This Week's Sneak Peek

The first cartoon drawn after New Year's is usually very challenging.

Most of the LGBT news sources I rely upon for inspiration have spent the last week or so running stories rehashing the year gone by -- topics my editors could hardly care less about for their back-to-work January edition.

This year, there was the suicide of a transgender teen that has been talked about around the blogosphere, but I hesitate to draw a cartoon that might be mistaken as making light of the situation, or, God forbid, inspiring more kids to give up and kill themselves.

So that's not what this week's cartoon is about.

This Week's Toon: the Pall Bearer

Cartooning about youth suicide is dicey. It's not funny, and you don't want to glorify one suicide and thereby inspire others. (I'm not even going to link to the story that inspired me to concentrate on this topic, for that very reason.) For this week's oeuvre, I started out trying to come up with some incisive observation for a grieving parent to make, but ended up turning my focus to someone else:

When kids commit suicide, their parents are permanently devastated. Their friends grieve for years, but heal and go on with their lives. But do the bullies who drove them to it even notice? Or do they just grow up and continue to leave their mark on the world by posting insults on internet comment pages?