real America’s Voice” network asked Mastriano a loaded question about his Democratic opponent in the gubernatorial race, Josh Shapiro, who is Pennsylvania’s Attorney General. Mastriano then took the opportunity to falsely claim: “He’s standing aside while the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia is grabbing homeless kids and kids in foster care, apparently, and experimenting on them with gender transitioning, something that’s irreversible.”

Mr. Mastriano is not alone in fabricating false facts, of course. The Republicans' senatorial candidate in Georgia, football star Herschel Walker has become a laughingstock around the country for claiming that he's an FBI agent-cum-police special consultant who graduated valedictorian from the University of Georgia (no, he didn’t graduate at all) and started a breaded-chicken empire nobody else has ever heard of. Not to mention his denying the stray children and abortions he happens to be responsible for. 

Even his own campaign staffers admit that Walker is a serial liar.

And yet he stands an even or better chance of being Georgia's next senator.

The GQP candidate for governor in Arizona, Kari Lake, clings ferociously to the lie that some nefarious conspiracy stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump. Retrumplicans in her state tried over and over and over again to find evidence of massive voter fraud, only to come up with a greater Biden win in Arizona than in the original vote count.

If she is elected governor, she promises to add new restrictions on Arizonans' right to vote: only on Election Day, at a polling place, on paper (counted only by hand), and with voter identification on all ballots. That's right: no more secret ballot. And if she still doesn't like how the people vote, she'll simply refuse to certify the results.

And she has a five-point lead in the polls.

Here in Wisconsin, voters have already elected Ron Johnson to two craptastic terms in the U.S. Senate and may very well give him a third, in spite of his pretending that the January 6 insurrectionists were unarmed and peaceful, that mouthwash was as good or better at protecting against COVID-19 as the actual vaccines, and that Dr. Fauci had "overhyped" both COVID-19 and HIV-AIDS.

On January 6, 2021, Johnson sent lists of fraudulent electors to Vice President Mike Pence on the Senate floor in an effort to overturn the wills of Wisconsin — and Michigan — voters. Happily, Pence's staffer told Johnson's errand boy to get lost. Johnson's excuse once the episode came to light was that somebody, he doesn't know who, wanted something, he didn't know what, delivered to Pence that day, so he said, sure, whatever, what does it matter?

The list of these Republicans goes on and so forth, et cetera ad infinitum, with one after another running to be governor, secretary of state, attorney general, senator, congressperson, judge, district attorney, sheriff, school board member, and deputy assistant ombudsman of the water department from coast to coast — many of them firmly convinced that public schools are providing litter boxes for students who believe they are cats.

It's times like these when you wish the phrase "most important election in our lifetime" hadn't been used to describe every election in our lifetime.

Q Toon: A Broom of Her Own

It's time for every editorial cartoonist to crank out his or her Hallowe'en-themed cartoon, whether it has a Great Pumpkin, trick-or-treaters, vampires, Frankenstein monsters, headless horsemen, Steve Bannon, or — clearly my favorite —take-offs on classic Charles Addams cartoons.

I'm not riffing on the Addams Family cartoons today (the current movie release hasn't promised me any kickbacks, so why would I?); I have instead adapted one of his other toons to star Congresscreature Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) over her recent gratuitous tweet attacking U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health, Rachel Levine.

Earlier this year, Greene showed off her smartassery by posting an anti-antitransgender placard outside her office, across the hall from a member of Congress who has a transgender daughter. Greene stubbornly deadnames transgender persons great and small, and cited her belief in a strict, immutable dichotomy of genders as reason to legislate against U.S. embassies ever flying pride flags.

Frankly, I could have made this cartoon about several others of Greene's ilk, including Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), Tucker Carlson (oh, but I just drew him last week), and the right-wing echo chamber in general, since the command from wherever they get their orders from was to pile on Adm. Levine last week.

Add to that just about every Requblican-majority state legislature in the country, scrambling to mount a full-bore assault on every aspect of life for transgender citizens, from sports to bathrooms to health care to voting rights to whatever they think of next. Critical Gender Theory in our county parks, I suppose.

No wonder China is laughing at us.

Boo!

Look out! It's the screaming memees!

and

and he wants you to want him:

Happy Hallow Days!

Q Toon: What's a Cthulhu to Do?

This is supposed to be my LGBTQ cartoon for the week, but I have to admit that I just wasn't finding any inspiration in the LGBTQ news stories over the weekend.

Australia is holding a vote on marriage equality, with the usual suspects weighing in pro and con. Antigay pogroms are underway in Egypt and former Soviet republics. Some Balkan nations are holding their first Pride parades over right-wing objections; so is a rural town in Iowa. Alabama will probably elect an antigay fascist to the U.S. Senate this year (but what else is new?).

Perhaps I could have tried harder to come up with an LGBTQ angle on the Harvey Weinstein scandal. My problem was that what ideas I did come up with could rightfully be accused of making light of the situation. (No, Mr. Weinstein, women do not consider watching you jerk off "foreplay.") Twitting those silly heterosexuals wasn't going to work, either; we have testimony that some male actors have had to put up with sexual harassment or assault from other Hollywood or Broadway moguls, but so far, James Vanderbeek, Alex Winter, Javier Muñoz and Terry Crews have not dared to name those perpetrators.

As Corey Feldman explained this week,

“Everybody deals with things differently. I’m not able to name names. People are frustrated, people are angry, they want to know how is this happening, and they want answers—and they turn to me and they say, ‘Why don’t you be a man and stand up and name names and stop hiding and being a coward?’ I have to deal with that, which is not pleasant, especially given the fact that I would love to name names. I’d love to be the first to do it. But unfortunately California conveniently enough has a statute of limitations that prevents that from happening. Because if I were to go and mention anybody’s name, I would be the one that would be in legal problems and I’m the one that would be sued. We should be talking to the district attorneys and the lawmakers in California, especially because this is where the entertainment industry is and this is a place where adults have more direct and inappropriate connection with children than probably anywhere else in the world.”

So perhaps I could have made this cartoon about Hollywood instead of Washington, as long as I had monsters on my mind. In the end, I decided that we have had such an unending stream of ghastly news emanating from the White House this year that more readers would understand this cartoon if it were about a president who has no interest in any policy other than reversing every accomplishment of his immediate predecessor; who has no loyalty to anything but his own bloated ego; who doesn't give two shits about the environment, the working class, or our men and women in uniform; and who is a consummate con man who has been able to get by with the unquestioning support of the 33% he can easily fool.

When America finally grasps the impact of the Trumps' rape of the nation, my fear is that the statute of limitations will have passed.

And we'll be told by an uncaring world that we knew what we were getting into.

Q Toon: Bad Chemistry

After two consecutive Trump cartoons, I'm taking a week off from rigging the election for Hillary Clinton to post a toon for Hallowe'en.

This was not the year for some sort of false equivalency cartoon of kids wearing Donald and Hillary masks frightening the bejeezes out of the citizenry. A cartoon of Trump as a jack-o-lantern is so obvious you could see it coming last July. A cartoon of Hillary Clinton trick-or-treating with a Wikileaky bag might have been tempting, if there were the slightest possibility of attaching relevance to my LGBT readership to it. There isn't, so some other desperate cartoonist is welcome to that idea.

There is one subtle tie between this week's cartoon and the 2016 campaign which some page designers may have caught. The caption is in a font, BF Tiny Hand, which creator Mark Davis based on Donald Trump's handwriting.
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Spooky Toons

Welcome to a special Halloween edition of Spookback Saturday! My cartoon this week was about an actual Halloween costume, but usually, we cartoonists mine this holiday for metaphors we can apply to whatever political story is in the headlines.

And I'm no exception. The charge that one's political opponent was attempting to scare seniors on the issue of social security was ready-made for a Halloween cartoon -- this one featuring the candidates for Wisconsin's 1st congressional seat in 1996 (Republican Mark Neumann and Democrat Lydia Spottswood).

Halloween and elections are made for each other. You can illustrate a charge that Candidate A is a Republican or Democrat in name only, for example, by having a donkey trick-or-treating in an elephant mask or vice versa. Just having kids dressed as political candidates and declaring that to be the scariest costume ever is overdone, I think -- I've seen way too many of such cartoons this season -- so the challenge is to find some way to turn that idea on its head.

I tried doing that in 2006 by portraying right-wingers attempting to be the very opposite of scary as they bemoaned Republicans' dismal chances in off-year elections. Fortunately, they did not succeed in convincing Democrats to stay home on Election Day that year.

Jumping ahead to 2013, these two persistent trick-or-treaters weren't being scary; but they were going to be disappointed by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie on the issue of marriage equality.

Another use for Halloween imagery is when there is some issue that "just won't die," as in this 1986 cartoon for the NorthCountry Journal about a dam on the Kickapoo River, started in the 1960's; the Army Corps of Engineers ended up leaving the gates open, however, yielding to environmental concerns. A Democrat running for Wisconsin State Assembly in 1986 wanted the project completed.

This cartoon actually ran in the November issue, so I had to frame it from the vantage point of being after Halloween.

A big problem with Halloween is that it is so prone to cliché. Do you think taxes, prices, or the rent is too damn high? Vampire cartoon! Do you think somebody doesn't realize how hopeless they are? Great Pumpkin cartoon! Do you think Tea Partisans are mindlessly reckless and bent on destruction? Zombie (or Frankenstein) cartoon! Do you hate Hillary Clinton? Witch cartoon!

I can't be sure whether this 1900 R. C. Bowman cartoon was drawn for Halloween, but it illustrates how old these spooky ideas are. There is very little new material without having to dig very deep (oh, about six feet) to find anything original on which to hang a cartoon.

The most famous Halloween editorial cartoon of all time was drawn in 1936 by J. "Ding" Darling, showing Harry Hopkins, James Farley and Franklin Roosevelt running off with a family's outhouse, labeled "Private Rights," with an alarmed John Q. Public peering out from inside. Darling hadn't actually meant the cartoon for publication, and his editor at the Des Moines Register thought it was in bad taste; but the wife of his syndicate publisher reportedly told the New York Herald Tribune editors, "If you don't publish it, I'll put it on the woman's page!"

If you're going to swipe an old cartoon idea from someone else, at least give them the credit for it.

Q Toon: Costume Drama

One of  2015's crop of topical Hallowe'en costumes has drawn the ire of the transgendered community: for $29.95, you can dress up like Caitlyn Jenner's "Call Me Caitlyn" Vanity Fair cover.

Spirit Halloween sells a costume consisting of a corset similar to the one Jenner wore on the magazine cover, plus a reddish wig; a version sold at Wholesale Halloween Costumes adds a sash with the words "Call Me Caitlyn" on it.

An on-line petition started in August demanded that Spirit Halloween withdraw the Jenner outfit.

"[I]f you follow through with production of a Caitlyn Jenner costume, cisgender people will purchase it to make fun of her and our community. At a time when trans women and GNC folx, especially black trans women, are being murdered at such a high rate, and homelessness, unemployment, and inaccessbility to healthcare run rampant in our community, making fun of one or all of us is utterly insensitive and deplorable."

(That word "folx" is a new one on me -- I'm familiar with the attempts to castrate words that contain the letters "man" or "men" in them, but I had no idea that "folks" was somehow trans/gyno/homo/whatever-phobic. I'll have to look that up.)

Spirit Halloween spokesperson Lisa Barr told CNN: "At Spirit Halloween we create a wide range of costumes that are often based on celebrities, public figures, heroes and superheroes. Caitlyn Jenner is all of the above and our Caitlyn-inspired costume reflects just that."

CNN offers some suggestions for Halloween costumes "you can get away with," although I'd caution white cisgender guys to be careful about dressing up as their #1 suggestion, Cookie from Empire.

Q Toon: Go Away. Kids, You Bother Me

It's late October, so whatever happens to be in the news is going to get the Halloween treatment by editorial cartoonists. So let's find something spooky about marriage equality coming to New Jersey:

I seem to be on a kick of cartooning governors lately. This one's not so obscure outside of his own state, but I figured I had better squeeze in an identifying label, anyway.