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.

Stayskalback Saturday

I learned through Daily Cartoonist this week that editorial cartoonist Wayne Stayskal died on Tuesday at the age of 86.

The Daily Cartoonist, in turn, had learned of Mr. Stayskal's passing from arch-conservative newspaper columnist Cal Thomas, who had collaborated with Stayskal on their book Liberals for Lunch in 1985 and had written the forward to Till Euthanasia Do You Part in 1993. As an obituary, Thomas's column has that bitchy bathos of how conservatives are so persecuted and that must be why Stayskal didn't achieve the exalted status of the giants of the editorial cartoonist pantheon.

I'm afraid there are plenty of editorial cartoonists from all across the ideological spectrum who have not achieved that status. Most of us don't and never will; heck, I don't even have a Wikipedia entry. But count me as a longtime fan of Mr. Stayskal from back when he drew for the Chicago Today.

Stayskal's cartoon for the final edition of Chicago Today, September 13, 1974

When I was a kid, I used to have a collection of Stayskal's cartoons pinned to the bulletin board in my bedroom. That was no way to preserve newspaper clippings for posterity, and they haven't been; I can still see in my mind's eye, however, his seemingly casual caricatures of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Richard J. Daley. (And, for some reason, a particular three-panel cartoon that parodied Crest's "Look, Ma, no cavities!" ads, with the punch line "Sugar's so darned high we stopped buying it!") He had a rough drawing style that suggested spontaneity, even hastiness, and brought to mind the scratchings of Ronald Searle or Gerald Scarfe.

Or perhaps Gahan Wilson, along with whose opera the above cartoon would comfortably sit cheek by jowl.

Stayskal was a protégé of cartoonist Vaughn Shoemaker, coming in 1962 to work with and eventually succeed him at the Chicago American (later Chicago Today). As the Chicago Tribune swallowed up the afternoon paper over the course of 1974, he joined Daniel Holland, Dick Locher, and Jeff MacNelly on the Trib's editorial pages. Before long, the Tribune scaled back its cartooning staff, and Stayskal moved to the Tampa Tribune in 1984 but continued national syndication through Tribune Media Services. Even after retiring in 2005 and returning from Florida to Illinois (now there's a contrarian for you), he contributed cartoons to townhall.com until 2010 or so.

He also drew for the comics pages: he wasn't able to make a success of Balderdash or Ralph; but his Trim's Arena, drawn under a pseudonym, appeared in several newspapers' sports pages in the 1970's and 80's.

To Mr. Thomas's complaint, it is true that Wayne Stayskal is absent from such cartooning reference books as Syd Hoff's Editorial and Political Cartooning (1976) and Maurice Horn's The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons (1980), and his Wikipedia entry is all of four sentences long. [Update: the entry has been expanded considerably since I wrote this post.]

But if my blog is dedicated to anything, it is to the proposition that the work of editorial cartoonists should be appreciated beyond the daily deadline, whether the artists reach the pinnacle with Thomas Nast, rub shoulders with the vast majority of quotidian scribblers, or toil in unwikipediated obscurity.

So here's to you, Wayne Stayskal. Rest in peace, and may you bring a daily chuckle to the readers of the Celestial Tribune.

New to My Comic Book Collection

Today's installment of Sketchback Saturday takes the form of a book report.

A few months ago, I pre-ordered Bill Sanders's forthcoming retrospective of his editorial cartooning career. I have both of the books published while he was the cartoonist for The Milwaukee Journal. Head for the Oval Room deals primarily the Nixon administration, some of which is also repeated in The Sanders Book. The latter book includes cartoons not only about the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations, but about Wisconsin and Milwaukee issues as well.

I'm looking forward to receiving the new book, which promises cartoons from his retiree years, but also examples of Sanders's early career with Stars and Stripes, The Greensboro Daily News, and The Kansas City Star. Given how different in style his Milwaukee cartoons are from his earlier work, it should be interesting to see how that evolution took place.

"How Much Are We Really Involved Here" by Bill Sanders in Greensboro Daily News, ca. March, 1962

When I pre-ordered Against the Grain, I browsed around amazon.com to see if there was anything else I'd be interested in, finding Jim Morin's 2016 collection from his 40+ years with The Miami Herald. I've long been fascinated by his distinctive cross-hatch style, which I'd describe as David Levine meets "Ding" Darling.

One of the more intriguing facets of Morin's book is how its date of publication influenced his choice of cartoons. In particular, there are a handful of cartoons about Donald Trump's brief campaign in 1999 for the presidential nomination of H. Ross Perot's Reform Party. Editorial cartoon books take up two and a half shelves of my bookcase, and although three or four of those books deal specifically with the year 1999, Jim Morin's World is the first book I've seen to devote any ink to Trump's short-lived flirtation with presidential politics that year.

I have to say that I barely took any notice of Candidate Trump at the time, myself; my editors at Q Syndicate, the Milwaukee Business Journal, and the Racine Journal Times probably wouldn't have been interested in cartoons about him anyway. Had Jim Morin published his book a year earlier, I suspect none of his Donald Trump cartoons would have made the cut for this book, so it's fortuitous that he had a chance to dig up his material about a nearly forgotten episode from when the current president first dipped his toes into political waters.

"Looks Like His Last Trip to Moscow Just Backfired" by Jim Morin in Miami Herald, June, 1985.

As another example of how the date of publication influences choice of material, the above cartoon is not in Morin's book. I'm not advocating for this particular cartoon, merely noting that it might have been included if this were a book about the Reagan years, since Nicaragua was a BFD in the 1980s. The Iran-Contra scandal, which hinged in part on a White House scheme to circumvent Congress to send arms to right-wing guerrillas in the Central American country, threatened to bring down the Reagan administration, but rates only two cartoons in this book. Nowadays, we only hear about Nicaragua when it gets hit by an earthquake or hurricane, so it's of less interest today.

Besides, there was so much else going on in the 1980s, even without a president tweeting all his brain farts every morning. If anyone is still publishing editorial cartoon memoirs thirty years from now, there will be an awful lot that seems of tremendous import today that will end up on the cutting room floor tomorrow.

Another cartooning memoir recent to my collection is The First and Only Book of Sack (only available from the Star Tribune and currently only on back order) by Steve Sack, featuring the best of his cartoons for the Minneapolis Star Tribune from 1981 to 2017. It's too bad that he didn't also include his older cartoons for The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, such as the one below. Mr. Sack is not a packrat, however, and it's extremely unlikely that foraging through his Indiana cartoons would have turned up any early drawings of Mike Pence, who, after all, was still in college at the time.

"Jump!" by Steve Sack in Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, August, 1980

From a cartoonist's standpoint, one of the joys of this book is to watch how Sack has adapted his style to evolving technologies. Sack has been an early adopter of computerized drawing techniques, ditching the extensive pen and ink crosshatching of his early work in favor of a succession of various media: charcoal, sharpie, watercolor, digital tablet, and iPad. Through it all remains a distinctive touch unlike that of anyone else in the biz.

Due to its publication date, Sack's book includes a handful of cartoons about Senator Al Franken (who also wrote the first of the book's four forewords) and one of Garrison Keillor, but none which reflect either man's #TimesUp fall from grace. The Keillor cartoon is especially unintentionally ironic, depicting the Prairie Home Companion host hiding out from a horde of sex-crazed women. The original context of the cartoon was that Keillor had been named one of Playgirl's Sexiest Men Alive in 1986. (Sack observes that one of the other men on that year's list was Donald Trump).

Such is the risk in any collection of topical writing; editorial cartoons almost always have an ephemeral quality to them. (Just check out any cartoon about Herbert Hoover before October, 1929.) I don't imagine that Sack's book is on back order because he's slipping in some hasty updates, because he'd just have to do it again in a matter of months.

We'll just have to wait until The First and Only Book's sequel.

Remembering John B. Anderson

SimonSezback Saturday today pays tribute to John B. Anderson, who died this week in Washington, D.C. at the age of 95. The Republican Congressman from Illinois was the first person I voted for in a presidential election, first in the 1980 Minnesota Republican caucuses, then in his Independent candidacy for the presidency.

We college students for Anderson were a devoted bunch, and I've seen a lot of Facebook comments from people my age who are still proud to have voted for him, and have never voted for a Republican candidate since. In the small town where I went to college, we vastly outnumbered supporters of all the other candidates —put together!— at the local caucuses, held on the same day as the New Hampshire primary.

John Anderson campaigning at UW-Parkside, March 27, 1980.

But by the time of the Minnesota Republican Convention to select the state's actual delegates to the National Convention, representatives from non-college districts had the votes to send a delegation committed entirely to the presumptive nominee, Ronald Reagan.

What endeared Anderson to us brand new voters was his earnestness and his willingness to go against a politician's instinct to say exactly what the people in the room might want to hear. From his New York Times obituary:

Mr. Anderson refused to pander, telling voters in Iowa that he favored President Jimmy Carter’s embargo on grain sales to the Soviet Union after it had invaded Afghanistan. He called for a gasoline tax of 50 cents per gallon — when a gallon cost $1.15 — to save energy.
Early on, when all six of his rivals for the Republican nomination assured the Gun Owners of New Hampshire that they firmly opposed gun control legislation, Mr. Anderson said, “I don’t understand why.”
“When in this country we license people to drive automobiles,” he added, “what is so wrong about proposing that we license guns to make sure that felons and mental incompetents don’t get a hold of them?”
He was roundly booed.

My cartoons of John Anderson in 1980 betray the humorless earnestness of a dewy-eyed supporter of a doomed cause (and the difficulty I've always had with drawing hands). My characters were stiff and two-dimensional in more ways than one.

Anderson's campaign left me with a lasting dislike of media coverage that focuses on the poll du jour. But for third-party candidates like Anderson, popularity polls have a real and practical effect on whether the League of Women Voters allow them to participate in televised debates, or even whether they can get on the ballot at all.

So too election rules crafted by the two major parties to safeguard their own interests. Anderson had to fight to get on the ballot in Ohio, where the deadline for an independent candidate to get on the November ballot was in March, well before either major party's nominee had been decided. In Anderson v. Celebrezze, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Anderson's favor, reasoning that

"Not only does the challenged Ohio statute totally exclude any candidate who makes the decision to run for President as an independent after the March deadline, it also burdens the signature-gathering efforts of independents who decide to run in time to meet the deadline. When the primary campaigns are far in the future and the election itself is even more remote, the obstacles facing an independent candidate's organizing efforts are compounded. Volunteers are more difficult to recruit and retain, media publicity and campaign contributions are more difficult to secure, and voters are less interested in the campaign. It is clear, then, that the March filing deadline places a particular burden on an identifiable segment of Ohio's independent-minded voters."

Mainstream cartoonists who had welcomed Anderson as a breath of fresh air in February were dismissing him as a quixotic kook in October. Still, I desperately clung to the prospect that The Issues were more important than The Polls. I even let the candidate of the Libertarian Party (which had a small but vocal presence on campus) in on the act.

President Carter in the above cartoon alludes to the brand spanking new Stealth Fighter planes (the F-117 and B-2 Spirit) announced by the Carter administration earlier that year.

This last cartoon was an extra wide oeuvre which you probably need to beclickify to embiggen to eulegibilitous size. I expect most readers to recognize the poem (itself a parody) and the song parodied by Ronald Reagan and John Anderson in this cartoon; the James Russell Lowell hymn parodied in the Jimmy Carter panel is more obscure today (my Lutheran denomination dropped it from its hymnals after 1978).

Ah, the zeal of youth! Been there. Voted that. Bought the t-shirt.

Thought I still had the bumper sticker, too.

Passing of the Torch

It's Solemnly Swearback Saturday here at Bergetoons, and at the risk of presuming to put my own juvenalia alongside some excellent examples from the past, I'd like to share a few historical cartoons about this nation's peaceful transfer of executive power.

Inauguration cartoons afford the opportunity to fill the frame with caricatures. As with this bit of wishful thinking, they don't have to be drawn at the time the White House is changing hands; I drew this in June of 1980, before the Democratic National Convention had officially renominated incumbent President Jimmy Carter.

Of course, John Anderson fell way short of becoming the 40th President of the United States. Instead it was that guy partly hidden behind Chief Justice Warren Burger; so come January, I updated a famous New Yorker cartoon by Peter Arno.

Arno's original cartoon of Herbert Hoover riding glumly beside a beaming Franklin Roosevelt, like John Darling's outhouse cartoon, became famous in spite of its not being published. Drawn for the New Yorker magazine cover, it was pulled by the editors after the assassination attempt on FDR that killed Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak on February 15, 1933. (FDR was the last president whose inauguration date was March 4; the 20th Amendment to the Constitution moving the date to January 20 was ratified between his election and inauguration, and went into effect in 1937.)

Steve Brodner recently posted this tour de force by the outstanding caricaturist Al Hirschfeld (1903-2003) of celebrities who performed at Lyndon Baines Johnson's 1965 inauguration gala:

LBJ Inaugural Guests by Al Hirschfeld, 1965

I'm seeing Elaine May and Mike Nichols, Carol Channing, Barbara Streisand, Julie Andrews, Carol Burnett, Alfred Hitchcock, Johnny Carson, Ann-Margaret, Woody Allen and Harry Belafonte, and wondering what exactly Alfred Hitchcock performed. I also presume that Nina is in the drawing at least half a dozen times.

When I was growing up, I had a 16-volume set of a History of the United States that was generously illustrated with editorial cartoons. Included was this fascinating depiction of Franklin Roosevelt's first inaugural by Miguel Covarrubias (1904-1957), a Mexican caricaturist and muralist who was, by the way, one of Hirschfeld's influences.

"The Inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt" by Miguel Covarrubias in Vanity Fair, March/April, 1933

On the dais with FDR are Eleanor Roosevelt; FDR's first Vice President, John Nance Garner; outgoing President Herbert Hoover and his wife; and outgoing Vice President Charles Curtis. Holding the laurel wreath is a figure who should be familiar to followers of these Saturday posts over the past year: Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Charles Evans Hughes. Yes, the same one who resigned from the court to run for president against Woodrow Wilson in 1916.

Smoking a cigar directly below Hughes is another unsuccessful presidential candidate, Alfred Smith (1928); John Davis, who ran on the top of the ticket in 1924 with FDR as his running mate, is the bland-faced man with white hair, glasses and  rounded collar below the middle pillar.

Indeed, almost everybody in the cartoon is a real person; even the guy in the lower right corner with his back to us is identified as J. P. Morgan. I certainly can't argue with that.

I'll close with perhaps my favorite cartoon about Inauguration Day. Even though neither you nor I are quite old enough to remember Calvin Coolidge, I think the humor still comes through Gluyas Williams's (1888-1982) cartoon. It's a truism in cartooning circles that great art never saved a mediocre idea; but it definitely elevates a good one.

"Crisis In Washington" by Gluyas Williams in Life, February 15, 1929

There are many, many more cartoons I could have included here — Mike Peterson ran a large selection from Warren Harding's inauguration yesterday — and I hope to run more in four years to celebrate yet another peaceful transfer of executive power.

100 Years Ago: Third Party's Over

Here's an editorial cartoon by Sidney J. Greene for the New York Telegram 100 years ago today, April 2, 1916:

To explain: in 1912, former President Teddy Roosevelt made a third-party run for the presidency as the candidate of the Progressives, also known as the Bull Moose Party. He won more votes than the Republican nominee, incumbent President William Howard Taft, but the election went to Democrat Woodrow Wilson -- ending two decades of Republican administrations.

Here the cartoonist depicts Roosevelt and his Bull Moose returning to the Republican fold in 1916 (apparently you could get away with "the same old bull" in a family newspaper even then). The other two figures in the cartoon are Republicans Elihu Root and Henry Cabot Lodge.

Roosevelt's return to the Republican Corral left open the question of whether the remnants of the party would settle with the Democrats or Republicans, here represented by their 1916 presidential nominees, President Wilson and Charles Evans Hughes, who had resigned his seat on the Supreme Court to run for President.

I can't find a signature on this cartoon, but the style suggests W.A. Carson.

Most Progressives returned to the Republican Party, with a few exceptions. Wisconsin's Bob LaFollette continued a valiant effort to revive the Progressive brand, receiving 17% of the national vote (and winning his home state's electoral votes) as the Progressives' presidential nominee eight years later.

As we face the prospect of a Republican split producing a third party candidacy again this year, it is hard not to notice how little success third parties have had electing presidents since the Civil War. Dixiecrats and Progessives bolted the Democratic Party in 1948, and Harry Truman won anyway. George Wallace left the Democrats to run under the American Independent banner in 1968, helping throw the election to Richard Nixon. John Anderson left the Republican party to run as an Independent in 1980, and it didn't hurt Ronald Reagan in the least.

Dream on, Younger Self. That is so totally not happening.

And in none of those cases were those third parties a significant factor in the elections that followed. The third party that might possibly have had a chance of catching on, Ross Perot's Reform Party, succeeded in winning the Minnesota governorship in 1998; but once Perot took himself out of the running, it nominated such a repulsive presidential candidate in 2000 that it promptly fizzled away into vapor.

On the other hand, its 2000 nominee had more of an effect on the outcome of the election than this guy did:

When I Met Al Franken

Now that Minnesota's senatorial election has at long last been settled, the truth can finally be told.

I met Al Franken in 1980, when we were both supporting a Republican candidate for President. I was a junior at St. Olaf College, a Lutheran liberal arts college across Northfield, Minnesota from Carleton College. Minnesota's presidential caucuses that year would be held on the same day as the New Hampshire primary; then as now, New Hampshire got the overwhelming majority of the media and candidates' attention. After all, local party members around Minnesota were only electing delegates to the next round of state caucuses.

Like many college students that winter, I supported John Anderson for president. Canvassing for the Republican party, I found very few Republicans who supported the eventual nominee, Ronald Reagan; in fact, some Republicans told me they were horrified at the prospect of his nomination. College students, particularly St. Olaf students, overwhelmed the Northfield caucus on election day, producing a lopsided supermajority for Anderson. (George H.W. Bush came in second, Reagan a distant third.) By the time the state caucus was held, Republicans who didn't live in college towns turned the state delegation solidly for Reagan, but that's getting way afield of this story.

Back to preparing for the caucuses. While Anderson, Bush, Reagan, John Connally, Howard Baker and Phil Crane were busily campaigning in New Hampshire, they sent surrogates to Minnesota. Anderson's surrogate to college campuses was Al Franken, a Minnesota-bred writer on Saturday Night Live. He appeared on the show in a deconstruction of comedy team conventions, playing Costello/Lewis/Tom to the Abbott/Martin/Dick of Tom Davis. The bit would open with an animated caricature of the Franken and Davis duo.

The guys running the St. Olaf campaign for John Anderson approached me in advance of a visit to the campus by Al Franken to ask me to draw a poster advertising the event. The obvious idea to me was to draw a take-off of the Franken & Davis cartoon, substituting John Anderson's head on the lankier Tom Davis body. My problem was that when Saturday Night Live was broadcast that weekend, there was no Franken & Davis bit on the show. And with no internet, Hulu, or even video casette to refer to, I had to draw the cartoon completely (except for the easily found pictures of Anderson) from memory.


My fellow students thought my cartoon was just swell anyway, and got the idea that when Franken came to campus, I should present the poster to him. They arranged for the presentation to take place at lunch in the school cafeteria. What any of us thought Mr. Franken would want with the black marker drawing on 3.5' by 2' blue poster board is anybody's guess. What happened was this.

Franken took a look at the poster and made a comment that it was almost, but not quite right. With a magic marker, he then drew an e-NORRRRRRR-mous phallus protruding from his crotch, right across John Anderson and into the advertising copy.

I'm pretty sure he didn't keep the poster. I know I didn't. Maybe somebody in the Students for Anderson group held onto it for a semester or so. We certainly didn't bring it to the caucus.