Q Toon: Avant la Deluge, Quoi?

As some of you may know, I draw my syndicated cartoons over the weekend to be released to LGBTQ newspapers and magazines, and the weekly ones hit the newsstands the following Wednesday, Thursday or Friday. Has anyone else noticed how often these days last weekend's news seems like it happened ages ago?

Before Hurricane Harvey decided to park itself over Houston for most of this week, Donald Joffrey Trump issued a memorandum aimed at ridding the U.S. military of transgender service members. Before that, he held one of his campaign rallies in Phoenix, Arizona to tease his pardon of Joe Arpaio, the sadistic anti-Latino former sheriff of Maricopa County, convicted of contempt of court.

Stealing that particular show was a guy placed prominently in the audience standing behind Trump; he wore a white t-shirt proclaiming that Trump and the GOP are not racist and repeatedly holding up a hand-made "Blacks for Trump" sign. He certainly caught social media's attention, and people checking out the web site advertised on his t-shirt discovered that he also believes that Hillary Clinton was colluding with ISIS to wipe out all black and white women, and that Cherokee Indians are "the real KKK slave masters."

So while I'm usually hesitant to joke about the mentally ill, I still worry about a nation where seemingly insane ideas are cherished as gospel by astonishing numbers of Americans. The man at the podium and his loyal fans are particularly susceptible, believing that thousands of invisible Americans swelled the crowd at Trump's inauguration, Mexican rapists are hurling 60-lb. bundles of marijuana over our border fences, and transgender soldiers are bankrupting the Pentagon. We've got anti-vaxxers, birthers, Jade Helmsters, and people who actually buy the powdered bone drink mix hawked by Alex Jones.

There are people who firmly believe, all evidence to the contrary, that tax cuts will balance the budget. People still believe that shifting the cost of society from the people who make the money to the people who do the work is a recipe for properity. Wisconsin is betting that a $3 billion subsidy to lure Foxconn here will be worth the investment, even though the state is unlikely to break even for another 25-40 years — even if you believe Foxconn will still be around in 2058.

But people believe that stuff, because they desperately want to.

Heck, a full third of respondents to a Fox News poll released yesterday believe Trump is "drawing the county together."

So, yeah, I totally made up that transgender Latino soldiers for Trump guy for this cartoon.

Only because I've completely lost faith that such a person couldn't possibly exist.

Comic Caper: Installment VI

Here's an extra special Whaddayaknow Wednesday installment in our continuing retrospective of a comic strip I drew in 1983-84 for the UW-Parkside Ranger, "The Funny Paper Caper." I've usually presented four strips at a time, but now we have come to the episodes which ran in April. The end of the school year was just around the corner, and I needed several more than the usual three or four panels per week if I wanted to get to the end of the story before the Ranger suspended publication for the summer.

When we left off on Saturday, the Yellow Geezer had been shot just as he was about to tell our detective-cum-narrator what evil mastermind was looking for the Maltese Pelican, and who may have killed Rufus T. Pornapple in a foiled effort to get it.

Whenever the investigator goes out on a call without back-up, you know something bad is going to happen. It's a cliché, yes, but it's an essential climax to Act III in any police procedural.

This Week's Sneak Peek

I bet he's spilling the beans about the secret handshake he and Ben Carson have.

Comic Caper, Caibidil a Cúig

Sagaback Saturday returns yet again to the thrilling days of yesteryear and the gripping serial "The Funny Paper Caper." If you've been keeping up with the story but only check this blog on Saturdays, there was a fourth installment on Tuesday that you missed. It introduces the series macguffin, in case you want to go back and read it. I'll wait right here.

Moving on, The Funny Paper Caper throws in a passing reference to Jeff MacNelly's "Shoe."

In the next couple of episodes, I gave myself the challenge of imagining what a cartoon character who was a child when his cartoon originally ran might look like as a wizened old man. I also took over more space on the UW-Parkside Ranger page. Those old comics were granted more newspaper real estate than cartoons nowadays; and besides, this character's dialogue, instead of appearing in balloons, appeared on his shirt.

The next week referred to above was spring break already, so time was running out to get this story wrapped up.

The Yellow Kid was not, in fact, oriental, but Irish. The original character's name was Mickey Dugan. Richard Outcault was the cartoonist who created "The Yellow Kid" for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World in 1895; George Luks continued the strip in the World when Outcault took it to William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal the following year. "Yellow" referred to the color of Mickey's shirt (color being a resource I didn't have on the Ranger comics page), and is where the term "yellow journalism" comes from.

With the characters crouched beside a dumpster, it was possible for the strip to return to regular size. For one week.

Condemned to Repeat It

Trump's address to the nation on Monday night, in which he sort of announced that he was going to do something about the war in Afghanistan. He didn't say he was sending more troops (although he is doing exactly that); mostly he talked about what he would not do. "One way or another," he promised, "these problems will be solved."

He would not withdraw troops from Afghanistan. He would not discuss any change in strategy. He would not describe our military goals. He would not engage in "nation-building." He would not mind if Afghanistan were a kleptocratic autocracy.

Most pointedly, he would not set any date by which the U.S. would turn responsibility for the fighting over to the Afghans.

I'm reminded of a cartoon I drew back in 2008. The George W. Bush administration had steadfastly refused to offer a timetable to withdraw troops from his war in Iraq. Saddam Hussein had been quickly deposed, but extinguishing the insurgency was proving considerably more difficult. In the summer of 2008, Bush announced a "time horizon" for the end of U.S. troop involvement.

“In the area of security cooperation, the President and the Prime Minister agreed that improving conditions should allow for the agreements now under negotiation to include a general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals–such as the resumption of Iraqi security control in their cities and provinces and the further reduction of U.S. combat forces from Iraq.”

According to NPR, an unnamed senior U.S. official — which usually means cabinet-level — was reminded of another war from the past-as-prologue:

When asked before [Trump's] speech how long the U.S. presence could remain in Afghanistan, a senior U.S. official responded, rhetorically, "How long have we been in Korea?"

Q Toon: Great Is Thy Cravenness

Led by Merck's Kenneth Frazier, eight business and labor leaders resigned from Donald Trump's Manuafacturers' Jobs Initiative Council over Donald Trump's tardy, begrudging, and muddled condemnation of Nazis, Klansmen and unspecified radicals "on both sides, on both sides." Leaders of another council, the Strategic and Policy Forum, announced it was disbanding because Charlottesville had become "a distraction" to their purpose.

"As our members have expressed individually over the past several days, intolerance, racism and violence have absolutely no place in this country and are an affront to core American values. We believe the debate over Forum participation has become a distraction from our well-intentioned and sincere desire to aid vital policy discussions on how to improve the lives of everyday Americans."

A pouting Trump seized his ball and flounced home. (Or, rather, to a campaign rally in Arizona.)

Before he could disband them himself, the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities  resigned en masse in a letter crafted so that the first letter of each paragraph spelled out the word "resist."

State Department Science Envoy Daniel M. Kammen followed suit with his own acrostic letter of resignation. At this point, the only reason the rest of the career bureaucrats and Obama holdovers are still in Washington is that they're still working on how to hide clever messages in their resignation letters.

The only resulting resignation from Trump's Evangelical Advisory Board, on the other hand, was New York City pastor Rev. A.R. Barnard. If his resignation letter contained any secret message, it has not yet been found. (A Chicago area pastor had resigned from the board last year over the Billy Bush interview tape.)

Prior to Rev. Barnard leaving the 24-member board, Matthew Dowd, a strategist on George W. Bush's 2004 reelection campaign, tweeted "Not a single member of Trump's Evangelical Council has resigned. We have learned corporate America has a greater moral compass.  So so sad."

The remaining members of the commission, the most prominent of whom had had no hesitation to criticize Democratic presidents, crept to the defense of Mr. Trump.

Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University, praised the president for his "bold truthful statement" about Charlottesville. Mark Burns, pastor of Harvest Praise and Worship Center in South Carolina, retweeted a link to a television interview in which he declared his support for Trump and criticized the counterprotesters. Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, blamed the news media for misrepresenting Trump's comments.

The Evangelical Board hold-outs have defended standing by their man by claiming that it's their Christian duty to give Trump their aid and counsel. By contrast, that Chicago pastor who quit the board last year, Rev. James MacDonald, posted this Facebook message to his congregation:

"The greater your influence the greater your complicity if you don't call the Charlottesville rally and attack what it really is: a heinous act of domestic terrorism entirely rooted in racial hatred.
"It is the height of hypocrisy to demand that people use the proper term 'Islamic terrorism' ... then turn around and refuse to use similarly candid terms when referring to racial hate crimes."

Comic Caper: Kapitel Fire

In the interest of getting through this story, today is now Turnback Tuesday. This is the fourth batch of  comic strips that I drew in 1983 and 1984 for the UW-Parkside Ranger and have been rerunning here purely because I didn't have another topic handy for a Saturday retrospective back on July 29.

In case you're just joining the story, our nameless Lieutenant-cum-narrator is investigating the murder of Rufus T. Pornapple, whose son has just identified a burglary suspect, only to have the suspect's wife suddenly burst onto the scene. The month's worth of episodes presented here don't introduce any new characters, so suffice it to say our murder mystery's milieu is the comics page of your daily newspaper.

I promise that something is going to happen to nudge the plot forward very soon.

I really ought to have made that bird bigger.