The Ghosts of Cartoons Past

Welcome to another Graphical History Tour. Let's rummage through my December cartoons from 2013, 2003, 1993, and 1983, shall we?

for Q Syndicate, December, 2013

I brought up Megan Kelly in this here blog the other day, quoting her fairly lengthy question to Chris Christie at last week's less-than-presidential debate. She accused him of being out-of-step with Republican orthodoxy and her own prejudices against transgender youth.

Ten years ago, Kelly was over at Fox Noise, whence she opined that everybody knows that Santa Claus can't possibly be Black because he's as Aryan as she is. Of course, we know from the historical record that the OG St. Nicholas was no such thing.

He was a Klingon. Qapla'!

for Q Syndicate, December, 2003

Once upon a time, I had an editor who objected to my depicting Santa Claus as gay. He was worried that it would offend readers' religious sensibilities. He had sold Q Syndicate by the time I drew this cartoon at the end of 2003, so I don't know if he would have had the same qualms about outing Old Man Time.

The editors of the Washington Blade really liked this cartoon, however, adding color and featuring it on the front page of their year-in-review issue. How I wish I had downloaded that version of the cartoon! (I had printed a screen grab of the page back then, but that piece of paper is a bit worse for wear twenty years on.) The Blade's colorizing job was an improvement over the original —cross-hatching really is no way to draw rainbow colors. But the grayscale image now in their archives is dark and muddy.

2003 was an extraordinarily good year for the LGBTQ+ community. An openly gay cleric, Rev. V. Gene Robinson, was elected Bishop Coadjudicator of the Episcopal Church New Hampshire Diocese. The original Queer Eye for the Straight Guy was the most popular program on Bravo, spawning further gay-oriented "reality programming." (Chip and Reichen were a gay couple on CBS's Amazing Race; Bravo's Boy Meets Boy was a gay version of The Bachelor with the catch that some of the supposed suitors were closeted straight dudes.)

Sadly, 2004 would prove to be a year of backlash, with President George W. Bush campaigning for reelection by pledging to enshrine opposite-sex marriage exclusivity in the U.S. Constitution — and America rewarding him by making him the only Republican presidential candidate in this century to win the popular vote.

UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., Dec. 9, 1993

Skipping back another decade, I have fewer cartoons to choose from, and this may be the only one in today's post that hasn't appeared in my blog before. The student newspapers for which I drew always suspended publication in early- to mid-December for finals and winter break. Local newsmakers are busy with holiday business (as are local cartoonists), so I don't believe I drew anything for the Racine Journal Times during any of the Decembers featured here today.

The baby and the muralist in this cartoon would be millennials in their thirties today; I guess the parents might be millennials, too. If so, their family is spared having a generation gap.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., Jan. 19, 1984

I drew this cartoon of the 1984 Democratic presidential candidates in December of '83 for the student newspaper of the University of Wisconsin at Parkside after the last issue of the semester had been published, so it was held over until January.

Having a plethora of official whatnots of the Olympic games was a new development in 1984. Having sponsors actually started way back in 1908 (Soup maker Oxo sponsored the London Olympics that year), and Coca-Cola has been an official sponsor ever since the 1928 Amsterdam games. But by 1984, it seemed that every other commercial on TV boasted of being the official adhesive tape, motor oil, or hemorrhoid ointment of the Olympics.

Since we're back to December of 1983, I have to close with the Christmas break episode of my crude take-off of "The Maltese Falcon" starring thinly disguised characters from the comic pages.

At this point in my story, a police detective who looked suspiciously like Dick Tracy was interrogating an out-of-work fellow you might have sworn was Mike Doonesbury — note: Garry Trudeau had put his strip on hiatus at the end of January — when a bunch of characters from one of my all-time favorite strips suddenly interrupted:

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., Dec. 15, 1983

I hope you'll check back before the holidays are over; but in case we miss each other, juHqu' qechmey!

Speaking of Gay Bishops

If the election of The Rev. Dr. R. Guy Erwin as bishop of the Southern California Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America hasn't made the front page of your RSS feed, perhaps it's because we've been there before.

Here's a cartoon about what it was like ten years ago when the Episcopalians crossed that threshold:

Conservative Episcopalians had conniption fits (they're called Episconniptions) over Robinson's election, and several U.S. churches went so far as to break away and join the Nigerian Anglican Church.

The bishop received death threats, and was pointedly not invited to the 2008 Lambeth Conference of the Anglican Communion. (This cartoon, however, was drawn three years earlier.)

He was invited to deliver an invocation at President Obama's first inaugural. If you didn't notice, it may be because he was omitted from the live broadcast on HBO and NPR and from the Presidential Inauguration Committee's official live blog.

Bishop V. Gene Robinson retired in January.

As for the Lutheran Church, before Bishop Erwin's election, The Rev. Eva Brunne was elected as Bishop of the Diocese of Stockholm, Sweden, in 2009. And of course, the Catholic Church had gay bishops long before Protestants got all worked up about theirs -- but I wasn't cartooning way back then.