Q Toon: Status Quo Anti

Well, folks, this is my gamble on Sunday on a cartoon idea that I thought would still be relevant after Tuesday.

I could have been delightfully wrong, I suppose. A blue wave could have swept all the transphobes out of office on Tuesday. But as our experience in Wisconsin has shown, they would still be able to wreak all sorts of mischief on their way out the door. Including refusing to leave.

Even a cartoon celebrating the end of instant fund-raising messages from the political parties and candidates could have gone awry.  All it would have taken would be for there to be some run-off election needed somewhere that would tip the balance of the House or Senate or governorship or state legislature, as Georgia foisted on us all the last two elections.

As I noted in Monday's sneak peek, we've had two presidential elections in the 2000's in which the outcome was still uncertain when Wednesday morning's newspapers went to press. We are now told to expect that to be the norm (and not just because Wednesday morning's newspapers are printed a couple hundred miles away these days).

One of my cartooning colleagues posted on Facebook the other day that the editor of one of his subscribing publications had asked him to supply them with some cartoons about something other than the election. It's a reasonable sounding request; nobody wants to go to print with this year's DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.

Or Harry Murphy's cartoon congratulating President-elect Charles Evans Hughes.

But my colleague said no. He's not the type to draw cartoons about sports scores or how sad it is that there was flooding in Valencia — although fresh carnage in Gaza or Lebanon might have piqued his interest. The guy has managed to crank out a cartoon every day almost without fail for several years now.

The fact is that there is very little else to draw editorial cartoons about in this country this week. Even our foreign co-workers appear to be fixated on our presidential election.

Anyway, I've chosen to publish this post in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, regardless of whether we know for sure who the next President of the United States is or not.

And, of course, whether Donald The Terrible and all those Republican House and Senate candidates are able to carry out their campaign promises to criminalize and persecute transgender Americans and their families.

October Jest

Next stop on our Graphical History Tour: October cartoons up from the spooky basement! Ghosts? Goblins? Werewolves and vampires?

No! Worse! Presidential politics!

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., Oct. 11, 1984

We were at the height of the political campaign season forty Octobers ago, so naturally, my cartoons were all about the candidates' debates.

President Ronald Reagan put in a poor performance during his first debate appearance with Democratic nominee Walter "Fritz" Mondale. Unlike President Joe Biden's poor performance this past June, it didn't result in hand-wringing from his side of the aisle urging him to pull out and let his Vice President take the wheel.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., Oct. 18, 1984

And it barely moved his poll numbers.

Walter Mondale tried to spook voters with the zinger, "'Let's tell the truth. Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won't tell you. I just did."

But Reagan had the mic drop moment with "I want you to know also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience."

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in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, Nov. 3, 1994

I drew this cartoon for the Hallowe'en day edition of the student newspaper at the University of Milwaukee in 1994, but their October 31 edition had no editorial page — the entire issue being devoted to campus sports. So they held it for the Thursday issue, after Hallowe'en was past. At least Election Day was still to come.

The incumbent Congressman in my district, Democrat Peter Barca, would be defeated in that year's Republican wave. He's running for that same seat again this year, and the campaign of the current incumbent, Republican Bryan Steil, has one television ad out now featuring a group of veterans complaining about a vote Barca made in favor of cutting veterans' benefits.

One of those veterans, from the look of him, wasn't even born when Barca cast that vote. The tiny print footnote during the ad disappears quickly and refers only to the House Bill Number. I doubt anyone is going to look up whether it was a procedural vote, an omnibus bill, or an amendment. I don't see Politifact weighing in on it.

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In 2004, I was asked to draw a series of sketches about that year's presidential election for Lavender Magazine in Minneapolis. This was the cover drawing for their October issue:

in Lavender Magazine, Minneapolis, October, 2004

I had done color cartoons for the Milwaukee Business Journal the year before, but the cartoons I sent to Lavender Magazine were black-and-white images for their own people to colorize. I somehow don't have a copy of the published magazine, or even a downloaded image of the cover, and their on-line archive doesn't date back to 2004; so the above is how I colored it myself this week.

I'm fairly sure that I did see the published magazine. I just don't know whether I simply can't find it, or if it was among the stuff that had to be thrown out after our basement flooded several years ago.

in Lavender Magazine, Minneapolis, October, 2004

In any event, this is an example of what I sent them, and my recollection is that the illustrations like this one to accompany text of the cover articles appeared in color.

The editors asked for eight illustrations, in each case spelling out what sort of scenario they had in mind for each one.

in Lavender Magazine, Minneapolis, October, 2004

This is my colorization, from an earlier post, of another of the Lavender spot illustrations, of John Kerry getting a make-over from the original Queer Eye for the Straight Guy crew.

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Well, that's enough politics for a Saturday, so I'll close with one of my most popular efforts, from October of 2014, after the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to overrule lower court rulings finding marriage inequality unconstitutional.

for Q Syndicate, October, 2014

The Court's ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges making marriage equality the law of the land would come down the next year.

Three of its dissenting Justices are still on the bench, and share with the three Trump appointees who have since joined them a marked disdain for stare decisis.

Q Toon: Ad Insultiam

There's a month to go until Election Day, and Republicans have broken out the transphobia on TV.

The Trump campaign has begun running trans-bashing ads charging that Kamala Harris supports transgender therapy for children "without their parents' consent," as well as gender corrective surgery for prison inmates and undocumented immigrants. The ads include footage of Harris answering questions from a transgender interviewer (Wait — isn't the Republican knock on Harris that she won't sit down for interviews?) followed by still shots of her with drag performers — at least one of which doesn't look photoshopped together — and Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Rachel Levine.

You may not recognize Levine’s name; but transphobes find her every bit as frightening as those of us on the other side found Roger Severino in Trump’s HHS. And rest assured that right-wing media are holding her up as a scary bugaboo every chance they can get.

Here in Wisconsin, Republican senatorial candidate Eric Hovde and the PACs supporting him have been running ads making the same accusations against Democratic incumbent Tammy Baldwin. One assumes that Republicans are running this as a one-size-fits-all ad against other Democrats in close races around the country; Baldwin just happens to be one of the most prominent LGBTQ+ candidates this year.

We creative types gripe about AI — Artificial Intelligence — infringing on our turf. Someone quipped something to the effect of AI allowing wealth access to creativity without allowing creativity access to wealth. Or something like that. I tried googling it, but Google just gave me inspirational quotations about attaining financial security.

Anyway, you'll miss us creative types when we're gone, I promise you. But nobody is going to shed a tear when AI puts the campaign admeisters out of work. I half suspect that the emails flooding my inbox from Sherrod Brown (personal!), Elisa Slotkin, Jon Tester, Tim Walz, Barack Obama, Michele Obama, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, Adam Kinzinger, Gwen Walz, Doug Emhoff, Chasten Buttigieg, and Moo Dang, the baby hippopotamus, each of them supposedly writing me ten or twelve times a day, must be spewed forth from AI servers in Cupertino. Some guy probably fed in the parameters to Watson 9000 four or five years ago: show me a desperate candidate up against a funding deadline and facing a barrage of attacks by a menacing cabal threatening all that America holds dear. 

I doubt that anyone will shed a tear if and when the job of grinding out political attack ads gets snatched away from the Don Drapers and Darrin Stephenses of Madison Avenue and K Street. Turning the work over to soulless mainframes in the cloud instead of the soulless operatives doing it now might scarcely be noticed by the rest of us.

Unless we happen to spot the surplus fingers and triple-jointed hips in the grainy, slow motion, black-and-white videos of Candidates X.

WisToon: Ask Not For Hovde Bell Tolls

Eric Hovde is making his second try for the Senate seat held by Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) this year. In 2012, he lost in the primary to former Governor Tommy Thompson; this time around, he's the Republican Party favorite.

Like a traditional Republican, he promises to end budget deficits (without saying whose budget he intends to slash). His ads blame Senator Baldwin for inflation, illegal immigration, and the supposed Biden plot to get rid of gas-powered cars. A TV ad by a shadow group funded by Hovde's brother charges that Baldwin of told people to stay home when COVID-19 first spread, “but used your money to fly to New York to live with her girlfriend at her lavish multimillion dollar apartment.”

When not playing up what Senator Baldwin has done for Wisconsinites, the Democrats' TV and social media ads attack Hovde for being a wealthy hedge fund manager living in sunny California (he counters that he grew up in Wisconsin and graduated from the University in Madison), and that he wants to take away old people's right to vote.

The ad by Senate Majority PAC includes a sound bite of Hovde, whose company owns a nursing home, telling a radio interviewer, “If you’re in a nursing home, you only have five, six months life expectancy. Almost nobody in a nursing home is at a point to vote.”

The Hovde campaign responded that he was only talking about Republican-fueled (and exaggerated) complaints about what they charge was a suspiciously high rate of voting at some nursing homes in Racine and Madison in the last election.

Just the same, I wouldn't want my loved ones in a nursing home run with that attitude.

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Speaking of my loved ones, we joke that Eric Hovde might be a cousin of ours.

It's conceivable. My great-great-great-great-great-grandmother was a Hovde. We have her family traced back a few more generations, but we know nothing of any of her siblings' descendants. It's entirely possible, however, that the surname refers to the farm where she was raised, and that anyone who worked there would be given that last name whether they were blood relatives or not.

Barkeep! A Round for My Friends!

Eric Hovde is vying for Wisconsin Republicans' votes to run against Tammy Baldwin again this fall (he lost to former Governor Tommy Thompson in 2012). He's been out in California lately, so he has been advertising heavily on television this month to re-introduce himself to the voters.

I assume this commercial was not filmed at the "beloved neighborhood bar" he finally succeeded in shutting down after a 25-year effort.

Q Toon: This Bud's for You

Pay no attention to Trump hauled into court, or Clarence Thomas schmoozing with that right-wing billionaire Nazi afficionado! Sound the alarm for really really urgent breaking news!!!!

Cishet snowflakes done got their panties all in a wad again, this time over beer cans.

Specifically, Bud Light, which put the face of transgender TikTokker Dylan Mulvaney on some of its cans as part of a partnership deal commemorating her 365th day of her transgendrification.

Not all of its cans, mind you. I suspect that it's not easy to find the Dylan Mulvaney Bud cans at your local Gas 'n' Grab or Dew Drop Inn.

But that was enough to make Kid Rock haul out some military-grade weaponry to blow up his stash of Bud Light real good on Twitter. Other buffoons went to social media to run over their beer with cars, trucks, and farm equipment, or just tossed them in the trash. Offered free Bud Light, attendees at a Kari Lake Still Thinks She's Governor rally stood on principle and drank Lite Beer by Miller instead.

Er, maybe they had Coors.

Seltzer?

Good ol' Tennessee whis-- oh, forget it.

Unfortunately for homobiqueertransdrag-o-phobes, the alcoholic beverage industry figured out long ago that there's gold in that there LGBTQ+ market. Hook-up apps have overtaken gay and lesbian bars as the go-to place to meet new dates, but the beer and liquor companies have learned that they can reach more customers sponsoring gay pride festivals than at Baptist revival meetings or conversion quackery camps.

And all they have to do is slap some rainbows on the bottle.

Q Toon: Televisibility

The LGBTQ community is more visible in television advertising these days than we were only a very short time ago.

Chalk it up to a greater sensitivity to diversity. When I was a tyke, the only faces we saw in television commercials were white, except for Jose the coffee farmer and the laundry woman whose "ancient Chinese secret, eh?" turned out to be a grocery store fabric softener. In the '70's, black faces began to show up: first football celebrities like O.J. Simpson and Mean Joe Green. Soon a hillside of multiracial folks offered "to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony," but it would still be a while before non-white actors would sell us cars, insurance, and other expensive stuff.

Now that societal attitudes toward the LGBTQ community have softened, folks like us have begun showing up in commercials, too. Their appearances are usually fleeting and might leave viewers thinking, "Did I just see what I think I saw?" The young woman who leaps enthusiastically into another young woman's arms at the airport in an amazon.com commercial ... are they a couple? Wasn't that a guy in make-up for nearly a full second in an Ulta ad?

Maybe the two gals dancing together at the house party in the Grey Goose commercial just happen to like dancing. And Spectrum Mobile made a point in its latest commercial of mentioning that the two guys featured in its ad campaign just happen to live together; they're not family. The framed pictures over their kitchen table of shirtless 1890's boxers don't mean a thing.

Advertisers and content carriers still get flack from older and more sensitive viewers when our presence in a commercial is impossible to overlook, even with the mute button on. Such was the case with an ad by Zola that ran on the Hallmark Channel. The setting for the commercial was the wedding of two women, which set off the alarm bells at One Million Moms Inc.

OMM has been battling against gays and lesbians in TV commercials ever since J.C. Penney hired Ellen DeGeneres as its spokesperson back in 2012. The then-110-year-old retailer was hoping that some gay cachet would give it a trendy vibe. It didn't work.

Flush with their seven-year-old success, Megamoms fired off a protest last week to Hallmark, which announced that it was pulling the ad "to avoid controversy." Zola, an on-line wedding gift registry company, replied by pulling the rest of its advertising from the Hallmark Channel, which shocked Hallmark into an immediate reversal.

“The Hallmark Channel will be reaching out to Zola to reestablish our partnership and reinstate the commercials,”  said Mike Perry, president and CEO of Hallmark Cards, which controls Crown Media Networks, the parent company of Hallmark Channel, in a prepared statement.  “Across our brand, we will continue to look for ways to be more inclusive and celebrate our differences.” He acknowledged the ban had caused “hurt and disappointment.”

I'm so glad that because I drew last week's cartoon about the Hallmark Channel, I gave this week's cartoon a more general focus. I didn't catch news of Hallmark's reversal until after I'd sent my cartoon off to the syndicate.

Besides, like the lady in the cartoon, I hadn't actually seen the commercial.

Midterms of Enfearment

For this week's installment of Salonback Saturday, I'm rehashing some of my favorite cartoons about midterm elections. Many of them have appeared in these journeys through my archives before. Given how few midterm election cartoons there are to choose from, I'd rather avoid some of the more hyperlocal ones requiring enough of tedious explanation to spoil the humor.

A while back, I mentioned my fictional Democrat, Luke Warmish, whose congressional career was interrupted in 1994.

There was no real Luke Warmish, but plenty of Democratic candidates were spooked by President Clinton's failure to get health care reform through a Democrat-majority Congress. This cartoon marks a profound difference between Democrats and Republicans as we were entering the Newt Gingrich era. Democrats head for the hills at the first sign of difficulty, for which they paid dearly in 1994 and 2010. (Today, they disavow any particular fondness for Nancy Pelosi.) Republicans rallied around their Republican president in 2002 and have done so again in 2018, in spite of Mr. Trump's high disapproval rating with voters.

It helps that gerrymandering has inoculated Republicans against the will of the general electorate, but the only Republicans you ever see admitting that they're not particularly fond of Trump's bombast, bigotry, divisiveness, and contempt for Constitutional principles, are the ones who have decided not to run for reelection.

You would hardly know it to look at my cherry-red home congressional district now, but for two decades, the seat was securely held by a Democrat, Les Aspin. The district still included Beloit and not the southern Milwaukee suburbs, and it ran on good-paying union jobs. Aspin barely broke a sweat at election time, especially after he was named chair of the House Armed Services Committee, winning more campaign contributions than he knew what to do with. His main campaign expense was printing new yard signs, changing colors every year. In some years they were orange; have you ever seen that color on a campaign yard sign?

An evergreen issue for election cartoons, midterm or full-term, is political advertising.

Most citizens don't have time to go to all the campaign rallies, and local TV news programs seldom pay attention to them unless a presidential (or Oprah Winfrey) visit is involved. I would guess that the readership for campaign mailers is also pretty low, so more voters get their information from candidate and advocacy group advertising.

There may be some ads run nation-wide, but most are strictly local, of little interest outside the district or state of the campaign. Here in Wisconsin, Republican Mark Neumann stretched the truth beyond recognition in a TV ad accusing incumbent Senator Russ Feingold of supporting federal spending on monkeys sent into outer space by the Russian space program. Feingold had opposed the budget item which somehow made it into the final budget bill anyway.

A commercial for an earlier race for Wisconsin's other senate seat, then held by Democrat Bill Proxmire, occasioned pre- and post-election cartoons that have to be presented as a pair. Once Proxmire won election to the late Joe McCarthy's seat in 1957, his national reputation for exposing government waste made him so popular at home that he was able to win reelection five times by overwhelming margins despite refusing outside campaign contributions and spending $200 or less of his own money on each campaign.

His hapless opponent in 1982, Scott McCallum, ran a TV ad trying to tie Proxmire to the sour economy by exploiting the plight of McCallum's unemployed brother. Meanwhile, President Reagan was working to convince the nation that unemployment rates were at last headed downward.

But no, Bill Proxmire didn't hire John McCallum. I made that up.

I don't mean for today's post to focus on my home state, but I can't recall drawing any cartoons about Minnesota politics (except for one upon the death of Hubert Humphrey) during my four years in college there. That in spite of the rather interesting election of 1978 with the governorship and both senate seats up for grabs. I followed the news in the newspapers, but didn't watch much television, so I guess I wasn't catching the candidates' commercials.

Occasionally, an ad from elsewhere in the country will grab my attention. In 2002, the Democrat running for reelection to the U.S. Senate by resorted the same sort of sneaky, underhanded innuendo about his opponent that Republicans get criticized for employing. But as Donald Trump would shrug, hey, it worked, didn't it?

Certain themes run through a lot of campaign commercials, since they have often been created by the same tried and true ad agencies and tested with scientifically selected focus groups. The candidates' names are interchangeable.

Hallowe'en was just a few days ago, and since it's always right before election day, it's natural fodder for election cartoons. It's a slam dunk to depict the candidates or their supporters as trick-or-treaters, as in this bite-sized candy from 2006 when Republicans were expected to lose several seats in the House and Senate.

I'm going to have to draw my first post-election cartoon this weekend. As you can imagine, that can be quite challenging. I close with a post-election cartoon from a year in which the campaign commercials made it difficult to support either candidate.

Ready, Set, Shop!

In honor of whatever this weekend stretching from Black Friday to Cyber Monday is called, Small Businessback Saturday brings you a four-page ad from the November 29, 1916 edition of The Outlook, for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. (These images are, of course, embiggenatable if you would like to peruse the small print.)

For those of you too young to know what an Encyclopaedia Britannica was, this was back in the dark and benighted days before Al Gore invented the internet. There was no Googling, and no Wikipedia at your fingertips. If you wanted to know about the Holy Roman Empire, the human circulatory system, Magellan's voyages, or the life cycle of the kangaroo, your first stop was to read up about them in the 30-volume encyclopedia set taking up an entire shelf somewhere in your house. Salesmen actually went door-to-door selling these things; they'd be sent to you one volume at a time, like a magazine description.

When you (or your great-granparents) had the full set, the subscription stopped, so you didn't get updated editions as time went on. My parents were convinced to buy a full set of the Encyclopedia Americana when they decided to start a family; so in the late '60's and early '70's when I was writing reports for school, the encyclopedia in my home was published when nearly all of Africa was owned by European colonial powers, the only thing sent up into space was a Sputnik, and the country American soldiers had been dying in for as long as I could remember didn't exist yet.

Key to selling encyclopedias was the Hard Sell. They were a considerable investment (you will not find anywhere in this four-page ad how much the volumes cost after the $1.00 introductory volume).

What I'd like to point out here is the sales pitch that this Christmas would be your last chance to take advantage of "the miracle of India paper." India paper, made from flax, was thinner than regular book paper while still about as durable and opaque. The volumes of the encyclopedia, therefore, could be thinner and less heavy than they would be with pages made from wood pulp. The full set of this encyclopedia was 35 lbs., versus 85 lbs. (16 kg vs. 40 kg.) for the wood pulp version.

There was, however, a Great War underway, and for some reason, all our flax came from Europe.
"War has devastated the flax field of Europe. Only a few thousand sets of The Britannica printed on India paper remain unsold. ... You can realize that the present supply can not last long.

"You should act at once whether you buy for Christmas or not."

Approve This Message

Now that another election is over and you find that you miss all those obnoxious, mendacious, cynical, vicious, snide, sleazy campaign commercials, take heart. There is still AM radio.

And if your inbox seems empty without those 40-50 daily emails from politicians and their staffers begging you for money, there are always Nigerian princes happy to fill the void.

Rhapsody in Coach

United's TV ad may have been inspired by this incident, but they certainly don't want you reminded of it.

United Airlines is airing a TV ad these days that shows a symphony orchestra playing Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue aboard one of their airplanes.

It's hogwash.

If you think that child kicking the back of your seat all the way from D.C. to Denver was annoying, try sitting in front of the trombone section.

And I don't care what the screen shows, nobody is going to be able to play a cello on an airplane, or fit a french horn in the overhead storage compartment. It's like that Buick ad with Shaquille O'Neal that shows him walking up to their little car, and then shows him sitting inside it; they don't show him actually getting into or out of the car. (Actually, I think they have him curl up into the fetal position, then they just build the car around him.)

At least United doesn't even bother to get the tuba, bass, and percussion section into the plane in their ad.

For the piano alone, they would have to take out 24 seats.

Q Toon: Back After This Word

I was away on vacation last week, attending a family wedding and meandering back home through Tennessee and Kentucky. (What do you call that? The Shallow South?) This meant I was paying less attention to the news than usual; when we watched TV, we were watching entertainment programs that were unlikely to help me come up with any ideas for this week's cartoon.

But we certainly took notice of this commercial for Norelco, in which a hirsute fellow uses the company's trimming products to get rid of his beard and chest hair, and even trim his pubes, judging himself more attractive to himself at each step of the way. The professional umbrage-taking group "One Million Moms" also took notice:

"The ad shouldn't run at any time. It is not only inappropriate for children; it is offensive to adults also. The company's response to people's concerns is in poor taste. They are basically saying that they don't care, and they are going to run the commercial anyway."

(click here to view)

Paul Berge Q Syndicate‡May 15, 2013 EditorialCartoonists.com

OMM urged their followers to register their objections on Norelco's Facebook page, or to call the company on the telephone:

"Call Philips Norelco at: 1-800-243-3050 or 1-888-744-5477. Please remember to be polite. Here is a sample script: 'The new Norelco manscaping and grooming commercial is extremely offensive in many ways. Please do what you can to get it pulled off the air, or I certainly won't be buying anymore Philips Norelco products.'"

 I guess we can't look forward to any similar ads for Lady Norelco products.