Q Toon: Minnesota ICE

I wish I had come across this quotation by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in time to send this cartoon out for publication by the federal holiday (yes, it still is a federal holiday, in spite of the racist Trump regime's refusal to respect it). Instead, it goes public during Black History Month (not a federal holiday, but another observance repudiated by the white supremacists in the White House).

The quotation is certainly not aimed at the good people of the Twin Cities who have literally risked their lives to stand up, speak out, video, and blow whistles against the wicked people and the wicked government that sent them there. We are all, however, at a Which Side Are You On moment in history.

There are still plenty of people who support, defend, and excuse what this government and its hired storm troopers are doing. Many such people are beyond any cartoon's powers of persuasion. (But we keep on trying.) This cartoon is directed to what I believe is the dwindling middle ground of Americans who are yet to face the musical warning of the late Neil Peart that, "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."

I had most of this cartoon inked before leaving on vacation last month, leaving a few spaces in case I needed to acknowledge outrages in addition to ICE's murder of Renée Nicole Good and the dogged persecution of brown-skinned detainees, including those who happen to be LGBTQ, such as Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Elias Perez Zuazo, and Jose Nuñez.

We weren't watching the news down in South America, but our Facebook feeds were flooded with reports and videos of the summary execution of Alex Pretti. I have a lot of college friends who live in the Twin Cities area, including one couple who live on the same block as Pretti's home.

Including Good and Pretti, 40 people have died in ICE custody or at ICE's hands in this first year of the Lawless Trump Regime's ethnic cleansing campaign. 32 in 2025. Eight in the first month of 2026.

So you will excuse me if I don't give a flying frock that somebody couldn't understand the words of Bad Bunny's halftime performance. 

MLK Day's Sneak Peek

On this Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 2026, it's worth remembering the words of the prophet:

"We shall have to repent in this generation, not so much for the evil deeds of the wicked people, but for the appalling silence of the good people." — quoted in Concise Dictionary of Religious Quotations, W. Neil, ed.

October Jest

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

No! Worse! Presidential politics!

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

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

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

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

And it barely moved his poll numbers.

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

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

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in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, Nov. 3, 1994

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

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

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

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

in Lavender Magazine, Minneapolis, October, 2004

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

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

in Lavender Magazine, Minneapolis, October, 2004

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

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

in Lavender Magazine, Minneapolis, October, 2004

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

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

for Q Syndicate, October, 2014

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

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

This Week's Sneak Peek

We'll get to that guy in due time; but first, today is Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Day.

On this holiday, I usually post a sketch I drew of King back in 1992. I drew it from a photograph that appeared in Look magazine that I particularly liked. (Look, until it folded in 1971, was a glossy, coffee-table rival magazine to Life but with Saturday Evening Post style cartoons. And now that I've explained that, I realize that as far as anyone under the age of 60 is concerned I might as well have typed that in cuneiform.)

Anyway, ten years ago, a schoolteacher saw my drawing on line and asked to use it on t-shirts he planned to give as awards to students participating in (if I remember correctly) an essay contest. 

I'm not generally in the business of giving my work away for free, but this was for kids. And requested very politely by a teacher who was, I'll bet, springing for the printing cost of the t-shirts himself. So I asked only that he send me one of the shirts.

Ten years on, I still cling to a glimmer of hope that someday I'll see one of his students, on TV or on line, wearing their essay prize t-shirt. Even though this is printed on the back. Maybe it's more reasonable to think that I'd hear from some former KIPP student or their parent who remembers having the tee.

Meanwhile, here is the quotation the teacher added to my sketch:

"All this is simply to say that all life is interrelated. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in in single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly...

"I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. That is the way the world is made. I didn't make it that way, but this is the interrelated structure of reality." — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. [Why We Can't Wait]

50 Years After MLK

When I found out that in his blog on Wednesday, Mike Peterson was going to display editorial cartoons drawn upon the assassination 50 years ago this week of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I seriously considered shelving my plans to do the same today.

But I had already begun the project; and really, what topic more deserves a trip in the wayback machine this week?

"The Nation Is Shamed — Again" by "T.S." in Washington Afro-American, Washington, D.C., April 9, 1968

I'll start with two examples I found in the African-American press. Many of the editorial cartoons in the Afro-American were left unsigned, but this one (and eventually several more in the 1970s and 80s) is signed with the initials "T.S." I believe "T.S" is Ted Shearer, most famous for creating the comic strip Quincy in 1970; Tim Jackson's Pioneering Cartoonists of Color is the only reference I have found to mention specifically his having drawn editorial cartoons. Shearer did draw for the Afro-American before launching Quincy, so until someone tells me otherwise, I'll credit this one to him.

Surely Dr. King's legacy influenced King Features' decision to syndicate Shearer's comic strip centered on Black American children in an un-whitewashed urban setting.

"Leadership..." by Robert S. Pious for Continental Features, April, 1968

Robert Savon Pious, in addition to drawing for pulp magazines, posters and WPA murals, had an established a career drawing editorial cartoons for the African-American press since the 1930s. His memorial cartoon here attempts to sum up Dr. King's life in images and brief quotations, and one can only imagine how difficult emotionally it must have been for Pious to draw it. (Regrettably, The Indianapolis Recorder cropped this cartoon rather poorly, and there is an unfortunate typo in the cut line.)

"Civil Rights Report" by Herblock in Washington Post, April, 1968

So, on to the white guys.

In those first days of April, 1968, editorial cartoonists must have felt inundated by the monumentally important news events cascading one after another. You may have become numb to the barrage of earthshaking news we feel on a minute-by-minute basis every day of the Corrupt Trump Administration in which this morning's lead story is this afternoon's sidebar; but 1968 was before the age of Twitter, or 24-hour news channels propelling the national conversation.

"Below Olympus" by Frank Interlandi in Los Angeles Times, April, 1968

President Johnson had gone on TV on March 31 to announce a halt to U.S. bombing of North Vietnam and also that he would not run for reelection. The first was to bolster peace talks, still foundering on the shape of the negotiating table at that point; the second threw the presidential race wide open. Students across the nation were protesting against racial discrimination and the war; an occupation of  college officials' offices at Bowie State College in Baltimore had just ended. A group of white students at the University of St. Thomas in Houston had organized themselves as a barrier to protect black protesters on college campuses from hostile police. In Congress, Conservative Southern Democrats, Goldwater Republicans, and real estate lobbyists were trying to block the Fair Housing Act.

And Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King announced that he would return to Memphis meet with strategists of the Garbage Collectors' strike and business boycott, in spite of violence having broken out while he was there to march in support of the sanitation workers on March 28. People started breaking windows, and in the police response, a 16-year-old was fatally shot and 62 were injured. From the April 2 edition (above) of The Washington Afro-American:

Dr. King, admitting a mistake had been made when he joined the march without having done some intelligence work or brought in staffers to control the violent element declared:
"Riots are here. Riots are part of the ugly atmosphere of our society now."

"What So Proudly We Hailed—" by Reginald Manning in Arizona Republic, April, 1968

After King's assassination, riots and looting broke out in several cities across the nation at once, including Washington D.C; Columbia, South Carolina; Baltimore, Maryland; Macon, Georgia; Detroit, Michigan; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Chicago, Illinois. That Sunday, a white gunman named Norris Edwards burst into a black church in Indianapolis and began firing at parishioners, killing three. Many cities imposed curfews on their citizens, including my hometown. (I was 8 years old at the time, old enough to imagine from media coverage that marauding hordes might come charging over the hill and down my dead end suburban street any minute.)

"Note to Congress" by Jack Knox in Nashville Banner, April 6, 1968

While some cartoonists' first response after King's assassination was to decry the riots, a more hopeful theme was repeated among others wishing to focus more on Dr. King's legacy.

"His Truth Goes Marching On—" by Lou Grant in Los Angeles Times, April, 1968

"...But His Truth Is Marching On..." by Hugh Haynie in Louisville Courier-Journal, April, 1968

Since my source for Hugh Haynie's cartoon is a little out of focus, I'll note that the printing on the man's sleeve identifies him as "Dr. King."

"His Spirit Marches On" by Cy Hungerford in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 6, 1968

From the vantage point of 50 years later, it seems curious that these three white cartoonists would all reference the same poem written by a white woman, yet I could find only two cartoons which quoted Dr. King himself. (Mike Peterson's post includes two others that refer to the "I Have a Dream" speech; but although we have posted a few cartoons in common, I am not copying cartoons from his post.)

"NOW!" by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, April, 1968

As tragic as Dr. King's assassination and the ensuing urban violence were, they succeeded in bringing a sense of urgency to the need for progress in racial justice in the United States that some had refused to acknowledge.

"The Time Has Come to Face the Challenge" by Dan Dowling in Kansas City Star, April, 1968

On April 5, President Johnson sent Congress a strongly worded letter (cited in the Jack Knox cartoon above) demanding passage of the Fair Housing Act. Also known as the Civil Rights Act of 1968, it passed on April 10 with provisions making it a federal crime to interfere with anyone's civil rights. Its main aim was to add federal enforcement provisions to the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and to explicitly prohibit discrimination concerning the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, national origin, or religion.

"More Lasting than Flowers" by Bill Crawford in Newark News, April, 1968

This Week's Sneak Peek

"The calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak."

-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

April 4, 1967

Q Toon: The Arc of the Moral Universe

Q Syndicate✒Oct 16, 2014

Well over a week after the fact, here's my response to the Supreme Court's decision not to overturn lower court rulings finding marriage discrimination unconstitutional.

It's not often that I put out something with no attempt and humor, irony, or at least sarcasm, but I decided that was the way to go this time. Nick Anderson's cartoon the morning after the decision portrayed the judicial situation better than most, although I thought it would be funnier to show Justice Roberts -- or perhaps several justices -- slapping a hand over an apoplectic Justice Scalia's mouth. But then Mike Keefe drew this one, so that idea was out.

And the judgments keep rolling in -- Idaho, Alaska, Nevada, North Carolina -- and suddenly one wonders which state will be the last to withstand the tide. Alabama?

Keep the Martin Luther King in Martin Luther King Day

"Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man."

--Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

--Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.