Q Toon: Tuberville at 20,000 Feet

I loathe headlines that give away the punch line, but I wonder how many people half my age would catch the reference in the first place.

Ah, well. If you didn't catch the reference in the headline, you didn't catch the reference in the cartoon, either. Ask a Boomer.

And if you didn’t get the reference to Senator Tommy Bubbaville (R-AL) and his goofy speech decrying the Federal Aviation Administration’s lax attitude toward furry airline employees, well, what are you doing here? 

I mean, it was in all the topical late-night shows and cable news programs desperate for a break from war, inflation, and a reckless regime running roughshod over democracy. There's an election coming up, and it's high time to do your homework for it.

When this idea first came to me, I didn’t remember that the gremlin on the wing of William Shatner’s airplane was itself quite furry. Somehow, I had something more Salt Vampire-like in my memory. Checking images from the original Twilight Zone episode meant having to tweak the dialogue slightly; I think it still works, though.

Do Not Adjust Your Set

How come spaceships on Star Trek only meet each other head-on, face-to-face? Someday, I'd like to see a Star Trek episode in which the Enterprise meets a ship approaching at a perpendicular angle, or even upside down.

And then when the viewscreen shows the other ship's captain and bridge crew, so are they.

Now Is the October of Our Recycled Content

It's a gorgeous fall weekend outside, so today's Graphical History Tour will be spent rummaging around the files in my basement, leafing through cartoons I drew ten, twenty, thirty, and forty Octobers ago.

for Q Syndicate, October, 2015

I'll start with a cartoon of Senator Rand Paul that parodies a character in the 1999 film Office Space. 

A cultural reference in a political cartoon is a hit or miss thing. If you're not familiar with the film, you're not going to get the cartoon. (The same is true if you hadn't heard about Sen. Paul opining that LGBTQ people wouldn't face workplace discrimination if we'd just stay in the closet on the job.)

Since Comedy Central showed the movie about a gazillion times in the ‘aughts, give or take a few myriads, I figured this character would be recognizable enough. Besides, I think “That would be great” was a meme once upon a time.

By the way, there's a very obscure Easter egg in the final panel: the graph on the bulletin board forms the shape of a winged ox, the symbol for St. Luke.

All it means is that I was drawing the cartoon on his feast day, October 18.

Moving from movies to television (and back again), we now time travel back to 2005.

Reacting to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's veto of marriage equality legislation, Star Trek actor George Takei gave an interview to Frontiers magazine of Los Angeles, publicly announcing that he is gay and in a long-term relationship with his now husband, Brad Altman. The interview also coincided with National Coming Out Day, but Takei had been out to friends and family for some time, and made no secret of his membership in various LGBTQ+ organizations.

for Q Syndicate, October, 2005

I took the opportunity to draw a silly cartoon of Takei as Sulu charging into a bunch of beefcake aliens. Lt. Hikaru Sulu didn't get much opportunity to battle aliens from Planet Thirst Trap — I don't think he beamed down to the planet where Apollo was cavorting around in a skimpy toga — although he did get to charge shirtless through the corridors of the Enterprise in search of a fencing partner.

2005 was before I started sending colorized cartoons for syndication, but for today's post, I thought it would be fun to color Ensign Expendable's shirt red.

Of course, then I had to colorize Kirk, Sulu, and Spock. And having done that, it didn't make sense for the aliens to be ghostly white... The hard part was knowing where to stop.

Eleven years later, John Cho portrayed Ensign Sulu in the third of the reboot series of Star Trek movies as openly gay, with a husband and daughter. While applauding writers Simon Pegg and Doug Jung  for including LGBTQ+ characters in Star Trek Beyond, George Takei objected to his character getting a gay make-over.

The new post-Shatner movies having started out as a prequel to the original TV show, while involving the complete destruction of Spock's home planet despite it being visited in the original series, I drew another Trek cartoon.

for Q Syndicate, August, 2016

Rather than get one's mind utterly bogged down trying to make sense of Star Trek's multiverses and time travel and warp drives through hyperspace, wouldn't it be easier to accept that in the 23rd Century, humanoid citizens of the United Federation of Planets will not have a problem with a Star Fleet officer being bisexual, ambisexual, pansexual, or gender fluid?

Heck, even in Roddenberry's universe, hardly anyone batted an eye, visor, or antenna at interspecies couples.

In the real world, of course, dozens of stations would have jumped ship if Lt. Uhuru had gotten into a serious relationship with anyone else on the Enterprise bridge.

Moving on to October of 1995:

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., October 26, 1995

Charles Snollygoster III was my stock Republican congresscretin character back in the 1990's: a right-of-center conservative who went along with whatever party orthodoxy was at the moment. The nursing home provision in the budget bill on which Rep. Snollygoster was about to vote passed the House but was rejected in the Senate, both controlled by Republicans that year.

Snollygoster originally had a left-of-center Democrat counterpart, Luke Warmish, who was hesitant to support Bill Clinton's health care plan and got tossed out of office in the 1994 Republican sweep. I never had reason to bring Warmish back, except as one name among many in a cartoon about political attack ads.

I never drew any Snollygoster cartoons after the Clinton presidency; if I had, I believe Snollygoster would have been primaried in the Tea Party elections of 2010 or shortly thereafter.

Jumping back ten more years:

in NorthCountry Journal, Poynette Wis., October, 1985

I've posted in this here blog almost every one of my cartoons from October of 1985, so here's this one again.

It's the first cartoon I drew for NorthCountry Journal, a monthly newspaper out of northern Wisconsin with an emphasis on environmental issues. The editor and publisher, Susie Isaksen, would send me the gist of the next issue’s editorial, and I would mail her a cartoon to fit it.

“Sorry, Charlie" was an advertising campaign for StarKist featuring a tuna longing to be caught and eaten, only to be rejected by the StarKist folks. We don't have tuna in Wisconsin lakes and rivers, but nobody had come up with a catchy, recognizable walleye character in 1985.

Recognizing my allusions was can be a problem from time to time: I based one NorthCountry Journal cartoon on the character Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes, a hugely popular comic strip from the very first strip in November of 1985. Ms. Isaksen, however, had never seen it. To her, my cartoon made no sense.

In the past couple of years, I've drawn cartoons directly parodying a Monty Python sketch, a Saturday Night Live character, an Aesop fable, The Godfather, The Wizard of Oz, Cabaret, one of Sir David Low's most famous cartoons, and two or three internet memes. I guarantee you that not every person who has come across my cartoons has been familiar with each and every one of those references.

Such is the nature of our increasingly fractured culture these days. Once upon a time, it was commonplace for editorial cartoonists to quote Shakespeare, and expected every reader to catch the reference. Not so much any more. I'm not saying I would never base a cartoon on Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, but there aren't many readers nowadays for whom a reference to King Lear or Twelfth Night would instantly ring a bell.

And that's it for today's Graphical History Tour... until tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow!

Spock's Lament

On Facebook the other day, I asked why, given that Vulcans practice arranged marriage, Spock's father, Sarek, broke with tradition and married an Earth woman.

A friend answered that Sarek, as Ambassador to Earth, decided it was the logical thing to do. Besides, as he told his son in the 2009 film reboot, "I loved her."

 

In the sequels and prequels, Vulcans hooking up with Earthlings turns out to be relatively common... Spock and Uhura... B'Ellana and Tom... T'Pol and Trip...

Humans are a bad influence, I guess.

Q Toon: The Warm-up Act

I'm starting to find the fascist wing of the GOP a bit tiresome.

I mean, just last week, I drew my cartoon about Florida Requblicans demanding that their colleges and universities surrender the health records of any and all transgender students to the state — the better to round them up someday — and compared them to Nazis hunting out hidden Jews, homosexuals, and Roma.

So this week, some right-wing podcaster delighted the thronglets at the Conservative Political Arian Convention by calling for the Final Solution to transgenderism. What am I supposed to do, draw a second Nazi-themed cartoon in a row?

Mike Godwin should be collecting royalties on all the Nazi comparisons.

Meanwhile, every Requblican-run state in the country is branding transgender citizens as outlaws, criminalizing their health care, and even barring them from public restrooms. And although we have waited in vain for decades now for anything to be done about armed psychopaths shooting up American society, those same legislators are moving lickety split to make cross-dressing a felony.

It's the gateway drag to transgenderism, don'tcha know.

Denne Ukens Sniktitt

All will be explained in good time.

Meanwhile, God Syttendemai, everyone. Skål!

 

Stop Me If You've Heard This

History, it is said, repeats itself. Or at least it rhymes. Or exhibits recurring themes and leitmotifs. Or wanders in circles. Or suffers flashbacks.

In the past week or so, the NRA elected itself a new leader best known for illegal arms sales; a foreign enemy released three American prisoners; Donald Joffrey Trump abrogated a treaty with Iran; and the White House complained that a criminal investigation was getting too close to the president had dragged on too long.

Where have I heard this song before? Doesn't that tree look familar?

When the Reagan administration's secret arms deal with Iran first came to light in 1986, it was immediately associated with the release of one of the hostages who were being held by various factions in Lebanon's civil war. Iran was backing Hezbollah there, while also in the sixth year of war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

I drew a connection with Nicaragua, whose socialist government had just arrested Eugene Hasenfus, an ex-marine from Marinette, Wisconsin. Hasenfus had been shot down while flying arms to right-wing rebels known as the Contras. I wasn't making the right connection, but I was in the right ballpark.

When the true Iran-Contra connection came to light, the Reagan administration line was that aid to the Nicaraguan guerillas was all the work of one U.S. Marines Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North.

It was a complicated scheme, involving North's funneling $10,000 from the Sultan of Brunei to a Swiss bank account (to the wrong account as it happened), and enlisting the aid of Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega against the Nicaraguan government. (Overthrowing Noriega would become a priority of the George H.W. Bush administration.)

Since President Reagan had no idea what was going on, he was obliged to appoint former Senator John Tower (whom we discussed a couple weeks ago) to lead a commission tasked with investigating the Iran-Contra affair. The Tower Commission presented its findings to the president in March, 1987.

But that didn't bring an end to the matter. Attorney General Ed Meese named New York attorney Lawrence Walsh special counsel to determine whether to charge anyone with any crimes. Congress also held hearings into the Iran-Contra affair; Lt. Col. Ollie North was a star witness. He defended his having lied to Congress because he believed aiding the Contras through illegal arms sales was a "neat idea."

You never saw future NRA head honcho Ollie North on TV except in full military uniform, badges and all.

On March 16, 1988, a grand jury handed down a 23-count indictment against top administration officials, including future NRA top gun Ollie North. By the time any of the court trials got underway, Ronald Reagan was out of office. He was also exhibiting signs of senile dementia, although those closest to him were doing their best to conceal the problem and to pass it off as his usual aw-shucks folksy demeanor.

Walsh had concluded that Reagan had not himself broken the law, so popular speculation immediately after his presidency centered on whether he would be called upon to testify at the trials of his subordinates. Of more pressing concern to the first of these was paneling a jury that could be impartial in weighing the fate of future NRA don Ollie North.

But a jury was finally seated. In May, 1989, North was found guilty of three out of 16 federal charges: accepting an illegal gratuity, aiding and abetting in the obstruction of a congressional inquiry, and ordering the destruction of documents.

Appellate courts would ultimately set aside North's conviction, as well as those of Reagan's National Security Adviser Adm. James Poindexter and nine others. Five others — including former State Department official Elliott Abrams and former defense secretary Caspar W. Weinberger — were preëmptively pardoned by lame duck President George H.W. Bush on Christmas Eve 1992.

There was no investigation of Walsh's investigation, of course. Bush's successor would have to endure a totally unrelated interminable investigation which was supposed to be about some Arkansas land deal in which Bill and Hillary Clinton had lost money. But it ended up being about extramarital affairs and —

I'm positive we passed that tree before!

'Tis the Seasoning

And you thought they were rushing Christmas.

Star Trek - The Lost Episodes

Yesterday's Q Toon did not exactly go where no Q Toon has gone before. Here's your Flashback Friday fix from 2005:

Q Toon: To Seek Out Fabulous New Worlds

We editorial cartoonists are having a lot of difficulty keeping up with Donald Berzilius Trump's barrage of jaw-dropping behavior, so I'm just going to ignore him this week. You're welcome.

In Hollywood hype for the latest Star Trek movie, word got out that Helmsman Hikaro Sulu, played by straight actor John Cho, has a husband in the new film, Star Trek: Beyond. Everyone involved probably intended this as tribute to gay actor George Takei, who originated the role in the 1960's TV series. Takei's reaction must have come as a disappointment.

 "I’m delighted that there’s a gay character," he tells The Hollywood Reporter. "Unfortunately, it’s a twisting of Gene’s creation, to which he put in so much thought. I think it’s really unfortunate." ... 

"I told [Cho], 'Be imaginative and create a character who has a history of being gay, rather than Sulu, who had been straight all this time, suddenly being revealed as being closeted.'"

Frankly, hardly any of the crew on the original show had a sex life unless Captain Kirk or First Officer Spock were involved, so it doesn't necessarily follow that TV-Sulu was "closeted." As any hardcore Trekkie, Trekker, Trekkoid or Tribble will tell you in animated detail, the only clue to Helmsman Sulu ever having a sex life of any kind comes in Star Trek: Generations (1994), in which Captain Kirk meets Hikaro's daughter Demora on duty as Helmsman of the Enterprise B. (For that matter, Sulu and his husband have a toddler daughter in Beyond as well. It's not as if 23rd Century gay people won't have been raising families for 250 years.)

As far as the "closeted" thing is concerned, you could argue that, at least, Dr. McCoy assumes Sulu is straight at the end of the "Shore Leave" episode. Just don't be alarmed if my eyes glaze over while you do.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Oh, my.

Oh, the Pain, the Pain

Resistance Is Futile

Just a little something I threw together for my Trekker friends -- one of whom suggested that I had better sign it.

Before it shows up on George Takei's Twitter feed.