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.

June Toons

Today's Graphical History Tour head down into the Bergetoon vaults in search of cartoons from ten, twenty, thirty, and forty Junes ago. 

2016

June, 2016

I noticed that the Philadelphia Gay News, which usually runs my cartoons in grayscale, chose to print my Barney Frank tribute cartoon in full color in their annual Pride issue currently on newsstands. I did offer a grayscale version of it, which I did not do for the cartoon I drew ten years ago this week in response to the Pulse nightclub massacre.

Rainbows do not translate well into grayscale or black-and-white. For the first 16 years or so when I began drawing for the LGBTQ+ press, I didn't incorporate color except for special projects. At first, whenever I put a rainbow flag in a cartoon, I could only suggest the colors by drawing six shades of cross-hatching. Around 2005, I started employing computer-generated halftones in my work, but it was another seven years before I began regularly colorizing my drawings.

Changing the mood entirely:

2006

for Q Syndicate, June, 2006

Some guys just aren't second date material. And some other guys just don't know how to break it to them.

The non-topical nature of this cartoon suggests to me that although I drew it in June, it may have been sent to Q Syndicate as a reserve for a later date when I might be on vacation or any other reason miss deadline.

So I assume it was published sooner or later, because if it is still languishing in the retired computer back-up files at syndicate offices, I ought to change the Q in the final panel to an N in order to keep it relevant.

1996

June, 1996

Here's a cartoon I drew for the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee student newspaper, the UWM Post, and drove it up to their office only to discover that they had no plans to publish during summer break.

Previously, the Post put out three issues each summer, publishing biweekly instead of its regular semiweekly schedule.

As for the content of the cartoon: Sen. Bob Dole, having secured the Republican presidential nomination with a record of supporting the party priority of criminalizing abortion, now sought to appeal to supporters of abortion rights. Not by softening his position on reproductive rights, but by welcoming the support of pro-choice Americans willing to have that choice taken away from them.

Standing behind Dole in this cartoon are House Majority Leader Dick Armey, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, Senators Phil Gramm and Jesse Helms, and theocratic activists Gary Bauer, Pat Robertson, and Ralph Reed.

1986

June, 1986

Speaking of cartoons that never saw print, I have not been able to determine whether or where this cartoon might have been published. It stars my congressman, Les Aspin, after he had voted in favor of President Reagan's military aid package for the right-wing Nicaraguan rebels, the Contras.

Aspin's vote stunned liberals at home and in Washington. Elected on a peacenik platform during the Vietnam War in 1970, his prior experience in the Pentagon garnered him the chairmanship of the House Armed Services Committee in 1985.

I populated this cartoon with a number of actual Democratic politicians: I can be certain of Alan Cranston, Daniel Inouye, Majority Leader Jim Wright, House Speaker Tip O'Neil, 1984 vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, and future President Joe Biden (which means that I was wrong about when I first drew him according to this Graphical History Stop). Some that I'm less sure of might be Representatives Barbara Mikulski and Dick Gephardt, Party Chair Paul Kirk, and Senator Robert Byrd.

Jumping back to 2016, I'd like to end up with a cartoon that I'm fairly certain got published somewhere.

for Q Syndicate, June, 2016

Republicans' mythical Big Tent popped up in Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, when he claimed to have great support among the LGBT community while simultaneously wooing the antigay evangelical vote that had become so critical to becoming a GOP nominee. Since then, the evangelicals have bowed before the Baal of Trumpism, ceding their dominance to the oligarchs and broligarchs, Nazis and apartheiders.

By the way, I couldn't find the file of the colorized version of the Friends with Benefits cartoon, so I've recolored the original scan. I probably didn't originally paint Trump's face orange like I do now, since I also hadn't drawn tiny hands or the overlong necktie in this cartoon. The pig snout came a bit later.

Now, I don't know what LGBT supporters Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee at this point, had in mind, aside from Ric Grenell, Scott Bessent, Milos Yiannopoulos, and Caitlyn Jenner. But Trump's campaign message after the Pulse Nightclub massacre was that Hillary Clinton would "bring[] in more people who will threaten your freedoms and beliefs" (his tweet). He also told an audience in Atlanta: 

"The LGBT community, the gay community, the lesbian community — they are so much in favor of what I've been saying over the last three or four days. Ask the gays what they think and what they do, in, not only Saudi Arabia, but many of these countries, and then you tell me — who's your friend, Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton?"

This ties in, not just to the cartoon at the top of today's post, but also to the Bob Dole cartoon. I doubt that Dole, or any of the guys drawn behind him, seriously thought that he had fans of the pro-choice persuasion. Inviting them to vote Republican was just one of those things politicians used to do even in the days when we were sorting ourselves into irreconcilable adversaries.

But one does get the impression that Donald Trump lives in a fantasy world where facts become true (or crooked) simply because he says so. He hears the LGBT community, the gay community, the lesbian community agreeing with him in his head, so they must be his bigliest friends, that he can tell you.

Ditto the adulating crowds at Madison Square Garden, the praise for his gilded ballroom, any number of big men who have come up to him with tears in their eyes, and those peace negotiations about to bring Iran's surrender any minute now.

Coping With Loss

I've made as a regular feature of these Graphical History Tours digging up cartoons that I had drawn 40, 30, 20, and 10 years earlier, give or take a week or two. That will be the theme for today, and the good news is that means there will be no cartoons about the lying sack of shite about to infest the Oval Office next January.

The bad news is that starting in 1984, elections in years ending in a four somehow seem to have all favored Republicans, and that is what each of these cartoons will be about.

in UW-P Ranger, Somers Wis., Nov. 29, 1984

That's a completely unrecognizable Newt Gingrich (R-GA) in the center of this cartoon from November of 1984. Gingrich's suburban Atlanta district had just reelected him to a fourth term in Congress, where he was founder of the "Conservative Opportunity Society." Ronald Reagan embraced the ideas of these previously obscure House members in his reelection campaign. 

It was easier to find pictures of former football star Jack Kemp (R-NY) and thus easier to come up with a good caricature. I'm not sure whether the third shoe salesman was intended to be any specific congressman.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee, Nov. 10, 1994

Ten years later, Gingrich’s hair had gone completely white, and I was having plenty of practice honing my caricature of the chief architect of Republicans’ “Contract With America.” The GOP had successfully campaigned on its promise to cut taxes now and to pass a constitutional amendment requiring balanced budgets in the future— the failure of Supply Side economics to date notwithstanding.

Q Syndicate, Nov. 2004

George Dubya Bush's reelection campaign in 2004 rested heavily on post-9/11 jingoism, but also on Republican Party promises to fight back against the homosexual menace. 

If any significant fraction of the liberals, LGBTQ+s, and feminists who have vowed to move to Canada because of an incoming Republican administration had ever carried through with it, Justin Trudeau would be cruising to another term in office with a solid parliamentary majority to back him up.

Instead, we have for the most part stayed here on our side of the line, fought for our right to marry, and left Mr. Trudeau desperately trying to salvage his rickety coalition government in a gale force blizzard.

Q Syndicate, Nov., 2014

Equal marriage rights were still tantalizingly beyond the reach for many of us in November of 2014. In Michigan, where Q Syndicate is based, adoptive parents April DeBoer and Jayne Rouse had sued as a couple for the right to adopt each other's children. The Sixth Circuit Court overturned lower court rulings that had favored DeBoer and Rouse, ruling instead that marriage was reserved for couples who might bear children unintentionally.

The ruling was a setback for same-sex couples with children in Michigan and other states covered by the Sixth Circuit (Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee).

The U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage the following year in Obergefell v. Hodges. 

For now. The Court now doesn’t think highly of marriage equality. Or Obergefell. Or stare decisis.

Thanksgiving Leftovers Already?

It's Saturday, so time to rummage through the archives and post a bunch of old cartoons; so let's get ready for Thanksgiving.

I thought I had posted a Thanksgiving retrospective of my own cartoons before this —as a matter of fact, I'm 99.44% sure I have— but I apparently didn't give the post a "Thanksgiving" tag. What the heck, then; Thanksgiving is a time for traditions, so let's just go ahead and thaw these turkeys again.

in The Chalice, Racine, Wis., 1977 or '78

This was an illustration I drew for the church newsletter sometime in the late 1970's. It might not even have been for Thanksgiving; the reference is clearly to the parable of Lazarus and Dives. But there is a turkey on the table, so, yeah, let's go with saying it's a Thanksgiving cartoon.

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, Nov. 2003

Here's a more traditional Thanksgiving cartoon, with pilgrims and Wampanoags and more food than you can legally shake a stick at. The story of the First Thanksgiving is acknowledged these days to be a heavily ornamented myth, but one that is firmly ingrained into American culture — and thus the setting of many a cartoon the product of cartoonists and editors needing to get over the river and through the woods with their whole family before the snow starts falling.

for Q Syndicate, Nov. 2006

I have occasionally found ways to make the traditional myths relevant to my readers of the LGBTQ+ press.

in InStep News, Milwaukee, Wis., Nov. 27-Dec. 12, 1996

 

Since Turkey Day follows so closely after Election Day, defeated candidates are an easy holiday target.

Dornan in this cartoon was flamboyantly antigay Bob Dornan (R-CA), a D-list actor elected to Congress in 1984. He publicly outed Rep. Steve Gunderson (R-WI) as gay on the floor of the House, accusing him of having "a revolving door on his closet." Dornan made a laughable stab at running for President in 1996, then lost reelection to his House seat that November. Setting the standard for a certain future presidential loser, Dornan claimed that Democrat Loretta Sanchez only won because of illegal votes cast by undocumented immigrants.

The other turkeys in the cartoon, by the way, are Republicans Mark Neumann, Phil Gramm, Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, Jim Sensenbrenner, and Dick Armey.

for Q Syndicate, Nov. 1998

Two years later, when voters failed to reward congressional Republicans for pressing the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, I took advantage of his name to depict Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich as something other than a turkey.

for Q Syndicate, Dec., 2000

Two years later, when an Arizona soup kitchen snubbed the district's Congressman, Republican Jim Kolbe because they objected to his being gay, their eventual apology opened up the opportunity to draw a Thanksgiving cartoon that departed from the usual pilgrims and turkeys.

In closing, whether you will spend your Thanksgiving celebrating with a houseful of family, or on your own over pizza or dim sum, may your holiday be healthy, happy and harmonious!

for Q Syndicate, Nov., 2018

All things being relative.

Saturday through the Looking Glass with Alice

Detail from cartoon in Manitou Messenger, St. Olaf College, Northfield MN, Oct. 23, 1980

This week's syndicated cartoon was a parody of an illustration by Sir John Tenniel of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. That is a source I've drawn from quite a few times over the years: Carroll's psychedelic absurdities fit all manner of political shenanigans, and Tenniel's artwork set the standard for Aliciana. (Besides, one doesn't have to contend with Disney Inc.'s lawyers.)

 

"You Are Old, Ronald Reagan" is a parody of Carroll's parody of a poem; the original extolled the benefits of virtuous living for longevity. 

There was considerable talk about Ronald Reagan's age when he ran for president in 1980. Reagan was 69 years old on Inauguration Day 1981, taking the title of Oldest President At Inauguration from the previous record holder, William Henry Harrison (aged 68 and still the record holder for Briefest Presidency). 

Pikers both! Joe Biden is 78, and thus older today than Reagan was on the day he left office. Trump is 74. And of the other candidates we could have elected, four are older than Reagan was when I drew the above cartoon: Bernie Sanders is 79, Elizabeth Warren is 71, and Michael Bloomberg will celebrate his 79th birthday in February.

Unpublished, February, 1987

Here are two excerpts from a Lewis Carroll themed cartoon I started, but never finished, to comment on the Reagan administration in 1987. The Tower Report depicted the president as disengaged from the Iran-Contra scandal; meanwhile, it was supposedly First Lady Nancy Reagan who had insisted upon the firing of Don Regan as her husband's Chief of Staff.

Unpublished, February, 1987

In Through the Looking Glass, Alice encounters Humpty Dumpty, who sermonizes on his idiosyncratic definition of the word "glory." 

in NorthCountry Journal, Poynette WI, April, 1988

It is not one of the better known episodes in Carroll's books, and certainly not as popular as the nursery rhyme about Mr. Dumpty's fall. I have nevertheless used it twice (here and in a cartoon about Mitt Romney) because it comes in especially handy when Republicans give their policies an intentionally misleading name: such as crafting legislation to make polluting easier and calling it "The Clear Skies Act of 2003," for example.

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, October, 1997

Elsewhere in Through the Looking Glass, Alice's encounter with Tweedledum and Tweedledee is well-known, if only because editorial cartoonists find it the perfect metaphor for any two entities that are supposed to be separate and distinct, but aren't. Indeed, the danger in using such an obvious metaphor increases the possibility that some other cartoonist might use the same image to express the same point about the same news item.

Q Syndicate, March, 2011

One way to avoid that possibility is to take the reference and stretch it out beyond its original limits.

Finally, I made use of Carroll's "Jabberwocky" a couple of times this year, in the background of a pair of cartoons about the presidential and vice presidential debates.

I'm Just a Soul Whose Intentions Are Good

Earlier this month, I chimed in on a conversation about someone else's cartoon that was widely misunderstood. For that post, I redrew one of my own cartoons in a way that intentionally defeated its own point. For SayWhatBack Saturday, I dredge up a few of my own cartoons that, at least as far as some readers were concerned, missed the mark unintentionally.

I drew the above cartoon for the parody edition of the University of Wisconsin at Parkside student newspaper as a follow-up to an earlier cartoon that, I was told, many readers didn't understand.

UW-Parkside Ranger, January 17, 1985

The cartoon was about the New York "subway vigilante" Bernard Goetz, who had shot some African-American youths on the subway because he had felt threatened by them. There are many reasons, however, that this cartoon didn't work. The guns, for one thing, were terribly drawn and barely recognizable as such. Some cartoonists can get away with oversimplifying objects, but things still have to be drawn so that the reader can't mistake them for something else.

The composition of the cartoon risks confusing the reader as to whether there are two separate panels or four. 

Perhaps most importantly, the racist imagery in the thought balloons is likely to offend readers before they get around to seeing the men below them. While intended to be grossly exaggerated misconceptions of whatever the facts of the subway incident were, they could have left the false impression that I was advocating one or the other.

UW-Milwaukee Post, April 16, 1991

I remember worrying that this 1991 cartoon (I must have been still writing 1990 on my checks) featuring two Republican Congressmen from Wisconsin would be taken the wrong way, but I never did hear any feedback about it. When I went to the UW-M Post office with the the cartoon for the next issue, nobody could find the original of this one — the only cartoon original I never got back in several years drawing for the Post — so I guess somebody did take it, the wrong way, after all.

Manitou Messenger, Oct. 4, 1979

Way back in 1979, I drew a cartoon for my college newspaper about John Paul II's first visit to the United States as pope. In it, I likened his crowds to those surrounding the title character in Monty Python's Life of Brian― to which end I had people quoting lines from the film.

I thought that the film reference made the cartoon funny, but somebody wrote the paper the next week to accuse me of plagiarism. I suppose I should have written "Apologies to Monty Python" on the cartoon to explain that I was making a cultural reference. (And to Playboy for the reference to their 1976 Jimmy Carter interview.) 

 

Cartooning rules on plagiarism and cultural references are somewhat hazy. Perhaps I should also have added an apology to DC Comics or Todd Phillips or Joaquin Phoenix to this past week's cartoon just in case Brad Hendricks is still monitoring me for plagiarism.

Anyway, my response to Mr. Hendricks's letter included 17 reference footnotes and hardly a single original thought in it.

Just to be clear about one thing, I didn't remember Mr. Hendricks's name after all these years. I no longer have the original of this cartoon, so I had to hunt it up in the Messenger's on-line archives, and Hendricks's letter to the editor came up in the search first.

UW-Milwaukee Post, Dec. 8, 1994

We cartoonists don't mind people writing in to voice their disagreement with a cartoon ― we invite it. What really hurts is when someone tells us they didn't "get" the cartoon. Readers tend not to write "I don't get it" letters to the editor, though, probably for fear of appearing stupid in case everyone else thought the cartoon was hilarious.

I did hear from readers, however, including staffers at the Post, who didn't get this cartoon about House Speaker-elect Newt Gingrich claiming to have the names of drug users among Bill Clinton's White House staff.

UW-Milwaukee Post, Dec. 12, 1994

So I followed up in the next issue with this cartoon explaining the Gingrich cartoon point by tedious point.

Q Syndicate, April, 2009

Here's another example of bad execution. Acting New York Governor David Paterson took marriage equality advocates by surprise when he proposed legalizing same-sex marriage in his state. I wanted to point out how unprepared for this marriage equality advocates were; but by my featuring not them but Gov. Paterson in the cartoon, several readers were rightly outraged by an apparent joke knocking Paterson for being legally blind. I lost some newspapers over this one, and it was my bad.

Q Syndicate, December, 2012

Finally, returning to the topic of appropriating cultural references: please note that I was careful to include the proper apologies to all the original creators of the characters in this 2012 Christmastime cartoon. 

 

There used to be a weblog called "Editorial Explanations" whose author, Andrew Wheeler, called out confusing and snarkworthy editorial cartoons, and this was one of nearly a dozen of my cartoons that had him befuddled. Well, no wonder. Christmas and marriage equality have nothing to do with each other; but it was December, so I forced them into an unhappy marriage anyway. For that matter, all of the folks in the cartoon happen to be single, adding another layer of non-sequiturity.

There's a good chance of Hermey the Elf being gay, though.

By the way, even though I can recite just about any Monty Python routine verbatim, I have somehow still not actually seen Life of Brian. 

Impeach Bill, Volume 2

Last week, Starrcrossedback Saturday thrilled and delighted dozens of you with a handful of my cartoons leading up to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.

September, 1998

Just to summarize, certain Republicans eager to overturn the popular election results had been looking for grounds to impeach Clinton from the very day he was sworn into office. When his denial under oath of having had "sexual relations" with a White House intern was proven false by what the mainstream media delicately called "DNA evidence" on her dress, Republicans had their fumus boni iuris.

Q Syndicate, October, 1998

In the U.S., there's always an election coming up; the Republican Congress launched their impeachment proceedings on October 8, with just one month left until midterms.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, November 10, 1998

Midterms in the sixth year of any presidency tend to go very poorly for the incumbent president's party, but 1998 turned out to be an exception to the rule. Republicans didn't lose enough seats to forfeit their majority in either chamber of Congress, but Democrats gained five seats in the House and held even in both the Senate and gubernatorial races.

in UW-M Post, December 15, 1998

Thus Democrats could complain loudly about Republicans' push to impeach, but they couldn't stop it, even though some Republicans hoped to find some lesser punishment the Congress might agree upon. Members of both parties offered bills to censure Clinton instead, a statement of formal reprimand carrying no enforcement or penalty, but none ever came to the floor for a vote.

Q Syndicate, December, 1998

Instead, the House voted to impeach Clinton on December 19, 1998, so Chief Justice of the Supreme Court William Rehnquist went right out and got some celebratory gold stripes stitched onto the sleeves of his judicial robe. (Yeah, Jerry Springer wasn't available.)  The Senate trial lasted from January 7 to February 12, forcing Clinton to deliver his State of the Union address while the impeachment trial was underway. But in the end, not only did Republicans fall short of the two-thirds majority vote to remove Clinton from office, they came up six votes short of even a simple majority.

in UW-M Post, February 2, 1999

The problem Republicans faced was that the electorate knew that Bill Clinton was a philandering, slick-tongued good ol' boy when we elected him, and we didn't care.

Much the same as the Democrats' problem now: a well-distributed minority of the electorate knew that Donald Trump was a corrupt, self-absorbed, lying bully when they elected him. And they're never going to care.

in UW-M Post, February 2, 1999

In presenting Trump's case this week, attorney Jay Sekulow played remarks Chuck Schumer, Zoe Lofgren, Jerry Nadler and other congressional Democrats made last time around, making much the same arguments that Republicans are making this time around. That impeachment Clinton would negate the previous election. That going ahead would mean that every president with a Congressional majority of the other party will be impeached. That the process is political.

Well, yes. The process is political. The founding fathers envisioned it that way; that's why impeachment isn't decided by the courts. (The founding fathers envisioned that senators would be representatives of their respective state legislatures, not of their political party; but we're stuck with what the system has become, and I don't think repealing the 17th Amendment would be much of a help anyway.)

And maybe. The Republicans' defense team has already started their preemptive impeachment trial of possible President-to-Be Joe Biden, prosecuted by the former Florida Attorney General bought off by President Trump, Pam Bondi. If they retake a majority in the House in 2020 or 2022, they're all set to go. Just like they were in 2016 if the election had gone the other way.

But no. Removing a president does not negate the previous election. Bob Dole would not have been inaugurated president in 1999, and Hillary Clinton won't get to move back into the White House this year no matter what. Al Gore might even have been a stronger candidate in 2000 running as the incumbent. By the Trump lawyers' logic, the only U.S. President in history that any Congress was constitutionally allowed to impeach and remove from office was the unelected Gerald Ford — which, ironically, would have elevated a Democrat to the presidency.

Faces in the Crowd

The cartoon I posted on Sunday employed caricatures of a number of House Republicans, when I could more easily have drawn a single GOP elephant at a microphone. So why didn't I do that and knock off an hour earlier?

June, 1996 for the UWM Post.

Pardon me if I step back a few years in order to answer that. In 1996, I drew a crowd of (hopefully) recognizable Republicans, grinning smugly, because that made more sense than drawing a single elephant, and was more effective than a bunch of smugly grinning elephants. Behind Bob Dole in this cartoon, mocking GOP claims of having a "big tent" on the abortion issue in spite of the hardline plank in the party platform, stand, from left to right: Dick Armey, Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott, Phil Gramm, Jesse Helms, Gary Bauer, Pat Robertson, and Ralph Reed.

(Since the UWM Post didn't put out any editions that summer, the above cartoon was never published, but I ended up drawing another one a lot like it for them in September.)

in UW-M Post, March 5, 1991

My cartoon of sheepish Democrats at the peak of George H.W. Bush's popularity would have been less pointed if I had drawn a donkey or donkeys among the sheep. (From left to right: Sam Nunn, Bill Bradley, Dick Gephardt, Tom Foley, Al Gore, Mario Cuomo, Lloyd Bentsen, and George Mitchell.)

in UWM Post, September 28, 1989

Which is not to say that every editorial cartoon has to include caricatures of actual politicians. I liked the idea for my cartoon about multiple ethics investigations going on in the nation's capital in 1989, but there weren't enough politicians actually leading one investigation while being the target of another for me to have drawn a bunch of real people.

This idea is not far removed from Thomas Nast's "Who Stole the People's Money? Do Tell. 'Twas Him" cartoon showing easily recognizable members of the Tammany Ring standing in a circle, each pointing fingers at the man to his right. It's a great cartoon that had great impact when it was published and has stood the test of time, even though the real Richard Connolly was not accusing Peter Sweeney, who was not accusing Boss Tweed, who was not accusing James Ingersoll, etc.

for Q Syndicate, June 21, 2004

Here again, I could have drawn specific Republican senators pulling a prank in 2004, but I think this particular cartoon works better this way artistically.

Still, I believe it is useful for cartoonists to hold actual politicians accountable for their stands on issues. Thomas Nast's cartoons would have had little impact if he had tamely drawn generic "City Hall" characters — or comical Tammany Tigers — every week. Likewise, it's all well and good to draw a cartoon highlighting Lindsey Graham's or Matt Gaetz's craptasm du jour; but if one doesn't hold their feet to the fire, the effect is likely to be ephemeral.


We can't all be Thomas Nast, but we can still try.

Another Day in America

This week's Stepback Saturday is sparked by yet another episode of America's Well-Regulated Militia run amok.

I could start this review of my old cartoons of previous gun murders anywhere, but I'm going to start with this one from March, 1996.

The National Rifle Association and its stooges in all levels of government often respond to any call for gun control with the tiresome and disingenuous trope that if we'd only just enforce the gun control laws that we already have, yadda, yadda, yadda. What action they have taken, however, is to repeal as many of those already existing laws as they can, and to defund enforcement of the laws that remain.

In April, 1999, two well-regulated militia high school students tucked an arsenal of semi-automatic weapons under their trench coats and put Columbine High School on the map.

Mass shootings at the workplace were already old hat by this time. If a sentence includes the word "disgruntled," you can be sure that it also includes a body count.

Numbers of casualties alone should not be the only thing that shocks us. This cartoon from March, 2000 was occasioned by the shooting of a very young girl by a very young boy. I forget whether the lad knew he had a real, loaded gun or not. If this had been the only time such a tragedy had ever happened, I'm sure that you and I would both remember the details.

When I first decided upon the theme of this blog entry, I thought I might only have a few cartoons to choose from, since most of the cartoons I've drawn in the current millennium have been for the Milwaukee Business Journal and the gay press, and gun violence isn't a prominent issue for either of them. Since the Beej no longer wanted my cartoons by the time a neo-Nazi shot up the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek in 2012, I drew no cartoons on gun violence for them; but it turns out that I've drawn too many cartoons for Q Syndicate about gun fatalities to include all of them today.

The inspiration behind this cartoon was a widely published photo of a middle school student who was shot at his school; in the photo, he had a caterpillar in his hand.  If a fellow student had not decided that bringing a gun to school and shooting a classmate in the back of the head was the most appropriate response to unwanted advances, Lawrence King would be 22 now.

My intention was not to include the names of the gunmen in these incidents, but I can't avoid it in the case of a drifter who claimed that a lifetime of teasing over his last name was the reason that he sought out a crowded Roanoke, Virginia gay bar and started shooting.

I bring up this particular case in part because of the coincidence that a shooting 15 years later in Roanoke, on live television, seems to have inspired the Umpqua Community College shooter to aspire to the same sort of lasting infamy. Yet, unless you have some close connection to the Roanoke gay community, I'll bet you had totally forgotten all about Mr. Gay.

There was no LGBT connection to the mass shooting at the Aurora, Colorado movie theatre...

...at least not for most of us. But some people are determined that guns have nothing to do with gun violence, and will blame anything, anything, ANYTHING else.

And the beat goes on.