Must Be the Season of the Imp

Today's wayback machine is set forty years ago to February, 1983, and we start off with the British royal family.

If it's any consolation to Prince Harry and Meagan, their forebears (his, anyway) had to put up with plenty of palace gossip and intrigue before either of them had even been born.

unpublished

There may have been a day when intrusion by British tabloid photographers on the royal family's privacy wasn't so obnoxious as it is today, but not within living memory. My cartoon included the Queen Mother, Princes Charles, Andrew, and Edward, and Princesses Diana, Anne, and Margaret hounding a fictional tabloid photographer and his wife.

I don't believe that this cartoon was ever published; the usual markings on the back of the paper telling layout what reduction percentage to get the cartoon to fit on the page are missing.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers, Wis., Feb. 3, 1983

When you hear about President Biden's lackluster approval ratings, it's useful to remember that the U.S. President in February of 1983 wasn't doing particularly well at the same stage of his presidency, either.

That imp in down in the corner was a gimmick I tried out that year of having a little character to add further comment on cartoons. Like Pat Oliphant's Puck, or Fred Siebel's crow, or R.C. Bowman's puppy (except I hadn't heard of R.C. Bowman yet). Mr. Imp didn't last very long.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers, Wis., Feb. 10, 1983

In fact, he was already missing by the next week's cartoon.

He was more trouble than he was worth. After spending a whole lot of time thinking up a cartoon in the first place, who needs to spend even more time coming up with lines for an imp that might well be saved for a later cartoon? 

Of course, these days, I have to come up with a headline to go along with the cartoon when I send it in to the syndicate. Otherwise, some editor there will send it out to my subscribers with a headline that steps all over the punch line. Imagine the third cartoon here under a headline "Telling Reagan to Let Them Think for Him."

in UW-Parkside Ranger,  Somers, Wis., Feb. 24, 1983

Alas, poor demon. Well I knew him, Horatio; an imp of limited jest.

Q Toon: Goodnight, Sweet Prince

I'm a little late to the Prince Tribute Cartoon Wake, but it was about time I drew something that didn't have anything to do with North Carolina's bathroom bill.

Prince had, shall we say, a complicated relationship with the LGBT community. He sang, "Am I black or white? Am I straight or gay?" and "I’m not a woman, I’m not a man; I am something that you’ll never understand."  He rejected stereotypical cisgender norms, performing in androgynous but highly sexual outfits, eyeliner and blush.  Becoming for a time The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, he created as his identity "Love Symbol #2," , an amalgam of the male and female symbols with a horn through it. It all made him an inspiration to queer Black Americans who didn't identify with the White American depictions of what it means to be something other than straight.

Nevertheless, Prince was most definitely and openly 100% heterosexual. If you bought "If I Was Your Girlfriend" expecting it to be some kind of anthem for Queer Nation, that's not what you got.

Did he oppose marriage equality? Maybe yes. Maybe no.

So I guess what I'm getting at with this cartoon is the enigma that was Mr. Nelson, Prince, , Camille, Joey Coco, or Alexander Nevermind, however you thought you knew him. "I am something that you'll never understand," indeed. He made a whole movie about "Purple Rain" that runs nearly two hours; and yet does anybody know what that really means?

At least it provided that basis for half of the Prince tribute cartoons out there, my own included. The other half, of course, drew crying doves.

Sure, I'd have liked to avoid referencing the same song as so many others, but I didn't find any hook out of my favorite Prince tune, "Mountains," which wasn't popular enough to be easily recognized, anyway. A cartoonist friend of mine derided one outlier, Henry Payne's cartoon showing a little red Corvette zooming through the Pearly Gates; but heck, Payne not only draws for the Detroit News, he's their Auto Critic. He takes any opportunity to draw cars in his toons. And I give him props for not referring to the same two songs the rest of us used.

Now, if the persistent rumors that pain killers were involved in Prince's death, we can all crank out cartoons quoting "I Would Die 4 U."

P.S.: If you want to get snooty about this stuff, I'm seriously not getting the purpose of Gary Markstein's, um, cartoon? here... I mean, a collage of celebrity tweets? What even qualifies that as a cartoon at all? How do you justify slapping a copyright notice on that? Do you know how many ideas I've rejected on this topic alone because I saw someone else post them on the internet before I could draw them?