Something Old, Something New

Today's Graphical History Tour returns to some of my own cartoons celebrating their decennaries this month, but I'm going to shake things up a bit this time and not take them in chronological order.

I'll start with this cartoon drawn for one of the more liberal of the student newspapers at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee.*

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., March 3, 1994

UWM has long had two vocal student groups advocating against each other for Palestine and Israel. The pro-Palestine group posted an inflamatory poster in the student union atrium in response to the Cave of the Patriarch's Massacre, in which American-Israeli physician Baruch Goldstein opened fire on Palestinians worshiping in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, killing 29 and wounding 125.

The Palestinian Human Rights Campaign's poster depicted a sequential cartoon of a Star of David morphing into a swastika. The Jewish student group complained to the chancellor of UWM, John Schroeder, that the poster was antisemitic and should be taken down.

It's an argument reflected in graphic discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at large, and never moreso than today.

If I were to draw a cartoon like this today, I would add a rule that any reference to blood is also out of bounds. You can draw Vladimir Putin as a bloodthirsty monster in Ukraine, or George W. Bush spilling blood in Iraq, or Slobodan Milošević dripping blood in Bosnia. But the moment you try any of that with Bibi Netanyahu, you're trafficking in Blood Libel against all Jews everywhere.

Cartoons by Dwayne "Mr. Fish" Booth and Serge Chapleau

A number of cartoonists have stumbled into the Blood Libel trap since the Netanyahu government's scorched earth campaign to push Palestinians in Gaza into the sea — most recently Dwayne Booth, who draws under the nom de plume "Mr. Fish," and Serge Chapleau of La Presse in Montréal, Québec. Chapleau's cartoon of Netanyahu as "Nosferatu en route to Rafah" was yanked off-line by La Presse this month after howls of protest from the Usual Quarters. The Association of Canadian Cartoonists issued a statement in support of M. Chapleau; he stands behind his cartoon, and La Presse stands behind dumping it.

Mr. Fish's cartoon from last November was singled out as anti-semitic by the right-wing Washington Free Beacon and then criticized by the Interim President of the University of Pennsylvania, Larry Jameson. Mr. Fish has not been fired from teaching his course on cartooning at U-Penn, and no journal that posted "Who Invited That Lousy Anti-Semite" on line has 404ed it with apologies; so I haven't heard any push for the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists to leap to his defense.

for Q Syndicate, March 2004

Moving on: This was a cartoon I drew as a reserve for Q Syndicate, to be released at some later date when I might be on vacation, laid up, or for some other reason fail to get a cartoon in on time. For that reason, the cartoon did not deal with any actual news story; it's not about any particular cartoon syndicate rejecting the work of any particular lesbian cartoonist.

I bring it up today because within cartooning circles here in 2024, some of us are more concerned with the decision by the major newspaper publishing conglomerates to standardize their newspapers' comic pages, because of which decision just about every comic strip currently drawn by a woman has disappeared from print.

Lynn Johnston’s “For Better Or Worse" has survived the purge, but it has been in reruns since 2008. Two other sort-of exceptions are "Luann" by Greg Evans with his daughter Karen as co-author, and "Shoe" currently drawn by Gary Brookins and Susie MacNelly, widow of the strip's original creator.

As Georgia Dunn noted in her strip "Breaking Cat News," "There are more dead men than living women in the funny pages."

Well, it's Holy Week in the Western Christian calendar, so let us open now our hymnals to page ax².

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., March 22, 1984

Back in the 1980's, conservatives upset by the separation of church and school and encouraged by the presidency of Ronald Reagan, were eager to impose prayer on public school students. Not mandatory, of course, but voluntary. 

Fair enough, I suppose. Turnabout, however, is fair play.

Who could have foreseen that forty years later, some tawdry huckster would be hawking Bibles with the Constitution as Apocrypha?

I wonder how many Corinthians it has.

for Q Syndicate, March, 2014

Speaking of turnabout as fair play, it's been ten years since Mr. Fred Phelps shuffled off his fetid coil. Since he based his entire career on speaking ill of the dead — loudly, through a bullhorn, at funerals — it was only fitting to dyslogize him in like manner.

He is risible indeed.

_____________________

* The other main newspapers were the right-wing Times and the Black American Invictus.

Turn Your Head and Cough

Drawing this week's cartoon (see yesterday's post), I was reminded of the last time I included a hernia check in a cartoon.

In May of 2005, I was drawing weekly cartoons to illustrate the editorials of The Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee. The editorial this particular week questioned the need for two proposed competing hospitals in the Milwaukee suburb of Oconomowoc, opining that either one or the other would be plenty, while having two would drive up costs. (One often assumes that competition would drive costs down, but not in the field of health care. There are redundant equipment, maintenance and administrative costs -- which hospital can offer the larger pay package to a prospective CEO? -- and patients generally don't shop around for the cheapest hospital the way they would for muffler repair or a can of soup.)

The BJ editors decided that they were uncomfortable with the suggestive cartoon I drew for them (above). Now, I can recall health care cartoons in a similar vein, such as one by the Indianapolis Star's Gary Varvel showing then-President Clinton pulling on rubber gloves to give Uncle Sam a rectal exam -- if you want to depict any health care issue as being somehow scary, go straight for the groin. I guess what plays in big, cosmopolitan Indianapolis doesn't necessarily play in little old homespun Milwaukee.

With the deadline already past for my cartoon, I hastily replaced my original approach with this hackneyed hunk of drivel:

I don't think I even bothered to draw a pencil sketch of the replacement cartoon before inking it.

Both hospitals ended up being built anyway, incidentally.

Weiners in Cartoons

Yesterday, I discussed how a story like Anthony Weiner's boxer tweet spawns many very similar cartoons. It also inspires cartoon ideas that no responsible newspaper will ever print.

I guarantee you will not see this cartoon by Sandy Huffaker in your local newspaper:

American editors are ever so careful these days not to offend. They're not so worried about the blue-haired ladies who might cancel their subscriptions in a huff as they are about advertisers who will cancel their advertising for fear of the wrath of Blue-Haired Americans for Decency Dot Org.
Editors in Europe are less prudish than their American counterparts. Here's a cartoon by Giorgio Forattini. The subject of the cartoon is Italian Prime Minister Giovanni Spadolini, who was about to succeed himself as head of a second coalition government:

Editors, advertisers, and cable TV newspersonalities would be shocked, shocked, I tell you, to see that cartoon on the editorial page of an American newspaper. Would you believe that the cartoon ran on the front page of a prominent newspaper?
(front page of La Stampa, Turin, August 17, 1982.)

The Denver Post killed a 2000 cartoon by Mike Keefe depicting the state of Florida dangling from Uncle Sam's groin ("Electile Dysfunction"). The St. Petersburg Times spiked a Clay Bennett cartoon in 1994 showing Bill Clinton wearing an "I'm With Stupid" t-shirt with the arrow pointing down at his crotch -- and the cartoon didn't even show any portrayal of anything penile. These, and other classics, found the light of day in David Wallis' Killed Cartoons: Casualties from the War on Free Expression (2007, W. W. Norton & Company). It's a wonderful read, and I thoroughly recommend it.