Q Toon: Spell Check

My biggest regret after drawing this cartoon is that I didn't include enough diversity in it.

I had already scrapped an initial sketch because I had started making the characters too large in the space — I probably wouldn't have been able to fit more than half a dozen people into the cartoon. Drawing characters too small, on the other hand, would have presented the problem of how to fill the space vertically (either by depicting the crowd from above, or positioned on, say, parade floats), as well as perhaps doubling how long it would take to grayscalify and colorize the versions sent to Q Syndicate. (In order to attend a family funeral Monday morning, I was up until 2:00 a.m. adding gray tones to the grayscale version, and back at it at 5:30 a.m. adding color to the CMYK/RGB versions.)

So if you are disappointed that my cartoon doesn't include any same-sex parents, twinks, bears, drag kings, Republicans, or left-handed Polynesian furries, well, so am I.

On the other hand, how do you know that none of the people in this cartoon is a Republican?

Our community is under attack, and not just in red states, but nationwide, from a hostile federal government. They are concentrating their fire right now on transgender persons, but make no mistake: they are coming for all of us.

Equity and inclusivity are more vital these days than ever. Now is no time to abandon any segment of our LGBTQ+ alphabet soup. We must hang together, as the saying goes, or hang separately. Only by cherishing, celebrating, and defending our diversity will we save ourselves.

After all, without DEI, PRIDE is just PR.

This Week's Sneak Peek

That statement from the White House expressing sadness at Former President Joe Biden's cancer diagnosis cannot possibly be, as the media keep reporting it, from Donald Trump.

The only thing he'd be unhappy with is the prospect of someday having to sit through another funeral where nobody thanks him for being everybody's favorite president.

Q Toon: Trump's DEI Hire

The odd couple of Liberal Leo and MAGA Max return to discuss a Trump cabinet nominee nobody else is drawing cartoons about.

Drawing for the LGBTQ+ press, I feel obliged to highlight President Re-Elect Donald Trump's naming of an out gay man to his cabinet. Scott Bessent stands out from Trump's other appointments not so much because of his sexual orientation, but more because in contrast to the rest of them, he's so normal.

Yes, he's a billionaire, not Mr. John Q. Public. But he's no worm-brain-addled RFK Jr., or Russian asset Tulsi Gabbard, or pardoned blackmailer Charles Kushner, or sexual harasser Pete Hegseth, or snake oil huckster Doc Oz, or fascist weasel Steven Miller. Nor did he shoot his own dog, as Secretary-designate for Homeland Security Kristi Noem did. Or come to Trump's attention via World Wrestling Entertainment, like his choice to head the Department of Education, Linda "But We Asked Our Pederasts to Please Stop" McMahon.

As important as the post of Secretary of the Treasury is — being fifth in the line of presidential succession and all — you might not hear much about him during his time in office, unless he joy rides in an Air Force jet as Trump's last Treasury Secretary was wont to do. (Quick: without looking at the money in your wallet, who has been Treasury Secretary during the Biden years?)

Do I really think that Scott Bessent is a diversity hire? Not really. His financial support of Trump and the MAGA movement would have a lot more to do with his appointment. Trump may want to burn Justice, Defense, Interior, Education, Health and Welfare, and Veterans Affairs to the ground, but he has a vested interest in keeping his Secret Service detail paid so they can afford his hotel room rates. (Didja know that the Secret Service is part of the Treasury Department?*)

To be honest, I suspect that if Bessent leaves the Even More Corrupt Trump Administration early, it will not be because he was the token gay hire. 

But when the Trump tariffs and draconian Muskaswami budget cuts push us into a new recession and eggs are still $4/dozen, somebody is going to have to be the scapegoat, and it's going to be the person who doesn't quite fit in with the rest of the Cabinet of Misfit Toys.

_____________

*Correction: The Secret Service was transferred from the Treasury Department to the newly formed Department of Homeland Security in 2003. The "U.S. Secret Service Mission Improvement and Realignment Act of 2020" would have returned it to the Treasury Department but died in Congress without coming to a vote.

August Four the People

You've been waiting all month to find out what cartoons I drew in Augusts past, I can tell. So let's rummage around in the old storage bin and see what we can find, shall we?

Back in May, I posted a cartoon I'd posted of Ronald Reagan preparing to tell jokes at the funeral of U.S.-Soviet détente. When I had selected it for that week's Graphical History Tour, I thought I had drawn it after Reagan's "We begin the bombing in five minutes" joke. Looking the quotation up, however, I found that I must have drawn the cartoon about something else he said.

August, 1984

This was the cartoon I drew shortly after the actual bombing joke.

In case you're not familiar with the story, Reagan was in the habit of making pretend announcements during the sound checks before his television and radio speeches. The sound checks were not confined to the studio, but went out to all the stations that would carry the speech live. Usually, the media overlooked those flippant pseudo-announcements except for the technicians checking for feedback, hiss, and warble.

This time, ears perked up at Reagan's joke: "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes." In spite of a standing agreement with the media that Reagan's mic check jests would be their little secret, this one leaked out, was reported by Gannett newspapers, and became world news.

The Soviet government (should I have explained that this was when Constantin Chernenko was spending the last few months in his mortal coil being President of the U.S.S.R.?) was officially mum about the incident, but their state media condemned Reagan's joke as "unprecedently hostile," and proof that he wasn't interested in improving U.S.-Russia relations. Some unknown Soviet officer in Vladivostok returned the joke by sending a coded message that "We now embark on military action against the U.S. forces," knowing the message would be intercepted by U.S. intelligence. U.S. and Japanese militaries were briefly on high alert, but afterward, everybody had a good laugh over it.

Just kidding.

I still haven't figured out what incident prompted my earlier cartoon, but it was the better one; and that's why it was the one printed in the first UW-Parkside Ranger of the fall semester rather than this one.

Any cartoon that depicts bullets flying at a president of the United States (or any other real person for that matter) runs the risk of becoming in bad taste if that person does in fact get shot. Which, as you surely know, Ronald Reagan had been three months into his first term. Even though Reagan was known for his roles in B-grade western movies, Americans don't like watching their leaders get shot at.

Could've been why no TV network would broadcast Reagan's film The Killers (1964) while he was president. 

in Journal Times, Racine Wis., August 22, 1994

In June of 1994, I confidently drew a cartoon assuming that the Republican Party would have a tough time finding a candidate to run against my district's Democratic Congressman, Peter Barca. Barca had won a special election one year earlier to succeed eleven-term Rep. Les Aspin after the latter was appointed Bill Clinton's first Secretary of Defense.

As it turned out, the 1994 election would see a rematch between Kenoshan Barca and Mark Neumann, a real estate developer from Janesville. And Neumann would coast to victory in the Gingrich-led Republican "Contract with America" wave in November, putting an end to the longest stretch of having Democrats in the First Congressional District seat.

Neumann was (and presumably still is) a hard-line right-winger, solidly anti-abortion and against President Bill Clinton's attempt to reform the U.S. health care system. The GOP talking point against the Clinton reforms was that Americans would be denied the right to make their own health care choices — ignoring that their Contract with America also called for denying women the right to make their own reproductive health care choices.

Which was a fine and dandy campaign slogan for Republicans until their Supreme Court justices granted their wish and Republicans had to deal with women upset by government control over their uteri.

Wisconsin's First Congressional District has had two Congressmen, both Republicans, since Mark Neumann's failed run for Russ Feingold's Senate seat in 1998. In the meantime, Peter Barca served as Bill Clinton's Midwest Regional Administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration, then went back to representing Kenosha in the Madison legislature, and later headed the Wisconsin Department of Revenue.

And now, thirty years later, he's running for his old congressional seat against incumbent Republican Bryan Steil. My better half and I talked with him at an open-air party in downtown Racine last month; he liked my Kamala Harris For The People button.

I neglected to mention that I had been drawing cartoons about him for the Journal Times thirty years earlier.

Hearkening back to 2004, here are a couple of people you did not see at the Republican National Convention last month:

for Q Syndicate, August, 2004

Come to think of it, I don't think we saw any former Republican nominees for President or Vice President on the Republican National Convention dais except for the current ones. Although to be fair, if Al Gore, John Kerry, or John Edwards spoke at the DNC this week, I missed it.

✍

I couldn't think of a good segue to any of the cartoons I drew in August of 2014, so here's some eye candy.

for Q Syndicate, August 2014

"That's So Gay" was the motto of the 2014 Gay Games, held in Akron and Cleveland, Ohio, that August.

By the way, given the kerfuffle over two female Olympians who had aspersions cast upon their gender, you might be interested to know how the Gay Games address transgender and non-binary-identifying athletes.

The Sydney Gay Games in 2002 defined gender by social identity: In the game of netball at those Games, the solution was for women’s, men’s, mixed and transgender competitions, with negotiations of rules and membership according to the gender that participants lived. These measures included removing the burden of proof from athletes to provide documentation, and instead assuming that all are genuine in their gender category selection. This was the most inclusive gender policy developed at that time, and it remains in place today.

The Gay Games were scheduled to be held in Hong Kong in 2022. They were pushed back a year due to COVID-19. New Chinese laws criminalizing "effeminate men," as well as concerns by Taiwanese athletes that they risked arrest, plus pandemic-related travel restrictions, led to a decision to split the 2023 games between Hong Kong and Guadalajara, Mexico. 

If you missed (or miss) the Paris Olympic Games this summer, the Gay Games in Valencia, Spain, are just two years away.

 

Q Toon: Citius, Altius, Querulius

Someone got the Christian Right all riled up about the over-the-top opening extravaganza for the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. A tableau including a cast of drag queens and an oversized Smurf was supposedly a blasphemous parody of Michelangelo's painting of the Last Supper. Before long, the outrage had spread like mono at a summer camp.

Except, of course, that it was meant to portray a bacchanalia out of Greek myth, and the Last Supper was supposedly not that wild. Just because Jesus's disciples couldn't stay awake afterward, taking post-prandial naps doesn't mean they were in full party mode.

Then last week, the same people got their panties in a collective wad over a transgender female boxer from Algeria who won against a cisgender female boxer from Italy. Fox Noise Machine went into overdrive. Right-wing cartoonists cranked out toons of burly behemoths pummeling defenseless little girls. Even President Melloni of Italy, Trump, and J.D. Vance weighed in.

The thing is, however, that the boxer from Algeria has been female all her life. By every measure promoted by transphobic Republicans — what's on her birth certificate? what's her given name? who does her grandmother think she is? — she is a woman. Not that you’re likely to see any apologies from the people who accused her of being Andre the Giant in drag.

There are certain people here and abroad who make their living being perpetually offended and making sure their audience is, too. 

Don't be surprised if somebody gets all upset that the closing ceremonies end without the IOC wishing the world a "merry Christmas."

Q Toon: So They/Them Say

I can be a stick-in-the-mud when it comes to English grammar. The growing use of apostrophes before the "s" in plural nouns sets my teeth on edge. I insist that "literally" literally means "literally," lest it mean nothing at all. And "the media" ain't singular. ("The opera," however, is, unless you're discussing someone's entire body of work.)

I am willing to yield somewhat to the people who want to be referred to in the third person as "they" or "them," but I often find it confusing. Is they or aren't they? Should the reflexive pronoun be "themselves" or "themself"? Or do they truly contain multitudes?

The Week magazine (February 10 issue) had an interesting review of the latest album by nonbinary recording artist Sam Smith. Throughout the entire article weighing in at over 160 words, whoever wrote it carefully avoided referring to them with any third-person pronouns even once.

So that's one way of dealing with it. 

Spoken language is not static but dynamic. If you don't believe that, try listening to a conversation among the Amish. Or go read some Shakespeare (who is known to have employed they/them pronouns on some singular occasions, by the way).

Still, it would be helpful if nonbinary people weren't leaving the entire onus (or onera) of remembering how many people they are on the rest of us. Meet us halfway, all right?

Would it have ruined Smith's album if their opening song were "Love Us More"?

This Week's Sneak Peek

I was hoping to find inspiration in any of the commercials or halftime show during the Superbowl last night. But I decided that having Rihanna's and her floating dancers targeted by U.S. fighter jets was just too damn mean to draw. 

Although I'm sure someone else has done it by now.

The musical performances were impressive, one way or another. Sheryl Lee Ralph gave a stirring rendition of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" (which has stirred up the hornets nest of Butthurt Right Wingers). I schedule the Black National Anthem every February, so we had sung it at Redeemer that morning — if not quite as slowly as Ms. Ralph's version. We did sing three verses of it to her one, however.

A few weeks ago, Daily Show guest host D.L. Hughley showed film of himself asking White people-on-the-street if they could sing the Black National Anthem; and I realized that while I could sit down at a piano and play it from memory, I wouldn't make it through the second line singing the words.

Which would at least save me the embarrassment of trying to hit the two pairs of high E's in every verse. 40 years ago, I could just barely hit the high E in the bass part of "Even So In Christ Shall All Be Made Alive" in Handel's Messiah, and that's just an eighth note at the top of a run up from a low A. In "Lift Every Voice," the high E's come as a climactic dotted quarter and a triplet in a song meant to be sung at a stately pace, and they're quite out of my range now.

I'd transpose the song down a step, but that puts the low notes out of the range of most sopranos and tenors. The song spans well over an octave, just one step less than "The Star-Spangled Banner."

Which makes Ms. Ralph's modulation up a step for the final two lines all the more impressive.

We Just Want to Pump You Up

When we left off last week's review of American cartoons from January, 1923 about France and Belgium sending troops into Germany to take control of the mining and lumber industries in the Ruhr valley, I promised some German cartoons this week. Given that the German mark had become practically worthless (we'll get to that later), whereas the country's industry had emerged from World War I essentially unscathed, the French government decided to confiscate whatever Germany had of value.

And not just coal and wood.

"Frankreich Fordert 60000 Tonnen Stickstoff" by Karl Arnold in Simplicissimus, Munich, Jan. 24, 1923

As you might expect, German cartoonists were none too pleased with their French overlords.

Karl Arnold's cartoon refers to reports of declining birth rates in France. The same, however, was the case in Germany, as well as Great Britain, Belgium, and Italy. A brief baby boom immediately after the armistice was declared was followed by a decline in each of these countries almost every year through the end of World War II.

"Die Friedens-Sabotage" by Werner Hahmann in Kladderadatsch, Berlin, Jan. 7, 1923

German cartoonists followed their government's lead in blaming France for derailing the peace process. Germany also hoped for relief assistance from the United States. French diplomacy probably didn't play as large a part in holding up American relief as did Republican isolationism.

"Clemenceaus Rückfehr aus Amerika" by Hans-Maria Lindloff in Kladderadatsch, Berlin, Jan. 7, 1923

But this was at a time when French elder statesman Georges Clemenceau returned from a lecture tour in the U.S. A main focus of his speeches was his argument against American isolationism (but also a plea for leniency in expecting France to repay U.S. war loans any time soon). His tour did little to alter U.S. policy.

"Der 'Grosse Vater' in Washington" by Arthur Johnson in Kladderadatsch, Berlin, Jan. 7, 1923

 

Coming off years of scathing cartoons of Woodrow Wilson, Arthur Johnson, half-American himself, held some hope that Warren Harding would hold to a more neutral European policy than his predecessor. His cartoon here continues a centuries-long motif of European cartoonists depicting the U.S. with Native American imagery. In this case, the transoceanic calumet is apt; keeping such a long pipe lit is no mean feat.

The smoke from the pipe spells out "Anleihe," which Google translates as "Bond."

"Die Grosse Täuschung" by Eduard Thony in Simplicissimus, Munich, Jan. 10 1923

I'm fairly certain that the bushy-eyebrowed character on the right is President Harding, although I can't identify the skinny woman with the broad hat.

"Das Almächtige Gold" by Olav Gulbransson in Simplicissimus, Munich, Jan. 10, 1923

International reparations conferences, including one organized by investment banker J.P. Morgan the previous June, failed to come up with any useful program for making Germany able to pay what the Entente powers demanded. Meanwhile, the German Reichsbank was desperately buying foreign currency, sinking the value of the mark and driving inflation to dizzying heights. 

"Die Falle" by Erich Schilling in Simplicissimus, Munich, Jan. 10, 1923

Between June and December of 1922, the cost of living in Germany skyrocketed 1,700%; it would only get worse in 1923. Any fall in the dollar against the mark at this point was momentary. As John McCutcheon pointed out last week, however, the exchange rate had become so overwhelmingly weighted to the dollar that any fluctuation had a huge effect on German currency.

My German is not very good; I've translated the poem accompanying Schilling's cartoon as literally as possible, rather than attempting to imitate the verse. I have undoubtedly mangled a metaphor or two.

"Hoffen und Harren" by Karl Arnold in Simplicissimus, Munich, Jan. 17, 1923

So that will have to suffice for now. Until next time, let us wait patiently with Adam und Eva (he having recovered nicely from his recent paidakiectomy).

Q Toon: Mistakes Were Made

A Russian judge denied WNBA star Brittney Griner's appeal of her drug trafficking conviction last week. Arriving in the country to play on a Russian women's basketball team, Griner was arrested at a Moscow area airport in January with a small amount of cannabis oil in her luggage, something she claimed to have had for medical purposes and had forgotten to leave at home.

Days after her arrest, Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine, incurring the condemnation of the Biden administration and the U.S.'s principal allies. Instead of expelling Griner from the country, Russia held her in jail for months until her trial, which ended with a guilty verdict and a sentence of nine years at a labor camp. 

Since then, America has tried quiet diplomacy to get Griner free. We offered to trade a Russian arms merchant for her and another jailed American. We sent Bill Richardson. We even sent Dennis Rodman.

I mean, c'mon, man!

One thing we absolutely should not be sending any more are WNBA players to beef up Russian basketball teams.

It's difficult to imagine anyone desperate enough to go, anyway.

Q Toon: Nothing But Nyet

 

The Russian trial of Brittney Griner is now in the sentencing stage. The Olympian and WNBA star faces a possible ten years in prison for having arrived at Sheremetyevo airport in January with a cannabis vape cartridge in her luggage. She pleaded guilty to the charge and delivered an abject apology in court.

In the first days after Griner's arrest, the Biden administration was largely silent on her plight, and her wife publicly urged everyone to keep quiet in order to let the State Department work behind the scenes. Since then, Cherelle Griner, the WNBA, and the LGBTQ+ community have begun to speak out, more and more forcibly.

The State Department is publicly advocating for Griner's return to the U.S., proposing a prisoner swap of Brittney Griner and a retired marine convicted of spying, Paul Whelan, for Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer currently serving time in a U.S. prison.

Born in 1967 in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, to a bookkeeper and a car mechanic, Bout went on to train as an interpreter at Moscow’s Soviet Military Institute of Foreign Languages.

Rumoured to speak six languages, Bout developed a decades-long career by acquiring Soviet military transport planes and filling them with various weapons that were left behind after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Since then, Bout has supplied weapons to conflicts around the world including Afghanistan, Angola, Congo, Lebanon, Somalia and Yemen.

For decades, governments and rebels fought each other with weapons that Bout sold to either side.

In 2008, Bout was arrested in Bangkok after he was caught on camera trying to sell weapons for use against Americans by undercover US Drug Enforcement Administration agents. He was convicted in a New York court in 2011 and was sentenced to 25 years at a federal prison in Marion, Illinois.

A third American, history teacher Marc Fogel, sentenced in Russia last year for having half an ounce of marijuana on him, has not so far been mentioned as part of any prisoner swap. If only we had another Russian "Merchant of Death" in Leavenworth or Florence ADMAX to sweeten the deal...

Putin's foreign ministry (and his foreign minions) have so far shown no interest in the Biden administration's proposal. Either Putin is waiting until the trial is officially over, or, following the example of the Iran hostage crisis, until the next administration is sworn into office.

Q Toon: Pox Populi

This week's cartoon serves as a reminder that monkey pox is spreading like, well, a virus. The World Health Organization reports that cases are doubling every two weeks, and time to control its spread is rapidly running out.

As any virus would that is spread through contact with skin and bodily fluids, monkey pox has found a convenient outlet among sexually active men who have sex with other men. Particularly, men who have sex with more than one other man. It's not fair, but it's true.

When HIV/AIDS burst onto the scene four decades ago, many gay men resisted the calls to change their behavior. 

Sadly, many of those men are no longer with us.

But the resistance to health warnings remains, and not just from men who have sex with other men.

Otherwise, COVID-19 might now be the answer to a trivia question. 

The Forty Summers of Twos

Last month, I noted that I had apparently drawn only one cartoon in the whole month of June, 1982 and offered that there was a probable reason for that.

The reason was that I was involved in the start-up of the Kenosha Tribune, which published its inaugural issue on July 1, 1982. Jumping from the well-established Journal Times in Racine to an upstart free weekly paper was a risky one, and one that didn't quite pay off. (I've already posted about the dispute between the publisher and the rest of the staff that doomed the Tribune, so I won't get into that here.)

"Hers & His" in Kenosha Tribune, July 1, 1982

The Kenosha Tribune focused on local issues, but my initial cartoons for the editorial page were devoted to national and international topics. I had put in time helping clean the new office, a block behind Washington Middle School; but I hadn't been equally diligent in catching up with Kenosha politics.

Happily, I did not draw a cartoon to accompany the publisher's issue one, page one article that alleged — without ever using the word "allegedly" or any synonym thereof — malfeasance by a police officer.  

"Start Negotiations" in Kenosha Tribune, July 8, 1982

My second cartoon touches on a couple points I've discussed here recently. As in last week's Q Syndicate cartoon, I used Cyrillic-style lettering to signify that a character (here Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev) is Russian.

I've also warned against using rubber cement as an adhesive. I used rubber cement to paste the text in Brezhnev's thought balloon over my original text there, and it has since discolored significantly.

Compare that with the dog in the Phyllis Schlaffly cartoon. I used a glue stick to add the dog to the cartoon, and there's almost no discoloration at all on the original drawing.

(As for the point of the Brezhnev cartoon, Ronald Reagan had campaigned against the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, or SALT, negotiations between the Carter administration and the Soviet Union. As President, Reagan basically renamed the negotiations "Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty," keeping one of the t's in "Strategic" so he could call it StART.)

"A Thoroughly Enjoyable Race" in Kenosha Tribune, July 22, 1982

With midterm elections heating up, it wasn't long before I was drawing more local cartoons such as this one about Wisconsin's upcoming gubernatorial primary, and sketching the candidates who came to the Tribune's humble offices to be interviewed.

Interestingly, none of the candidates in this cartoon would be elected Governor in the fall: not Republican nominee Terry Kohler (of the bathroom fixture family), his Republican rival Lowell Jackson (a former and future member of the Governor's cabinet), or Democratic former Governor Marty Schreiber.

Marty Schreiber, for Kenosha Tribune, July/August, 1982, but unpublished

Kohler, the son of a past Governor of Wisconsin, would win the September primary, secured the GOP nomination for Governor, but was trounced in the general election by Democrat Tony Earl, 57% to 42%, the worst showing for a Republican gubernatorial candidate in 40 years before or 40 years since. (To be fair, three Democratic gubernatorial candidates made worse showings in those 80 years: William Sullivan in 1942, Daniel Hoan in 1946, and Bill Proxmire in 1952.)

Moving along: Having spent so much of this post on 1982, I don't want to skip over 1992 entirely...

"Boola Boolah," unpublished, July, 1992

Besides, I drew each of those blades of grass individually with quill pen and ink, so it's about time they finally got to be seen by somebody somewhere.

We can discuss whether the Bush administration deserves credit for the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, and how much of it, some other time.

"Ah, Wikstrom" in Business Journal, Milwaukee, July 12, 2002

Jumping ahead to 2002, I have absolutely no recollection of the staff editorial this cartoon was drawn to accompany. But it affords me the opportunity to offer yet another take on Donald Joffrey Trump and his stubborn refusal to recognize that he lost the 2020 election.

Yes, he's a grifter and a spoiled brat grown up and grown old without ever once being held accountable for diddley squat. And yes, the Founding Fathers left him a glimmer of hope by creating the Electoral College because they were elitists who didn't entirely trust the Will of the People to elect the best President every time.

But I think that what the Trump presidency shows us is that coming from the World of Business is not such a great qualification for high office after all. Neither Wendell Willkie nor H. Ross Perot got to prove themselves in the Oval Office, but thanks to that damned Electoral College, we were treated to the Trumpian shitshow for four years

In the World of Business, your accounting team can take the same set of numbers and tease stockholders with tales of exponentially growing profits on the one hand, and plead to the IRS that losses swallowed up all your earnings. So naturally, if election officials in Georgia tell you that you're 11,780 votes short, you simply tell them to juggle the books and find you 11,780 more votes.

And if that fails, launch a hostile take-over.

for Q Syndicate, July, 2002

I wasn't colorizing my syndicated cartoons in 2002 (I had done so for the Business Journal's Biz insert cartoons and some InStep covers), but I went ahead and added color to this one before posting it on the GeoCities site I had at the time.

It deserved a little taupe, after all.

It was in 2012 that I started including a color version of every cartoon when sending them to Q Syndicate. I'll sign off today with one of my favorites from that year.

"Where the Boycotts Are," July, 2012

Q Toon: Heat Index

Euphoria. Minx. White Lotus. The Boys. Sex/Life. The Deuce. Elite. The Time Traveler's Wife.

Thanks to streaming services and series developed for pay cable channels, there is no shortage of guys baring it all on television nowadays.

We may have to stop calling it "the boob tube."

Okay, there's no shortage of that, either. It may be time, however, to find, shall we say, a more gender-neutral term.

As it turns out, most of the penises showing up on TV are in fact prosthetic devices there to shield the actors' modesties.

I suspect that has not historically been the case with female mammaries. 

But I could be wrong. I'm no expert there.

Q Toon: Contains S-3XL Content

There are always complaints about how commercialized LGBTQ+ Pride festivals have gotten over the decades.

But these festivals are all about Being Who You Are, and some people happen to be natural born entrepreneurs.

So I hope you'll forgive me for occasionally wondering whether the Progress Flag (the rainbow flag with black, brown, white, pale blue and pink chevrons added on the hoist side) was created as an expression of greater inclusiveness, or just to sell more flags, bumper stickers, decals, clothing, and jewelry to people who already had the old six-color versions.

Alas, we didn't make it to Milwaukee's Pridefest last week, so this is only a wild guess as to what the hot new festival merchandise is this year.

Q Toon: Kind of a Drag

Some presumably disgruntled ex-staffer of Requblican Congresssbro Madison Cawthorn (Q-NC) leaked a couple of party photos of Cawthorn to Politico last week. The photos show Cawthorn wearing women's lingerie as some laughing ladies look on.

I can't blame a kid for wanting to explore his feminine side, even if he has gone on record (just last week, as it happens) tweeting that "There is only one God and two genders."

Not much is known about the context of the photos; it them, Cawthorn is in a wheelchair, so they must have been taken after the 2014 car accident that left him partly paralyzed. He has explained that the photos were taken on a cruise sometime before he ran for Congress in 2020, so I guess we have to chalk this up to "youthful indiscretion."

Cawthorn is only 26, so any youthful indiscretions of his are still pretty recent. He wasn't responsible for that car crash, but he is responsible for his lie that his friend who was driving the car left him to die in the fiery wreck, and for using that lie in a campaign ad. (In fact, the friend dragged him to safety.)

Or his lie that he was accepted to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis.

Or his brief college career distinguished only for his track record of sexually predatory behavior toward numerous coeds.

Or attacking a reporter for "quit[ting] his academia job in Boston to work for non-white males, like Cory Booker, who aims to ruin white males running for office." Cawthorn subsequently apologized that "the syntax of our language was unclear and unfairly implied I was criticizing Cory Booker" — but not for the unmistakably clear message that working for a non-white male was somehow a dastardly thing for the reporter to have done.

It's hard to keep up with Master Cawthorn's youthful indiscretions. Since I drew this cartoon, he got himself in trouble trying to board an airplane with a loaded gun in his carry-on bag — such an understandable oversight, given that the law about carrying loaded guns onto commercial planes is older than he is.

And just last week, he was a no-show at his court date for speeding and driving after his license had been revoked.

You might not have heard about any of those youthful indiscretions; but you probably had heard that only last month, Cawthorn boasted on a podcast that other Republican Congresslewdies had invited him to a "sexual get-together" — an invitation he apparently accepted...

"The sexual perversion that goes on in Washington ... being kind of a young guy in Washington, where the average age is probably 60 or 70 — [you] look at all these people, a lot of them that I've looked up to through my life, I've always paid attention to politics. ... Then all of a sudden you get invited — 'We're going to have a sexual get-together at one of our homes, you should come.' ... What did you just ask me to come to? And then you realize they're asking you to come to an orgy. ... Some of the people leading on the movement to try and remove addiction in our country, and then you watch them do a key bump of cocaine right in front of you. And it's like, this is wild."

...unless the bump of cocaine was at some other Republican get-together. 

Being a lying, racist, sexist frat boy, and a reckless illegal driver to boot, was one thing. Shooting his mouth off on the internets was a youthful indiscretion too far even for spineless Kevin McCarthy, who called Mad Caw in on the carpet for a good finger-wagging. 

Didn't the kid realize that Matt Gaetz and Don Jr. are in enough trouble as it is?

Q Toon: A Shot of Preposterone

 

Remember when the Baby Boomers hit middle age, and suddenly newsmagazines were running cover stories about menopause (it's not just for women any more!) and 50 being the new 39?

Well, now it's Gen X's turn.

Having discovered erectile dysfunction, Fox Noise host Tucker Carlson has decided to devote a week of his program to his fears that American men are losing their testosterone. The montage of manly images in the ad promoting his series included this bizarre image:

It turns out that this wasn't some idiot plugging into a hilltop Tesla recharging station. Instead, it has something to do with some self-appointed expert whose Rx for iron-poor testosterone is to bathe one's testicles in red light. I assume he was inspired by the folks who claim to have found health benefits from exposing their anuses to ultra-violet light to explore arousing his sperm by exposing his testes to the other end of the visible spectrum.

Look, I'm sure the dude has published dozens of peer-reviewed studies. 

I mean, click-bait dick pics.

The peers interviewed by Newsweek, on the other hand, were not amused.

Urologist Petar Bajic, MD, at the Cleveland Clinic's Glickman Urological and Kidney Institute, in Ohio, ... told Newsweek that men considering red light therapy to enhance their testosterone levels would be wasting their money.

Dr. Bajic said: "The bottom line about red light therapy for low testosterone is that there is no evidence to support its use and no psychological basis for how it might even work because light wouldn't penetrate the skin to enter the testicles. ... "

Mr. Crotchy McSunbather, the guy prescribing submerging into ice baths, and whatever the deal is with the shirtless fellow milking cows without a bucket — they all fit into the melting together of New Age Holistic Anti-medicine and anti-vaxxer eagerness to try anything from horse dewormer to injecting bleach, as long as the doctor didn't order it.

Sometimes it feels as though that particular crowd are just testing us all to find out just what weirdness and ridiculousness they can foist on their followers before even those gullible disciples crack up laughing at the utter inanity of it all.

Kind of like fashion designers.

It's stylish, and, what the hell, it promotes fertility!

Anyway, getting back to Tucker's War on Flaccidity, it's hard (no pun intended) to believe that his fearmongering isn't meant to frighten his viewers into believing that transgender persons and gender dysphoria are brand new phenomena, a novel threat never seen before in the history of Manlinesskind.

But just as every generation is the very first to discover sex, every generation eventually, inexorably becomes the first to discover diminished sex drive.

Steve Roper en français

Just something I ran across while looking for something else: the adventure cartoon "Steve Roper" in a Québécois weekly newspaper:

Steve Roper, created by Allen Saunders and Elmer Woggon, entered their comic strip, "Big Chief Wahoo," as a blond news photographer in 1940. Roper eased out the titular Seminole from the strip, and somewhere along the line he quit bleaching his hair, turning it black. Here in 1956, he and Clark Kent obviously have the same barber.

By the time I was old enough to follow the plots, Roper's temples had gone gray; and a crew-cut, blue-collar, often shirtless friend of his, Mike Nomad, was starting to have all the adventures. Roper actually vanished into the Bermuda Triangle for ten years, and I'm not making that up.

"Steve Roper and Mike Nomad," by then drawn by Frank Matera, was a wrap in 2004.

Q Toon: Free Brittney

I freely confess that I struggled coming up with anything to draw about Brittney Griner, the WNBA star and Olympic medalist who has gotten caught up in the international standoff between Putin's Russia and the rest of the world.

On February 17, one week before Putin's invasion of Ukraine but well after his troops were poised at the border, Russian police arrested Griner at Sheremetyevo airport, reportedly having found a vape cartridge and hashish oil in her luggage. Whether there is anything to the charges or if they were completely trumped up, none of us in the cheap seats may ever know.

Her wife has pleaded with everyone to honor their privacy, which also limits what one might say in a cartoon. Nor has her plight worsened to the level of so many citizens of Ukraine; a representative of the American embassy has been able to visit Griner in detention and reports that she is in good health and spirits.

As an American, a lesbian, and a black woman, Griner faces an uphill climb getting a fair trial in Russia. Instead of an American-style legal system in which a prosecutor presents one side of the case and the defense presents the other, in a Russian court, an investigator appointed by the government presents a case file that determines what can and cannot be argued in court. Her defense is free to conduct its own investigation, but concepts such as an impartial jury of one's peers and a right against self-incrimination simply do not exist.

If found guilty, Griner could face up to ten years in prison, or even in a labor camp.

Griner did not come to Russia as a tourist:

Ms Griner had a second job, and that was why she had flown to Russia — to play for EuroLeague team UMMC Ekaterinburg, where she had worked since 2014 during the US off-season.

Roughly half of WNBA players compete overseas in the off-season. For most, it's a way to augment their domestic income: WNBA players receive roughly five times more in Russia than they do in the US.

"If she were Steph Curry or LeBron James, she wouldn't be over there at all because she'd be making enough money," [sports journalist Tamryn] Spruill said. 

After Griner's detention and arrest, I'm fairly sure that any remaining WNBA players moonlighting on Russian basketball teams are seriously reconsidering whether any salary is worth being set up to be a pawn in geopolitical brinksmanship.

Q Toon: The Great Right North

Here's a lede U.S. conservatives are very unlikely to match any time soon:

Conservatives led the charge in Canada's Parliament to vote to ban conversion therapy for minors.

The Senate voted without any objections on the bill proposed by Conservative Senator Leo Housakos and fast-tracked through all legislative stages December 7. Previously, the House of Commons voted unanimously to pass the bill brought forward by Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole, who has become a proponent of LGBTQ rights since becoming head of the party. O'Toole allowed his party to have a free vote on the issue.

In an unusual occurrence, conservatives voted in agreement with their liberal counterparts.

"The community has been heard," Housakos said in the Senate, reported the Toronto Star.

"It was heard by the House of Commons and we saw the House of Commons do the right thing and pass this piece of legislation unanimously and they did so because they thought it was in the national interest to do so," Housakos continued.

The Senate's passage of the bill requires royal assent from the Governor General or her designate for it to become law, reported the paper.

Assuming that Joe Manchin is not the Governor General of Canada, it looks good for Canada to become the sixth nation to ban conversion therapy, which uses psychological, physical, or spiritual pressure to convert a patient's sexual orientation or gender identity.

20 states and the District of Columbia ban conversion therapy, and there are restrictions in five more. In Wisconsin, for example, while conversion therapy on minors isn't illegal, an executive order by Governor Evers prohibits use of state funds for it. Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, on the other hand, have brought suit in federal court to prevent local governments from enforcing their own bans.

It's mighty difficult to imagine any more than a scattered few U.S. Republicans casting any pro-LGBTQ votes, incurring the vengeful wrath of the right-wing rage machine and the televangelicabal. So let's hear it for the brave and principled conservatives of our neighbor to the north!

Cu-roo-coo-coo-coo-coo-coo-coo!