Saturday Selfies

It's time once again for the Graphical History Tour  to venture down into the deep recesses of your friendly tour guide's basement to rummage through some April cartoons decades old.

Starting with—

1986

in UW-P Ranger, Somers Wis., April 28, 1986

Just five years after a mentally deranged person attempted to assassinate the President of the United States, Congress, with the full support of that assassination target, decided it was time to relax gun controls. 

The so-called Firearms Owners Protection Act of 1986 amended the Gun Control Act of 1968 to redefine "gun dealer," excluding those making occasional sales or repairs, and legalized interstate sales of firearms provided that seller and buyer meet in person.

Another provision of the Act prohibited "the establishment of any system of registration of firearms, firearm owners, or firearm transactions."

On the other hand, it did add penalties for the use of armor-piercing bullets during the commission of a crime involving illegal drugs.

1996

Gun rights in this country depend to some extent on one's socio-economic status.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee, April 18, 1996

Nowadays, the Citizen's Militia types even get presidential pardons and Justice Department pressure on judges to vacate seditious conspiracy convictions for trying to overthrow the U.S. government.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee, April 22, 1996

Speaking of eternal constants, consider the plight of poor, cursed Lebanon. Once considered the Paris of the Middle East, capital Beirut was ripped apart by a sectarian religious war in the 1970's and pummeling by its neighbor to the south, Israel.

The main difference between then and now is that Shimon Peres appeared to have genuine regret at the death and destruction, whereas the Netanyahu government seems to revel in it. Targeting ambulances, schools, journalists, and hospitals all seems entirely intentional now.

The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, where this cartoon was printed, has long had Islamic and Jewish student groups very vocal about matters involving Israel, Palestine, and their neighbors. I might have expected some blowback over this cartoon, but the next issue's letter to the editor from the Israel Activist Center defending Israel's actions made no mention of my cartoon. 

Nor did the counter-response from the President of the Collective Union of Arab Students a week later. And with that, the school year ended, and any further salvos in the conversation went up on some long forgotten BBS.

2006

for Q Syndicate, April, 2006

Donald Trump, Eric Swalwell, and Tony Gonzales most certainly did not invent sex scandals. One such scandal, quickly forgotten among the parade, involved sexting of underage girls by Department of Homeland Security Deputy Press Secretary Brian Doyle.

55-year-old Doyle, believing he was sexting with a girl of 14, was caught in an on-line sting by the Polk County, Florida, Sheriffs Department. Charged with sending the fictitious girl sexually explicit photos and movie clips, Doyle had even given her his name, that he worked for DHS, and his office and governmental cell phone numbers.

This embarrassment came on top of the department's woefully inadequate response to the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, and the revelation that someone at DHS had disposed of an envelope of suspicious white powder out an office window. (There had been a few incidents of envelopes being mailed to news anchors and Democratic politicians made to appear as though they contained a toxic chemical.)

Going for a Three Stooges reference here was complicated by the fact that DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff bore no resemblance to Larry, Moe, or Curly. I do think that I got his caricature down in this, the one and only time I ever put him (or Brian Doyle, for that matter) in a cartoon.

2016

for Q Syndicate, April, 2016

I haven't set a cartoon in a diner in a long time, which is too bad. I like the setting, with its possibilities for slightly altering the point of view. 

In the years before I started colorizing my cartoons, the second or third panel would have probably shown this couple in silhouette. It keeps the cartoon from being too static, since the characters aren't actually moving around doing things.

The situation also allows for this sort of twist ending in a way that, say, talking heads on Fox Noise might not.

Toon: Can't Argue With That

 

Sticking By Our Guns

Almost ten years ago, I posted a collection of my cartoons I drew in response to mass shootings in the U.S. Even though my bailiwick is the LGBTQ+ press, I'm still drawing cartoons on that same tragic topic, because the carnage hasn't stopped, and the LGBTQ+ community has by no means been spared.

Today's Graphical History Tour highlights one cartoon I've drawn about mass shootings in America per year since my last round-up of the damn things.

✍

After the Pulse nightclub massacre nine years ago, when a gunman killed 49 patrons of an Orlando nightclub with a predominantly Latino clientele, I submitted two cartoons to Q Syndicate. One, featuring an American flag at half staff, a rainbow rising out of black clouds, and a quotation attributed to one of the victims, was the one run by most (if not all) publications that printed my cartoons.

June, 2016

Because I thought that the cartoon did not work in grayscale, I also submitted this alternative cartoon, highlighting the callous reaction of the Lieutenant Governor of Texas, and his non-apology apology for it. But even the Philadelphia Gay News, which prints my cartoon in grayscale, went with the flag and rainbow cartoon.

The next year, a heavily armed gunman holed up in an upper floor room of the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas and opened fire on an outdoor country music festival across the strip. Armed with enough high-powered rifles and bump stocks to equip a battalion, the gunman fired 1,000 rounds into the crowd over the space of ten minutes. 58 concert goers were killed and hundreds injured before the gunman turned a gun on himself.

October, 2017

The list in this cartoon is tragically incomplete. I could have added Catholics at mass, Jews at synagogue, newspaper staffers, Veterans Home workers, Waffle House patrons, and on and on.

Some forty years ago, we used to call mass shootings "going postal," on account of cases of disgruntled postal workers shooting up their place of employment. Nowadays, we can just call it "going American."

February, 2018

In February of 2018, the scene of mass shooting was Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Death toll: 17 students and staff. Injured: 18. Response by the Florida legislature: legislation to protect students from the evils of pornography and requiring the posting of "In God We Trust" in every classroom in the state.

August, 2019

In one week in July and August, 2019, a mass shooting at a Garlic Festival in Gilroy, California left three dead; 23 were killed at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas and two at a Walmart in Southaven, Mississippi; yet another outside a bar in Dayton, Ohio killed nine; and one was killed and fourteen injured in a pair of mass shootings in Chicago.

Those were only five mass shootings out of 417 that year as defined by the Gun Violence Archive — more than one per day on average — with a total death toll of 15,381.

Such incidents dipped in the COVID year 2020. There were no mass shootings recorded between March 20 (Springfield, Missouri) and September 19 (Rochester, New York), the longest such gap since 2003.

And all it took was a mysterious, incurable disease taking hundreds of thousands of lives the old-fashioned way.

December, 2021

Congressional Gun Nuts Thomas Massie (R-KY, and yes, he's the Republican co-sponsoring a bill demanding release of the Epstein files) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO) responded to a late 2021 school shooting by posting photos of themselves and their families posing in front of their Christmas trees, everyone brandishing a high-powered rifle.

November, 2022

Five patrons of Club Q, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, were killed and 25 injured when a gunman armed with an AR-15 style rifle, a Glock 17 style polymer handgun, and wearing protective body armor, shot his way into the LGBTQ+ nightclub. The attack took place the night of November 19, 2022, the eve of Transgender Day of Remembrance. (Facing hate crime charges, the killer claimed after their arrest to identify as non-binary, but no acquaintances or family remember them so identifying before that.)

Colorado Springs is in Congressbanshee Boebert's district, so she dutifully issued the tweet I summarized within her Christmas card of the previous year.

You may have noticed that I didn't have a mass shooting cartoon for 2020; so here's an extra one from 2022 — because I've drawn more than one cartoon about mass shootings almost every year:

May, 2022

Americans were shocked by the mass shooting of schoolchildren in Uvalde, Texas, in the spring of 2022, despite mass shootings having become commonplace in this country. While Uvalde police dithered around Robb Elementary School for over an hour, an 18-year-old with an assault rifle and black body armor went from room to room, methodically shooting children and staff. Children had to pretend they were dead as he returned to rooms he had left, shooting the wounded and anyone who called for help. 19 children and two teachers died before Border Control agents stormed the school and shot their murderer.

As in the aftermath of other school shootings, there was much talk by opponents of gun control of "hardening" our schools — making them impenetrable to mass murderers and just about everybody else. The nitwit Senator from my home state, on the other hand, went on TV to prescribe getting rid of "wokeness" and Critical Race Theory.

For the record: the Uvalde killer entered Robb Elementary through a locked door that failed to latch; and Critical Race Theory has never been part of the curriculum for schoolchildren in Uvalde or anywhere else.

April, 2023

Congresscretin Tim Burchett (R-TN) responded to the April, 2023 massacre of six schoolchildren and staff in Nashville, saying, "It’s a horrible, horrible situation, and we’re not going to fix it. Criminals are gonna be criminals. And my daddy fought in the Second World War, fought in the Pacific, fought the Japanese, and he told me, he said, ‘Buddy,’ he said, ‘if somebody wants to take you out, and doesn’t mind losing their life, there’s not a whole heck of a lot you can do about it.’"

September, 2024

There were some 50 or so school shootings in 2024, but what most concerned presidential candidate Donald The Terrible Trump was his bonkers delusion that kids were going to school and undergoing gender reassignment surgery in the nurse's office. (JD Vance's presence in my cartoon references an awkward campaign photo op in a doughnut shop.)

But yes, Trump literally did respond to a mass shooting in Iowa, in which a sixth grader was killed, with "It’s just horrible, so surprising to see it here. But have to get over it."

I nearly pulled this cartoon, drawn the same weekend that a bullet supposedly grazed Trump's ear at a Pennsylvania campaign rally. He got over it — you and I have had worse paper cuts — but his loyal minions spent the next week wearing gauze over the sympathetic injuries to their own right ears.

💭🙏

I'm afraid I don't have any witty remarks to wrap up this week's Graphical History Tour. No words of encouragement. No easy answers. 

Just the Gun Violence Archive map of mass shootings so far this year.

Q Toon: A Familiar Target

My apologies for such a verbose cartoon this week. I might not have needed to include the explanation that the Republicans in the cartoon are discussing a response to the mass shooting of children attending mass at a Catholic private school in Minneapolis last week.

Except for the possibility that there would be another mass shooting by the time this cartoon reached the newsstands.

Right-wing media and politicians quickly latched onto reports that the gunman was an MtF transgender person. (I do not know the shooter's preferred pronouns; I will use feminine ones to refer to her, but use the word "gunman" as if it were gender-neutral.) Firing hundreds of rounds through the stained glass windows into Annunciation Catholic Church, the shooter then took her own life.

What relevance, if any, the gunman's gender identity had to do with the shooting one can only speculate, so speculate the right-wing media promptly did. 

What is clear is that she was a former student of the Catholic school, and that her mother once worked at the parish. The shooter left behind a some sort of  manifesto and numerous threats on line, including threats to do exactly what she did. 

“This is not a church or religion attack, that is not the message,” according to the killer's manifesto. “The message is there is no message.” 

The shooter's previous online posts evince a festering hatred of virtually everybody and everything — with the exception of mass murderers. Them she admired.

But transgender persons are Republicans' go-to scapegoat for murders these days (at least when the killer is white). Trumpster Obergruppenführer Sebastian Gorka was on CNN over the weekend pushing inflated numbers for transgender shooters in these mass shootings, mischaracterizing some specific gunmen as trans to do so.

House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) used the occasion to call on the state of Minnesota to repeal its transgender refuge law (which affords protections to caregivers and persons undergoing transgender therapy who might be threatened to extradition to a state where transgender therapy is illegal). Congressloon Emmer failed to explain how that law is relevant to the Annunciation shootings; the gunman did not flee to Minnesota from some red state Cisberry R.F.D. 

By the way, do you remember the white guy who assassinated a Minnesota legislator and her husband? Slimy Don Jr. went on TV to point the blame at transgender community despite the killer having publicly railed against the  LGBTQ+ community — transgender persons in particular. 

Well, at least Republicans haven't gotten around to blaming transgender people for measles outbreaks and forest fires. Those are still the fault of midichlorians and Jewish space lasers, last time I checked.

Q Toon: Graveside Manners

Shortly after I pitched this idea to my editors and sat down at my drawing board Sunday, I saw the news that yet another attempt to assassinate Mr. Trump by some deranged idiot equipped with weapons of mass casualty had been thwarted. I seriously considered hunting for some other topic for this week's cartoon; perhaps if some comment by Pete Buttigieg on Meet the Press had tickled my fancy, I would have found one.

Since I didn't, here's this one.

Trump's repeated insistence that somewhere in this glorious country, parents are sending their children off to school only to have the little tykes come home having been subjected to spontaneous gender reassignment surgery in the principal's office apparently falls under JD BH Vance's theory that it's okay "to create stories so that the American media actually [pay] attention."

The ReQublican Qandidates are remarkably less concerned with the very real instances of children going to school only to come home with mortal coil reassignment surgery performed by another one of those deranged idiots equipped with weapons of mass casualty. There have been two attempted assassinations of presidential candidates this year; as of September 6, there have been 46 mass shootings at schools in the United States in 2024.

And zero gender reassignment surgeries at any school anywhere in the country.

Right-wingers have been quick to accept Dear Leader's fairy tales, however, and to discount reality. They dismiss grieving parents as "crisis actors," so it's hardly surprising that some on the other side immediately spread wild conjecture on line that the Mar-a-Lagoon golf course wannabe sniper is also some sort of crisis actor, hired to distract the electorate from Trump's ridiculous debate performance, or Project 2025, or reports that inflation is down and employment is up.

And the Fox Noise Machine just as quickly answered that the guy was inspired by Democratic campaign warnings that Trump is a racist, a fascist, and danger to the Republic, just because Trump says racist, fascist things and promises to be a dictator on Day One.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan's admonishment that "You are entitled to your opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts" is so passé these days. Pick and choose whatever facts you fancy, tune out the rest, and believe whatever you want. The gunman is a Republican! He's a Democrat! He's a Ramaswamian! He's a Bernie Bro! He's a floor wax! He's a dessert topping! He's Schrödinger's assassin!

How long, O Lord, how long have we been coming here?

In Memory of Dianne Feinstein

U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) passed away last weekend at the age of 90.

Hillary Rodham Clinton began her remembrance of Feinstein with this anecdote:

One day, on the floor of the Senate in 1993, Idaho Republican Larry Craig condescended to Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic sponsor of a proposed ban on assault weapons. “The gentle lady from California needs to become a little bit more familiar with firearms and their deadly characteristics,” he said. Craig, a board member of the National Rifle Association, had picked the wrong target.

“I am quite familiar with firearms,” Dianne responded, with fire in her eyes. “I became mayor as a product of assassination. I found my assassinated colleague and put a finger through a bullet hole trying to get a pulse. I was trained in the shooting of a firearm when I had terrorist attacks, with a bomb in my house, when my husband was dying, when I had windows shot out. Senator, I know something about what firearms can do.”

Feinstein's bill would be passed by Congress and signed into law by Hillary's husband — unfortunately, with a sunset provision that allowed it to expire during the George W. Bush administration, facilitating horrible nationwide carnage in the decades since.

Feinstein was never quite as liberal as some people wanted her to be. Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On recounts early in her tenure as Mayor of San Francisco, she alienated many in the LGBTQ+ community (we only used half of that acronym back then) by not supporting municipal employee benefits for same-sex couples. In return, as AIDS began spreading like wildfire among gay men, that factored in the fierce resistance she faced against shutting down the city's bathhouses to address the crisis.

More recently, liberal Democrats excoriated her for not asking Brett Kavanaugh about allegations of  against him that she knew about when he appeared before the Senate confirmation panel to be elevated to the Supreme Court. So did Republicans, for completely different reasons, once those allegations were made public.

And of course, there were all the calls from her fellow Democrats for her to step down from her seat this year, given her health and perceptions of mental deterioration. Clearly, however, she had every intention of serving out the remaining months of her sixth term in the Senate. Well, old age ain't for sissies.

(On the topic of age: It would have been easier to have caricatured Feinstein as she appeared recently. I intentionally chose to make a caricature of her as she appeared decades ago.)

Whatever anyone thinks about her mayoral record, she has been an ally on LGBTQ+ and women's issues ever since being elected to the Senate in the "Year of the Woman" 31 years ago. On "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," the "Defense of Marriage Act," women's reproductive health rights, and trans rights, her record has been virtually impeccable.

And now she has been succeeded by an out lesbian woman, Laphonza Butler, President of Emily's List and formerly an advisor to Kamala Harris's 2020 presidential campaign.

Q Toon: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

If you were hoping to find my cartoon this week to be about something other than the Republican jihad against transgender persons, well, I hope you will settle for being 75% satisfied.

Since I drew this cartoon Sunday night, the nightly news has been able to give us breaking reports on Donald Berzelius Trump's sexual assault verdict and George Devolder Santos's fraud indictment, so Gay Homer there can be relieved that the news writers are not, in fact, on strike.

I tend to doubt that the $5 million civil judgment against Trump in the E. Jean Carroll suit does anything to lessen the possibility of a Trump-Biden rematch next year. It hasn't revealed anything about Trump that we, including his most devoted sycophants, didn't already know in November, 2016. Nor, not surprisingly, did his pathetic display of bullying arrogance on CNN last night.

Meanwhile, the AR-15 pandemic is still wreaking havoc across the country. Between one mass shooting and its resulting funerals, there are likely to be another dozen more mass shootings. And the political party in charge of most of the country's statehouses is firmly convinced that transgender people, wokeness, and critical race theory are the greater threats to life and limb.

With any luck, I'll be able to take a complete break with the issue of transgender persecution for at least one week, and present you with a cartoon about the freshman congresscretin from Long Island... even though that news story will be pretty old news by next Thursday.

At least I might not be competing for gags with the late night chat show writers.

Q Toon: America, We Hear You

Mass murders in the U.S. continue to outnumber the days on the calendar this year — a statistic made possible by the conjoined statistic that guns outnumber U.S. citizens.

The response by Republican lawmakers is epitomized by Tennessee Congresscretin Tim Burchett, who promised grieving parents after the massacre of six schoolchildren and staff in his state, "We're not going to fix it."

“It’s a horrible, horrible situation, and we’re not going to fix it,” Burchett said. “Criminals are gonna be criminals. And my daddy fought in the Second World War, fought in the Pacific, fought the Japanese, and he told me, he said, ‘Buddy,’ he said, ‘if somebody wants to take you out, and doesn’t mind losing their life, there’s not a whole heck of a lot you can do about it.’”

And also by the yahoos in the Nebraska legislature, who are poised to allow concealed carry without permit or gun safety training, thus voiding ordinances in Omaha and Lincoln.

Amid the daily carnage this month, the National Rifle Association held its annual convention in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Guns and cash exchanged hands in the parking lot with nary a thought given to whether either party to the transaction were a criminal, mentally unstable, a terrorist, or Gov. Kristi Noem's two-year-old kid.

Because, you see, as far as the NRA and its ammosexual fetishists are concerned, guns are not the problem; guns are the solution. And they'll be more than happy to sell you as many and whatever arms you think you need to protect yourself against their other customers.

As a result, in just the past week, two cheerleaders were shot in Texas when one of them got into a car she mistakenly thought was hers in a supermarket parking lot. We also had a scared shitless gun owner in Kansas City firing his gun through his front door and shooting in the head a 16-year-old boy who was supposed to pick up his little brother and sister and had rung the wrong doorbell. And some other shoot-first-think-later homeowner in upstate New York shot dead a 20-year-old woman in a car that was backing out of his driveway when the women in the car realized they weren't at the house of their friend.

Now, I've never had a stranger open my car door by mistake, but there's nothing at all unusual about people using our driveway to turn around instead of driving around the block. It's usually delivery people or neighbors' guests. If unwanted salespersons, or kids looking to earn money mowing lawns come to the door, we tell them we aren't interested, or sometimes we just ignore them.

But then, we don't belong to the NRA.

Q Toon: In a Customer Service Room

Last Monday, Audrey Hale, 28, shot his way into Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, and fatally shot three staff members and three 9-year-old students. Hale, a former student at the private Presbyterian school, was armed with a semi-automatic pistol, an AR-style rifle, and a handgun.

Initial calls for sensible gun controls after this, the 130th mass shooting in 2023, were quickly drowned out when police let everybody know that Hale identified as transgender on social media. Aha! Something besides guns that Republicans could blame this one on! And they were already trying to ban transgender therapy! Oh, goody!

Several conservative political figures, including Sen. J.D. Vance, Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, and Donald Trump Jr., were among the personalities on social media who implicated the role of the shooter's transgender identity in the shooting. The motive for the shooting remains unknown, according to authorities.

Statistically, transgender Americans are much more likely to be the target of violence than its perpetrator. Yet right-wing propagandist Benny Johnson cited three other presumed transgender or non-binary mass murderers to argue that "the modern trans movement is radicalizing activists into terrorists."

To which someone with more authority to speak on the issue replied:

"4 shooters out of over 300 mass shooters since 2009 are transgender or non binary. That's just 1.3 percent of all shooters," Anthony Zenkus, a lecturer in social work at Columbia University, wrote on Twitter. "You just proved our point: 99 percent of mass shooters in the United States are cis gendered."

Tennessee politicians have called for publication of a manifesto that Hale left behind, but many in the LGBTQ+ community worry that while his manifesto might help police understand his motives, publishing it only serves to inflame right-wingers' passion for trans-bashing, while perversely glorifying the murderers' twisted thoughts and potentially inspiring some future killer.

We didn't need to read what the Las Vegas shooter thought about casinos, or how the Tree of Life shooter justified slaughtering worshipers in a synagogue, or why the Monterey Park shooter objected to Lunar New Year celebrations, or the ruminations of the guy who killed the journalists at the Capital Gazette regarding freedom of the press.

To list but one cisgender mass murderer for each of the transgender killers Benny Johnson named. 

All we need to know about them is that their minds were filled with hate and rage. Of which, like military-grade weaponry, we seem to have no shortage of peddlers on social media and right-wing "news" channels.

March Times On

This week's Graphical History Tour takes a hop, skip, and a jump through 40 Marches' worth of my cartoons.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., March 3, 1983

Your social media was no doubt littered with notices that the final episode of M*A*S*H aired 40 years ago this week. 

The two-hour broadcast broke records for viewership, but I didn't get to see the show that night. I was in the cast of the local Theater Guild's production of George Bernard Shaw's "You Never Can Tell" at the time, and "Goodbye, Farewell and Amen" aired during one of our performances. The crew had it on a small television backstage, so I did get a few passing glances at it; but in the absence of On Demand technology, I had to wait until CBS got around to airing the rerun to see the whole episode. 

(If I remember correctly, as a rerun, it was broken up into four half-hour episodes.)

CBS did try to hang on to M*A*S*H fans by concocting a spin-off about Col. Potter, Father Mulcahy, and Cpl. Klinger working at a Veterans Administration hospital stateside. It lasted two seasons; I'm pretty sure I never watched the second one.

unpublished, March, 1993

Two of the cartoons that I drew for the Racine Journal Times in March of 1993 never got published, and this is one of them.

The Racine Unified School Board's personnel committee had recommended a policy of automatic suspension lasting 20 weeks or a full semester for any student found to have brought any dangerous weapon into a school. The suspension would last an entire year if the student threatened another person with the weapon, and permanent expulsion if the weapon were used.

This was before Columbine and a host of other mass shootings at schools, but there had been the occasional rumor of somebody bringing a knife or a gun to school at least as far back as my own high school days. How many of those rumors were true I couldn't tell you.

Nowadays, Wisconsin law mandates that "school boards of common or union high school districts shall expel a pupil from school for not less than one year whenever it finds that the pupil, while at school or while under the supervision of a school authority, possessed a firearm" (per Giffords Law Center). It is likewise illegal to carry a knife of any kind into a school building; but otherwise, state law prohibits local knife and gun regulations from being stricter than the lax standards Republicans passed in 2016.

Speaking of unpublished cartoons...

unpublished, March 2003

Ten Marches later, the Dubya administration was determined to go to war with Iraq, and absent a gay angle or a Business Journal editorial coinciding with my point of view, I didn't have a publication interested in paying me for cartoons about a topic addressed by every syndicated editorial cartoonist already. So I went ahead and drew this one for my own amusement (and the amusement of anyone who happened upon my old GeoCities page).

I used it as an exercise in exploring colorizing the cartoon. In black-and-white, little Prime Minister Tony Blair and his British flag didn't stand out enough to be noticed; it helped to have him seated among colored chairs. Colorizing the cartoon also allowed the movie screen to be in grayscale, like an old movie.

But you may have noticed that I have largely given up crosshatching, and colorizing this cartoon had a lot to do with that.

for Q Syndicate, March, 2013

Which is not to say that I never give myself a lot of tiny detail work to paint on Monday morning. This wedding bower, for example.

No doubt that's why I decided to leave the chairs white.

Toon: For the Sake of Argument

And the gunfire continues.

Just yesterday afternoon, someone with a rapid-fire weapon sprayed bullets into a graveside funeral service in my hometown, at a cemetery I used to pass by every day on my way to and from school. Three bursts of gunfire over the space of about a minute injured two mourners; as of this morning, it seems no one was killed.

I guess our town is lucky today.

So far.

Q Toon: Sticking to His Guns

Last Thursday, Fox Business host Neil Cavuto asked Senator Ron Johnson for his reaction to the horrific murder of 19 third- and fourth-grade students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, by an 18-year-old armed with AR-15 semi-automatic rifles.

"Do you think we would require stiffer background checks?" Cavuto asked RoJo.

“You know, no matter what you do, people fall through the cracks,” Johnson shot back. “You can’t identify all these problems. You can’t arrest somebody for a crime they haven’t committed yet. These are difficult issues.”

Reiterating his belief that the solution lies in “renewed faith” and “strong families, Johnson then quickly leaned into the latest right-wing moral panic.

“We stopped teaching values in so many of our schools. Now we’re teaching wokeness,” the senator fumed. “We’re indoctrinating our children with things like CRT, telling, you know, some children they’re not equal to others and they’re the cause of other people’s problems.”

Pushing back, Cavuto interjected: “But school shootings have been happening long before CRT.”

Undeterred, Johnson asserted that “CRT’s been going on under the radar for quite some time as well,” declaring that “wokeness” and “liberal indoctrination” have also been going on for a long time.

“This is a much larger issue than what a simple new gun law’s going to, it’s not going to solve it, it’s not going to solve it,” he concluded.

If I shared Wisconsin's senior senator's confidence that banning "wokeness" was going to solve our gun problem, and if I thought that Critical Race Theory had the slightest relevance to any of this, I'd be right RoJo's pushing for a return to teaching heterosexual white male supremacy. 

But I don't.

Nor do I think that it's at all practical to post guards armed as if for World War III at every entrance to every school building, grocery store, hospital, movie theater, house of worship, fast food diner, office holiday party, and open-air garlic / music festival.

But since Ron Johnson, and the rest of the GOP, are steadfast in their belief that American gun killings have nothing whatsoever to do with American guns, give him an E for Effort for trying to link the carnage to some Republican talking point, any Republican talking point.

J.N. "Ding" Darling, May 31, 1922

100 years ago this month in America:

"Some Things You Can't Buy Without a Doctor's Prescription" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in New York Tribune, May 31, 1922

______________

Update: This cartoon originally appeared in the Des Moines Register on May 29, 1922.

Toon: Stop the Insanity

 Three mass shootings, and it's only Tuesday.

Saturday Hash

Uncaptioned, by Clifford Berryman in Washington (DC) Evening Star, Dec. 3, 1920

The month between Thanksgiving and Christmas during a presidential transition can be a slow news period as far as political cartoonists are concerned. The incoming president is busy filling his cabinet with people the cartoonist hasn't learned to draw yet, and the outgoing president is not desperately trying to stage a coup to overturn the popular vote. Well, not normally.

1920 was a pretty normal year as presidential transitions go, so editorial cartoonists had plenty of opportunity to address topics of general interest. Some of them, as illustrated by Clifford Berryman's complaint against unregulated gun sales above, are if you'll pardon the yuletide expression, evergreen.

"Big Flap Jack Contest" by Frederick Opper for International Feature Service Inc., ca. Dec. 3, 1920

Fred Opper's complaint about high prices never gets old, either, although it would be hard to find a mainstream cartoonist today blaming "grocery profiteers" and "rent gougers." What went up, however, must have come cheap; those "pick pocket prices" are the same ones my generation's grandparents used to remember fondly in the '60's and '70's.

"Out" by Bob Satterfield for NEA, ca. Dec. 1, 1920

Bob Satterfield commends a drive to oust criminals, indecent dancing, and vice from the nation's dance halls.

"Tormentors" by Nelson Harding in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Dec. 3, 1920

Nelson Harding begs to differ. Besides opposing dirty dancing, "fanatical reformers" were pushing to extend prohibition to tobacco and any number of other vices. There was even a push by something called the Lord's Day Alliance to nationalize "blue laws," making any commercial activity, interstate travel, or newspaper publication on Sundays a federal offense. That particular proposal died for lack of any member of Congress wishing to be associated with it.

"Broken Idols" by Magnus Kettner for Western Newspaper Union, ca. Dec. 3, 1920

Speaking of vices: I've somehow made it through the last two years without posting anything about the 1919 Black Sox Scandal, but Magnus Kettner gives me an opportunity to get around to it at long last. A grand jury handed down indictments against eight baseball players and five gamblers in October. A committee headed by Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis convened in December to begin setting rules to clean up professional baseball.

"An Ounce of Prevention" by J. N. "Ding" Darling in Colliers, Dec. 11, 1920

"Ding" Darling offered some advice on avoiding strikes of the non-baseball variety.

"Ireland, 1920" by David Low in London Star, ca. Dec., 1920

Meanwhile, overseas, 100 Irish "Black and Tan" guerillas killed 17 police cadets in an ambush near Macroom, and British police uncovered a plot to attack the House of Parliament and 10 Downing Street. In retaliation, the British arrested the Irish Vice President (President De Valera being in the U.S. at the time) and three politicians who were members of both Parliament and Dail Eireann.

John T. McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, ca. Dec. 4, 1920

Armenia's armed conflict against Turkey was not going well. Tsarist Russia had fashioned itself as the protector of the Ottoman Empire's Christian minorities in the Caucasus; Soviet Russia's support of the Armenian cause, however, was limited to diplomatic protest. The same was true of western powers, each of whom would rather that someone else step in.

"A Peaceful Change" by Bob Satterfield for NEA, ca. Dec. 2, 1920

Mexican President Venustiano Carranza was killed during a coup led by General Álvaro Obregón in April, 1920 (most historians believe he was assassinated, but some argue that he committed suicide). On December 1, the provisional government of Adolfo de la Huerta turned power over to Obregón. This marked the end of ten years of civil war, and the beginning of a quarter century of military generals heading the Mexican government.

"Can They Untangle It?" by Wm. C. Morris for George Matthew Adams Service, ca. Dec. 2, 1920

In 1920, the California revisited a 1913 "Alien Land Law" severely restricting non-citizens' rights to own agricultural property in the state. The law's primary targets were Japanese immigrants, and the 1920 law sought to close loopholes left open by the original law. Japan regarded California's actions as a violation of the spirit of a 1911 friendship treaty between Japan and the U.S. 

In 1923, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that California's laws were not a violation of 14th Amendment rights of equal protection. Eventually, the California Supreme Court decided in 1952 that the 14th Amendment did indeed invalidate the Alien Land Laws.