This Week's Sneak Peek

While we still have the liberty, we editorial cartoonists are having a little fun with that Time magazine cover photo of Donald Trump that has so upset him. Your humble scribbler included:

Jack Ohman, for example, has been drawing Trump with no face this past week, just that vulviform neck wattle. How long he can keep that up only time (not the magazine) will tell; we humans rely on observing facial expression to determine someone's meaning and intention. Not including the face can open up a cartoon to misinterpretation.

By the way, I've been seriously considering forgoing the pig snout in my caricature of Lord Trump for much the same reason. It gets in the way of some facial expressions, as I kept butting up against in this week's cartoon.

But I wouldn't want to end up drawing a "This Shop Gives to Every New President of the United States a Free Rhinoplasty" cartoon, so I'd have to replace the snout with some other visual symbol.

I tried drawing him with Mussolini's cap once, which might have been too obscure a reference these days. It also got in the way of drawing his bizarre hairdo, one of his most recognizable features. A crown or a MAGA cap present the same problem (and could also get in the way of dialogue balloons).

I guess there is some point at which one might as well let Trump symbolize himself. Cartoonists got along just fine drawing Nixon as Nixon and Hitler as Hitler. Future cartoonists (assuming there will be any) are likely to draw future authoritarians with Trumpiform features as a way to signal how crooked, corrupt, dictatorial, delusional, or mendacious they are.

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By the way, when my copy of Time arrived in the mail on Friday, the cover was not that under-the-chin photo of Trump's wattle. The cover story of my issue was the account of one of the Israeli hostages released last week. The alternative covers shown in thumbnails on page six were for a Best Inventions listicle and a feature piece on Stranger Things. 

By the time the next Time comes out, ceasefire violations could well have rendered "His Triumph," "The Leader Israel Needed," and "How Gaza Heals" moot. 

You Know You’re Governor of Minnesota When…

Time photo: Dan McCoy. The Week illustration: Jason Seiler. 

Q Toon: Couples Therapy

This week's cartoon was inspired by a pair of articles I had read recently. One, in Time magazine, claimed that Americans left and right aren't as diametrically opposed as your social media feed would have you believe. The other, in the New York Post, gave voice to complaints of "MAGA gays" who feel shunned and dissed by others in the LGBT movement — including their favorite bars and even their own spouses.

Mark Dorman, a retired teacher from Hell’s Kitchen, said he has been all but blacklisted from the Atlas Social Club, his local gay bar, since he spoke positively about the former president there last summer.
“I’m almost anti-gay,” a frustrated Dorman, 64, told The Post. “It’s an embarrassment to see this kind of behavior… I’d really invite them to go to Iran or Gaza. See what that does for you. See how fast they throw you in prison or kill you.”
“It feels like the Soviet Union, Marxist environment now,” he said. “With the gay community, they feel that Republicans on the far right have an anti-gay thing. ..."

The "Go To Iran or Gaza" is a common meme among Magazoids who deign to advise the LGBTQ+ community to ignore the chapters pertaining to us in Mein Trumpf: The 2025 Project. Yet somehow, I don't think that when Mark Dorman cites the Soviet Union, he has been following events in the Far Right Paradise that Russia has become under Trump's buddy Vlad the Defenestrator.

It's Dorman in the Post article whose marriage nearly ended over Trumpism (frankly, Dorman is their source for the whole article). Their marriage only survived because they agreed to stop discussing politics. So I hope for Dorman's sake that his husband never, ever, ever reads the New York Post.

I think we all have some family member/s with whom we have reached an agreement not to mention politics any more. Which is where the Time article comes in.

And divided we certainly think we are. The only thing Americans seem to agree on is that Americans cannot agree on anything. It’s hardly worth summarizing the headlines about doom and radicalization. In the prelude to a November ballot featuring the candidate synonymous with polarization, all the dapple and nuance of life is once again being reduced to a binary. Choose a side: red or blue.

Yet in the wintry interval between Jan. 6 and Inauguration Day 2021, that Populace survey, dubbed the American Aspirations Index, found “stunning agreement” on national goals across every segment of the U.S. population, including, to a significant extent, among those who voted for Donald Trump and those who voted for Joe Biden. On the few points where the survey registered disagreement (notably, on immigration and borders), the dissent was intense. But intense disagreement was the exception, not the rule. 

Oh, you could probably add abortion to the list of points where the dissent is "intense." But is not talking about divisive issues really what it takes to keep this country together?

Or is that just what they want us to think?

"We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be," [Heritage Foundationführer Kevin] Roberts told host of "Real America's Voice" Dave Brat, a former congressman who spent his brief time in government claiming the attendees of the Women's March are much more dangerous than white supremacists.

On the other hand, if Team Edward and Team Jacob can bury their differences now that nobody talks about the Twilight series any more, maybe there is yet hope that we will all meet again some sunny day.

Not the vampires, of course.

2023 in Headlines

Another year has come and just about gone, so here is my annual photo of major headlines during anno domini 2023:

By the way, Mike Peterson accepted the challenge of finding some worthwhile year's end cartoons from 1923. You can find Part One here.

Now Turn and Face to Your Left

Tell me I'm not the only one who saw the latest cover of Time magazine this way.

In Case You Were Worried

Well, to begin with, duh.

Double Issue!

My copy of Time magazine's Person of the Year issue arrived in the mail today, and on page 16, there's a collage of covers of all 46 issues of the magazine this year.

It used to be that you subscribed to Time (or Newsweek, or U.S. News and World Report) and got 52 issues every year. 53 if there were a January 1 issue and a December 31 issue that year. Now there are at least six weeks during which they simply don't put out a magazine.

The reason for this is the "Double Issue," which supposedly gives you double the value one week so that the magazine's staff can take the next week off. This year, those were the "100 Most Influential People" issue (May 5 / May 12, 2014, 150 pages), "The Smarter Home" (July 7 / July 14, 2014, 108 pages), "The Genius Issue" (Dec. 1 / Dec. 8, 2014, 118 pages), and "Person of the Year" (Dec. 22 / Dec. 29, 2014, 164 pages, four of which are alternative cover pages).

By the way, those first two covers at right are the December 23, 2013 Pope Francis Person of the Year issue (also a "double issue") and the December 30, 2013 The Year In Pictures issue. This year's Person of the Year cover(s) isn't (aren't) included.

So that's actually only 45 issues dated 2014, assuming that "The Year in Pictures" will come out in two weeks as the January 6, 2015 issue.

Or, I'm guessing, the January 6 / January 13, 2015 double issue. Who wants to work between Christmas and New Year's, anyway?

2013 in review

At the close of every year for the last four decades, I've taken a picture of newspaper headlines from the year gone by. These pictures originally served as a sort of bookmark in my photo albums, back when using rolls of film limited the number of pictures I'd take, and I'd put every photo into an album.

I don't do that with my thousands of digital photos, but I've kept up the habit of taking these headline photos. Here's to 2013:

You can click on the photo to embiggenify it; even then, that New York Times headline about the Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1964 is pretty tiny.

In closing, if your 2013 has been in any way less than you had hoped, I wish you a happier and brighter new year.

2012 in Headlines

Newsmagazines have made further inroads into this year's edition of my annual photograph of newspaper headlines.

While I've always had a row of magazines along the top, and have occasionally filled in the sides of the photo with magazines as well, there were some stories this year that just didn't make big headlines in my neck of the woods: easing of military dictatorship in Myanmar, for example, or election of a new leader in China.

And my hometown newspaper doesn't appear at all; the Racine Journal Times increasingly highlights local stories atop page one. And while they did scoop the Kenosha News by a day on Mitt Romney's selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate, the JT had to cram the story in as a two-column story on the edge of the page -- hardly legible in photos such as this one.

It's hard enough to read the Financial Times banner headline about François Hollande's election in France. That story didn't get as prominent play in the other newspapers available in my area, however. I remember buying this particular paper at the local Barnes & Noble; the cashier remarked that it was the first copy of the Financial Times she had ever seen anyone buy there.

Q Toon: My Umpty-umpth Cartoon on DADT

I had to draw this cartoon before the Pentagon study was in fact released, so I'm quite happy that it did indeed include the finding that the Marine Corps harbors the greatest resistance to gays and lesbians being allowed to serve in the military without lying about themselves.

I'm also pleased that I was able to draw this marine so that he didn't look like a second consecutive attempt to mimic Tom of Finland. No, this fellow looks more like a character in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

Now, one additional note about the topic of this week's sneak peek blog entry, the current cover of Time magazine: If you see fit to include "Ilovely computer virus," "Chandra Levy disappears," and "The Dark Knight released," does it really make sense that the first legal same-sex marriages in this country didn't rate any mention at all?

This Week's Sneak Peek

Okay. Now you know what the cartoon is about.

I was looking over the headlines cluttering up Time magazine's "What Really Happened" cover story last night and noticed that not one of them was an LGBT news event.

I suppose there could be some LGBT news item hidden behind the area left blank for the mailing label (the death of Michael Jackson and the shootings at Fort Hood are partly hidden there), or behind the cover title or the flag. But I'm not sure what story they could choose. The two major LGBT stories between 2000 and 2010, marriage equality and gays in the military, arrived at the forefront in the 1990's, and have yet to develop in a decisive direction.

A report on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is scheduled to be released tomorrow, after nearly a decade of discharges of openly or outed lesbian and gay service members during wartime. A few state supreme courts ruled that denying marital rights to same-sex couples was unconstitutional, but many states passed restriction of marriage amendments to their constitutions. Meanwhile, George W. Bush pushed a Different-Sex Marriage Only amendment to the U.S. Constitution during his reelection campaign in 2004, never to take the issue up again once the election was over.

If tomorrow's Pentagon study paves the way to allowing lesbian and gay service members to serve their country openly and honestly, the federal government will have to address the issue of same-sex couples again. Spouses of service members are entitled to certain benefits; will those benefits be extended also to legally wedded spouses of gay and lesbian service personnel? What of service members in the "domestic partnerships" and "civil unions" available in states which do not recognize "marriages" between same-sex couples?

I hope our LGBT community leaders are ready for that battle when it comes. Their track record to date is not impressive.