One More Reminder

I can’t believe that four years after the last time we were here on the precipice, our Graphical History Tour has to repeat this stop. But apparently there are a lot of Americans whose memories of the Donald Berzelius Trump administration are not just hazy, but positively gauzy.

March, 2016

His immediate priority upon assuming office in 2017 was to staff many of his cabinet departments with people opposed to those departments' missions.

March, 2017

For the Department of Education, public education foe Betsy DeVos.

March, 2017

For the Department of Health and Human Services' Office for Civil Rights, civil rights foe Roger Severino. 

Few of us noticed Trump also tossing the Obama administration's preparations for pandemic response into the garbage. But have no fear. Trump is promising to put brain worm-addled Robert "Let's Strap A Rotting Whale Carcass On Top Of The Car And Drive Down The Highway" Kennedy Jr. in charge of the nation's health in his second reich.

June, 2017

Starting under Administrator Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency abandoned its mission, repealing nearly 100 environmental protection rules and regulations.

July, 2018

And then there was the Trump foreign policy. Bashing our NATO allies. Fawning over Kim Jong Il. Keeping even his translator out of his private meeting with Vlad the Defenestrator, his handler at the Kremlin.

I don't even have a cartoon about the time he wanted to bomb Mexico and pretend someone else did it.

March, 2020

Then, we come to the defining moment of his presidency, the COVID-19 pandemic. His first reaction, as it has been with immigration, was to wall off the whole country against foreigners, returning tourists and business people, imports, birds, and wind. When it became painfully obvious even to Trump that it was too late for that, he discovered that he could be the center of attention by going on television every day to promise that the pandemic would miraculously be over by Easter. Then summer. Then Columbus Day.

April, 2020

He spouted ridiculous phony cures, from horse tranquilizer to bleach to shining bright lights up everybody's ass. And the death toll kept mounting. Although Kim Jong Un did not end up on that list.

We didn't know that Secret Agent Trump sent a COVID-19 test machine to Putin at Kremlin headquarters when they were still scarce in the country he supposedly wanted to make great again.

October, 2020

Turned out that Trump was COVID-positive himself when he appeared on stage to debate Democratic Party presidential nominee Joe Biden.

Trump's utterly unhinged performance that night was but a foretaste of the shitshow Trump and his gangsters thrust upon the nation after we decisively voted to toss him out of office. Refusing to concede, he sent his consiglieres to argue a pack of lies in the courthouses, on the airwaves, and over the intertubes.

January, 2021

The cartoons I drew of Trump protesting his election loss paled next to the riot he fomented at the U.S. Capitol. The assaults on police officers. The wanton vandalism. The threats to kill the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, and any other member of Congress they might happen to stumble upon.

The Senators who were sent scurrying for their lives only to come back and decide that no impeachable offense had ever occurred.

February, 2024

Revenge upon his political enemies as a campaign theme wouldn't poll well, to Trump decided to make vilification of darker-skinned immigrants the primary focus of Trump 2024. The issue was so important that he made sure that the bipartisan immigration reform bill hammered out in Congress never made it to the floor of the House.

September, 2024

Just in case those brown-skinned immigrants miraculously stopped showing up at the southern border, Trump had another target for persecution: American transgender persons. 

Oh, I haven't even gotten around to his stealing thousands of classified government documents he had never gotten around to reading and stashing them in his bathroom, ballroom, and garden shed. Or his holding Puerto Rico hurricane relief funds for ransom, then showing up to throw paper towels at people. Or his history of sexual assaults. Or his 34 felony convictions.

I could repost more cartoons, but frankly, this post is way over the limit already.

For now, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that enough Americans will decide that Donald the Grouch Trump was in the wrong end of that big ass garbage truck this week.

Happy Centennial, Sparky Schulz!

If you picked up a newspaper today, first of all, thanks for keeping journalism alive for another day; second, you may have noticed a lot of Peanuts references in the comics page.

Today would be the 100th birthday of Charles Schulz, Peanuts' creator.

Schulz was probably the very first inspiration sparking (wink, wink) my urge to cartoon — as he was to so many of my contemporaries. As a child, I had all the Peanuts books, including The Gospel According to Peanuts and The Parables of Peanuts — the former, autographed by its author, Robert Short. Peanuts didn't run in my local paper, but my grandparents would clip and save Peanuts from the Sheboygan Press for me every day even into my college years.

The Gospel According to Peanuts, Bantam edition, 1968, must have been my sixth Peanuts book.

So how to join in the centennial celebration of such a towering figure in our field?

Just last June, I highlighted Schulz's reference in Peanuts to a cartoon drawn by a mentor of his, Frank Wing, in the wee decades of the 20th Century. Five years ago, I celebrated April Fools' Day by featuring some of the more obscure characters he drew in Peanuts.

But for today, I decided to rummage through my own archives in search of cartoons I've drawn with a nod to Mr. Schulz.

I was a bit surprised to come up with only three.

Well, reaching back to some of my juvenalia, four. But that old, old cartoon essentially stole an idea drawn by Tony Auth and stuck Charlie Brown and a few other additions into it. It was utterly unoriginal, and I don't feel like giving that cartoon new life on the internets.

But here are the three that I don't mind bringing back today.

March, 2017

There was this caricature of Scott Pruitt, an anti-environmental activist and the Corrupt Trump Administration's first head of the Environmental Protection Agency, as Pigpen, the hopelessly filthy member of the Peanuts gang who could raise a cloud of dust ice skating.

I had hoped to find an occasion to work this caricature into a fully realized cartoon, but that never came about in the less than 17 months Pruitt was in the cabinet. When he resigned in July of 2018, he was the target of at least 14 federal investigations.

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, July 5, 2005

This one from 2005 takes a Peanuts trope that long ago became a cliché in editorial cartooning. Perhaps the only other Peanuts trope we have rehashed more often is the Great Pumpkin.

Q Syndicate, January, 2014

So when I went to that particular inkwell again in 2014, I attempted to find something fresh and new to do with it.

Chris Kluwe was a punter for the Minnesota Vikings, and a vocal supporter of LGBTQ+ causes, which he claimed led to his being cut from the team. A subsequent investigation found testimony to support some of Kluwe's charges, but after getting bogged down by uncooperative witnesses, ended quietly. The Vikings settled the case by promising to donate some undisclosed monetary amount to LGBTQ+ causes.

I suppose that since I draw primarily for LGBTQ+ publications, a cartoon about young angst-ridden children isn't, well, sexy. But then, you could say that about a lot of the topics I draw about.

Oh, sure, I could easily draw cartoons in which Marcie and Peppermint Patty take their relationship to the next level. And yet that seems like cartoon blasphemy somehow, akin to drawing Snoopy with rabies, Schroeder playing bagpipes, or Charlie Brown winning the World Series.

So I didn't add to the reams of cartoons of weeping Charlie Browns and Snoopys when Schulz died very shortly after retiring the strip; the topic didn't fit either Q Syndicate's or the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee's needs that week.

Well, let's not end today's post there. 

I started this post talking about how Charles Schulz inspired me, and generations of other cartoonists, when we were youngsters. I'll leave you today with his very first published cartoon, in the nationally syndicated feature "Ripley's Believe It Or Not," when he was just fifteen years old.

"Ripley's Believe It or Not" by Robert Ripley, for King Features Syndicate, Feb. 22, 1937

"Peanuts" by Charles Schulz for United Features Syndicate, July 1, 1972

Cough And the World Coughs With You

“At what point does America get demeaned? At what point do they start laughing at us as a country? We want fair treatment for its citizens and we want fair treatment for our taxpayers. We don’t want other leaders and other countries laughing at us any more, and they won’t be. They won’t be.” — Trump

Continuing his administration's War on the Environment, Donald Joffrey Trump made it official on Thursday: the United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord in order to keep Pittsburgh's citizens hard at work in the coal mines. Having singlehandedly saved the Clean Coal biz, Mr. Trump can now turn his attention to loosening the regulations that are stifling our very, very fabulous alchemy industry, and rescuing the jobs of all those seamstresses spinning straw into gold.

After an exhaustive examination of every tittle and jot of the Accord, Mr. Trump has discovered that it requires the United States to be the one and only country making the sacrifices necessary to keep this world inhabitable. And he will have none of that. If he has to, Trump will bring those melting glaciers to the negotiating table at Mar-A-Lago himself and hammer out an agreement to make global temperatures even better than they are today.

Plus tax cuts.

Scott Pruittpen

Today's cabinet portrait: Scott Pruitt, Donald Joffrey Trump's head of the Environmental Protection Administration Pre-Apocalypse.