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.

February Shorten Suite

Today's Graphical History Tour steps back forty, thirty, twenty, and ten Februaries ago to check out what I was drawing back then.

1986

in NorthCountry Journal, Poynette Wis., February, 1986

I can't remember the exact point of the editorial that accompanied this cartoon in the environmentally-focused NorthCountry Journal, but it's not difficult to guess the general drift. 

Drawing architecture is not one of my favorite pastimes; I must have used a straightedge to draw so many parallel lines, and somehow managed not to smear any wet india ink. There is, miraculously, no white-out on the original of this particular cartoon.

1996

Rummaging through my cartoon files from 30 Februaries ago, I first found a cartoon likening reactionary GOP presidential contender Pat Buchanan to Nazis — which I still think is valid — but then I came across this one.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee, February 29, 1996

Lamar Alexander, a former Governor of Tennessee and Secretary of Education in the George H.W. Bush administration, was dubbed by the professional punditry one of the moderates in the GOP presidential field.

Which just goes to show how long the positions he espoused in my cartoon have been mainstream in the Republican Party. Abolishing the Department of Education since became GOP platform boilerplate, so the Lawless Trump Regime's destruction of the DOE is no longer anything new or surprising.

Alexander's proposed "new military department responsible for drug enforcement" and "dealing with illegal immigration," put forth more than five years before 9/11, is now the Lawless Trump Regime's Department of Homeland Security.

2006

for Q Syndicate, February 2006

But enough about politics.

Awards season affords a welcome opportunity to step away from the news out of Washington and whatever politician is trying to capitalize on homophobia at the moment. Movies with Oscar nominations in 2006 included Brokeback Mountain, TransAmerica, and Capote, promising one of the most LGBTQ-centric ceremonies since, well, 1960. 

By the way, do I have to explain now where these women are and what they are doing? Naah, not gonna do it. Go ask your mother.

2016

for Q Syndicate, February, 2016

Staying with Hollywood, my cartoon ten Februaries later remarked how straight actors win praise for playing LGBTQ roles, but out LGBTQ actors can get pigeonholed having to play LGBTQ roles exclusively.

There have been some notable exceptions to the practice in the last ten years, notably Jonathan Bailey as Bridgerton heartthrob Anthony, Neil Patrick Harris as How I Met Your Mother's Barney Stinson, Jim Parsons as Big Bang Theory's Sheldon Cooper, and Matt Bomer in role after role after role.

Theater has a long history of white actors playing Parts of Color (from Othello to The Mikado to Apache), but that's decidedly out of fashion these days.

There are some who advocate that only LGBTQ actors should portray LGBTQ characters; but there is little chance of that as long as actors such as Rami Malek, Nick Offerman, Brendan Fraser, and Ewan McGregor keep winning awards for gay roles.

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Rev. Jesse Jackson passed away this week, so I'll close today's Graphical History Tour in his memory with one of the cartoons I drew of him during his 1984 presidential campaign.

January, 1984

My cartoon, drawn after Jackson led a delegation of Black faith leaders who secured the release from Syria of U.S. Navy Lt. Robert Goodman, seems not to have been published. The UW-Parkside Ranger instead printed a cartoon I drew in which a stack of papers on Secretary of State George Schultz listed a number of pending foreign policy issues, including suspended nuclear disarmament talks, yellow rain, a Korean passenger plane shot down by the U.S.S.R., and the 241 Marines killed in a Beirut suicide bombing.

One might argue that the 52 U.S. hostages freed by Iran on Reagan's first hour in office outweigh the one seaman freed by Syria; but I would argue that Reagan was responsible not for achieving but for delaying the Iran hostages' release, so that doesn't count.

In any event, freeing Lt. Goodman, who had been shot down over Lebanon, captured, and taken to Damascus, established Rev. Jackson as more than a special interest candidate in the 1984 Democratic primaries. He was among the front runners for the nomination four years later, then concentrated on leading his PUSH/Rainbow Coalition.

In spite of being visibly afflicted with Parkinson's disease, Jackson came to Kenosha to march in a Black Lives Matter protest a month after the 2020 riot there, and spoke at the church where I was working at the time. I did not get to meet him, but here's a photo of him at Grace Lutheran Church with an assistant and Greater Milwaukee Synod (ELCA) Bishop Paul Erickson, and another of some of the local television coverage.

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!

August Assembly Required

Back when I was drawing cartoons for University of Wisconsin student newspapers, there would be one cartoon I drew every August in order to make the deadline of the first edition of the new fall semester.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Kenosha Wis., Sept. 5, 1985

As it happens, the UW-Parkside Ranger did publish Volume 14, Issue 1 on August 29, 1985; but this cartoon I drew that August only made it into Volume 14, Issue 2. I don't remember whether I hadn't known there would be an August 29 issue, or whether there wasn't space for this cartoon. It was probably the former, though.

Anyway, there was a white minority government ruling South Africa in those days. Apartheid meant a strict segregation of the races; native Blacks were kept subjugated in impoverished villages, forbidden the vote, and generally treated like trespassers in their own land. In response, corporations and universities were responding to demands to divest from South African companies.

Amid violent suppression of Black South African protests against a new constitution, President Ronald Reagan resisted congressional and citizen calls to impose sanctions on the South African government. Even with a Republican majority in the Senate, Congress would pass the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 over Reagan's veto, banning new U.S. investment in South Africa and sales to the country's police and military, while cutting off South African imports.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, Sept. 5, 1995

The UWM Post published three issues during the summer semester in those days; I would contribute cartoons to the summer editions in 1996.

As for this cartoon, Sen. Phil Gramm (R-TX) was a prominent fiscal conservative, and the lead namesake of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Balanced Budget Act on 1985. The bill promised to balance the federal budget by 1990 by mandating across-the-board cuts in government programs if Congress failed to pass budgets beneath a prescribed deficit level.

It didn't work. The federal deficit would be eliminated, temporarily, under President Bill Clinton, but thanks to tax increases that were anathema to Gramm and the rest of his party — which were reversed as soon as the supposed deficit hawks were back in total charge of things.

The line in the third panel of my cartoon is a direct quote of his rationale for simultaneously cutting benefits for the poor and taxes for the rich — still Republican dogma to this day. They got their way in spades with the Big Abomnibus Budget Bill of 2025, which proved that Republicans never really cared about running up the deficit in the first place — in case anybody thought that George W. Bush's deficits were a fluke.

Gramm was running for president in the summer of 1995, and made a good showing in an Iowa straw poll in August; but his campaign didn't make it past the Iowa caucuses in January. The one positive thing I can say about him is that he was a hoot to draw.

✍

I've got one other cartoon from August, 1995 that I'd like to include here, because it never got published. I'll leave it up to you to decide why that was.

It's about a local news item, and drawn for the Racine Journal Times. The Ku Klux Klan announced plans to hold a rally on August 19 in front of the courthouse in Elkhorn, population then around 5,000, in Walworth County. In response, the county's Republican and Democratic parties issued a joint statement denouncing the Klan while affirming their First Amendment right "to have and declare" their beliefs. 

"We do not support the belief that hatred solves problems," their joint letter read. "We believe hate crimes and hate group activities negatively affect everyone in the community."

When the Walworth County board took up a resolution in support of "peaceful counteractions against hate groups," someone objected to the term "hate groups." So the board amended the resolution so that it lent its support to "peaceful counteractions against unhappy groups."

Unpublished, August, 1995

Lake Geneva Supervisor Dan Janowak explained to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Meg Jones that he suggested the alternative phrasing because the KKK "is not a hate program. It's more or less people that are unhappy with what's going on and they don't necessarily hate."

Board Chairman Lawrence Scharine weaseled, "'Hate' or 'unhappy,' it doesn't make much of a difference. The point is still there."

"Lied" or "weaseled," it doesn't make much of a difference. The point is still there.

The Klan rally took place as planned, separated from counter-protesters by "a small army of police in riot gear." The Journal Times didn't offer an estimate of the number of Klansmen involved (and Imperial spokesWizard David Neumann wouldn't say how many members the local Klan had), but implied that they were outnumbered by the 400-500 counter-protesters and curious on-lookers. "Klansmen spoke against affirmative action and hiring quotas," the JT''s Joseph Scolaro reported. "They continually called protesters 'scum' and decried homosexuals and minorities."

The only arrests made at the rally were of two anti-Klan protesters from Milwaukee, released on signature bonds.

Speaking of affirmative action...

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, August 5, 2005

As difficult as it may be to remember only twenty short years ago, a little corporate diversity was thought to be a good thing. I drew this cartoon to accompany a Business Journal editorial in favor of favoring "disadvantaged" businesses.

The idea was that businesses owned by racial minorities, women, and/or physically challenged persons should be given favorable consideration in bidding for government contracts; in practice, just having one or two such persons serving on the corporate board would qualify a company as labeled disadvantaged.

Under the present regime, of course, these companies would have to fire any racial minorities, women, and physically challenged persons on their corporate board just to have a glimmer of hope to compete with and out-bribe all-white, all-male, all-cis family and golfing partners of La Cosa di Trump.

for Q Syndicate, August, 2015

And finally today, marriage equality vs. religious liberty.

Hold My Hand And I'll Take You There

Welcome aboard today's Graphical History Tour, offering a self-serving selection of my own cartoons from Mays in years ending in -five.

Since Grifter-in-Chief Donald Frequent Flyer Trump has just returned from the Arabian peninsula with his very own private pleasure dome in the sky, our first stop is deep in the heart of Texas, twenty years ago:

for Q Syndicate, May, 2005

Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah visited President George W. Bush at his Crawford Ranch (in April, actually), and Americans were taken aback seeing our president holding the crown prince's hand as they walked to Casa de Dubya.

This was less than four years after 9/11, and it was well known that several of the terrorists who took over the planes were Saudi nationals. But the Bush administration had committed to overthrowing Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and needed acquiescence of the other powers in the region.

It Abdullah, who reigned as the Saudi King from August, 2005 until his death in January of 2015, is an uncle of the present Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. 

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Kenosha Wis., May 2, 1985

Skipping back another twenty years: West Wing staffers regard meetings with foreign heads of state as an opportunity to burnish a president's stature as a world leader. But even carefully planned events can misfire.

President Ronald Reagan had come under criticism after a meeting of the G-7 in West Germany. To mark the 40th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, Chancellor Helmut Kohl persuaded Reagan aides to schedule a side trip to a cemetery in Bitburg where some 2,000 German soldiers were buried. Reagan's Deputy Chief of Staff made a preliminary visit to the cemetery in February, where he failed to notice 49 grave markers for members of the Waffen-SS.

Politicians and Jewish leaders in Europe and the U.S. urged Reagan to cancel the Bitburg trip; instead the White House added a stop at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to Reagan's itinerary. A spokesman for children of Holocaust survivors, Menachem Rosensaft, spoke for those not mollified: “By entering Bitburg, [Reagan and Kohl] desecrate the memory of all those who were murdered by the SS, and of all those whom they pretended to commemorate here at Belsen.”

By the way, the "584" marker by my signature was my mistake. May is kind of late to still be writing the previous year on cartoons, checks, and other documents — especially since I didn't have old age as an excuse forty years ago.

Let's come forward to 1995 and some domestic issues:

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, May 4, 1995

Politicians have been telling us for more than thirty years that Medicare and Social Security are heading to hell in a handbasket. The Republican plan has been to get rid of them entirely without getting rid of them at all — basically by making the benefits from them smaller and smaller and more difficult to get.

At the same time, they stoke seniors' resentment of paying taxes for schools well after their own children have walked away with diplomas funded by senior citizens of earlier generations.

for bergetoons.blogspot.com, the internet, May, 2015

Jumping ahead to May of 2015, we return to the Lone Star State, where conspiracy fabulists were all hot and bothered about a U.S. Army training exercise called "Jade Helm" — which apparently enlisted Walmart basements in a secret government plot to overthrow the government of Texas. Accordingly, Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered the Texas State Guard to monitor and report the nefarious activities of them darn Yankees.

At the same time, the Texas legislature passed a law preventing localities from regulating fracking, but what is really at issue here is this: Governor Abbott has had ten fracking years to get to the bottom of this "Jade Helm" conspiracy, most of them with the full backing and support of Republicans and Qanoncompoops in charge of the federal government.

And somehow he has failed to reveal anything about the Jade Helm Conspiracy.

Which can only mean one thing: Texas Governor Greg Abbott is himself part of the Jade Helm Conspiracy to overthrow the government of Texas!

More on this story as it continues failing to develop.

Jagged Little April

Today's Graphical History Tour continues rummaging through the dusty files of cartoons from my salad, appetizer, and cheese course days.

Last week's GHT left off with a cartoon marking the tenth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, so let's start off with this cartoon marking the twentieth.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., April 20, 1995

My cartoon was an homage to the famous one by David Levine of LBJ showing off his appendicitis scar. I was  commenting that we were still arguing over what the lessons of Vietnam were. Did we need to stop getting involved in domestic disputes overseas? Or was the problem that we failed to commit to overwhelming force?

It was a debate the U.S. was having in the absence of an International Communist Threat. The fall of the Soviet Union was supposed to herald the End of History, whatever that meant; yet our supposed Peace Dividend had already been partly spent in the the former Yugoslavia and in Haiti.

One of my highly respected colleagues cast some shade last week on editorial cartoons that pay homage to classic editorial cartoons. I'm as guilty of that as anyone (I'll note that he and I have both ripped off Bill Mauldin's Weeping Lincoln cartoon). I guess if there is a rule about such things, it is to avoid copying someone else's idea that is already an overexposed meme on the internets.

I say that as someone who once cartooned Bill Clinton as a bunch of dancing screensaver babies.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., April 13, 1995

Sticking with April of 1995 for a moment but turning to a local issue: Milwaukee Aldermen Dan Schramm and Tom Nardelli objected to the Common Council settling a lawsuit by the family of Konerak Sinthasomphone to the tune of $850,000. Sinthasomphone was the 14-year-old Laotian-American boy returned to Jeffrey Dahmer's clutches by police officers Joseph Gabrish and John Balcerzak on May 27, 1991.

Schramm blamed Dahmer's victim for having put himself in danger, and Nardelli cast aspersions on his parents. We'll never know why Konerak didn't keep his distance from the man still on parole for drugging and sexually assaulting Konerak’s older brother; we do know why Gabrish and Balcerzak chose to believe the white serial killer rather than the Asian boy with a hole drilled through his skull or the Black women who called the police for help.

Can't we talk about something more pleasant?

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, April 8, 2005

Jumping ahead to April of 2005, here's another local issue cartoon. Sort of. 

Before getting into the topic of the cartoon, I just want to point out that I spent a lot of time and effort drawing in black around all that verbiage on the chalkboard. The verbiage isn't white-out, or white ink, or gesso, it's all absence of black ink. Oh, sure, I could have simply filled the space with black in Photoshop and superimposed the repeated sentence in Comic Sans. But we here at Bergetoons honor our commitment to bring you only the highest quality, hand-crafted cartoonistry.

I drew this cartoon before our present government made white supremacy official policy and DEI a dirty word. The editorial page of the Business Journal (at least twenty years ago), like Lt. Governor Barbara Lawton, was quite in favor of promoting diversity on corporate boards, and this character appeared in several of my cartoons accompanying those editorials. 

Here's an earlier cartoon featuring the the fictional board of Gibson, Gibsen, Ibsen and Gibbs:

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, June 13, 2003

No Photoshop cut-and-paste in that cartoon, either.

Moving on to April, 2015:

for Q Syndicate, April, 2015

About all that stuff I said about handcrafted artisanal cartoonistry and being above filling drawings in Photoshop, um, just forget that.

Once I decided that I needed to start sending out cartoons in living color, there was no way I was going to draw two versions of every cartoon: one in color and one in grayscale. Nope, nuh-uh! All the colorizing for one and halftones in the other is done in Photoshop to one black-and-white scan of one drawing.

This cartoon followed an early morning incident in March in which an unidentified man dressed in a construction suit tried to enter the White House grounds through the gate at Pennsylvania Avenue, but was stopped by Uniformed Division officers and taken into custody. Also that April, a man who had jumped the north fence onto the White House lawn in July pleaded guilty to trespassing on restricted grounds.

More seriously, the previous September, an Iraq War veteran named Omar Gonzalez had made it all the way into the White House through the North Portico doors, where he overpowered a Secret Service officer. He ran through most of the main floor before getting tackled by a counter-assault agent. He was later sentenced to seventeen months in prison.

That’s it for another Graphical History Tour. Please return your seats and tray tables to the upright position, and remain seated until history comes to a complete stop.

Cartoon Like a Lion, Out Like a Light

Having learned last week more than you'll ever need to know about the guy who didn't become Calvin Coolidge's Attorney General, today's Graphical History Tour rummages through my basement in search of new and interesting takes on my own old cartoons.

If we're lucky, we may even find some.

March, 2015

Before there was Project 2025, there was the ALEC Agenda. The corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council was founded in 1973 to create cookie-cutter right-wing legislation for state governments from one end of the country to the other.

The Wisconsin politicians in my cartoon are Assembly Leader Robin Vos, then Senate Leader Scott Fitzgerald, and then Governor Scott Walker. Walker is out of office now; Fitzgerald has gone on to Congress, and you may have seen him as one of the congresscretins confronted by angry constituents at his town hall meeting last week.

The character having the ALEC Agenda rammed down his throat — a term usually used by Republicans to vilify marriage equality, abortion rights, health care reform, and anything else they despise — is the laborer from the Wisconsin state flag.

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, March 25, 2015

I didn't get to draw hard-hitting cartoons of Republicans ramming their agenda down Wisconsin throats during my stint illustrating the editorials of the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee. Once in a while, however, I got to have a little fun with a topic, such as this one.

Investor Mark Attanasio purchased the Milwaukee Brewers Major League Baseball team from Bud Selig in 2004. The team, which hadn't made the MLB post-season since 1982, had a brand new ballpark, and Attanasio wanted to find out what else it was going to take to attract fans to the game.

The fourth panel is an homage to Richard Guindon, whose self-titled cartoon was a beloved feature in the Minneapolis Tribune when I was in college in Minnesota. Not that any regular readers of the Business Journal had any reason to know that; to my knowledge, Guindon's cartoons never appeared in any Wisconsin newspaper.

While lutefisk night at the ballpark might plausibly be a real thing at Target Field (yet certainly isn't), a more appropriate homage to Richard Guindon would have been for the lady in panel four to have cited her enthusiasm for Bring Your Carp to the Ballpark Night.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., March 6, 1995

Jumping back another decade, here's another cartoon that would never have run in the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee. 

This was the first installment of a two-parter, satirizing some image-polishing television advertisements by a certain multinational corporation. Unlike the weeks that have passed between my current episodes of the Max & Leo Show, the student newspaper at UW-Milwaukee published twice a week; so readers could follow the sequel to the Exxtron commercial three days after the first episode.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Kenosha Wis., March 7, 1985

Finally, let us take a moment to honor the memory of Soviet General Secretary of the U.S.S.R. Communist Party, Konstantin Chernenko. 

Chernenko died on March 10, 1985, just shy of thirteen months in office, of cirrhosis of the liver, chronic emphesema, and congestive heart failure at age 73. He had come to office upon the death of Yuri Andropov, who had succeeded another elderly Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, only sixteen months earlier.

State-run media in the U.S.S.R. had consistently downplayed reports of the three leaders' declining health. On February 25, 1985, aides hauled the obviously ill Chernenko out of his hospital bed so that he could vote for himself (as candidate for Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) on live television. His last television appearance was three days later to read a brief victory statement celebrating his election.

In completely unrelated news, Donald Полезный Идиот Trump is older today than any of those three Soviet leaders were when they checked into their respective mausolea. 

Tales of Future Past Pluperfect

Is it time for my weekly Graphical History Tour again already? Oh, shoot! Looking back at my February cartoons from decades ago, I find that I don't have much to say today about many of them.

But since I did set this one up last month, here's one starring then-House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) from 1995, after he had made a slip of the tongue calling Congressman Barney Frank an antigay slur during a radio interview:

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., Feb. 6, 1995

How an inadvertent slip of the pen made it into my homage to George Cruikshank I have no idea. I'm sure it was purely unintentional.

for Q Syndicate, February, 2015

For decades now, Republicans have labored tirelessly to deprive the poor of sustenance and children of free school lunches. To atone for such unChristian attitudes, they demand that public schools post the Ten Commandments in every classroom so that children know which Lord Thy God the government has decreed for them.

They like the Ten Commandments rather than those woke Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount.  Especially not the version from the Gospel According to Luke read in "Lutheran" (and Episcopal and Catholic) churches last Sunday, which include some verses not in Matthew's account:

24 “But woe to you who are rich,
    for you have already received your comfort.
25 Woe to you who are well fed now,
    for you will go hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now,
    for you will mourn and weep.
26 Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you,
    for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets."

Hey, I don't mean to cut this post short, but, well, it is a holiday weekend, after all.

for Q Syndicate, Jan./Feb., 2005

Happy Presidents' Day!

Quel Hommage

Today's Graphical History Tour dives into the archives in my basement and comes up with a quartet of cartoons from Januaries from decades ago.

I mentioned earlier this week that some of my fellow editorial cartoonists mimicked Ann Telnaes's drawing style in their #StandWithAnn cartoons, while I and others had not. I've drawn a number of cartoons over the years in the style of other artists, particularly when appropriating their ideas. Other times, I have simplified the drawing, as in this one:

in UW-P Ranger, Kenosha Wis., Jan. 31, 1985

I was referencing a nearly 75-year-old cartoon drawn by Puck cartoonist Johannes Keppler when then-President William Howard Taft was having similar problems getting his legislative agenda through Congress and the courts.

"I Must Have Been Dozing" by Johannes Keppler in Puck, June 22, 1910

I didn't include anywhere near as much shading, the window, the doorway, or anything outside the room, but I kept the Capitol sewing basket, the table it rested on, and two of the cats.

Now, there was a problem with my cartoon in that hardly any of the Ranger's readers would have had any reason to be familiar with the original Keppler version. Not even the professors would have had a subscription to Puck magazine in 1910; only someone else with The American Presidency in Political Cartoons 1776-1976 (Peregrine Smith Inc., 1976) could possibly have caught the reference.

The message of the cartoon still applied, and should have been understood by anyone paying any attention to current events; but as a tribute, the cartoon was, frankly, just stealing an old idea.

Reusing someone else's old cartoon works best if the original cartoon is (or ought to be) well known: Thomas Nast's "Who Stole the People's Money," or Charles Schulz's cartoons of Lucy yanking the football away from Charlie Brown. I am reminded, however, of a recent cartoon by a fellow editorial cartoonist that referenced a specific episode of The Simpsons. According to the reader comments, I wasn't the only person who had missed that particular episode and therefore the reference.

Then there was the time that I drew a cartoon for the NorthCountry Journal relying on a reference to "Calvin and Hobbes," a very popular comic strip running in many newspapers at the time. The NCJ editor and publisher, however, had never seen "Calvin and Hobbes," so I had to explain it to her and assure her that her readers would get the cartoon.

By the way, the credit line under my signature in my Ranger cartoon says "again," because I had drawn a cartoon the previous November about Ronald Reagan's reelection, based on a Keppler cartoon celebrating Teddy Roosevelt's 1905 inauguration. I don't suppose many Parkside students or faculty were familiar with that cartoon, either.

✍

in UWM Post, Milwaukee, Jan. 30, 1995

I include this cartoon in part to set up a subsequent homage cartoon. Dick Armey (R-TX) was the new House Majority Leader in the 104th Congress, and one of the architects of the 1994 Republican Revolution.

During a January 20, 1995 radio interview, Armey referred to fellow Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA), the only out gay man in Congress, as "Barney Fag." The quote, verbatim, as Armey was discussing a possible book deal, was: “I like peace and quiet and I don’t need to listen to Barney Fag, [pause] Barney Frank, haranguing in my ear because I made a few bucks off a book.” 

The slur was reported by several radio networks, and Armey blamed the media for reporting on what he claimed was an audio glitch, not a slip of the tongue or intentional insult.

Rep. Frank refused to accept Armey's excuses, saying, “There are a lot of possible ways to mispronounce my name but that one, I think, is the least common, ... I turned to my own expert, my mother, who reports that in 59 years of marriage, no one ever introduced her as Elsie Fag.”

✍

in Business Journal, Milwaukee, Jan. 21, 2005

A propos the Washington Post editor's excuse for spiking an Ann Telnaes cartoon on the grounds that it reiterated past and future opinion columns, here's one of the many cartoons I drew for the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee reiterating the editorial it ran alongside.

That was, in fact, the role I was expected to fill at the Business Journal from 1996 to 2005. I was brought in to replace conservative cartoonist Craig DuMez, who had often drawn whatever was on his mind. The editors at the Business Journal were interested in having editorial cartoons that reflected the week's editorial — which weren't always as far to the right as DuMez was.

Or, in this case, political at all.

I've never met the guy, but DuMez might have chafed at having to draw as many cartoons about hospital expansions, mergers, and construction as I had to do in my nine years with the Business Journal. This editorial had something to do with an addition to Froedtert Hospital, which the Beej hoped wouldn't be tarted up with a bunch of fancy frills — the sort of things one assumes architects dream about and hospital planners hope will make patients feel they're in a five-star hotel.

✍

for Q Syndicate, Jan., 2015

Finally, 2015 was going to be the year that the Supreme Court discovered that criminalizing same-sex marriage discriminated against same-sex couples, so Republican legislatures around the country were desperately preparing mechanisms to keep unconstitutional discrimination legal.

This is one of my cartoons in which the characters are not based on real people, even if their actions or opinions are based on those of actual persons. My clue to the reader that I've made up the person in the cartoon is if their name is somehow a pun.

You might find Lauryl's name in the list of ingredients on your shampoo bottle. Senator Beautron can be found overlooking a sports arena and displaying scores, stats, and replays.

I was considering last names for my latest recurring characters, MAGA Max and Liberal Leo, whom I named purely for the alliteration. "Headroom" has already been taken, so perhaps Max's surname should be K. Passidy. Or something less obvious, like Carpone. How about O'Delay, Leo?

I'll have to get back to you on that.