2018 in Headlines

I've been taking photos of the year in newspaper front pages and magazine covers every December 31 for some 45 years now. These days, it's harder to get a comprehensive sampling, now that the local papers have ceded national news to the internet and hardly any newspapers play up international events.

So I have no banner headlines reporting the deadly tsunami in Indonesia, fascist victories in Brazil and elsewhere, the cock-up of Brexit, or the Saudi-Iranian proxy war in Yemen. There were devastating hurricanes, typhoons, and fires; was any one of them more important than the others?

Instead, this year's photo is dominated by the mercurial president of the United States and those "I hire the best people" in his cabinet discovering that he can't hear their advice over the rumblings of his gut.

Here, too, is a collage of my favorites of the cartoons I drew this year. I don't pretend for them to be a comprehensive review of the year, either. They're just the ones I happen to like right now. And since I didn't put them in a slide show, embiggenation is necessitatified.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Oh, look! It's Old Man 2018 on his way out the door!

The week between Christmas and New Year's always brings out an avalanche of political cartoons featuring a.) someone in line bringing an elected official to the exchange window, and b.) Old Man Time turning the world over to Baby New Year. All the newsmakers have gone home for the holiday, and all the editors have gone on holiday as well, greenlighting a week of The Year In Review articles. And heck, we cartoonists enjoy some time off this time of year as much as anybody else.

That was before a minority of American voters elected a president who doesn't respect the time-honored tradition of the Slow News Week.

Nevertheless, I promise that the cartoon I drew last Thursday night has none of that tired old crap in it. But since predicting what our mercurial president might do a week ahead of time is a fool's errand, I think I might have found something else that would still be relevant a week later.

Church Work

Supralapsarianismback Saturday begs your pardon for wallowing in my juvenalia again this week.

My mother is at the point in life where she has been going through her things to separate out the things she needs from those she no longer does, giving away the stuff she thinks someone else might want, and throwing out the rest. Among the things she has given to me so far is a big folder stuffed with clippings of my cartoons.

I have the originals of most of them, but there are a few pages of cartoons I had completely forgotten about, drawn for the church where I grew up. I kind of remember drawing the above cartoon for the monthly newsletter — at least I remember the time spent laboriously drawing all those straight lines with a Bic pen and a ruler. (It's hard to see in the scan, but the missile farthest to the left is full of cross-hatched lines.)

The church's copying equipment wasn't kind to all that meticulous shading and thus to the hand-drawn lettering. Some of the voided areas appear to be fingerprints, which, from my subsequent experience with church copiers, I take it to mean that there were a lot of paper jams running that page.

The next two must have been drawn for a fund-raising drive. Obviously, the Sunday School wanted to buy a VCR, although I suppose they could have wanted to enroll the Sunday School teachers at the local technical college to learn how to work the new-fangled things. (I kid.)

I do remember how the basement room where the senior citizens' group met would flood would flood during a heavy rain. It didn't flood bad enough to float the piano, but it certainly made the room unusable for a week or two. Mom was the coordinator of the group in those days, and she would occasionally enlist my help if she needed a program during a school vacation.

That piano was beyond the point where floating in water could do it any further harm.

Mom's note on the page with this last clipping identifies it as accompanying Hunger Sunday in 1985. I've abandoned the Bic pen and ruler technique and gone over entirely to shading with a quill pen and india ink by this time. There's an allusion here to the parable of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke 16:

 "Now there was a rich man and he was clothed in purple and fine linen, making good cheer in splendour every day. And [there was] a poor man, by name Lazarus, [who] was laid at his gateway full of sores, and desiring to be filled with the crumbs which fell from the table of the rich man .... "(DARBY)

Q Toon: Down for the Count

Bergetoons, and a cartoon full of partying auctioneers wish all my readers a very happy, healthy, and humor-filled new year in 2019!

This Week's Sneak Peek

Not meaning to rush the holidays or anything, but this week's cartoon doesn't go on the newsstands until later this week. Sure, it'll still be Christmas until a week from Saturday, but even the folks who rhapsodize about celebrating Christmas 365 days a year are tired of it before the calling birds and French hens show up.

Happy Holidays to you!

Dry Humor

The bartender in my syndicated cartoon this week would be out of a job if the politicians of a century ago had anything to say about it.

Which they did. 100 years and a month ago, Congress passed the Food Production Stimulation Act, ostensibly to further the war effort, even though the armistice had been declared ten days earlier.

"And I Thought It Was Only a 'Dud'" by Ted Brown in Chicago Daily News, November, 1918,
recaptioned by Cartoons Magazine, Chicago, February, 1919

After some provisions authorizing the Secretary of Agriculture to act on combating diseases and pests among livestock and produce and to stockpile seeds, the Act prohibited the production of alcoholic beverages of all kinds after May 1 and their import, export, and sale after June 30 "until the conclusion of the present war and thereafter until the termination of demobilization, the date of which shall be determined and proclaimed by the President of the United States." Exception was made only for wine for "sacramental, medicinal, or other than beverage purposes."

"The Latest Autocrat" by R.A. Evans in Baltimore American, November, 1918

The Prohibition movement cobbled together a peculiar coalition of progressives, puritans, suffragists, nativists and racists: Women's Christian Temperance Union president Frances Willard told the New York Voice in 1890 that "'Better whiskey and more of it' is the rallying cry of great, dark-faced mobs." Irish, Russian, Italian, and especially during the war, German immigrants were popularly depicted as habitual drunkards wasting valuable resources and contributing to the downfall of American society.  Prohibitionists promised that banning alcohol would save families from the scourge of abusive fathers, boost industrial production, and fill the pews on Sunday morning.

"Didn't Even Get an Armistice" by Sydney J. Greene in New York Evening Telegram, November 23, 1918

Not everybody was on board, but the prohibition movement had bipartisan support in Congress and around the country. 

"The Last Hope Is Gone" by William Hanny in St. Joseph (MO) News-Press, November 23, 1918

The 1910's and 20's were fertile ground for amending the U.S. Constitution, and prohibition would not be limited to this single bill,  or subject to some future president declaring peace to have broken out. Fifteen states — including nine in which liquor was legal — had already voted to ratify the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution by the time the Congress voted for it in December. Ratification would need approval by 21 more state legislatures; 46 voted aye by February. Only Connecticut and Rhode Island voted against it.

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"Scuttling the Good Ship Victory" by Frank A. Nankivell in New York Journal, November 23, 1918

Moving on to another subject entirely, Congress instigated a postwar investigation into subversive activities at home during the conflict. As far as the editors of the New York Journal were concerned, the chief focus of the investigation was William Randolph Hearst's media empire, headquartered at the New York American. The Journal's editorial page cartoonist, Australian-born Frank A. Nankivell, drew cartoons exclusively attacking Mr. Hearst for the last six weeks of 1918.

On December 3, the Journal splashed three supposedly damning telegrams by Hearst unearthed by the congressional investigation. In one from March 3, 1917, Hearst dictates a cartoon he wanted his New York cartoonist, Winsor McCay, to draw.

According to the Journal, McCay did indeed draw that cartoon to his publisher's specifications. If I am ever able to find that cartoon, I'll be sure to come back and repost it here. Suffice it to say that other cartoonists in Hearst's media empire cranked out "yellow peril" cartoons in the months before U.S. entry into the Great War (see Chicago Examiner cartoonist Harry Murphy's cartoon in this post), with or without Hearst's active direction.

"So Simple—It Sells Papers" by Frank A. Nankivell in New York Journal, December 13, 1918

Surely Journal president Ogden Reid couldn't have been dictating Mr. Nankivell's cartoons!

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Q Toon: Shelved

It's time for the obligatory Merry Christmas cartoon!

Carolyn Aebersold popularized her family tradition of Elf on the Shelf in a 2005 children's picture book, telling the chilling story of how elves would steal into households around the world to spy on children and report their behavior back to Santa Claus.

Little did Ms. Aebersold realize that Mark Zuckerberg had already released his Facebook into the world, harnessing people's eagerness to talk about themselves in order for him to harvest information on the behavior of kids from one to 92. It's not only the stuff you post on Facebook, but anything else you do on your computer when you foolishly think Facebook isn't looking. The data is then sold to the highest bidder, the lowest bidder, and all the myriad bidders inbetween.

Then Google and Twitter came along to fill in whatever blanks in our on-line behavior Facebook might have overlooked, but at least they only captured what we were doing on our computer, tablet, phone, or FitBit.

So, to make the spy network of things complete, every room in the house now has Siri, Alexa, Hey Google, and whatever dumbed-down gadget Cricket Wireless is going to come up with for us old fogeys, reporting to the Valley of the Shadow of Silicon what's in our refrigerators, how long we leave the lights on, who rang our doorbells, and whatever the Roomba found on the floor. They're willing to testify in court against us, and we've already signed away our Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights somewhere in volume 87 of the Terms of Service Agreement.

So you better look out; you better not cry; you better not pout. I'm telling you why:

Watson's taking everything down.

Merry Christmas!