This Week's Sneak Peek

 Max and Leo are back already:

There was a chance that I wouldn't have a cartoon here today.

A powerful wind storm blew through here on Friday afternoon, knocking out the power to us and 720 other WE Energies customers. We had just taken delivery of the building materials for a gazebo, and barely had enough time to take our flag down when it hit.

At first, we were told that electricity would be restored around 10:00 p.m.; but by evening, WE Energies was telling us that the cause of the outage was unknown and not to expect the power back on until Monday.

Happily, we got power back on at 4:33 a.m. (we both happened to be awake); some nearby areas got their electricity back after 7:00 in the morning. I didn't have to draw by candle light, or send my cartoon in by carrier pigeon.

All in all, we were pretty lucky. The same storm capsized a boat on Lake Geneva, drowning three children. Homes around us lost trees and fences. I hear there was some flooding around the state.

I hope your Fourth was safe, sane, and enjoyable, leaving you nothing to clean up other than the usual firecracker debris, cake pans, grills, and beer cans.

St. Urho's Day's Salakähmäinen Kurkistus

No, I'm  never gonna give you up.

Our internet, phone, and cable was restored sometime around 8:00 Saturday morning. We don't know whether the power was out at their local satellite headquarters or somewhere between there and our neighborhood; we weren't the only household incommunicado. At least one neighborhood in town had no power until Sunday afternoon.

At which time the snowstorm started sneaking in.

An Ill Wind

Here's a local issue cartoon — or at least it was when I drew it. Since then, I've seen the story reported on international media and late-night chat show monologues. By the time you read this, it'll probably have its own page on Wikipedia.

Samantha Kuffel, 31, was one of the on-air meteorologists at Milwaukee's CBS affiliate, WDJT-58. But right-wing professional umbrage-takers raised a ruckus after she posted on Instagram about Elon Musk's Nazi salute from the podium bearing the presidential seal at Donald Trump's inauguration festivities. 

Was it? Neo-nazis think so. Judge for yourself.

It cost her her job.

"Meteorologist Sam Kuffel is no longer employed at CBS58," said the staff memo from news director Jessie Garcia that was obtained by the Journal Sentinel. "A search for a replacement is underway."

A spokeswoman for Weigel Broadcasting Co. confirmed via email late Wednesday that Kuffel was no longer with Channel 58. But the spokeswoman said she couldn't comment further because this was a personnel issue.

On Tuesday, conservative radio host Dan O'Donnell sharply criticized Kuffel for her two Instagram posts, accusing her of "spreading the lie that Elon Musk was giving a Nazi salute" during the presidential inauguration. He labeled her posts "vulgar."

Was she fired for daring to speak up against the rising tide of fascism in this country? Did Channel 58 worry that viewers wouldn't be able to trust her impartiality when it comes to what percentage chance there is of precipitation or how to calculate wind chill?

Kuffel gave management every excuse to let her go. The Guardian quotes the employment-terminating unexpurgated Instagram posts:

“Dude Nazi saluted twice. Twice. During the inauguration. You fuck with this and this man, I don’t fuck with you. Full stop.”

In her second post, Kuffel appeared to post a screenshot of a scene from the FX sitcom It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia in which Rob McElhenney’s character Mac says: “Screw that old bitch. He’s a Nazi.”

Don't go looking for Kuffel's Instagram account now; it's been deactivated.

Those of us in the media, if we want to hang onto our jobs, have to be judicious in how we speak in public. I can cuss a blue streak at my computer; but on-line, restraint is the rule. Quoting other people is one thing; but in cartoons and here on the blog, 

Bad language or abuse
I never ever use
Whatever the emergency.
Though "Bother it!" I may
Occasionally say,
I never use a big, big "D."

No, never.

Well, hardly ever.

Finally, Sam — can I call you that? You local TV news people try so hard to be our friends I feel that I know you — Anyway, Sam, you have to keep in mind at all times that Trump and his MAGA minions are thin-skinned, easily butt-hurt snowflakes. 

Think what happened to you was unfair? Why, they even took offense at Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde and demanded that the New Jersey-born cleric be deported for closing her sermon with this:

“Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you and, as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. 

"There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and Independent families, some who fear for their lives. The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals. They…may not be citizens or have the proper documentation. But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, gurudwaras and temples. 

"I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. And that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land. 

"May God grant us the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being, to speak the truth to one another in love and walk humbly with each other and our God for the good of all people. Good of all people in this nation and the world. Amen”

Not an F-word, or even a big, big D, in her whole sermon.

Q Toon: Florida Man Yells at Rainbow

Let me preface today's commentary by saying that I generally don't check the weather forecast for my cartoon's locale before sitting down at my drawing board. So I just want to make it clear that Governor DeSantis here is not rooting for this week's torrential rains to continue pummeling Florida. This cartoon is not about the weather.

Okay, now that that's out of the way:

🌈

Florida Republicans didn't want to see rainbow-colored lights illuminating their state's bridges in celebration of Pride Month in June. So they passed a law last month decreeing that Florida's bridges be lit up exclusively in red, white, and blue from Memorial Day to Labor Day.

They thus were able to pretend that the purpose of the law was a patriotic celebration — of the colors of the American flag. Or, if y'all'd rather, the Stars 'n' Bars. (Le tricolore? Mais non!) 

The diktat from Tallahassee is part of what Governor Ron DeSantis calls, without a trace of irony, "Freedom Summer." 

I suppose the rednecks up in Niceville are enjoying their freedom to tell the gays down in Key West how to decorate.

We'll see whether Key West gets its freedom back in time for LGBTQ History Month in October. 

🌈

Earlier this week, prolific editorial cartoonist Clay Jones shared a comment left under one of his cartoons at GoComics, from a reader chastising him for using — stealing, even — popular cultural references in his work.

The rest of us editorial cartoonists shared — stole, even — a good chuckle over that one. Most of us reference popular cultural stuff all the time. This isn't the first time I've resorted to a Simpsons meme; and I've also based cartoons on Calvin and Hobbes, Rocky & Bullwinkle, Peanuts, Monty Python, Dr. Seuss, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, All About Eve, Sunset Boulevard, It's a Wonderful Life, The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, Oliver Twist, and The Three Musketeers.

On the other side of the pond, editorial cartoonists can get away with aping Serious Art that would go over the heads of many readers stateside; Dave Brown of the Independent signals his readers that he has redrawn someone else's classic by showcasing the cartoon in a fancy gilt-edged frame. The rest of us could do that, too, except that it would be stealing the idea from Mr. Brown.

Down under, David Rowe redrew Manet and David paintings on successive days this week; Financial Times readers may have caught the references without spying the obligatory apologies in the corner of the cartoons. American readers would likely have missed the parodies unless published in the student newspaper of the School of Art Institute of Chicago.

Elsewhere, references to artwork are rife in editorial cartoons in other countries where keeping the cartoon wordless makes it saleable outside of the cartoonist's native language.

My own thought on all of this is that one shouldn't make the same reference over and over. Once one has parodied Edvard Munch's "The Scream" for Topic A (another choice I could have made for this week's cartoon), one should seriously consider not parodying "The Scream" again for a good long time. Unless you want to be known as That Guy Who Keeps Drawing The Scream.

Which, if you can pull it off, isn't ipso facto a bad thing. At least you won't have to worry whether readers will think your cartoons are about the weather when they're not.

Just make sure that someone else isn't already That Guy.

One More Holiday Wish

 

In the spirit of the season.

Late Weather Update

For Thawback Thaturday, how about we check the weather aftcast?

Folks in my neck of the woods may end up snowed in today, but we have had some unusually warm weather around here the past several weeks. By which I mean several days have been above freezing, but not enough that I've been tempted to join the Polar Bear Plunge. Apparently much of the United States enjoyed some balmy weather in January 100 years ago, too.

"The Wrong Pew" by Cyrus Hungerford in Pittsburgh Sun, January, 1920

It has been said that the surest way to tell whether a church is as welcoming as it claims to be is to see what happens when a visitor sits in a pew a longtime member considers private property. Hungerford hits on this phenomenon to comment on spring-like weather visiting a couple months ahead of schedule.

Archibald Chapin compares the weather instead to the many labor strikes shaking up the established order at the time.

"All In Favor of This Strike..." by Archibald Chapin in St. Louis Republic, January, 1920

It's important whenever this sort of thing comes up to distinguish between weather and climate. Every time it snows these days, there are cartoonists who dredge up tired old jokes about how the day's weather disproves global warming.

"Ol' January Thaw" by Magnus Kettner for Western Newspaper Union, January, 1920 

Weather changes all the time, sometimes drastically from day to day, week to week, or year to year. I recall an extraordinarily balmy winter my senior year in college; we were partying outside in Minnesota in our shirtsleeves in January and February. Two years earlier, and again three years later, we had record-breaking cold.

But if you look at long-term records, you can't help but observe that the general trend over the decades has been that the mean global temperature is rising. The Arctic ice cap is melting, and so are glaciers all over the world, to an extent completely unprecedented in recorded history. Australia is not on fire because of a conspiracy of 200 arsonists; but time will tell whether the continent will now suffer an annual fire season that dwarfs the ones we now see every year in California.

"And This!" by William Donahey in Cleveland Plain Dealer, January, 1920

Individual heat waves and cold snaps come and go. So the fact that I'll be starting up the old snowblower later today in no way disproves the theory of global climate change any more than the 50F temperatures earlier this week prove it.

Meanwhile...

Watson a Name?

The cartoon I drew for the syndicate this week starred a fictional Hollywood character named "Brock Stoder." The name doesn't have any hidden meaning; it was merely something that sounded like a film star's name without actually sounding like a particular film star's name.

When I originally described the idea to my editors, he had the name "Brock Slater," but it occurred to me that I had better Google that name in case it happened to be someone's real moniker. As it turned out,  there's a business management consultant in Chicago by that name. Just in case I'm ever in Chicago needing a consultation on managing my business, I decided I might as well change it.

I had already inked "Brock S" by then, so I tried "Brock" plus a couple other butch-sounding surnames (one of which turned out to belong to a transgender soldier who might actually have a chance of having the cartoon brought to his attention) before cooking up "Stoder," which doesn't seem to be anybody's last name.

Coming up with names for cartoon characters can be a tricky business. Most of the generic characters in editorial cartoons don't need names, except when the cartoonist wants to have a recurring character, or if it would be weird for someone else in the cartoon not to call him/her by name. I'll often use a pun as a name to signal to the reader that the character doesn't represent an actual individual, and in hopes that no parent would have been so careless or mean as to inflict such an easily mocked name on their child. A page in one of my sketch books is devoted to names that I might find a use for later: LiBrarion Buchman, Juan Thieu III, Purmia Bruschi, Oliver Sudden.

For a few years, I drew a generic congressman, Luke Warmish, who was a kind of middle-of-the-road career politician:

I quickly determined that Congressman Warmish was a Democrat, but in 1993 and '94, I portrayed him shying away from overt support of President Bill Clinton's health care reform proposals. He lost his reelection bid in the Republican sweep of 1994, but his name showed up in one later cartoon about Political Action Committee ads on TV, without indicating what office he might be running for.

Meanwhile, I had given Warmish a Republican counterpart in Charles Snollygoster IV, whose surname comes from a word meaning a person, "especially a politician, who is guided by personal advantage rather than by consistent, respectable principles."

Congressman Snollygoster had no problem taking his stand on the bedrock Republican issues of the day — against flag burning, in favor of The Family, against taxes — so he lasted longer than Mr. Warmish did. I imagined him representing a safe suburban district somewhere in Illinois; I suspect, however, that he would have been primaried sometime since 2010.

I haven't found it necessary to invent fictional right-wingers, Tea Partisans, or Trump Loyalists; there is plenty to criticize in the real ones without making fake ones up.

Sometimes one's editor doesn't want to single out any particular legislator. It would have been irresponsible, for example, to have used a real politician in the cartoon at the top of this post, which was intended to highlight the underhanded tactics used in issue ads against politicians.

Sometimes the cartoonist wants the character to say something no politician in his right mind would say (at least in the Time Before Trump). I gave this state legislator, who appeared a few times in my NorthCountry Journal cartoons (and at least once later in the UW-Milwaukee Post), a name unlikely to belong to any elected politician anywhere in the English-speaking world.

Not all my fictional named characters have been politicians, or have appeared multiple times. These two simply needed nameplates in the first panel.

This daytime talk show host's name had been sitting in my notebook for years, and it's a good thing I've never been a drag performer.

(And yes, I've been informed that "transgender" is the preferred term nowadays. Sadly, nobody on Ms. Drewledge's staff had been so enlightened.)

You may have noticed this meteorologist's name on your shampoo bottle. I therefore hasten to stipulate that I have the utmost respect for the professionalism and dedication of America's weathermen and weatherwomen; even though I often wish that the news department spent the same amount of time, say, forecasting the chances of the bills making their way through the state legislature that the meteorologist gets every night to tell us what the jet stream is up to.

Ms. Sulfate, however, is not a professionally accredited meteorologist. But at least she wasn't saddled with the name Phil Kiesterlich.

This Week's Sneak Peek

 To help with storm relief, I suggest Lutheran Disaster Response. 100% of donations go directly to helping survivors.

Q Toon: Phil's Out

Can we just be silly for a moment?

I know that some people will accuse Mr. Punxsutawny Phil of being insensitive to the plight of the victims of Winter Storm Jonas, even though, as an outdoor-dwelling creature, Phil ought to have plenty of empathy for that sort of thing.

On the other hand, as an internationally famous meteorological spokesrodent, Phil probably enjoys a pretty cushy one-percenter lifestyle compared to the rest of his genus.

That's our mailbox on the left.

Blizzard Jonas spared my particular neighborhood this time around, but I'm no stranger to two-foot-plus snowfalls. And winter ain't over yet. As folks around here will tell you, if the ground hog comes out and sees his shadow, we'll have six more weeks of winter. If he doesn't, winter will drag on for another month and a half.

Either way, Spring will eventually come in with more freezing temperatures and at least one nasty snowstorm.

Toon: Whatever the Weather

It has been a brutal winter up and down the East Coast of the U.S. Boston, Massachusetts is suffering under almost 100" (2.5 meters) of snow as we seem to be stuck in a loop this year of one storm after another pounding New England.
Meanwhile up in Alaska, the starting point of this year's Iditarod dogsled race will be moved for only the second time ever due to a lack of snow. (And I'd like to point out that I only read the story at that link when I was writing this blog entry, after drawing this cartoon.)

Hath Spring Sprung?

This is a cartoon I drew for a local magazine targeted at retirees. Back in 1989.

This Week's Totally Gay Cartoon

In Maine, the legislature passed, and the governor signed, a marriage equality bill. Christian Civic League Maine Family Council leader Michael S. Heath wrote an op-ed piece offering the observation that a spell of cold, damp weather and a potato blight just might be a sign of God being peeved with the state legislature and Governor Baldacci.

I just thought it curious that the right wing of this country firmly doubts that a century of CO2 and methane emissions by billions of people couldn't possibly affect global climate, but same-sex marriage can.

Incidentally, the cold snap in Maine has since broken.

But a tornado hit Minneapolis just as the ELCA Churchwide Assembly there was about to vote to adopt (by the exact 2/3 margin required!) a statement on human sexuality that pointedly refuses to condemn homosexuals. Hmmm.