A Letter from the Editor

From time to time, I devote these Graphical History Tours to reports of books I have recently bought.

Having taken my sister to the airport in Milwaukee this week, I was obliged to stop in at the Renaissance Book Store in the concourse. I frequently find old books of editorial cartoons there, and this visit was no exception.

Cover cartoons by Karl Hubenthal, Paul Conrad, Robert Graysmith, and Jeff MacNelly

The Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year — 1974 is one that was not already in my collection, so I had to bring it home. The cartoons are from 1973: the year the U.S. withdrew from the Vietnam War; the Watergate scandal burst wide open; Spiro Agnew resigned the vice presidency; Syria and Egypt attacked Israel; the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries imposed an oil embargo on Western Europe, Canada, and the United States, resulting in a severe energy crisis; and U.S. troops massacred Native American protesters at Wounded Knee, South Dakota.

It was also the year the Supreme Court issued its decision in Roe v. Wade, but there is no mention of it in this particular book.

I was really struck, however, by the book's forward, written by Washington Star-News editor Newbold Noyes. In light of the state of newspaper editorial cartooning these days, I'd like to quote it in full; so aside from a few cartoons from the book and my credit lines, the rest of today's GHT is Mr. Noyes:

"The Boss Says Make It Funny" by Bill Crawford (for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., ca. Sept. 4, 1973) on back cover

So far as an editor is concerned, the cartoon on his editorial page is that white-hot point of light beneath the burning glass. Here the newspaper's editorial statement is reduced to its simplest and strongest terms. More readers are likely to register the cartoonist's message, on any given day, than any other commentary. For better or worse, this pictorial comment comes closer to embodying the spirit of the newspaper than any other element in its pages.

So far as the editor is concerned, this is not always for the better. We have to be candid about this: for an editor, the power focused in the cartoonist's penpoint is something of a problem. When editors meet, the things that really are on their minds do not appear on the formal agenda — they surface in talk around the bar.

When the board of the American Society of Newspaper Editors met the other day on the shores of Arizona's Lake Powell, its members did not devote their first cocktail session to the beauties of the second largest man-made body of water, or even to Watergate. They talked instead about the Los Angeles Times' decision to move its editorial cartoon to the the "op-ed" page, that kaleidoscope of other opinion appearing opposite the newspaper's own editorials.

"Alas, Poor Agnew..." by Paul Conrad in Los Angeles Times, October 17, 1973

Was the switch being made on general principles, or because of some clash of opinion on a major issue developing between editor and cartoonist? Was it a good idea for the rest of us? How about moving the cartoon off the editorial page only on those days when it evidenced a major departure from the views of the editor? How would their cartoonist [Paul] Conrad react?

Evidently, the Times' just-announced move touched a sensitive and responsive nerve in editorial circles.

The problem, of course, was not a new one; it was just that here was somebody doing something about a situation that, subliminally, had perplexed us all. I hearkened back, as the talk rolled on, to the time when our morning competitor in Washington warmly supported Eisenhower in its editorial columns, while its editorial cartoonist [Herblock] persisted in presenting the General as the very personification of Simple Simon. The town took wry delight in the Post's embarrassment, but the newspaper somehow survived. It seems to me the cartoonist went on a vacation, or something.

I am going into all this not to suggest that editorial cartoons no longer belong on editorial pages (which seems to me a dubious proposition), but only to make one point: there is potency in this branch of journalistic commentary. A good argument could be advanced, I think, that the editorial cartoonists in this country have more immediate impact on public opinion than editors, or columnists, or TV anchormen, or any other group.

What makes a good cartoon? Everyone has his prejudices. I, for instance, happen to be partial to those that make a serious point with a humorous twist. In times such as these, however, when very little that happens is at all funny, it is fortunate indeed that a good cartoon can be sad, or bitter, or furious.

Some say that, because cartoons rely on over-statement or exaggeration — distortion, if you will — they must be basically mean. I don't agree; a number of my favorite cartoonists, including Gib Crockett of the Washington Star-News, are consistently good-natured in their approach. That quality should be no more unwelcome on an editorial page than it is in real life.

"Yankee Gone Home" by Gib Crockett in Washington Star-News, January, 1973

The essence of good cartooning, needless to say, is simplicity. This is true of almost any sort of artistic expression, graphic or otherwise, but in cartooning it is the name of the entire game. You cannot be subtle in a cartoon. You cannot be balanced. You cannot worry too much even about being fair.

The cartoonist produces his effect by over-simplifying — by stripping away all the qualifications, the "yes, buts" and "on the other hands," and reducing his message to one pure unequivocal statement.

That, obviously, makes editors uneasy. One such pure, unequivocal statement says far more to more readers than a thousand carefully considered, nicely balanced words. So in addition to being more influential with public opinion in general, the cartoonist may even have more effect than the editor on the public's perception of his newspaper's stance.

This is why the editorial nose is always out of joint in relation to cartoonists — more than usual these days, because of the unusually complex and critical nature of the issues we are trying to deal with. My own guess is that, despite their discomfiture, most editors will let cartoonists continue to dominate the editorial pages, just as they have all along.

The reason, in one pure and unequivocal statement, is that the editorial page would be so damn dull without its cartoon!

—NEWBOLD NOYES, November 5, 1973

"And That's the Truth" by Mike Peters in Dayton Daily News, August 16, 1973

Churchill: A Life in Cartoons

This week's Graphical History Tour is yet another book report: just in time for the 150th anniversary of Winston Churchill's birth, cartoon historian Tim Benson offers over 300 editorial cartoons from the British wartime leader's career in Churchill: A Life in Cartoons.

Back in October, I was curious about an Arthur G. Racey cartoon from 1924 that held up Churchill's propensity for wearing hats as something out of the ordinary, even though just about everybody wore hats in those days. The mystery is explained in Benson's introduction to the book: at the dawn of Churchill's career, cartoonists thought that unlike his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, he lacked "the features which lent themselves to easily recognisable conventional treatment" (— cartoonist Francis Carruthers Gould, August, 1904). 

Benson writes that heeding the advice of Gould and other cartoonists,

"Churchill started wearing a variety of hats, all of which were distinctive in that they were too small for his head. Churchill once claimed that this was a deliberate strategy, beginning in 1910 when he caused a stir by donning a felt cap several sizes too small in front of photographers."

"Our Choice of Political Leaders" by Victor Weisz in News Chronicle, London, Nov. 23, 1945

He later adopted the cigar (never smoked down more than an inch) and the V symbol for the same reasons, although by then cartoonists had sufficiently honed their caricatures of the man that they really didn't need the extra clues. But, as Donald Trump is always drawn with an extra-long red tie, the cigar was de rigueur in any Churchill cartoon.

When I ordered this book, I expected it to be full of David Low cartoons (like the one on the cover), but Benson has deliberately sought out cartoons which, according to the back page, "have not seen the light of day since they were first published." Low is not overlooked entirely, but you'll find many more cartoons by George Whitelaw, Victor "Vicky" Weisz, Clive Uptton, and Leslie Illingworth.

There are also plenty of cartoons from the United States, Germany, Italy, Australia, and the U.S.S.R.; even a few from Brazil, India, South Africa, Netherlands, and Mexico. What struck me, having just read and reviewed a book about Canadian editorial cartoonists, is that there is only one cartoon in this book from Canada. (The book has no index; if anyone finds a second Canadian cartoon in there, please let me know.)

"Das Alte Lied" ("The Old Song") by Arthur Johnson in Kladderadatsch, Berlin, Sept. 12, 1943

The cartoons published in nations that were Britain's enemies, such as this one by Arthur Johnson (sadly, not in color in Benson's book) in which it's the U.S. flag that Churchill is obliged to carry, serve as a welcome counterpoint to the patriotic wartime cartoons from the homeland. Benson notes as an aside that this is one of the few German cartoons that alluded to Franklin Roosevelt's polio — an absolute no-no in U.S. and allied cartoons, photographs, and reportage. 

If I have any complaint about the book, it is that there are a few cartoons that, when printed two per page, include print that is too small for these old eyes to read. Typically, that involves labels identifying politicians who are long forgotten or simply unknown this side of the pond. Since the text accompanying every cartoon does a more than adequate job of explaining their context and external references, my not being able to identify the Labour councilman from Westgloughingham is a very small point.

Churchill: A Life in Cartoons helps greatly in the understanding of the two World Wars from a British point of view (especially as distinct from the U.S. perspective). With a half century of cartoons dating from 1904 to 1954, including a number drawn by cartoonists who have graced our Graphical History Tour over the years, Benson's is a remarkable and praiseworthy contribution to the celebration of Churchill's sesquicentennial.

Now, I'm not one to tell you to run right out and buy this book. But Christmas is right around the corner and you might have someone in your life who is interested in cartooning, or history, or England; and perhaps that is something they would tell you.

Rapport du Livre ce Samedi

I can't attend a convention of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists without coming home with at least one book to report on here, so today's Graphical History Tour is devoted to Sketches from an Unquiet Country: Canadian Graphic Satire 1840-1940, edited by Dominic Hardy, Annie Gérin, and Lora Senechal Carney. 

It's a dense tome; a reader must occasionally cut one's way through scholarly language such as “critical tradition that bifurcates aesthetic forms” and “historiographic metafiction.” The collected essays deal with the century between the failed rebellions of the late 1830's and the start of World War II. All of them address the nature of satire itself; some of them emphasize historical events, and others societal mores. Artistic styles also come in for assessment.

Nancy Perron displaying the work of Albéric Bourgeois at ACC-AAEC Convention

Some of the content was covered during presentations to the ACC and AAEC members at the Musée McCord-Stewart earlier this month.

One of them, as I mentioned in this blog, was Christian Vachon's essay arguing that the character of Uncle Sam as we know him today originated in Canada.

"Uncle Sam Kicked Out" by John Henry Walker in Grinchuckle, Montréal, Sept. 23, 1869

The idea of Uncle Sam existed earlier than this John Henry Walker cartoon, but Walker dressed him in striped breeches and a star-spangled coat weeks before Thomas Nast first did the same. In earlier cartoons, there is little to distinguish Uncle Sam from his predecessor, Brother Jonathan, a wise-cracking Everyman appearing in cartoons from the earliest days of nationhood.

To bolster the case of Nast getting his inspiration for Uncle Sam from Walker, Vachon cites examples that Nast also borrowed Uncle Sam's Canadian counterpart, Johnny Canuck, from Walker's cartoons. Uncle Sam, however, has survived Johnny Canuck as a cartoon stock character. (Johnny Canuck's revival during World War II as an action comic hero and again as the mascot of Vancouver's professional hockey team is outside the purview of this book, but it does include some examples of 21st-Century Canadian politicians cast as Canuck in editorial cartoons.)

Another essay follows the development of Miss Canada, a daughter of Britannia and sister of Columbia. All three are based on Greek goddesses; only one of them was typically accompanied by a beaver. Nowadays, all three are attic has-beens, and only the beaver survives in cartoons.

Cartoons of Arthur G. Racey, whom we featured here two weeks ago, appear with Jalene Grove's essay on "The Pretty Girl," chronicling Canadian artists' resentment of U.S. ideas of what constitutes female beauty.

Selections from "The American Girl" by A.G. Racey in The Moon, Montréal, 1902

 I've edited out some of the racist examples that accompanied Racey's satires above of U.S. cover girls (offensive cartoons are not limited to the chapter on anti-Semitism). The essay charts the progression from turn-of-the-century grotesque caricature to later cartoonists whose sly, wink-and-a-nod parodies may require a second glance nowadays to catch their satirical aspects.

It is unfortunate that the chapter on women's suffrage in cartoons does not include any cartoons arguing in its favor. Perhaps Pierre Chemartin and Louis Pelletier couldn't find any (U.S. cartoonists were certainly slow to come around to the idea). 

"Ulysse and the Sirens" by Henry Mayerovich in New Frontier, Montréal, Sept. 1936

The unfeminine harridans of women's suffrage are followed by a chapter showcasing the anti-Semitic, pro-fascist cartoons of Le Goglu (The Bobolink). Le Goglu's editor is at center in the above cartoon from the next chapter, about the anti-fascist press in Canada. Those two essays really have to be read as a pair.

Most of the essays are translated into English from their original French. The cartoons include the work of both Anglophone and Francophone authors; translations are offered for many but not all of the latter. One of the exceptions, "Les Pouilleux de Québec: Skidou!" is excerpted on the book's cover. It's a parody in Le Goglu of someone else's cartoon about hobos; I would translate the title as "The Lousy Ones of Quebec: Skidoo!"

The text gives an English translation of the seemingly innocuous poem accompanying the first panel of the cartoon, showing a woodsman settler in colonial times. The three other quatrains are given only in French. The book's cover illustration comes from the fourth panel, the poem for which proposes kicking all the Jews out of Canada to Palestine, the land of flying lice ("le pays de poux-volants"). 

The penultimate essay, on Albéric Bourgeois and his alter ego, Baptiste Ladébauche, by Laurier LaCroix serves as a welcome palette cleanser after the bitter and salty fare from the fascists and socialists.

In the end, I can't fault the scholarship in this book in any way. There are a few passages where cartoons are cited in the text without including them as illustrations, which is regrettable; Although I understand perfectly well that some of them may not have been available, at least in the high-resolution quality of the cartoons that are included. The cartoons printed in color in the middle of the book, while limited, come as a pleasant surprise.

The U.S. educational system barely acknowledges the existence of our neighbor to the north, so much of the history here is bound to be new to us readers "from across the line." If you're interested in appreciating more about Canada than its back bacon and poutine, this book is a fine place to start.

Q Toon: Do Not Disturb

Red state colleges are welcoming students back to campus by emptying their libraries of books about feminism, LGBTQ+ experience, African-American and other minority studies, and anything else reeking of social justice. Students returning to New College in Florida last week discovered waste receptacles overflowing onto the ground with such books. 

University of Kentucky President Eli Capilauto also announced this week that UK has disbanded its Diversity office. This after he had criticized anti-DEI lawmakers in February, arguing, "Let’s not extinguish the thirst for knowledge because certain questions aren’t allowed because they are uncomfortable or challenging."

Elsewhere, George Mason University, Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Wyoming are among the other institutions of higher learning that have knuckled under to the demands of politicians who have decreed diversity, equity, and inclusion to be anathema. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion are now literally thought crimes in Texas, Iowa, Idaho, Utah, and Kansas.

Those of you who know me know that I do not use the word "literally" figuratively.

Even private enterprise is succumbing to Republican Cancel Culture. Tractor Supply, John Deere, and Harley-Davidson have broken ties with the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and announced that they will would strike any "socially motivated content" from their employee training materials. So I guess I won't need my Harley-Davidson tee shirts any more.

Not that little old me would be able to dissuade the farm equipment companies from chasing those lucrative red-state contracts to haul all those academic books and their dangerous ideas to landfills.

This Week's Sneak Peek

I've finished Terry Mosher's Aislin's Favourite COVID Cartoons from Around the World, and while I continue to give it an enthusiastic thumbs up, I do have to caution that the Montreal cartoonist does not provide an English translation for the French language cartoons.

I rarely get to use my high school and college French — the one time that comes to mind was when our luggage was misdirected in a Nice hotel — so I didn't mind the lack of Québecois-to-English translation in Aislin's book. Your experience may vary.

Q Toon: She's Got a Little List

 

The Holy Land is erupting in war, bringing horror, misery, and death to innocents of all ages on both sides.

After weeks of dysfunction, Requblicans in the House have finally found a Speaker who is acceptable to both the plutocratic and fascist wings of the party. 

So naturally, my cartoon this week is based, loosely, on a weird little news story that broke while I was busy with the AAEC convention earlier this month.

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (AP) — An Alabama public library mistakenly added a children’s picture book to a list of potentially inappropriate titles because the author’s last name is “Gay,” the library’s director said.

Read Me a Story, Stella, a children’s picture book by Canadian author Marie-Louise Gay, was added to a list of books flagged for potential removal from the children’s section of the Huntsville-Madison County Public Library because of “sexually explicit” content.

But the book, which is about a pair of siblings reading together and building a dog house, should not have been on the list and was only added because of the keyword “gay,” Cindy Hewitt, the library’s executive director told AL.com on Sunday.

Once the library's ridiculous book censorship made news, the library sheepishly admitted that they had overreacted to a list of "explicit material" generated by AI (i.e., Alabama Intelligence). Their excuse was that they had merely erred on the side of hysteria.

No harm done, right?

Kirsten Brassard, Gay’s publicist at Groundwood Books, said the episode sends a “hateful message” coming from a public library,

“This proves, as always, that censorship is never about limiting access to this book or that one. It is about sending the message to children that certain ideas — or even certain people — are not worthy of discussion or acknowledgment or consideration,” Brassard told the news outlet.

It's not clear from the news accounts that I've read whether the Huntsville-Madison County Public Library even had Read Me a Story, Stella in the children's section in the first place, let alone whether anyone on the staff had ever read it. Perhaps, as a gesture of goodwill, they will now get themselves a copy.

No doubt with a "Parental Advisory" sticker plastered over the author's last name.

This Week's Sneak Peek

A page of character sketches drawn in advance of this week's cartoon:

Before posting Saturday's review of May It Amuse the Court, I did take care to check whether John Cassel's given name could possibly have been Ino Casals, as he is credited in the book.

Although the New York Evening World referred to him by his initials "J.H." and later as "John Cassel," his signature does appear as if it were "Jno Cassel" or even "Gino Cassel."

"More" by John Cassel in New York Evening World, April 20, 1919

If he were a first or second generation immigrant, as several other cartoonists of the late 19th and early 20th Century were, it is conceivable that some official at Ellis Island summarily Anglicized his name, or a parochial school nun decided to just change his name to that of a saint. Ellis Island officials and nuns were the coffee baristas of their day.

"After the Downpour" by John Cassel in New York World, November 10, 1922

I did not find a great deal of biographical information about Cassel, but contemporary sources all name him John. My guess is that what appears to be a lower case "o" in his signature is supposed to be a period: "Jn. Cassel."

Incidentally, the illustration credit for the cartoon in May It Amuse the Court is listed as "Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch." Cassel quit the New York World in 1927 over disagreement with management regarding New York Governor Alfred E. Smith's presidential campaign. After that, he was distributed by McClure Syndicate, quitting in May of 1929 to "devote his time to etching and experimental art work." 

By 1932, he had resumed drawing editorial cartoons, now at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. (It would have been odd if he had quit one Joseph Pulitzer newspaper, the Evening World, only to go to work for another, the Post-Dispatch. The St. Louis newspaper did, however, reprint Cassel's work occasionally when Daniel Fitzpatrick was on vacation. The Daily Eagle is correctly listed in the text of May It Amuse the Court as the original publication for the Cassel cartoon.)

Q Toon: Library Checkout Time

The people who insist that we mustn't do anything to keep guns out of our schools are now on a crusade to get books out of our schools instead.

Specifically any books that touch on issues of race or sexual orientation. 

Whipped up by the usual right-wing media agitators, Republican targets include Beloved by Toni Morrison, All Boys Aren't Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto by  George M. Johnson, and Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe. And literally, by which I always mean literally, 847 other books.

I will grant that some of these books contain passages that aren't suitable for second graders — but then, so does the Old Testament. And high school libraries can't be limited to second-grade material.

You can't discuss race in this country without acknowledging racism, including the institutional racism that well outlasted slavery, forcibly destroyed African-American attempts to enjoy prosperity, legally assaulted Asian-American liberties, and stole the country from its original inhabitants.

Nor can you discuss sexuality without discussing sex. This idea that you can limit sex education to "when a man and a woman really love each other, the man plants his seed in the woman and nine months later there's a baby" is how you get dudes who fetishize farm equipment. 

Our radicalized Republican party and their base, of course, don't want anybody discussing race or sexuality in the first place. 

Or science. Or plutocracy. Or economics. Or public health. Or justice. Or logic. 

Or arithmetic.

Q Toon: The First Rule of Book Club

As Buzz and Killer explain in this week's cartoon, a transgender activist named Andi Dier disrupted a book-signing event of Rose McGowan, an actress who has accused Harvey Weinstein of raping her. McGowan had been on the talk show circuit to promote her autobiography, Brave.

One thing I've learned in life is that if someone says they've been raped, you should try to show some respect and sympathy. One thing you should not do is start telling her "Oh, you think that's bad?"

Ms. Dier thought this was a good opportunity to go on the attack.

The video begins as McGowan is challenged by the activist, Andi Dier, about remarks she made on a RuPaul podcast last year: “I have a suggestion. Talk about what you said on RuPaul. Trans women are dying and you said that we, as trans women, are not like regular women. We get raped more often. We go through domestic violence more often. There was a trans woman killed here a few blocks… I have been followed home.”
McGowan then cut her off: “Hold on. So am I. We are the same. My point was, we are the same. There’s an entire show called ID channel, a network, dedicated to women getting abused, murdered, sexualized, violated, and you’re a part of that, too, sister. It’s the same.”
Dier then asked what McGowan had done for transgender women, and McGowan asked Dier what she had done for women, and then all hell broke loose.

Nobody came out of the incident, shall we say, smelling like a rose.

Dier was ejected from the event. McGowan accused Dier of being a paid stooge of unnamed nefarious forces, and, after meeting an obligation to appear on Late Night with Stephen Colbert later that night, McGowan abruptly canceled her book tour, complaining that nobody had stepped up to defend her at the Barnes & Noble.

So, in case you're still wondering what the hell this was all about, here's what McGowan said on RuPaul's podcast:

She said they think they know what it’s like to grow up female because they "felt like a woman on the inside" but concluded this was false. McGowan said: "That’s not growing as a woman, that’s not living in this world as a woman and a lot of the stuff I hear trans [women] complaining about, yeah, welcome to the world."

As for Diers, there are internet accusations that pre-transition, he was a sex offender himself. (She denies this, and there doesn't appear to be any criminal record involved.)

Her life now seems to be devoted to punishing people who are slated to appear on a certain television program. Although claiming to have supported Bernie Sanders's run for the presidency, Diers wrote about badgering the Socialist-Democrat on the campaign trail:

After confronting Senator Sanders on stage, he walked away in a hurry and kind of ignored what I was saying. I was regretting not shutting it down but focused my efforts on making sure he wouldn’t leave this city without knowing my name. So we drilled him 3 more times that day.
By the time we got [to] the Late Night with Colbert, he was practically running away from us.

So now you know what this week's cartoon is all about. Don't you feel better?

America in Cartoons: A Book Report

In place of my usual Smorgasback Saturday rummaging through my own old cartoons or the century-old cartoons of others, I herewith present a book report on the latest addition to my bookshelf.

Perusing the remaindered books cart at Barnes & Noble recently, I discovered two copies of America in Cartoons: A History in Pictures, edited by Tony Husband. I'd never seen the book on the regular shelves; but then, I don't visit the bookstore quite as often as I used to, so perhaps I had missed it. At any rate, I bought the 192-page hardcover tome for under $6.00.

Husband is a British cartoonist whose work has appeared in Private Eye, The Spectator, and Punch. The bulk of his work is humorous, but he has published more serious cartoon books about dealing with his father's dementia and with his son's drug addiction. His compilations of other people's topical cartoons include books on propaganda, dictators, and the 20th Century; I already had his book on cartoons of World War II*.

There is a nice selection of cartoons in America in Cartoons, but if there is one glaring fault, it is that they all appear to be downloaded off the internet. I do the same here, but I do my best to clean up the images so that they are legible. And that's only for viewing on a 96 pixel-per-inch screen; the print quality for a book needs to be considerably greater.

That's especially true of the oldest cartoons in this book. Reading the tiny, italicized, vertical dialogue in the typical cartoon drawn in the early years of the Republic is difficult enough without each letter being reprinted as six or seven dots. The intricately detailed crowds and crosshatching of Winsor McCay's cartoons a century later become fuzzy, fading into the gray background suffered by many of the book's illustrations.

Using the internet as source material also leads to some curious crediting in the appendix. The artists are credited by name in the text of the book, but while for example the book includes several cartoons by Daniel Fitzpatrick and Bill Mauldin from their days at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the cartoons are credited in the appendix to the State Historical Society of Missouri. Herblock's cartoons are credited to the Library of Congress.

I appreciate that space is limited, but it seems strange to me that there is no mention of Watergate or Bill Clinton's impeachment in this book, which was published in 2015 and closes with a fairly generic Bill Bramhall cartoon (credited to Getty Images) of Barack Obama. Watergate in particular marked the glory days of 20th Century American editorial cartooning and illustration, whether you think the actual scandal was of lasting importance or not.

That said, there is a nice mix of cartoons about politics and war on the one hand and everyday life on the other. Entertainment and pop culture often get overlooked in collections of historical cartoons, and I enjoyed running across them in Husband's book. And I'm happy to see the 600-thread-count, precisely composed editorial cartoons of Winsor McCay, which often get passed over in favor of his equally amazing Sunday comic pages. I just wish these copies were worthy of the originals.

For all I know, they might look just fine on your iPad or Kindle. There are people like me who will eat this stuff up anyway just for the chance to see some classic cartoons that we haven't seen before. If you're one of us, check out the remaindered books cart at your local bookstore, or watch for it to show up used on-line.

I just wouldn't pay the full £9.99 list price plus shipping and handling.

___

* Which I also found in the remaindered books cart, apparently.

Toon: Yesterday's Gone, Yesterday's Gone

I confess: I still haven't made my way through my copy of Making History yet. So I'm not rushing out to buy Hillary Clinton's latest book, which joins a very short list of best sellers by electoral college also-rans explaining why they aren't living in the White House.

If Mitt Romney, John McCain and John Kerry have unsold manuscripts tucked away in a drawer about how they were mistreated by the media, the stock market, and the FBI, we've been graciously spared the spectacle of them hawking their excuses.

Al Gore, the last presidential candidate to come in first in votes but second in the race, wisely chose to write about Things That Matter when he decided to retire to the authors' studio. Bob Dole surely had a lot to say about the forces that kept him from reciting the presidential oath, but he chose to expose himself to ridicule by hawking erectile dysfunction remedies instead.

So, Mrs. Clinton, I'm really very sorry that you're not President of the United States. Believe me, I'm really, really, really sorry about that. But you've got a Clinton Foundation all set up that you could be running, and I'm sure the experience will give you lots and lots of material for a much more worthwhile book.

Q Toon: The Cross in the Closet

This week's cartoon is inspired by a fundamentalist Christian originally from Nashville (now in Portland, Oregon) and graduate of Liberty University who has written The Cross in the Closet, about the year he spent pretending to be gay.

The only people Timothy Kurek let in on his ruse were an aunt, asking her to keep an eye on how his mother was handling the news, and a guy he recruited to pretend to be his boyfriend after getting weirded out by oiled-up beglittered guys trying to pick him up in gay bars. He began working in a gay café, joined a gay softball league, and attended Pride events, all the while maintaining his inner identity as a straight Christian.

Many friends, especially from Liberty, ... wrote emails to him after he came out asking that he repent of his sins and warning that he faced damnation. He does not regret their loss. "I now have lots of new gay friends," Kurek said.

He sneaked a peek at his mother's diary and read that she would rather have been told she had terminal cancer than that her son was gay. Fortunately for Mr. Kurek, she did not attempt to ship him off to an ex-gay indoctrination center.

Eventually she too was won over and changed her views. "My mom went from being a very conservative Christian to being an ally to the gay community. I am very proud of her," he said.

Kurek also experienced firsthand being called abusive names. Though he himself had once called gay protesters at Liberty "fags", he found himself on the other side of the fence of insults. During a softball practice session in Nashville, a man walking his dogs called Kurek and his teammates "faggots."

Kurek had to be restrained from confronting the man and then broke down in tears at the shock. "When I was first called that for real, I lost it. I saw red. I felt so violated by that word," he said.

The version of the story I came across first was this one on RawStory.com, and it's a good thing I googled Timothy Kurek before setting pen to paper. Rawstory illustrated the article with a picture of a cute cowboy in a presumably gay line dancing group. The cute cowboy looks nothing like Mr. Kurek, who is considerably more ... hefty. And given to wearing heavy steel earrings. Although he does like plaid shirts. As a bit of editorial license, I have given him a shave in the cartoon.

I have no idea what his mother actually looks like. I considered drawing her as Debbie Novotny from Queer As Folk (US), but decided against it.

This Week's Cartoon

Hmm... Is a pun in any way an appropriate eulogy, especially for an accomplished, serious author?