National Coming Out Days

Q Syndicate, October, 2013

Tomorrow being National Coming Out Day (NCOD), I thought I'd share a handful of the cartoons I've drawn over the years to mark the event. There are many years when I failed to publish an NCOD cartoon; it comes in the midst of election season every other year, so I often feel compelled to draw about more pressing matters. 

This year, I just couldn't keep up with the deluge of More Pressing Matters.

Q Syndicate, October, 1998

One of my early NCOD cartoons featured 18-year-old Dylan confiding in his gay Uncle Jim over coffee. Fourteen years later (although I miscounted and had Dylan say it was twelve), I revisited the pair. Well, it's not likely that any of my readers actually remembered the earlier cartoon, so let's just go along with Dylan's version of the time line; here's how I imagined 30-year-old Dylan and 50-something Jim had aged.

Q Syndicate, October, 2012

If the two ever make it back in a cartoon, I figure that Dylan has married and adopted a child. Uncle Jim, however, has commitment issues and is a swinging sexuagenarian single. He probably never did explicitly come out to his parents.

But let's not overlook some real people who have not come out.

Q Syndicate, October 2002

This wasn't exactly an NCOD cartoon, aside from its timing. Out magazine editor Brendan Lemon had written in his magazine in May, 2001, that he had been "having an affair with a pro baseball player from a major-league East Coast franchise, not his team’s biggest star but a very recognizable media figure" for a year and a half. A year and a half later, inquiring minds were still abuzz over who that very recognizable media figure might be, and New York Mets catcher Mike Piazza actually held a news conference to announce that it wasn't him.

Eighteen years later, we still don't know who Lemon's boyfriend was, but one has to assume that the stress Lemon wrote about, having to keep their relationship hush-hush while being very much an out public figure himself, eventually doomed the relationship. You can count Major League baseball players who have come out of the closet on one hand, and most of them did so after they retired from the sport.

As for the football player in panel four, he was just someone I made up for a punch line.

Q Syndicate, October, 2017

This odd little news item highlights the sort of thing that could get the vote of ordinary citizens like you or me thrown out. Overzealous election officials, and those pressured by Republican legislatures to suppress the vote, can disqualify you if your signature doesn't quite match what they have on record. Or if you've resumed using your maiden name. Or, certainly, if your gender doesn't present the same as it did when you first registered.

I hope not to have any reason to keep drawing more cartoons about this family very, very soon.

Q Syndicate, October, 2007

And I'm sure you remember Senator Larry Craig (R-ID), of wide stance in the men's room at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport fame.

He's still not giving keynote speeches anywhere these days.

It's just as well if some people want to stay in the closet, anyway. Really. We're good.

Toon: Pence Flies Off Topic

Considering how many cartoons I drew with Mike Pence in them during the 2016 campaign and in the early years of the Corrupt Trump Administration, it has been a surprisingly long time since I've drawn him lately.

Never fear. After this week's Vice Presidential So-Called Debate, it was only natural that he should make another appearance — if for no other reason than to celebrate the fly that perched on his head for two minutes and nine seconds, during which it held a nation's undivided attention.

The main difference between these so-called debates and an actual debate is that in an actual debate, you have to respect whatever time limit you have been given, which Mike Pence and Donald Typhoid Mary Trump completely ignored. Short of getting the Oscars' orchestra to start playing candidates off when they prattle on too long, however, there seems to be nothing the moderators of these things are able to do.

You don't get to interrupt the person on the other side of the debate, either, but I guess Pence gets points for interrupting Kamala Harris only a small fraction of the number of times Trump interrupted Joe Biden.

But most importantly, You Have To Stick To The Question You Have Been Asked. Wander off into a completely different topic, and you flunk the debate right away. If you're in a spelling bee, you don't get to choose some word you'd rather spell instead.

Harris evaded a couple of Susan Page's questions about whether Democrats were going to "pack" the Supreme Court and so forth, but Mike Pence didn't just wander off topic, he vaulted over the fence, sprinted far afield, and blatantly refused to answer any question when he felt like talking about something else.

38:57 PAGE 

Senator Harris just said that climate change is an existential threat. Vice President Pence, do you believe that climate change poses an existential threat?

39:07 PENCE

As I said, Susan, the climate is changing. We’ll follow the science, but, once again, Senator Harris is denying the fact that they're gonna raise taxes on every American...

Or, at 14:21, Page asked Pence, in light of Trump's current health crisis, "...have you had a conversation or reached an agreement with President Trump about safeguards or procedures when it comes to the issue of presidential disability? And if not, do you think you should?" Pence ignored the question and went on and on about promising a coronavirus vaccine and warning that the 2009 swine flu epidemic would have been a lot worse if it had been a lot worse.

I do wonder about the debate prep these people go through. For the Harris-Pence event, the candidates prepared with former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi playing the part of Senator Harris and former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg standing in for the Vice President.

Do these stand-ins play their parts honestly, or do they act out the partisan caricatures they perceive of the other side?

Do they charge ahead over their allotted time and talk over the candidate they're training?

Yeah, that they probably do.

Q Toon: The Family That Comes Out Together

Late last week, I had a cartoon idea about presidential debates all set to propose to my syndicate editors. But then came Donald Trump's midnight tweet that he has COVID-19, and I had to scrap that idea in case it was rendered obsolete or at least in bad taste by events this week. A subsequent idea I liked could have run into the same problem by today; I drew it anyway and posted it here on Sunday.

National Coming Out Day is October 11, and I'm pretty sure it's not going to be cancelled or anything, so this is what I sent off to Q Syndicate for this week.

So anyway: In olden days, people coming out to their families had to brace themselves for the possibility that their families would reject them.

 

Now you have to brace yourself for just about anything — from "Get the hell out of my house," to "Yeah, we know," to — well, this young man's parents.

Who might be sending a subtle message in case anybody was thinking about moving back home next summer.

This Week's Sneak Peek

 Is it Monday already? Is it still only October?

I checked in on a couple of the panels at Cartoons Crossroads this weekend: one on preserving one's artwork, and another on "May You Cartoon in Interesting Times."

The latter, with KAL Kallaugher, Jen Sorensen, Eric Garcia, Pat Bagley, David Brown, and Angelo Lopez, was very interesting (except that my browser started freezing and skipping ahead a lot toward the end). I really wish I had not needed to leave before the preservation presentation was finished.

I already use acid-free paper and India ink, and I've learned never to use rubber cement, or to mix newspaper pages in with my originals. I would like to have heard or asked about such media as white-out and gesso. I'm also curious about fixatives for charcoal. I almost never use charcoal any more, but there was a time in the 1980's when I did. 

A college professor had recommended using hair spray to keep charcoal from smudging, and as far as that goes, it works just fine. A small amount of charcoal from my 1980's cartoons has rubbed off onto the back of adjacent pages, but nothing has discolored.

Yet.

The last time I used charcoal on a cartoon was in 2006 to depict the aftermath of an explosion. In case I ever want to draw another cartoon like it, I may still have a 40-year-old can of AquaNet down in the basement somewhere.

Anybody know how long that stuff lasts?

 

Karma Comedian

So Donald Joffrey Trump has a date with Rona... Laissez la Schadenfreude rouler!

Before we get carried away, however, Business Insider notes that "Trumpworld delighted in cruelty; now that Trump has COVID, it demands empathy":

Whether he was mocking a disabled reporter's affliction and delighting in Hillary Clinton's health travails on the 2016 campaign trail or separating migrant children with Down syndrome from their parents and ridiculing Joe Biden's son's struggle with drug addiction during his time in office — Trump supporters can't get enough of the Dear Leader triggering the libs, or really anyone with a conscience.

To his fervent supporters, Trump's callous viciousness is funny. It's the humorless politically correct scolds and loser Never Trumper conservatives who need to lighten up, they say.

Now that President Trump and first lady Melania have tested positive for COVID-19, Trumpworld has discovered the value of empathy. And they are shocked — shocked! — that some of Trump's critics have delighted in the irony of Trump's coronavirus denialism contributing to his own infection.

Just last Tuesday at the so-called debate, Trump criticized Joe Biden for wearing a mask in public; and Trump's entourage refused to wear masks at the debate in spite of that being a requirement for everyone in attendance.

Nevertheless, I don't feel delighted that Trump — and more and more people present when Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court — has caught a virus that has been quite lethal to Americans in his age and weight bracket.

Because karma (yes, I know I mean hubris) is indeed a bitch. But she doesn't discriminate and shows no favors.

Nickel Movies and the League

"Freeneasy Film Company Presents" by Frederick Opper for International Feature Service, ca, October 1, 1920

In my round-up of September, 1920 editorial cartoons about that year's presidential race, I shared some of Frederick Opper's series lampooning Democratic nominee James Cox as the hapless stepfather of Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points. I'll kick these October cartoons off with some more installments from Opper's series, supposed to evoke the popular moving picture serials of the day.

"Jimmy and His War Bride" by Frederick Opper for International Feature Service, ca. Oct. 2, 1920

In October, Opper (or his editors) changed the title of his series from "Freeneasy Film Company Presents" to "Jimmy and His War Bride." Opper has a low opinion of the dowdy bride, representing the League of Nations, or her fourteen offspring, who look less and less like actual children by this point. 

Cartoon historians will recognize Opper as the creator of "And Her Name Was Maud!", a comic strip about a mule who looked very much like the Cox family's "educated donkey, Dopo."

"Jimmy and His War Bride" by F. Opper for International Feature Service, ca. Oct. 4, 1920

By drawing the Fourteen points more doll-like than child-like, Opper was able to get away with suggesting that they might be thrown to the wolves. Had they retained the individuality they had at the beginning of the series, someone in Opper's audience might have felt some sympathy for their plight.

"Jimmy and His War Bride" by F. Opper for International Feature Service, ca. Oct. 6, 1920

Well, that's quite enough of that. Being October, there was plenty of other entertainment besides the movies.

"World's Series: Over the Fence" by Thomas E. Powers in New York Evening Journal, ca. Oct. 7, 1920

T.E. Powers notes baseball's World Series to depict Republican nominee Warren Harding and his bat of "Common Sense" knocking Cox's "League Question" pitch out of the park all the way to England. I suspect, however, that he might have found the Democrat more fun to draw. Very few of Powers caricatures are so artlessly bland as this one of Harding.

"If We Were in the League" by Winsor McCay in New York American, ca. Oct. 16, 1920

Winsor McCay, with his meticulous style and perspective, perhaps enjoyed drawing all these tombstones.

"What They Call Harmony" by Rollin Kirby in New York World, ca. Oct. 24, 1920

I have to give Democratic cartoonists a break, even if not equal time; so here's a brief musical intermission from Rollin Kirby before the next feature film begins.

"Go! And Don't You Never Come Back" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Collier's, October 9, 1920

Returning to our moving pictures theme: "Ding" Darling departs from the cross-hatching style he used for newspapers, employing ink wash and (I suspect,) charcoal to evoke an ominous scene from melodrama in this cartoon for Colllier's magazine. Republican presidential nominee Warren Harding, backed by Senators Borah and Johnson, throws the film's heroine out to the blizzard. Sheltering Little Miss League of Nations are three past and future Republican nominees for president: William Howard Taft (1908), Herbert Hoover (1928), and Charles Evans Hughes (1916).

"Preserving American Independence" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Collier's, October 23, 1920

I can't be absolutely sure what media Ding used for his October 9 cartoon, but later cartoons for Collier's, such as this October 23 opus, suggest that he was happy to use ink wash for the superior reproduction capabilities of the weekly magazine as contrasted with daily newspapers.

✍

Leaping forward for a moment to the present day, there is no precedent for a presidential candidate — let alone the incumbent president — falling seriously ill this close to an election. Had President Woodrow Wilson pressed his interest in being re-nominated for a third term in 1920, the U.S. might have faced the same prospect.

Wilson had a history of petit mal strokes as early as 1896, but a series of strokes in September and October of 1919 left him paralyzed on his left side and blind in his right eye. Unbeknownst to the nation, Edith Wilson took over the everyday duties of the presidency during her husband's recuperation. He was unwilling to resign his office, and Vice President Marshall had no authority to wrest it from him.

While Wilson officially withdrew from the presidential race early in 1920, he withheld support from the party's strongest candidate, his own son-in-law James MacAdoo, still holding out hope that a deadlocked Democratic convention would come back to him for a third term. Not surprisingly, the party never seriously considered that option.

With Inauguration Day still over a month away, Wilson was bedridden with influenza in January, 1921, but survived until February 3, 1924. 

Of course, Warren Harding wouldn't survive the next presidential term, either; Wilson attended his successor's funeral.

Toon: Temper Tantrump

Here's one more cartoon for good measure this week. 

Mr. Trump's performance at Tuesday's so-called debate has got people trying to figure out how to get the overgrown spoiled brat who literally cannot shut up for two minutes to adhere to the rules. He interrupted Joe Biden over six dozen times*, and not for quick outbursts, either. Again and again, and yet again and even more agains, he insisted on shouting over the Democratic nominee and the moderator, Chris Wallace, as well.

Proposals for any future debates include giving the moderator the ability to cut off the president's microphone, or having as moderator a middle school teacher. We could go so far as to hold the next debate on Ellen DeGeneres's "Game of Games" set, where the talk show host could open the floor beneath either candidate for infractions, or dump chocolate pudding on them, or strap them in place and yank them offstage through the wall.

But Ms. DeGeneres is trying to reclaim her image as a nice person these days, so perhaps she wouldn't be interested.

__________

* Update: Chris Wallace said on Fox News today that Trump interrupted Biden 145 times. But who's counting?