The Dog Days of Cartooning

Or, You Cannot Be Sirius.

1986

in Iconoplastic, Poughkeepsie NY, August 1986

Our Graphical History Tour today delves deep into the Bergetoons vaults for its carefully ripened and aged cartoonistry.

Iconoplastic ("The Magazine for the Self-Interested") was published by a college classmate of mine, Mark Hopkins. The photocopied zine was a way for a bunch of us who had attended St. Olaf together to share our artwork and creative writing with each other. Most of the cartoons I sent to Mark had appeared previously in the UW-Parkside Ranger, but this was one I had drawn expressly for Iconoplastic.

Every one of the five issues of Iconoplastic was dated August, 1986; this cartoon appeared in the second of them. There was supposed to be a sixth and final issue in June of 1987, but if it was ever printed, I never got to see it.

I had begun writing the date in the margin of my cartoons, so I know that I actually drew the above cartoon in August of 1986. I'm sure that it had to do with Ronald Reagan's Missile Defense Initiative, popularly known as Star Wars.

1996

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., Sept. 3, 1996

Why am I including this September cartoon in a collection of my August cartoons? Well, according to my margin notes, I drew it in August. Its topic was the 1996 Republican Party platform, a laundry list of religious right priorities, which the party's nominee, Sen. Bob Dole, told reporters he hadn't read.

The composition of this cartoon is a lot like one I had drawn two months earlier, but with a slightly different cast of Republicans standing behind Dole. Appearing between him and Newt Gingrich is probably the best caricature of Pat Buchanan that I ever produced, which is a pity, since I drew plenty of other cartoons in which he was the main focus rather than an extra in the background.

I had drawn the earlier cartoon for a summer semester issue of the Post that was never published, so I wasn't concerned that some reader might have thought they had seen this cartoon before. 

2006

for Q Syndicate, August 2006

There is nothing wrong with your set.

At some point during the sketching out of this cartoon, I realized that for the dialogue to read properly — for your eyes to read the straight line before the punch line — I either needed the second dialogue balloon to cover Mildred, or to flip the drawing horizontally 180 degrees.

I decided that rather than starting the whole cartoon over, I would just write the dialogue, my signature, and the date in mirror image, then flip the whole cartoon 180 degrees in Photoshop. Being left-handed, I ink my cartoons from right to left anyway, so as to avoid smearing wet ink with the side of my hand.

Here's how the published cartoon looked.

Visually, I think the composition of the cartoon worked better this way, too. The eye sees Luke and Brian first, then Mildred, and finally the two men talking behind Luke and Brian's back.

According to my marginalia, I drew this cartoon in August as a cartoon to be held in reserve, to be released sometime when I didn't send in a cartoon on deadline, so I can't be sure when it was actually published. I think my Better Half and I went on vacation that November, although that would have been an odd time for Mildred to be watering her garden and everyone else to be wearing shorts.

Unless they lived in Florida or southern California.

2016

for Q Syndicate, August 2016

Running for President in 2016, Donald Trump responded to the Pulse Night Club massacre by claiming that his anti-immigrant policies would protect LGBTQ+ Americans.

He didn't mention that the heavily Latino clientele of the Pulse Night Club was just the sort of people who would be targeted for exile to concentration camps in shithole countries by the Corrupt Trump Regime™'s ethnic cleansing program. 

And he apparently had no clue that the T stands for Transgender, people whose persecution would join that of Latinos and Moslems as Corrupt Trump Regime™ priorities.

That, and erecting monuments to himself all over Washington, D.C.

Drawing them discomfited by what I had Trump say in this cartoon, I gave a hefty benefit of the doubt to three of his ardent supporters: Kellyanne Conway, Rudy Giuliani, and his running mate, Mike Pence. That benefit proved entirely undeserved. The three proved ready, willing, and eager to debase themselves in service of Dear Leader's alternative facts, phantom election fraud, and commitment to not just one, but two Corinthians.

January ’Sixes

This week's Graphical History Tour opens on a somber note, as we come to January, 1986, and one of those moments where anybody alive them remembers where they were and what they were doing.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., Feb. 6, 1986

On January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded at "throttle up," just over a minute after launch. All aboard were killed, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe, chosen to be the first civilian passenger to fly into space. 

In five years, space shuttle flights had almost become routine, but because of McAuliffe's presence on the crew, millions of schoolchildren across the country were watching the liftoff. It was carried live on all the TV networks. 

We all knew the liftoff was not supposed to look like this. Everyone looked on in stunned silence, hoping against all reason to see the shuttle emerge from the fireball.

But no escape measures available to the crew; ejection seats and full pressure suits used in the first four space shuttle test flights had been removed before operational flights began in 1981. It's highly improbable that they would have been helpful in the event of an explosion, anyway.

A Presidential Commission attributed the explosion to a faulty O-ring made of material vulnerable to changes in temperature (there had been freezing temperatures in Florida overnight). Shuttle flights were suspended until September 29, 1988, after the implementation of new safety measures and stricter design standards.

1996

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., Jan. 25, 1996

We’re now in an even-numbered year, so here’s fair warning that upcoming Graphical History Tours are going to include some presidential election cartoons. Fair warning also that it’s January, and someone is getting ready to harangue a joint session of Congress live on all the TV networks.

President Bill Clinton was all set to run for reelection in January of 1996. While there was a crowded Republican field heading into the year, Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole was the odds-on favorite. 

Multi-millionaire Steve Forbes, Jr., with a fortune at his disposal and a signature issue of replacing the current income tax system with a simple “flat tax” for everybody, had emerged as Dole’s closest rival.

2006 

for Q Syndicate, January, 2006

I have to tell you, when I was thumbing through my cartoons from January of 2006 to decide which one to post today, I had absolutely no recollection of what television show this cartoon was about.

The series might have been an attempt to update “Touched by an Angel” (1994-2003), or to make a faith-based “Harvey”; obviously, it never caught on. 

It was apparently one of the uncounted eminently forgettable January replacement series that come and go like Frosty the Snowman. Facebook Memories just reminded me of another such failed series, “¡Bob!”, a vehicle for Rob Schneider and Cheech Marin. I’m wondering if either of them remember it. I’ll bet you don’t.

2016

for Q Syndicate, January, 2016

Here's a cartoon about a spate of "religious liberty" laws, pushed by Republicans to legalize discrimination against LGBTQ+ persons — special rights for straights.

What I love about this cartoon is how easy winter scenes are to draw. Especially when the object is to set the cartoon in the middle of the most desolate nowhere imaginable. I may have spent more time thinking up the cartoon than drawing it, even considering all that lettering of the dialogue.

Well, here's where the Graphical History Tour ends today. Safe travels, drive carefully, remember to steer into a skid, and always remember to carry a blanket and maybe an extra jacket in the car.

Space. The Final Vomitorium.

When I slap together these Graphical History Tours featuring my own cartoons, I usually dredge up one cartoon from each decade marker for the month. But when I started looking through the cartoons from April of 1985, I couldn't decide which one I wanted to write about.

So here are a whole bunch of them.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., Apr. 25, 1985

With the current maladministration punishing any media that don't kowtow to Trumpspeak, here's a reminder of an earlier president's efforts to get reporters to echo the Official Line.

Unlike the Gulf of Mexico, which has bore that name for centuries, the Reagan administration's space-based "Strategic Defense Initiative" was brand new. But it was popularly called "Star Wars" after the film series. Reagan and spokesflack Larry Speakes were up against late-night comedians and editorial cartoonists. "Star Wars" was shorter than "Strategic Defense Initiative" and pithier than "SDI."

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Kenosha Wis., Apr. 4, 1985

This cartoon starred local Congressman Les Aspin (D-WI) in a triple role. The inset copies a cartoon I had drawn for the Ranger the previous November, after Aspin had debated Republican challenger Pete Janssen on the Parkside campus, cruising on his way to an eighth term. First elected in 1970 as a critic of the Vietnam War who had served as a U.S. Army officer in Vietnam and a Pentagon systems analyst under Robert MacNamara.

With some serious seniority under his belt in 1985, the Defense Department gadfly was named Chair of the House Armed Services Committee, and his more conservative positions soon came to the fore. I drew this cartoon after he voted in favor of Reagan's Star Wars program and the controversial MX missile system.

He would also support Reagan administration aid to the Contras fighting against the socialist government of Nicaragua, and later, George H.W. Bush's build-up to the Gulf War I. It got him deposed as Armed Services Committee Chair, but only briefly; it also got him named Bill Clinton's Secretary of Defense.

In the meantime, his House position in those days got us Blue Angel fly-overs on Fourths of July hereabouts.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Kenosha Wis., Apr. 11, 1985

Wharton School of Business D-student Donald Trump has been wreaking havoc recklessly imposing and revoking draconian tariffs, eviscerating your 401k and college savings fund. It's all part of his cunning plan to undo decades of global free trade.

Forty years ago, the postwar American dominance of world markets was suddenly challenged by Japan. In the 1960's, Americans considered Japanese products cheap and of inferior quality; but after the energy crisis of the 1970's made gas-guzzlers unfashionable, Japanese automakers produced fuel-efficient cars while U.S. automakers were slow to retool.

The U.S. complaint was that Japan was not letting American goods into their country while underselling our domestic manufacturers. (And then buying our domestic manufacturers.) At the end of March, both houses of Congress voted overwhelmingly in favor of resolutions calling for retaliation against Japan unless it reduced its trade imbalance with the U.S. Over the course of the year, 300 protectionist bills were introduced in Congress by members of both political parties. 

So the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations hammered out free trade agreements wherever they could; and thus Coke was able to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. And domestic manufacturers moved all the jobs to Mexico, China, and wherever the median wage was a bushel of beans per month.

✍

I drew an alternating pair of comic strips for the Ranger that year. "Reductio and Absurdam" starred a man and a woman — I never established which was Reductio and which was Absurdam — who appeared in a variety of situations. They might be a couple, or co-workers, or teller and customer, as the gag warranted.

"Reductio and Absurdam" in UW-Parkside Ranger, Kenosha Wis., April 11, 1985

The only consistent conceit was that, except for any text, I drew the cartoon in charcoal. The problem with charcoal as opposed to india ink is that I couldn't go back and erase pencil marks showing around the charcoal. 

I called the other cartoon "Post Nasal Strip." That I drew with india ink, the medium I've relied on for most of my cartoons for not quite 60 years. 

"Post Nasal Strip" in UW-Parkside Ranger, Kenosha Wis., Apr. 11, 1985

"Post Nasal Strip" tended to be more topical than "Reductio and Absurdam," here highlighting a quote by Sen. Jake Garn (R-UT) upon his return from a jaunt into outer space on the space shuttle Discovery. NASA had publicly mused about sending a artist, journalist, or teacher as the first civilian into space, but gave the seat to the Chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies instead.

Garn had flown as a pilot with the U.S. Navy and the Utah National Guard before winning election to Congress in 1974. Designated "payload specialist" for the Discovery flight, he was the guinea pig for experiments on Space Adaptation Syndrome. So basically, he was there to throw up.

And so he did. And the rest is History.

"Jake Garn was sick, was pretty sick. I don't know whether we should tell stories like that. But anyway, Jake Garn, he has made a mark in the Astronaut Corps because he represents the maximum level of space sickness that anyone can ever attain, and so the mark of being totally sick and totally incompetent is one Garn. Most guys will get maybe to a tenth Garn, if that high. And within the Astronaut Corps, he forever will be remembered by that."

Two side notes about my cartoon: I snuck in the Ranger Features Editor, Jim Niebuhr, as the fellow delivering the punch line in the final panel. And yes, having performed on a thrust stage, I know what a vomitorium really is.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., May 2, 1985

Last week's Graphical History Tour was all about the fall of South Vietnam, so I'll close with this cartoon drawn for its tenth anniversary.

The cartoon was supposed to accompany an article about the anniversary. The article didn't run, but the Ranger ran my cartoon anyway, just below the cartoon I had drawn for the editorial page.

You'll notice that there is one president missing from my cartoon. There was a war in Vietnam (this time with China) during Jimmy Carter during his presidency, but the U.S. stayed out of if. Nor did Carter commit American troops to a shooting war anywhere else, so there was no particular reason for me to include Carter in this cartoon.

Toon: My God, It's Full of Stars

We've stepped outside several times over the weekend in search of the aurora light show. I don't know whether it's light pollution from Foxconn, or from Milwaukee to our north, but we haven't caught the display everyone else on Earth seems to have.

Even with the clouds that came in Saturday night, some people in our area got some nice photographs, so we must simply have not waited outdoors long enough.

Slip the Surly Bonds of Earth

For our trip in the wayback machine last weekend, I discussed some of the highs and lows of memorial cartoons. Since the 30th anniversary of the Challenger disaster is coming up this week, I thought I'd share the two cartoons I drew for that occasion.

I didn't see the explosion live; I had a second shift job in 1986, and I overslept the launch time. (Some of you may recall that the launch had been postponed from an earlier date, which factored into the ill-considered decision to launch on January 28 in spite of the freezing temperatures overnight.) I had my TV programmed to turn on at a certain time every weekday, forcing me to get out of bed and go into the next room to watch it or turn it off. All channels were on news coverage when the TV came on, as the news anchors were still trying to come to grips with what schoolchildren around the country had just witnessed.

This first was my immediate reaction to the disaster.

This cartoon was drawn entirely in charcoal, except for the material in the text box (which I had to redo because I inadvertently omitted the name of one of the astronauts; thankfully, an editor caught my mistake before it went to press).

A week later, the student newspaper I drew for at the time wanted a drawing for its front page, and I came up with an illustration whose wishful thinking was misinterpreted by some as a sort of denial that the disaster had really happened -- like those people who have insisted all these years that we never landed on the moon.

That misinterpretation was partly because when the cartoon appeared in print, you could see the outline of the space shuttle contrary to my intention. I drew the shuttle only using white-out, but some shadow of the white-out showed up anyway.

The point of the cartoon was to push back against the response from some that the space program should be shut down. Given the chance, I'd have liked to have changed the caption to advocate letting "their dreams live on" or "soar" or something other than "not ... die."

17 years later, February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia broke apart on reentry. I did not draw a memorial cartoon on that occasion, although I did end up having a few seconds on local TV. It was a Saturday morning, and I'd gone to the church where I work to fetch something I'd forgotten there on Friday afternoon. I decided to put an appropriate prayer on the outdoor sign as long as I was there, and was almost finished when a reporter from Milwaukee's channel 6, in Racine because astronaut Laurel Blair Clark had attended the high school two blocks away, stopped to get a comment from me. The reporter mistook me for the church's pastor, but I quickly corrected him; and since he didn't happen upon any other Racine clergy walking the main streets on his way back to Milwaukee, he used the footage of our interview.

Venus Through Saturn's Rings

I am such a sucker for these pictures of Saturn!

Way back when Voyager 1 sent back spectacular images of Saturn casting a shadow on its rings, I drew a cartoon of the image with "So long, come again" in lights on the planet's dark side. (Pioneer 11 was the first satellite to fly past Saturn a year earlier, but its photos weren't quite as dramatic. Its photo of the rings from over Saturn's north pole, however, represented a remarkable feat nevertheless.)