The Dog Days of Cartooning

Or, You Cannot Be Sirius.

1986

in Iconoplastic, Poughkeepsie NY, August 1986

Our Graphical History Tour today delves deep into the Bergetoons vaults for its carefully ripened and aged cartoonistry.

Iconoplastic ("The Magazine for the Self-Interested") was published by a college classmate of mine, Mark Hopkins. The photocopied zine was a way for a bunch of us who had attended St. Olaf together to share our artwork and creative writing with each other. Most of the cartoons I sent to Mark had appeared previously in the UW-Parkside Ranger, but this was one I had drawn expressly for Iconoplastic.

Every one of the five issues of Iconoplastic was dated August, 1986; this cartoon appeared in the second of them. There was supposed to be a sixth and final issue in June of 1987, but if it was ever printed, I never got to see it.

I had begun writing the date in the margin of my cartoons, so I know that I actually drew the above cartoon in August of 1986. I'm sure that it had to do with Ronald Reagan's Missile Defense Initiative, popularly known as Star Wars.

1996

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., Sept. 3, 1996

Why am I including this September cartoon in a collection of my August cartoons? Well, according to my margin notes, I drew it in August. Its topic was the 1996 Republican Party platform, a laundry list of religious right priorities, which the party's nominee, Sen. Bob Dole, told reporters he hadn't read.

The composition of this cartoon is a lot like one I had drawn two months earlier, but with a slightly different cast of Republicans standing behind Dole. Appearing between him and Newt Gingrich is probably the best caricature of Pat Buchanan that I ever produced, which is a pity, since I drew plenty of other cartoons in which he was the main focus rather than an extra in the background.

I had drawn the earlier cartoon for a summer semester issue of the Post that was never published, so I wasn't concerned that some reader might have thought they had seen this cartoon before. 

2006

for Q Syndicate, August 2006

There is nothing wrong with your set.

At some point during the sketching out of this cartoon, I realized that for the dialogue to read properly — for your eyes to read the straight line before the punch line — I either needed the second dialogue balloon to cover Mildred, or to flip the drawing horizontally 180 degrees.

I decided that rather than starting the whole cartoon over, I would just write the dialogue, my signature, and the date in mirror image, then flip the whole cartoon 180 degrees in Photoshop. Being left-handed, I ink my cartoons from right to left anyway, so as to avoid smearing wet ink with the side of my hand.

Here's how the published cartoon looked.

Visually, I think the composition of the cartoon worked better this way, too. The eye sees Luke and Brian first, then Mildred, and finally the two men talking behind Luke and Brian's back.

According to my marginalia, I drew this cartoon in August as a cartoon to be held in reserve, to be released sometime when I didn't send in a cartoon on deadline, so I can't be sure when it was actually published. I think my Better Half and I went on vacation that November, although that would have been an odd time for Mildred to be watering her garden and everyone else to be wearing shorts.

Unless they lived in Florida or southern California.

2016

for Q Syndicate, August 2016

Running for President in 2016, Donald Trump responded to the Pulse Night Club massacre by claiming that his anti-immigrant policies would protect LGBTQ+ Americans.

He didn't mention that the heavily Latino clientele of the Pulse Night Club was just the sort of people who would be targeted for exile to concentration camps in shithole countries by the Corrupt Trump Regime™'s ethnic cleansing program. 

And he apparently had no clue that the T stands for Transgender, people whose persecution would join that of Latinos and Moslems as Corrupt Trump Regime™ priorities.

That, and erecting monuments to himself all over Washington, D.C.

Drawing them discomfited by what I had Trump say in this cartoon, I gave a hefty benefit of the doubt to three of his ardent supporters: Kellyanne Conway, Rudy Giuliani, and his running mate, Mike Pence. That benefit proved entirely undeserved. The three proved ready, willing, and eager to debase themselves in service of Dear Leader's alternative facts, phantom election fraud, and commitment to not just one, but two Corinthians.

Rx Against COVID Memory Fog

Senator Randy Paul (R-KY) led a star chamber hearing this week aimed at trapping Dr. Anthony Fauci into somehow committing perjury. Even if only about the color of his tie. 

So today's Graphical History Tour offers a little reminder of what the world was going through a mere six years ago.

March, 2020

We first heard of this novel virus as a problem in far-off China and aboard cruise ships. The Trump Administration responded by trying to quarantine cruise ship passengers, naming Vice President Mike Pence in charge of addressing the health threat, and calling communicable disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci out of retirement for his expertise.

March, 2020

In the days between my drawing this cartoon and its publication anywhere, hairdressers — and just about every other public service industry — were closing up their shops. The nation hunkered down, stopping first to empty store shelves of toilet paper.

April, 2020

Within the first weeks, everybody was working from home except doctors, nurses, emergency responders, and grocery store employees. Schools tried to figure out how to teach students remotely. Senior citizen homes closed their doors to visitors. Afternoon and late night chat shows shut down immediately; the halting of other television and movie production would take a while to affect viewers. Major League Baseball played to empty stadiums.

Meanwhile, bodies piled up in makeshift morgues.

March, 2020

We didn't know much about the corona virus, which was all that much scarier for everyone. What little we were learning did not inspire confidence: it could spread through the air, the body had no natural defense against it, and any vaccine or cure was yet to be found.

Donald Trump soon discovered that by going on live television to brief the nation about the pandemic, he could command the media's undivided attention. It did not matter at all whether he had the slightest idea what he was talking about; he could just make any shit up as long as it fed his bottomless ego to be on TV.

He even boasted about getting bigger ratings than the Superbowl.

March, 2020

We didn't see much any more of Vice President Pence, supposedly the nation's COVID Czar. I guess he went back to his previous job as the president's golf caddy and Ambassador to Televangelistan.

For his part, Trump promised that the pandemic would be over by Easter, then by Mothers' Day, then by Flag Day, then by summer. Operating without a medical license, he prescribed disinfectant, horse deworming medicine, and shining bright light up one's rectum — none of which treatments had any basis in scientific fact.

April, 2020

When Kim Jong Il, Supreme Leader of North Korea, disappeared from public view for several weeks, there was speculation that he might be dead (he isn't). When dark humor is all a cartoonist has to offer, well, the darker the better.

May, 2020

Despite reports of COVID tearing through church choirs before The Shutdown, it didn't take long for the religious right to complain against social distancing. Not being allowed to pack the pews severely impacted the health of brick and mortar evangelists' bank balances, so Trump told the nation to reopen all the churches.

December, 2020

2020 dragged on. Every time we thought there was an end in sight, COVID cases spiked again. 

October, 2020

After a few months, the television networks decided against giving Donald Trump free air time to tout quack cures and predict COVID's miraculous disappearance, and Trump gave up taking a daily position behind the podium where he might be asked uncomfortable questions. Dr. Fauci became the public face of the government's response to the pandemic, delivering a frank, honest, and un-sugar-coated medical advice.

July, 2020

But by summer, the trolls and conspiracy mongers of the internet, egged on by Fox Noise and the rest of right-wing media, were hard at work promoting their own hare-brained fantasies about where the virus came from. Conservatism being opposed to anything associated with promoting the common good, they complained loudly that masks and social distancing infringed on individual rights.

September, 2020

They came up with the idea of publishing "face mask exemption cards," although the things carried no legal, scientific, medical, or practical authority. One was supposed to present the card at any office or business that had a policy mandating the wearing of masks, as if the business had some obligation to honor the card.

July, 2020

Until vaccines were finally developed roughly a year after the virus was first identified, the rest of us had to manufacture our own defenses.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Hi there, folks!

I will have a regularly scheduled editorial cartoon this week, and it will have something to do with election season, but I'm afraid it won't be about tomorrow's vice presidential candidates' debate. I wish they would schedule these things on Sundays so that I can have a timely cartoon about them, but this year's debates have all been in the middle of the week.

I'll be away at the combined convention of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists and the Association of Canadian Cartoonists in Montréal later this week, so I may not have time before I pack up and leave to draw, scan, and colorize a cartoon about whatever transpires between Messrs. Vance and Walz tomorrow night.

Which would disappoint me if I can't. Vice presidential debates historically make little to no difference in the outcome of an election, but tend to have some of the most memorable moments.

Lloyd Bentsen crushing Dan Quayle: "I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy." 

Adm. James Stockdale: "Who am I? Why am I here?"

John Edwards: "I think the Vice President and his wife love their daughter. I think they love her very much. And and you can't have anything but respect for the fact that they're willing to talk about the fact that they have a gay daughter, the fact that they embrace her. It's a wonderful thing. And there are millions of parents like that who love their children, who want their children to be happy. ...."
Gwen Ifill (after Edwards finished criticizing Republicans' proposed Definition of Marriage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution): "Mr. Vice President, you have 90 seconds."
Dick Cheney: "Let me simply thank the Senator for the kind words he said about my family and our daughter. I appreciate that very much."
Ifill: "That's it?"
Cheney: "That's it."

Sarah Palin: "In my comment there, it was a lame attempt at a joke and yours was a lame attempt at a joke, too, I guess, because nobody got it."

And who can forget the fly on Mike Pence's hair?

AYBOTYWFYA

Most of my Graphical History Tours of vintage cartoons take us back a hundred years, occasionally fifty. When I dig through my own work, we go back forty, thirty, twenty, and ten years.

But the Big Question facing us today is this: Are You Better Off Than You Were Four Years Ago?

In no presidential election year since FDR has the answer to that question been so stark.

Perhaps you remember March of 2020.

I have very personal reasons for continuing to be upset by the advent of COVID-19: after cancelling regular visits to my parents out of concern about potentially exposing them to the virus, I soon reversed that decision when Mom's cancer returned, and she chose to forgo further treatment.

Waiting in vain for the outside world's crisis to end, we had to postpone her funeral for month after month after she passed.

for Q Syndicate, March, 2020

There are a million other such stories out there, but now you know where I was coming from.

At first, Vice President Mike Pence was put in charge of the U.S. government response to the coronavirus pandemic. The Center for Disease Control's Dr.  Fauci, well-known in the LGBTQ+ community as one of the early responders to the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980's, became familiar to millions of Americans as a leading authority on how "novel viruses" spread and what is involved in creating a vaccine.

for Q Syndicate, March 2020

By the time this cartoon appeared anywhere, hair salons were already shutting down. As were schools, houses of worship, movie theatres, bars, restaurants, bowling alleys, late night talk shows, and — at the height of the presidential primaries — campaign rallies and polling places.

So too was Q Syndicate. Its client publications, dependent on advertising from businesses that were shutting down, suspended publishing, meaning there was nobody to whom to sell my cartoons. 

Turning now to the sports page:

March Madness (the NCAA basketball version) was cancelled five days before the games were scheduled to start. Major League Baseball cut the pre-season short and put the regular season on indefinite hold. (When the MLB season finally opened in July, games were played at first to empty stands and later to cardboard cut-outs.)

Daily newspapers had no news for the sports section other than speculating what teams might have won or lost if they hadn't sent everybody home. I don't know how ESPN, Fox Sports, and all the Tennis/Golf/Soccer/NASCAR/Poker channels managed to fill 24 hours of air time every day; even the ten minutes allotted to sports in every local TV news program seemed a lot to compose.

But they managed to do so anyway.

In spite of having no publisher, I kept drawing cartoons, if only to keep in practice.

And to vent. Venting was vital. It still is.

Gun nuts weren't the only people stockpiling.

Anticipating a breakdown of the nation's supply chain, Americans stocked up on whatever was rumored to be on the verge of short supply — a self-fulfilling prophecy. It started with toilet paper and quickly moved on to bottled water, hand sanitizer, PPE masks, flour, yeast, and even bicycles.

Vice President Pence more or less disappeared from view once Donald Trump started taking the podium at the nearly daily announcements to the media and the nation on the pandemic. The problem with that, of course, is that Trump seems to believe that anything he wants to be the truth can be true if he but says it aloud.

So he stated firmly that the pandemic would be over in time for Easter. "Like a miracle."

Reporters would then ask questions of the health experts standing beside him, who had to come up with ways of telling the nation that the President didn't know what he was talking about without saying that the President didn't know what he was talking about.

What mattered more to Donald Trump was that, while he was starved of the adulation of adoring crowds at campaign rallies, he could crow on Twitter that his press conferences were "a ratings hit" with "'Monday Night Football' numbers."

The pandemic was not under control by Easter. People who still had jobs were still working from home. People whose jobs disappeared couldn't go out in search of new employment. Assisted living facilities closed their doors to all visitors. Soon only hospital emergency rooms were busy. And morgues...

We all remember it, don't we?

Don't we?

Q Toon: Stumped Speechless

Here at last is my cartoon response to Fox Noise's cattle call in Milwaukee last week of eight of the Republican candidates hoping against hope that something, anything, will force Corrupt Donald Trump to drop out of the presidential race.

At the moment, even though Trump is facing four separate felony trials going into the election, for everything from paying off a porn star to trying to subvert an election to sending a lynch mob into the halls of Congress, that seems like a long shot. Trump does not know the meaning of defeat.

Or truth, or integrity, or perfect, or democracy, or Constitution, or Corinthians.

My cartoon, of course, is riffing on Bret Baier's asking the candidates to raise their hands if they would support Trump as the nominee of their party even if he were convicted in one of those trials. Depending on whom you ask, former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson was the only candidate who kept his hands down. 

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has been most vocal of any of the eight in proclaiming that Trump is unqualified to be President again; but he sort of halfway raised a hand. Perhaps he was asking recognition to speak.

The other six definitely raised their hands: Tech Bro Vivek Ramaswami right away; Florida Governor Ron DesAntis after checking what the candidates to his right and left were doing.

It was a trick question anyway. Each candidate, in order for permission to be on stage at all, had to first sign a promise to support the Republican presidential nominee, whoever that trumps out to be.

Meanwhile, the only thing more universal among Republicans than slavish loyalty to Donald P0115809 Trump is their fear and loathing of transgender Americans. The candidates pledged to continue their party's assault on transgender student athletes especially:

"If you’re able-bodied in America, you work. If you take out a loan, you pay it back. If you commit a violent crime, you got to jail. And if God made you a man, you play sports against men." — Sen. Tim Scott, closing statement.

“[T]here’s a lot of crazy woke things happening in schools ... biological boys don’t belong in the locker rooms of any of our girls.”— former Gov. Nikki Haley, in response to a question

“I’m saying in North Dakota, we made a priority of protecting women’s sports and we’ve done that in our state." —Gov. Doug Borgum (who vetoed one anti-trans athlete bill in North Dakota but signed two others)

"There are only two genders." — Vivek Ramaswamy

I think we have finally found here one thing that might just possibly shake Republicans' unquestioning devotion to Trump — as absurdly incredible as his declaring himself a transgender student athlete would be.

But then, he does seem to think that he's 6'3" and 215 pounds.

And he does have the vocabulary of a third grader.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Last night, I was leafing through some of my recent cartoons hunting up ones in which some of the characters in this week's cartoon will appear, and I discovered that I was incorrect in stating that I have not drawn Donald P01135809 in a cartoon since January 21, 2021.

Well, mostly incorrect. It's not really him in the cartoon.

It was a pillow with the face from that Trump balloon.

You remember that balloon... it was well over 6'3"; but filled with hot air, it just might have weighed in at 215 lbs.

Q Toon: It Was On His To-do List for the Second Term

Even though I've already drawn two cartoons about LGBTQ+ Pride this year, acknowledgement had to be made of Vice President Kamala Harris marching in Washington D.C.'s parade over the weekend. Participating in a Pride parade adds to Harris's ever-growing list of vice presidential Firsts.

It had to be orders of magnitude more fun than meeting with Presidents of Guatemala and Mexico to discuss our problem with Latin American immigration, then being harangued on right-wing media for not having tossed in a photo op with Trump's Ugly Border Wall.

As we know from Veep and The West Wing, Vice Presidents get stuck doing all the sh¡tty jobs that the guy behind the Oval Office desk would rather not handle himself. Biden has been there and knows the drill. So, too, has Mike Pence, who had to suffer the added indignity of dodging a lynch mob sent by his president.

Pence probably wouldn't have wanted to walk in an LGBTQ+ Pride parade, but he would have gone if Trumplgruber had told him to. As it was, the most enjoyable thing he ever got to do as vice president for four years was attend a Colts-49ers game just so he could stalk out before the coin toss.

Q Toon: Lindsey Explains It All

 

I get annoyed by right-wing editorial cartoonists who do little more than illustrate a Republican Talking Point day after day, so I have to apologize for doing the same with a Democratic one.

My cartoon this week is taken almost verbatim from a comment I made on Facebook last week and subsequently saw made and memed by others. If I didn't find Lindsey Graham's duplicity particularly galling, I probably would have left this cartoon undrawn.

Senator Graham was a House trial manager in the impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton over aforementioned blow job. On January 16, 1999, then-Representative Graham told Senators:

“When a president gets out of bounds, and doesn't do as he or she should do, constitutionally -- and I would argue that every president and every citizen has a constitutional duty not to cheat another citizen, especially the president -- and they get out of bounds, it is up to us to put them back in bounds or declare it illegal.

"And how do we do that? How do we regulate presidential misconduct when it's done in a presidential fashion? Through the laws and powers of impeachment. That is why we're here today. ...

What's a high crime? How 'bout if an important person hurt somebody of low means? It's not very scholarly, but I think it's the truth. I think that's what they meant by 'high crimes.' Doesn't even have to be a crime. Just when you start using your office and you're acting in a way that hurts people, you've committed a high crime. ...

You don’t even have to be convicted of a crime to lose your job in this constitutional republic if this body determines that your conduct as a public official is clearly out of bounds in your role. Impeachment is not about punishment. Impeachment is about cleansing the office. Impeachment is about restoring honor and integrity to the office.”

Democratic House trial managers played Graham's argument at last year's impeachment over that perfect phone call to the President of Ukraine. It didn't sway him from his slavish fealty to Donald Berzelius Trump then, and neither did his momentary revulsion against the events of January 6 this time around.

Dismissing last week's House trial managers' presentation out of hand as "offensive and absurd," Graham went on to blame Speaker Nancy Pelosi for somehow having a hand in the insurrection, and he even threatened to impeach Vice President Kamala Harris over last year's Black Lives Matter riots as soon as Republicans win back the House.

Now that would be offensive and absurd.

Ta

Read more here: https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/white-house/article230483449.html#storylink=cpy

Let It Only Be Four Years

Last week, I rehashed a bunch of my cartoons about the first two years of the Corrupt Trump Administration, so here are some from 2019 and 2020.

February, 2019

The nature of this here blog is to emphasize LGBTQ issues, so I ought to start today's post by acknowledging the one positive move the Corrupt Trump Administration has made in that regard. Log Cabineer Ric Grenell successfully pushed Trump to call for an end to persecution of LGBTQ citizens by other countries. That might seem out of character for Mr. Trump, until you realize that the policy comes at no real cost to him personally.

March, 2019

Former FBI Director Mueller's investigation into Trump campaign collusion with Russian meddling wrapped up early last year with Mueller's report laying out the evidence but refusing to state any conclusions. Lickspittle Attorney General William Barr released a disingenuously bowdlerized summary of the Mueller report that gave the false impression that the investigation had exonerated his boss.

October, 2019

By the time the full Mueller report came to light, American media had bought the Corrupt Trump Administration's spin.

September, 2019

For four years, Trump Inc. has been hard at work grifting off the presidency: finagling business deals with China for daughter Ivanka, charging the Secret Service to protect Mr. Trump at his own properties, and happily leaning back while foreign governments and corporate lobbyists curry favor with the Corrupt Trump Administration by checking into Trump Inc. hotels to do so. Add in the moolah Junior and Eric raked in from their supposed charities, and you get a clear picture of the Trump family's moral compass.
 

I can't even let little Tiffany Trump slide here: her omission of the "T" at an LGBTQ event recently is seen as a sign that she has inherited her father's animus toward transgender persons.

August, 2019

His animus is not limited to the military. Mr. Trump and his lackeys want to drive them out of the military, out of a job, and out of housing, out of sight, out of mind, and out of existence.

December, 2019

The Supreme Court ruled against Mr. Barr in the employment case above, but that is likely to become a short-lived victory. Senate Republicans refused to consider one Supreme Court nomination and 110 lower court nominations during Barack Obama's presidency so that they could pack the courts with doctrinaire, activists right-wingers during Mr. Trump's. Trump has thus been privileged to add three such Justices to the three put on the Supreme Court by the Bushes.

In case you have somehow not made up your mind about how to vote this year, I will point out one more time that Justice Stephen Breyer is 82 years old.

January, 2020

The House of Representatives impeached Trump over his efforts to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to meddle in U.S. presidential politics. Mr. Zelenskyy ignored Trump's request to "do us a favor, though," and Senate Republicans ignored the House.

March, 2020

As coronavirus swept the world this year, Trump began holding daily press briefings, breaking an absence from the press room that had lasted over a year. He boasted of the high viewership ratings these press briefings were getting – better than Monday Night Football!

April, 2020

Not that you could rely on anything coming out of Mr. Trump's mouth in this crisis being any more truthful than anything he had said before. 

Or since.

Unfortunately, by limiting these two Saturday posts to my own cartoons, I've given short shrift to some really important issues: he has put kids in cages, found "very fine people" among racist mobs, treated women and minorities with contempt, attacked the media for fair reporting, and both behaved and governed like an overgrown spoiled brat.

It's time to send him to his room without any supper.

Has It Only Been Four Years?

January, 2017

Instead of reaching back a century for classic editorial cartoons, or a few decades for my early work, your faithful servant today limits today's post to the first two years of the Corrupt Trump Administration. His has been an extraordinarily long quadrennium, and it might be easy to have forgotten just how gawdawful his presidency was in the days before impeachment (remember that?) and COVID-19.

January, 2017

Donald Berzelius Trump's first priorities upon taking office was to erase every trace of Barack Obama's presidency, and one of the earliest things to disappear was the White House LGBT Liaison office and its corresponding web page.

March, 2017

From Day One, the principal qualification for cabinet and sub-cabinet posts in the Corrupt Trump Administration has been complete and total opposition to the department or agency one would be placed in charge of.

March, 2017

That includes Roger Severino, who is still in charge of dismantling HHS's Office for Civil Rights, and Betsy DeVos, still in charge of defunding public education.

March, 2017

Fossil fuel fanatic Scott Pruitt left the Environmental Protection Agency under a cloud of ethics violations in 2018. His replacement, coal industry lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, is hardly any improvement.

October, 2017

As Attorney General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions led the Corrupt Trump Administration's assault on the rights of minorities, especially the LGBTQ community. His one saving grace was that he did not see himself as the Trump family's personal lawyer, which is why he was replaced by lickspittle William Barr.

August, 2017

Trump has expended a lot of energy targeting transgender persons in general, and especially in the U.S. military. One of his justifications he gave for working to drum transgender personnel out of the military was the "tremendous" cost of their medical treatment... the total of which has proved to be far, far less than the cost of Trump's frequent golf trips. 

January, 2018

By the way, it was an exceptionally crass Trump tweet in June, 2017, alleging that a female cable TV host had been bleeding from cosmetic surgery, that got me to vow always to draw Trump with a pig's snout. His tweet came on top of a vulgar tweet about another female cable TV host menstruating, another tweet remarking that a female Republican senate candidate's face repulsed voters, and a retweet of a meme contrasting a flattering photo of Melania Trump with an unflattering one of a Republican senator's wife.

There was a flurry of pig-Trump cartoons that week; I have kept it as a leitmotif ever since, even when reconciling the snout with the needed facial expression was a real challenge. I have often also given him pig's hooves, thus breaking away from the editorial cartoon cliché of drawing him with tiny hands.

July, 2018

Let us not forget Trump's foreign policy, which consists largely of pissing off our democratic allies and sucking up to autocratic dictators. Especially the murderous ones.

July, 2018

You thought I was pivoting from foreign policy to the topic of our judicial system, didn't you? Well, perhaps you were right.

November, 2018

Through it all, Trump has behaved like a petty dictator, which explains his affinity for dictators abroad. He has been assisted by the Republican politburo in the House and Senate, and their mission to pack the courts with right-wing activists (which we discussed here more fully on Thursday).

January, 2018

Within the White House, we have Trump's Ministry of Truth, demonstrating why it's not such a great idea to run government like a business.

August, 2018