February Shorten Suite

Today's Graphical History Tour steps back forty, thirty, twenty, and ten Februaries ago to check out what I was drawing back then.

1986

in NorthCountry Journal, Poynette Wis., February, 1986

I can't remember the exact point of the editorial that accompanied this cartoon in the environmentally-focused NorthCountry Journal, but it's not difficult to guess the general drift. 

Drawing architecture is not one of my favorite pastimes; I must have used a straightedge to draw so many parallel lines, and somehow managed not to smear any wet india ink. There is, miraculously, no white-out on the original of this particular cartoon.

1996

Rummaging through my cartoon files from 30 Februaries ago, I first found a cartoon likening reactionary GOP presidential contender Pat Buchanan to Nazis — which I still think is valid — but then I came across this one.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee, February 29, 1996

Lamar Alexander, a former Governor of Tennessee and Secretary of Education in the George H.W. Bush administration, was dubbed by the professional punditry one of the moderates in the GOP presidential field.

Which just goes to show how long the positions he espoused in my cartoon have been mainstream in the Republican Party. Abolishing the Department of Education since became GOP platform boilerplate, so the Lawless Trump Regime's destruction of the DOE is no longer anything new or surprising.

Alexander's proposed "new military department responsible for drug enforcement" and "dealing with illegal immigration," put forth more than five years before 9/11, is now the Lawless Trump Regime's Department of Homeland Security.

2006

for Q Syndicate, February 2006

But enough about politics.

Awards season affords a welcome opportunity to step away from the news out of Washington and whatever politician is trying to capitalize on homophobia at the moment. Movies with Oscar nominations in 2006 included Brokeback Mountain, TransAmerica, and Capote, promising one of the most LGBTQ-centric ceremonies since, well, 1960. 

By the way, do I have to explain now where these women are and what they are doing? Naah, not gonna do it. Go ask your mother.

2016

for Q Syndicate, February, 2016

Staying with Hollywood, my cartoon ten Februaries later remarked how straight actors win praise for playing LGBTQ roles, but out LGBTQ actors can get pigeonholed having to play LGBTQ roles exclusively.

There have been some notable exceptions to the practice in the last ten years, notably Jonathan Bailey as Bridgerton heartthrob Anthony, Neil Patrick Harris as How I Met Your Mother's Barney Stinson, Jim Parsons as Big Bang Theory's Sheldon Cooper, and Matt Bomer in role after role after role.

Theater has a long history of white actors playing Parts of Color (from Othello to The Mikado to Apache), but that's decidedly out of fashion these days.

There are some who advocate that only LGBTQ actors should portray LGBTQ characters; but there is little chance of that as long as actors such as Rami Malek, Nick Offerman, Brendan Fraser, and Ewan McGregor keep winning awards for gay roles.

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Rev. Jesse Jackson passed away this week, so I'll close today's Graphical History Tour in his memory with one of the cartoons I drew of him during his 1984 presidential campaign.

January, 1984

My cartoon, drawn after Jackson led a delegation of Black faith leaders who secured the release from Syria of U.S. Navy Lt. Robert Goodman, seems not to have been published. The UW-Parkside Ranger instead printed a cartoon I drew in which a stack of papers on Secretary of State George Schultz listed a number of pending foreign policy issues, including suspended nuclear disarmament talks, yellow rain, a Korean passenger plane shot down by the U.S.S.R., and the 241 Marines killed in a Beirut suicide bombing.

One might argue that the 52 U.S. hostages freed by Iran on Reagan's first hour in office outweigh the one seaman freed by Syria; but I would argue that Reagan was responsible not for achieving but for delaying the Iran hostages' release, so that doesn't count.

In any event, freeing Lt. Goodman, who had been shot down over Lebanon, captured, and taken to Damascus, established Rev. Jackson as more than a special interest candidate in the 1984 Democratic primaries. He was among the front runners for the nomination four years later, then concentrated on leading his PUSH/Rainbow Coalition.

In spite of being visibly afflicted with Parkinson's disease, Jackson came to Kenosha to march in a Black Lives Matter protest a month after the 2020 riot there, and spoke at the church where I was working at the time. I did not get to meet him, but here's a photo of him at Grace Lutheran Church with an assistant and Greater Milwaukee Synod (ELCA) Bishop Paul Erickson, and another of some of the local television coverage.

Januaries '4eign and Domestic

It's time to ease back on the wayback machine just a little bit, so here are a few cartoons I drew in Januaries of years ending in -4. (Which was coincidentally the high temperature here the other day.)

1984 was a presidential election year, of course; and like today, the United States was bedeviled by hostilities in the Middle East.

The U.S.S. John F. Kennedy had been on patrol off the coast of Lebanon after the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, in which 241 soldiers had died. In response to some hostile fire, the JFK launched a bombing raid on December 4. The plane of Navy Lts. Mark Lange and Robert Goodman was shot down by a Syrian ground missile. Lange did not survive; Goodman was taken captive in Damascus.

Unwilling to accede to the conditions set by Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad that the U.S. withdraw forces from Lebanon, the Reagan Administration's efforts to win Goodman's freedom were getting nowhere. Then a delegation led by by Rev. Jesse Jackson went to Damascus, and Jackson, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, succeeded where Reagan had failed.

Jackson nevertheless came in seventh place in the Iowa caucuses. Go figure. Must have been because there are no naval bases in Iowa.

I drew the above cartoon for the January 12, 1984 edition of the University of Wisconsin - Parkside student newspaper; but they still had an unused cartoon from December and ran that one instead.

Moving on to 1994, and the aftermath of more U.S. soldiers killed in a far-off civil war:

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., Jan. 24, 1994

President Clinton's first Defense Secretary, Les Aspin, resigned at the end of 1993, tacitly taking the fall for the Blackhawk Down incident in Somalia. Clinton's nomination of Admiral Bobby Ray Inman as Aspin's replacement was greeted initially with bipartisan praise — save for New York Times columnist William Safire, who alleged that Inman was biased against Israel. 

Inman withdrew his name from consideration at a stormy press conference, where he blasted Safire and complained that Republican Senators Bob Dole and Trent Lott were out to get him. Both Senate leaders expressed surprise and shock at Inman's accusation, and the White House was taken totally off guard.

Clinton's subsequent nomination of William Perry to the post went off smoothly. There was later speculation that Inman was actually trying to head off being connected to a scandal at International Signal and Control, where he served on the board of directors.

for Q Syndicate, January, 2004

I don't have a cartoon from January of 2004 that fits with the general topic of today's post; so instead, I'll include this homage to P.T. Bridgeport, a recurring character in Walt Kelly's "Pogo" whose dialogue always appeared in late-1800's advertising fonts. 

Lettering dialogue is usually my least favorite part of drawing a cartoon. This was an exception.

for Q Syndicate, January, 2014

Returning to foreign issues, I chose this cartoon from ten years ago because it gives me an opportunity to address a cartoon I haven't drawn this month.

On December 29, the President of Burundi, Évariste Ndayishimiye, was asked about respecting LGBTQ+ rights.

"For me, I think that if we find these people in Burundi they should be taken to stadiums and be stoned, and doing so would not be a crime," he said.

If any U.S. politician had spewed such hate-filled bile in the no-news week between Christmas and New Year's, I would have been all over that story in that week's cartoon. But doing so about a politician none of my readers had ever heard of from a country that many could not find on a map (present company excepted, of course) with a history of Western colonialism and yada yada is fraught with danger.

Would it be possible to condemn Mr. Ndayishimiye without risking accusations of racism and cultural imperialism?

We could debate whether homosexuality existed in Africa before Christian and Islamic missionaries preached anti-LGBTQ+ persecution there. Western colonizers did everything they could to erase local culture and history wherever they went; yet it beggars belief to imagine that homosexuality existed only in Europe and in scattered Native American nations before Christopher Columbus, Vasco de Gama, and Francis Drake set sail.

Mr. Ndayishimiye, as it happens, is Roman Catholic, but with some glaringly apparent differences with the current Pope.

My 2014 cartoon attempted to argue that institutionalized homophobia rather than homosexuality is the Western export to Africa (at least as far as Christianity is concerned). Not that I have never leveled criticism at African politicians —viz. here and e.g. here — but I don't have much of a readership in Burundi, Uganda, or Kenya.

Or anywhere else on the continent.

Lo, mbaya sana. I'm better off sticking to cartooning politicians my readers can vote for or against.

One reference to The African Queen in that regard is probably my total allotment, anyway. At least until I manage to draw a better Katherine Hepburn.

The Ghosts of Cartoons Past

Welcome to another Graphical History Tour. Let's rummage through my December cartoons from 2013, 2003, 1993, and 1983, shall we?

for Q Syndicate, December, 2013

I brought up Megan Kelly in this here blog the other day, quoting her fairly lengthy question to Chris Christie at last week's less-than-presidential debate. She accused him of being out-of-step with Republican orthodoxy and her own prejudices against transgender youth.

Ten years ago, Kelly was over at Fox Noise, whence she opined that everybody knows that Santa Claus can't possibly be Black because he's as Aryan as she is. Of course, we know from the historical record that the OG St. Nicholas was no such thing.

He was a Klingon. Qapla'!

for Q Syndicate, December, 2003

Once upon a time, I had an editor who objected to my depicting Santa Claus as gay. He was worried that it would offend readers' religious sensibilities. He had sold Q Syndicate by the time I drew this cartoon at the end of 2003, so I don't know if he would have had the same qualms about outing Old Man Time.

The editors of the Washington Blade really liked this cartoon, however, adding color and featuring it on the front page of their year-in-review issue. How I wish I had downloaded that version of the cartoon! (I had printed a screen grab of the page back then, but that piece of paper is a bit worse for wear twenty years on.) The Blade's colorizing job was an improvement over the original —cross-hatching really is no way to draw rainbow colors. But the grayscale image now in their archives is dark and muddy.

2003 was an extraordinarily good year for the LGBTQ+ community. An openly gay cleric, Rev. V. Gene Robinson, was elected Bishop Coadjudicator of the Episcopal Church New Hampshire Diocese. The original Queer Eye for the Straight Guy was the most popular program on Bravo, spawning further gay-oriented "reality programming." (Chip and Reichen were a gay couple on CBS's Amazing Race; Bravo's Boy Meets Boy was a gay version of The Bachelor with the catch that some of the supposed suitors were closeted straight dudes.)

Sadly, 2004 would prove to be a year of backlash, with President George W. Bush campaigning for reelection by pledging to enshrine opposite-sex marriage exclusivity in the U.S. Constitution — and America rewarding him by making him the only Republican presidential candidate in this century to win the popular vote.

UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., Dec. 9, 1993

Skipping back another decade, I have fewer cartoons to choose from, and this may be the only one in today's post that hasn't appeared in my blog before. The student newspapers for which I drew always suspended publication in early- to mid-December for finals and winter break. Local newsmakers are busy with holiday business (as are local cartoonists), so I don't believe I drew anything for the Racine Journal Times during any of the Decembers featured here today.

The baby and the muralist in this cartoon would be millennials in their thirties today; I guess the parents might be millennials, too. If so, their family is spared having a generation gap.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., Jan. 19, 1984

I drew this cartoon of the 1984 Democratic presidential candidates in December of '83 for the student newspaper of the University of Wisconsin at Parkside after the last issue of the semester had been published, so it was held over until January.

Having a plethora of official whatnots of the Olympic games was a new development in 1984. Having sponsors actually started way back in 1908 (Soup maker Oxo sponsored the London Olympics that year), and Coca-Cola has been an official sponsor ever since the 1928 Amsterdam games. But by 1984, it seemed that every other commercial on TV boasted of being the official adhesive tape, motor oil, or hemorrhoid ointment of the Olympics.

Since we're back to December of 1983, I have to close with the Christmas break episode of my crude take-off of "The Maltese Falcon" starring thinly disguised characters from the comic pages.

At this point in my story, a police detective who looked suspiciously like Dick Tracy was interrogating an out-of-work fellow you might have sworn was Mike Doonesbury — note: Garry Trudeau had put his strip on hiatus at the end of January — when a bunch of characters from one of my all-time favorite strips suddenly interrupted:

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., Dec. 15, 1983

I hope you'll check back before the holidays are over; but in case we miss each other, juHqu' qechmey!

Cheap Shots with a Ten-Foot Poll

In last Saturday's Graphical History Tour, I shared a few cartoons and illustrations I drew 40 years ago in April of 1982. I had almost included one from April of 1992, but I decided to give that month a post of its own today.

I'll start out with one that drew a couple of complaints.

in Journal Times, Racine, Wis., April 8, 1992

Religious fundamentalists were upset that the Racine Health Department had begun offering free condoms in response to the AIDS crisis. For years, health advocates had been urgently recommending that men who had sex with men must use condoms every time. Although some in the gay community reacted with the same attitude we've seen in the past two years toward face masks, the absence of any treatment for HIV/AIDS in 1992 made a lot of sense to the rest.

Antigay puritans, however, argued that condoms are less than 100% effective — and that was without guys wearing their condoms down around their nuts instead of up where they're of any use. As far as the Just Keep Saying No crowd were concerned, total abstinence was the only prophylactic that was 100% effective and therefore the only one worth considering.

Just like how abstaining from breathing is 100% effective against transmission of COVID-19.

A frequent denizen of the Journal Times's Letters to the Editor section (he had just had another letter, "Condoms Cause AIDS," in the paper two days earlier) recognized my caricature of the gentleman leading the opposition to the health department program.

in Journal Times, Racine Wis., April 17, 1992

There was another letter, very much like Mr. Brook's, sent in by parents of a friend of a friend. 

in Journal Times, Racine Wis., April 13, 1992

When I was a kid, I had occasionally subbed for their son delivering the Sunday morning Milwaukee Journal, with which there always seemed to be one supply problem or another. The worst was when the delivery truck had left 75 extra copies of the classified ad sections instead of 75 copies of the news sections. This was in the days when cell phones were the thing of science fiction, so I had to schlep a third of a mile back to my house to call the circulation department, which never answered their phone at 4:30 a.m. on a Sunday.

At any rate, I don't owe the Pfeiffers any favors.

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Nationally, the major story for the month (prior to the Rodney King riots 30 years ago yesterday) was the presidential primary election season grinding to a close.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, Wis., April 6, 1992

On the Democratic side, the contest had come down to two former governors: Jerry Brown of California and Bill Clinton of Arkansas. President George Bush had clinched the Republican nomination and polled ahead of either Democrat, even though fascist-wing Pat Buchanan was doggedly refusing to do the Republican thing and fall in line behind him.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., April 9, 1992

By the time the Wisconsin primary was over — well, I hesitate to say Bill Clinton was the "favorite" for the nomination, because there wasn't a great deal of enthusiasm around the former Arkansas governor. He had issues with marital infidelity (an issue that had dashed Gary Hart's presidential ambitions four years earlier) and collegiate marijuana use (still a disqualifying consideration for a sizeable chunk of the voting-age population). He had mighty lame excuses for both.

Furthermore, the central issue of his campaign, aside from personal ambition, was a mild repudiation of the Democratic Party liberal ideals. Its "third way" smörgåsbord of fiscal conservatism and social progressivism was meant to appeal to middle-of-the-road moderates — that ambiguous slice of the American electorate who famously don't really get enthusiastic about politics.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., April 27, 1992

Then, just as the news media began wondering what they were supposed to report on with the party conventions still a couple months away, along came billionaire H. Ross Perot, dropping loud hints that he might perhaps consider thinking about mulling whether to make himself available for a third-party run for the presidency.

Primary Cullers

The last couple of Saturday posts ran pretty long and required exhaustive research, so this week, I'm just digging up a handful of my own cartoons and wasting less of your time. Let's take a quick trip down Memory Lane to Primaries Past, shall we?

in UW-Parkside Ranger, February 4, 1988

I've learned not to get too heavily invested in a single favorite candidate this early in the presidential race. Like Bruce Babbitt in 1988 (anybody remember him?) they tend not to fare particularly well. Oh, sure, I'd like to have seen Julián Castro do better this time around, but I'm not bereft or befuddled over his having to drop out before a single vote was cast.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, February 18, 1988

Iowa and New Hampshire have, by virtue of cutting to the head of the line, acquired outsize status in the nominating process. The two have awarded a total of 65 delegates this year, less than 1.5% of the 4,750 that will meet in Milwaukee this July. But three candidates shuttered their campaigns as soon as New Hampshire's votes were in; and for whatever reason, non-white candidates could gain no traction in these two overwhelmingly Caucasian states this year. #PrimariesSoWhite.

for UW-M Post, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, March 23, 1992

I cast my first presidential vote in Minnesota's 1980 caucuses, which were held on the same day as the New Hampshire primary that year (and were promptly shooed back by the national parties in deference to the Granite State). But ever since, I've voted in Wisconsin's caucus (1984) and primaries, which have usually been held in April.

in UW-Milwaukee Post, February 27, 1992

At the current state of the race, you often hear pundits drooling over the nightmare scenario of a brokered convention. The fact, however, is that by April, the field has winnowed down to two or three candidates, one of whom is on his/her last legs.

But at least we have April 7 all to ourselves this year. In 1996, Wisconsin moved its primary to mid-March and got lumped in with Illinois, Michigan and Ohio in what was dubbed the "Big Ten Primary." Each of those other states were significantly more delegate-rich than the Dairy State. We're not accustomed, as Iowa and New Hampshire voters are, to running into presidential candidates every time we walk out the front door; but in 1996, we saw even less of them than usual.

in Racine, WI Journal Times, March 15, 1996

Moving our presidential primary to March also meant that with Wisconsin's non-partisan elections in April and primaries for those elections in February, voters were asked to come to the polls three times in three months. In 2000, Wisconsin moved its presidential primary back to April.

Wisconsin Democrats and local election officials around the state successfully fought Republican efforts to move up this year's presidential primary, which will be held on the same day as the nominally non-partisan election for the state Supreme Court. There is a de facto partisan Republican majority on the Court, with an appointee of Scott Walker up for election to a full ten-year term this year; Democrats thought that the presidential primary would energize their base enough to vote him out.

What Democrats have failed to consider (aside from the possibility that the nomination might be settled by April 7) is that there will be plenty of Republican voters coming out to elect mayors, school boards, city council members county supervisors, and other non-partisan officials, and to vote on whatever local referenda might be on the ballot. The Democratic presidential primary will be the only openly partisan race on the ballot, and there will be nothing preventing Republicans from voting in it.

Do not be surprised if polls of "likely Democratic voters" prove to be way off the mark.

George McGovern

This morning comes the news that former Senator from South Dakota George McGovern is "coming to the end of his life" and has been entrusted to hospice care.

I don't have any of my own cartoons from his 1972 race for the Presidency, although I do recall having tried to sketch a Time magazine cover image of Richard Nixon only to have my drawing look more like McGovern than Nixon. I do have a college newspaper clipping of a cartoon from December, 1983, when McGovern was making yet another try for the Democratic nomination:

If I remember correctly, I had difficulty drawing McGovern this time around and ended up drawing him on another sheet of paper and pasting that head over the one on the page with the rest of the cartoon. That would account for all those marks around his head on the printed copy, as the exposure here appears quite dark.

By 1984, I had a lot more experience drawing Richard Nixon, so I doubt that it would have helped me to try to draw that Time magazine cover again.