Q Toon: Jimmy Carter, 1924-2024

In case any of my publications were coming out this week, here’s my memorial tribute to President Jimmy Carter. 

There have actually been a few good ones from my colleagues whose work appears in daily newspapers — thoughtful pieces and, in some cases, apologies for misjudging him way back when it mattered.

You can count on one hand the editorial cartoonists publishing now who were getting paid to draw during Carter’s presidency. I was drawing for my college newspaper ( for exposure, before we called it that); my cartoons about Carter for the Manitou Messenger were few and far between, but generally critical.

But at least I was harsher on Teddy Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.

Those of us old enough to remember Carter’s presidency from start to finish also remember how the constant drumbeat of criticism directed at Carter resulted in eight years of Ronald Reagan. It enabled Reagan to cruise to reelection simply by making “Carter” into Walter Mondale’s first name.

This may be why some of us were too hesitant to criticize Joe Biden, who, like Carter, will probably be ranked by history in the middle of U.S. presidents (assuming he escapes the fate of James Buchanan). We saw Donald Trump, a mean-spirited liar, cheat, grifter, fascist, and overgrown brat— not in the Gen Alpha sense — plotting his comeback aided and abetted by his lickspittles in Congress, the courts, and right-wing media. (You too, Wall Street Journal.)

We did not want any responsibility for clearing the path for Trump, next to whom Ronald Reagan looks like FDR.

Well, maybe not FDR. LBJ, perhaps.

Carter had to cope with suddenly rising energy prices, inflation, and the Iran hostage crisis— that last one worsened by a rescue helicopter crash and Reagan’s lackeys colluding with Iran to keep the crisis going through the 1980 election. 

On the positive side of the ledger, he negotiated a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt that still stands, strove to run an administration that looked like America, and set policies which lessened our reliance on petrocracies that resented us then and despise us still. And even his harshest critics concede that his post-presidency was nothing short of exemplary.

May angels sing him to his well-deserved rest.

End of the Year Sneak Peek

Unlike a lot of my fellow editorial cartoonists, I did not have a Jimmy Carter memorial cartoon in the can, so I was drawing mine last night.

Well, I could have just reissued this one from almost two years ago, but I wouldn't.

I know of at least one other cartoonist who drew his Carter memorial cartoon yesterday. Clay Jones dislikes memorial cartoons, but came up with a good one; he wrote in his Substack of another cartoonist who confided to him of having three Carter memorial cartoons waiting to go. (Since that cartoonist posted all three of them on Facebook yesterday, is there any point in keeping him anonymous?)

Editorial cartoonists have a love-hate relationship with our memorial cartoons. Our editors and readers love them, but we hate having to draw nice things about people. We also hate it when someone else draws the cartoon of a tear drop on a logo, symbol, statue, building, Uncle Sam, or whatever that we were going to draw.

On the other hand, there is usually awfully little to draw about in the week between Christmas and New Year's. Print and broadcast media have fallen back on reprinting/rebroadcasting favorite stories from the previous year, providing little news for us. Many cartoonists just take the week off as well, or crank out cartoons of people in line taking Politician X in a box to the returns desk at the store — which is kind of the same thing as taking the week off, when you come right down to it.

Q Toon: The Things That Guide My Life

I've finally gotten around to my Jimmy Carter tribute cartoon this week. It quotes extensively from an interview the former president gave to Huffington Post in 2012:

Q: A lot of people point to the Bible for reasons why gay people should not be in the church, or accepted in any way.

A: Homosexuality was well known in the ancient world, well before Christ was born and Jesus never said a word about homosexuality. In all of his teachings about multiple things -– he never said that gay people should be condemned. I personally think it is very fine for gay people to be married in civil ceremonies.

I draw the line, maybe arbitrarily, in requiring by law that churches must marry people. I’m a Baptist, and I believe that each congregation is autonomous and can govern its own affairs. So if a local Baptist church wants to accept gay members on an equal basis, which my church does by the way, then that is fine. If a church decides not to, then government laws shouldn’t require them to.

As president, Carter didn't have a lot to say about homosexuality. Not because gay rights weren't an issue, mind you. Lesbian and gay activists were openly pushing for non-discrimination laws, and the other side had Anita Bryant crusading against us. Sgt. Leonard Matlovich was suing the Air Force to reinstate him after it had discharged him in 1975 for being gay (he won his suit in 1980, but accepted a monetary settlement instead). San Francisco's gays and lesbians rioted after the antigay assassin of Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone was sentenced to only seven years in prison. The first homosexual rights march on Washington D.C. was in 1979.

On the other hand, the disease that would later be named HIV/AIDS was known only to a few and understood by even fewer. Even within the lesbian and gay community, there was little interest in marriage equality.

Carter's administration did, through Midge Costanza and her Office of Public Liaison, urge federal agencies to adopt and enforce antidiscrimination policies, however. And in 1978, when pressured at a pre-election rally by gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown to endorse a "no" vote on Proposition 6, the antigay Briggs Amendment, (and promised that Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan had already done the same), Carter returned to the mic and added his support for California's lesbians and gays as a postscript to his appearance there.

Well, I suppose the 1970's were a different time. I don't remember Senator Joe Biden speaking up for us, either; yet that doesn't negate his endorsement of marriage equality in 2012. 

So I return here to the Huffington Post interview. Toward the end of the interview, Carter explains his Christian life philosophy more fully. It wouldn't all fit into my cartoon, but his answer to a question about people who cite selected biblical passages to defend their homophobia deserves to be included here in full.

A: The example that I set in my private life is to emulate what Christ did as he faced people who were despised like the lepers or the Samaritans. He reached out to them, he reached out to poor people, he reached out to people that were not Jews and treated them equally. The more despised and the more in need they were, the more he emphasized that we should go to and share with them our talent our ability, our wealth, our influence. Those are the things that guide my life and when I find a verse in the Bible that contradicts those things that I just described to you, I put into practice the things that I derive from my faith in Christ.

Amen, Mr. President. Amen.

This Week's Revision and Extension

Putting together Saturday's retrospective of some of my Jimmy Carter cartoons, I should have thought to check the stuff Mom had saved for the earliest possible samples. 

Better late than never. In lieu of my usual Sneak Peek, here's one from my high school newspaper before the 1976 presidential election:

A Man from Plains

The news that former President Jimmy Carter has begun end-of-life hospice care has prompted a general outpouring of sympathy from all quarters (congressional Repugnicans and Fox Noisemakers excused).

It has been a long time since I have drawn Mr. Carter in a cartoon. He didn't venture into LGBTQ+ topics during his presidency, but has offered support to our community in the years since; I am likely to find something to say about that in next week's syndicated cartoon.

In the meantime, here are some oldies from my vault.

Unpublished, Dec. 1977

This is the earliest Carter cartoon I have in my files. There were earlier ones in a folder I mislaid back in my college days which are now lost to history; I can't remember whether I ever drew Jimmy Carter for my high school newspaper. As a freshman at college in December of 1977, I drew cartoons for the student newspaper; but since we had nationally syndicated cartoons by Mike Peters, I mostly stuck to campus issues.

This old sketchbook cartoon does sum up Carter's presidential legacy, though: changing the focus of foreign policy to human rights rather than supporting any regime that claimed to oppose communism, the Carter administration was able to wrangle some successes on its own terms.

March, 1979

Neither of them came easily, but you can cite the peaceful turn-over of the Panama Canal and a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt as two of those successes. Our dealings with the U.S.S.R., Cuba, and OPEC, not so much.

in Manitou Messenger, Northfield MN, March 8, 1979

Domestically, the 1970's were not a great time to be president of the United States. Rising oil prices fueled inflation faster than wages could catch up with it. Carter named the national mood malaise, and his own popularity was not immune to it.

Carter had never been popular with organized labor, and liberals in the Democratic Party chafed at his centrist policies. Republicans, painting Carter as weak and feckless, promised a brighter future based on the a return to the morals and tax levels of days long past.

April, 1980

And then a bunch of Iranian university students occupied the American embassy in Teheran and held its staff hostage for 444 days, right up to the day Carter turned the Oval Office over to a has-been B-list actor from California.

in Manitou Messenger,  Northfield MN, Nov. 6, 1980

I drew two cartoons for the post-election issue of the campus newspaper in November, 1980: one to run if Carter won, and this one to run when he didn't. (Even as a committed Anderson supporter, I didn't see any need to draw a third cartoon.)

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers WI, March, 1982

I've posted this one often. It is commonplace for presidents these days to blame a poor economy on their predecessor; Reagan did so more than a year after Carter had returned to Plains.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., Oct. 18, 1993

If the historical assessment of Carter's presidency left something to be desired, his post-presidency has been exemplary. Instead of enjoying fame and fortune, he helped Habitat for Humanity build houses well past an age when most people are happy to let more youthful hands lay bricks and pound nails.

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, Sept. 12, 1997

In addition to his work with Habitat for Humanity, Carter was known for serving as an elections monitor in fledgling democracies worldwide. In 1997, he was asked to bring this work with the Carter Center back home. Courts threw out the Teamsters' reelection of their union president the previous year due to ballot rigging and other irregularities, and challenger Jimmy Hoffa Jr. urged Carter to step in during the court-ordered election redo. 

The Carter Center has monitored 111 elections in 39 countries since the 1980s, and decided after the party conventions in August that the U.S. presidential contest merited something similar, citing a "backsliding" of American democracy that started a decade ago and has accelerated during the Corrupt Trump Administration.

✍

I couldn't let this week's Graphical History Tour pass without also acknowledging the passing on Thursday of Tony Earl.

As a candidate for Wisconsin's Governor in 1982, he didn't make it in to our office at the Kenosha Tribune before the paper imploded, so I never did produce a caricature of him there. He did make it into a few of my cartoons for the UW-Parkside Ranger and the NorthCountry Journal during his four years in office (and once in the UWM Post as a candidate in the 1988 Senate primary). 

He is fondly remembered as an honest and decent politician from an era before our democracy backslid, before everyone bunkered in our fortified enemy camps, and when a Democrat in Wisconsin's governor's office could still get things done. I seldom had reason to aim a caustic pen at him; but if I have to narrow it down to one cartoon to post in his memory, I'll let it be this one.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Dec. 15, 1983

Rest in peace, Governor Earl.

Ranan Lurie, RIP

Another of the giants in my profession has gone to that great drawing board in the sky:

1968, Life magazine

Ranan Lurie, who died on Wednesday at the age of 90, was an outstanding caricaturist in his day, an Israeli-American published worldwide. (Albeit hardly ever in one place for very long.)

1969, Life magazine

And when I say he was a caricaturist, it's largely because he concentrated so much on getting the faces of politicians so exquisitely exact that he didn't bother to be so persnickety with the other elements of his cartoons.

1972

And it didn't detract from his cartoons in the slightest.

(But make no mistake: drawing someone riding a bicycle ain't easy.)

1973

Aside: Let this be a lesson, kids: don't ever use rubber cement to put newspaper or magazine clippings into a scrapbook. (You kids didn't understand a word of that, did you.) What appears to be grayscale in this cartoon of Henry Kissinger and the leaders of Germany, Greece, France and Great Britain is just my lousy choice of an adhesive staining the paper.

And I've cleaned up this scan considerably.

Oct., 1976

Even if you didn't catch Lurie's signature or the helpful title over his cartoons, you could recognize them by the little sun shining in each and every one.

July, 1976

There are more recent Lurie cartoons out there, but I'll have to leave them for others to display. These are just a few of the ones I saved in scrapbooks back in the day.

Rest in shalom, Mr. Lurie.

Remembering Fritz Mondale

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Kenosha Wis., Nov. 1, 1984

The news was quickly overshadowed — perhaps even in Minnesota — by the Derek Chauvin verdict this week, but we lost one of the good guys this week. Former Vice President Walter "Fritz" Mondale passed away Monday at the age of 93.

So I'd like to take this opportunity to honor the man by pulling up some of my old cartoons in which he was featured — with the recognition that, like most editorial cartoonists, I tend not to draw a lot of cartoons about what a swell person the object of the cartoon is.

July, 1978

This unpublished cartoon from my notebooks is the earliest Mondale cartoon I have. It was not necessarily the first Mondale cartoon I ever drew; I lost a folder with four years' worth of these sketches while I was in college, and I couldn't possibly tell you what I drew about the 1976 Democratic ticket.

I can tell you that Mondale, with Washington experience that his president lacked, was a vital asset to the Carter administration, which gave him an office in the White House and sent him on important foreign trips such as this one to Israel. Menachem Begin was not particularly receptive to the U.S. administration's criticism of its settlements on territory seized in 1967 and 1973.

August, 1980

This is another unpublished cartoon from my notebooks. Curiously, I don't seem to have drawn Mondale in any published cartoons during his vice presidency, in spite of my stint as editorial cartoonist at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, during those same years. Even when Mondale came to our campus to install College President Sidney Rand as U.S. Ambassador to Norway — the political highlight of the year at St. Olaf! — what did I draw for the Manitou Messenger?

I drew one cartoon that week about John Anderson's campaign for president, and another about the possibility of reinstating the draft (neither original of which I still have, nor any other cartoons from that semester).

Oct., 1983; in UW-Parkside Ranger, December 15, 1983

Drawing for another school newspaper, I took plenty of opportunities to draw Walter Mondale during his 1984 presidential campaign. I drew this one in October, 1983 when the movie "The Right Stuff" seemed tailor-made to benefit the campaign of Democratic astronaut John Glenn (although the cartoon only saw print as part of a "Berge's Year In Review" feature).

As a note of explanation for you youngsters, "Look for the Union Label" was an advertising jingle for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in the 1980's, pleading with consumers to buy union-made clothing rather than the cheaper imports that soon put the union's members out of work. And to you oldsters, I apologize for the earworm.

Dec., 1983; in UW-Parkside Ranger, January 19, 1984

Going into the 1984 campaign, Mondale had the endorsements of most of the major unions and liberal interest groups in the country.

July, 1984

What was a decided advantage for Mondale in the Democratic primaries (and even moreso in the caucuses) became more of a liability in the general election.

July, 1984

Even breaking ground by naming a woman, Rep. Geraldine Ferraro (D-NY), as his running mate, failed win him the sort of credit it ought to have. It came off instead as catering to yet another interest group.

A lot has been made of Mondale's vow that because of Ronald Reagan's ballooning federal deficit, "Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won't tell you. I just did." He was right, of course: Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton all had to raise taxes before the budget would balance. But it wasn't something Americans wanted to hear in 1984.

More significantly, the U.S. economy was on the rebound. A decade of escalating energy prices had come to an end, double-digit inflation was in check, business was picking up as interest rates fell; and Reagan was only too happy to take credit for it all. Reagan contrasted this renewed sense of optimism with the national "malaise" proclaimed by his predecessor, which he pinned on Mondale's tail at every opportunity.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, October 4, 1984

Reagan recovered from a shaky performance in the candidates' first debate with the quip during the second one that "I will not make age an issue in this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience." It was a scripted line, but Mondale reportedly knew at that moment that the election was lost.

The media had already come to that conclusion. Given television journalism's obsession with polls and sound bites, the only question about the outcome of the election was just how badly Mondale would lose.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, September 13, 1984

All things considered, it isn't fair to remember Fritz Mondale only for ending up on the bottom of the biggest electoral landslide in U.S. history, so here are just a few accomplishments from his career:

As a young senator, he co-wrote the Fair Housing Act of 1968, a pillar of federal civil rights legislation. He later engineered a 1975 bipartisan deal that ended the two-thirds rule for stopping filibusters, so that 60 senators instead of 67 could cut off debate.

Under President Jimmy Carter, he became the first vice president with a day job, as adviser to the president, not just a bystander. He called it the “executivization” of the vice presidency.

And as a Democratic presidential nominee, he chose the first female nominee for vice president from a major party.

March Times On

Following up on my post from two Saturdays ago, here's a retrospective of some of my favorite cartoons from the first March of previous decades. I won't limit myself to Wisconsin issues this time, but in order to continue where I left off two weeks ago, I'll start with 2011 and work backward.

This first cartoon referenced a "Letter to Wisconsin Republicans From a Conservative Prison Guard," whose response to Governor Scott Walker and state legislators' attacks on state employees such as himself was to declare eternal opposition to the Republican Party.

I'm curious whether the guy has remained committed to defeating the politicians who had betrayed him. Did he become a Bernie Bro? A Lincoln Projector? A MAGAlomaniac?

Sadly, his letter has vanished from the internet, and I think it may have been published anonymously to begin with, so there is probably no way to know whatever happened to him.

for Q Syndicate, March 2011

Later that month, I drew this cartoon critical of Democratic legislators in Maryland. (See, folks, we liberals do not walk in lockstep the way Republicans do.) I bring this cartoon up partly to show how far we have come in ten years on the issue of marriage equality, but also to discuss colorization. At the time, I was still sending cartoons to Q Syndicate only in grayscale.

In this case, however, I was depicting both rainbow colors on one character and Maryland's flag on the other, neither of which translate well into shades of gray. I made a colorized version back then for this blog, and I might have added it to the files I sent my editors. I didn't have a graphics program capable of saving files in better-for-print CMYK format until the next year, however.

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, March 16, 2001

Scott McCallum was elevated to the Wisconsin governorship when Tommy Thompson left to join the George W. Bush cabinet in January, 2001. Thanks to a state constitutional amendment passed after the 1977-79 "Acting Governorship" of Martin Schreiber, McCallum was the first governor to nominate his Lieutenant Governor for State Senate confirmation; he tapped Sen. Margaret Farrow (R-Elm Grove), to be the state's first female Lieutenant Governor.

The Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee took issue with the leisurely pace Senate Majority Leader Chuck Chvala announced for Farrow's confirmation process. Her nomination was announced in March; she ended up taking office in May.

Speaking of things that took from March until May...

for Q Syndicate, March, 2001

I don't have much to say about this cartoon except that it was one of my favorites from that year. I don't often like the non-topical cartoons that get drawn to be held in reserve for when I can't send in a cartoon; it's nearly impossible for a cartoon to be at once topical yet timeless. "The Break-up" was eventually released, probably that May when my better half and I were on vacation in Germany.

Jumping back ten more years in the Wayback Machine...

in Journal Times, Racine WI, March 7, 1991

You sure do, kid. In 30 years, your children will get to experience remote learning via Zoom.

Mommy and Daddy in this cartoon were Baby Boomers my age; junior high schools (grades 7 to 9) in my hometown were conducted in split shifts from 1974 to 1978 because there weren't enough schoolrooms to accommodate all of us at the same time.

The Racine Unified School District did not institute year-round schooling for everyone, but did begin offering it in the 1990's as an elective option at selected schools.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Kenosha WI, March 14, 1991

Sometime during the Reagan administration, congressional Republicans began wearing flag lapel pins conspicuously and uniformly during televised joint sessions of Congress — in particular for presidential addresses. Democrats soon followed suit. When our troops went to fight Gulf War I, both sides added yellow ribbons (popularized from the Tony Orlando and Dawn hit from the 1970's). Republicans then started wearing buttons with an agreed-upon slogan on them and, with that war now won, chanting "USA! USA!" at high points during President Bush's speeches. 

By the way, that's supposed to be Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) up in the fifth row between Senators Paul Simon (D-IL) and Al Gore (D-TN).

Stepping back ten more years one last time, I find our old pal President Warren Gamaliel Harding staring out of a picture frame.

in St. Olaf College Manitou Messenger, Northfield MN, March 5, 1981

President Jimmy Carter had named Sidney Rand, the president of the college where I matriculated, as Ambassador to Norway in 1980. Soon after taking office in 1981, President Ronald Reagan notified Rand that he had two weeks to vacate the embassy. That is normal for any change in administration, but Senator David Durenburger (R-MN) called it "a lousy way to do business" nevertheless. "Norway has had four ambassadors in four years," Durenburger told the Minneapolis Tribune, "and to kick him out like that I thought was just another slap in the face to a very important country."

It took almost ten months before Rand's successor, Mark E. Austad, moved into our embassy in Oslo — so you've got no right to complain, Lt. Gov. Farrow! — by which time I had been graduated from St. Olaf and had lost interest in U.S.-Norwegian affairs. Happily, relations between our two countries survived that tumultuous period, and Minnesotans are still allowed to name their football team after their Scandinavian cousins.

What Is So Rare As a Cartoon in June?

For Smatteringback Saturday today, I'm rehashing a handful of my own cartoons from Junes of ten, twenty, thirty, and omigod forty years ago.

June, 1980

Back in 1980, I didn't have cartoons published outside of the regular school year, so this cartoon never saw print; but I've run it twice on this here blog, so all its tedious shading hasn't been for naught. A college student's youthful idealism allowed me to imagine that independent presidential candidate John Anderson had any chance of being sworn into office on January 20.

In Racine, WI Journal Times, June 17, 1990

Ten years later, I was drawing local issue cartoons for the Racine Journal Times and cartoons on more general topics for a couple University of Wisconsin newspapers. The local issue above concerned Racine's major shopping center, Regency Mall, and its developers' insistence that there not be a bus stop at any of its doors. In their thinking, convenient bus stops would invite riff-raff from the inner city (oh but don't you dare think they were talking about persons of color); shoppers and employees complained of having to walk — especially in winter — from the roadway that circles the perimeter of the parking lot.

In those days, Regency Mall bustled year 'round, with shoe stores; specialty clothing shops for men, women, and children; half a dozen jewelry stores; a couple of bookstores and two music stores; and anchors J.C. Penney's, Sears, Boston Store, and Prange's.

Today, almost all of that is gone. The remaining jewelry stores, discount clothing shops, exercise gym, and fast food joints are widely separated by vacancies covered over with mural-sized historical photographs of Racine.

The failure of the mall had nothing to do with moving the bus stops to the inner ring drive.

In UW-M Post, Milwaukee, June 20, 1990

A huge issue for Republicans in 1990 was stopping protesters from burning the U.S. flag — which only made protesters want to do it more often. Upholding a similar decision the previous year, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in U.S. v. Eichmann on June 11, 1990 that flag-burning was protected by the First Amendment. "Punishing desecration of the flag dilutes the very freedom that makes this emblem so revered, and worth revering," wrote archliberal Justice William Brennan in opinion, joined by archconservative Justice Antonin Scalia. Republicans campaigned to amend the constitution to overturn the court's decision. Congress voted on the proposed amendment six times between 1995 and 2006, but it has always fallen short of the necessary 67 votes in the Senate.

Q Syndicate, June, 2000

Let us now jump ahead to 2000, by which time I had begun drawing LGBTQ-centric cartoons for Q Syndicate. I had a few particular members of the clergy in mind when I drew this June cartoon about the way certain liberal religious folk were trying to ride their camel through the eye of the needle between accepting same-sex marriage and being "welcoming." But this pastor does not physically resemble any of them.

Q Syndicate, June, 2000

Also in June, 2000, there was speculation that Reform Party presidential candidate Pat Buchanan might tap talk show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger to be his running mate. I'm not sure what "Dr. Laura," who called homosexuality "a biological error" and claimed that "a huge portion of the male homosexual populace is predatory on young boys," would have added to the ticket when Buchanan's antigay animus was already firmly established. In the end, she wasn't interested in running for Vice President anyway, but I certainly enjoyed drawing this cartoon.

If you can name Pat Buchanan's 2000 running mate without looking it up, congratulations. You are either the world's wonkiest politics geek, or you've been dead for two years.

Meanwhile, one of the other candidates that year decided that the United States just doesn't have enough federal Christian holidays.

I can't remember whether I drew that cartoon for Q Syndicate, or if it only ever appeared on my old GeoCities page. At this point, it's difficult to check which; although, since there isn't any explicitly L, G, B, T, or Q subject matter, it's probably the latter. It certainly wasn't in the Milwaukee Business Journal.

Q Syndicate, June, 2010

Finally, here's a cartoon from June of 2010 just for schitzengigels and because it didn't make the cut for my look back at Pride cartoons a couple weeks ago.

No Fool Like an Old Fool

It's Spoofback Saturday and April Fool's Eve to boot, so let's take a break from wallowing in the centennial of World War I just a bit.

This is not a Mike Peters cartoon. It's a parody I drew for my college newspaper's mock issue in 1979. In addition to scribblings by resident St. Olaf cartoonists, the Manitou Messenger ran Mike Peters's cartoons distributed by College Press Service. They were more dependable than my editorial cartoons were; but as irrepressible as Mr. Peters was and is, he didn't send us material for the parody issue in which we student journalists blew off steam.

So I mimicked his style as best I could in a cartoon buttressing up one of the conceits of that year's parody issue: that there had been some sort of nuclear accident involving Ytterboe Hall, a 79-year-old red brick dormitory that, in reality, the school administration wanted to tear down (over the objection of its residents and our "Keep Ytt Up" slogan. Ytt would be demolished a few years after I graduated, but St. Olaf eventually put the Ytterboe name on a new building more in keeping with the campus's limestone motif.)

One of my other Mike Peters parodies didn't involve campus issues at all. Ronald Reagan's first Secretary of State Al Haig was the John Bolton of the day, famously declaring after the president's attempted assassination by John Hinckley, "I am in charge!" I think, however, that the caption beneath this cartoon must have been copied from a real Mike Peters cartoon, because I don't remember inking it. I don't have the original of this cartoon, and it was a long time ago, so I could be wrong. On the other hand, I wasted a lot of time mimicking halftone with a Bic pen and a ruler on these things; the forgery of Peters's print style in the caption, if that's what it is, is considerably more true to Peters's handwriting than that of the word "France" on the map.

But how does one parody one's own work?

For one thing, I answered any reader who had told me "I don't get it" by drawing cartoons so impossibly dense, inside, and disjointed that nobody could possibly "get it." Except for Idi Amin (referencing an earlier cartoon that had him hiding out in the utility tunnels beneath the campus), most of the characters in the above cartoon were campus personages. And just to be as obscure as possible, Gwenellda's time-traveling friend was a character from The Uglies, a Manitou Messenger cartoon by L.K. Hanson, dating from a decade before any of us students had come to campus.

Having a time-traveling character in my cartoon would have been more impressive if I had somehow known to include the work of 2018 Herb Block Award winner Ward Sutton, who drew for the Messenger eight years later than I had.

But if I had had that power to see into the future, I wouldn't have been so cocksure that I'd never need to know Thing One about computers. And I might have made it to the Messenger's staff photo on time senior year.

For the UW-Parkside Ranger (renamed the Stranger) in 1984, I depicted the swearing in of the unnamed police detective in the "Funny Paper Caper" I was drawing that year as the 37th president of the United States (with a character from fellow Ranger cartoonist John Kovalic's "Wild Life" as Veep).

Various political figures and a few Ranger staffers populate most of the rest of the cartoon.

But there's more to a parody newspaper than cartoons. Photo editors liked to get in on the laughs, too. Holland Hall at my alma mater is blessed with the most massive urinals you have ever seen in your life, so some enterprising Messenger staffer depicted the school track team posing inside one.

Other memorable photos I remember involved an enormous abstract iron art piece called "The Spirit Also Helpeth Us" by Dorothy Berge (no relation as far as I've ever been able to tell), depicted in various situations such as addressing a convocation in Boe Memorial Chapel. Or gigantic mutant squirrels menacing the campus due to that nuclear leak in Ytterboe.

And in those days, they did it all without PhotoShop.

So did I, taking a file photo from 1955 that appeared to show Ronald Reagan talking to an empty space, and using it to illustrate a bogus story about Basil Wraithbone, a washed-up actor who used to be one of the Ghostly Trio on "Casper, the Friendly Ghost."

If PhotoShop had been around in those days, and if I had had the foresight not to be so snooty about eschewing computers, I could have made it so that you could still see the empty space behind Mr. Wraithbone.

That story is too long to include here in full; so here's another bit of Fake News I wrote.

It's too long, too, but short enough for today's post, and I got to use a couple names I picked up in Medieval History class.

Because being able to namecheck Frankish kings seemed so much more useful back then than getting into the vanguard of the computer revolution.