This Week's Sneak Peek

I'm not giving anything away by revealing that the setting for this week's cartoon is a customer service area. You know the type: it's a waiting room stocked with old magazines that you would never think of reading, except that there's nothing else for you to keep from staring at the other customers because you've been waiting there so long your phone battery is low.

I didn't check to make sure that there isn't an actual Brakes magazine. I sure hope there isn't one. And now I've stunk up my chances of their ever commissioning a cartoon from me.

By the way, in case anyone was curious about the cartoon at the top of Saturday's post: yes, that was an actual cartoon drawn by Mr. Pat Oliphant.

It was not, of course, drawn for the Denver (DC) Star, however. You can find it in the late Gilda Radner's Roseanne Roseannadanna's "Hey, Get Back to Work!" Book (Long Shadow Books, 1982), where you'll also find cartoons drawn expressly for the book by Garry Trudeau and Al Hirschfeld.

It's Always Something

Every once in a while when I'm cyberleafing through old newspapers in search of a topic for these Saturday posts, I run across a cartoon that makes me stop and wonder what could possibly have been in the cartoonist's mind.

"Jimmy Earl Carter's Camp David Quiz Show" by Pat Oliphant in Denver (D.C.) Star, April 1, 1978 

Well, this is not a post about that. (It's April Fools' Day. What did you expect?)

This is, instead, a book report on the latest addition to my library.

I found this 2020 book in the U.S. History section of my local Barnes & Noble. Liberally illustrated with Bill Mauldin's original artwork, pencil edits and all, from the Pritzger Military Museum and Library, the first half of the book consists of separate essays about Mauldin's life and work.

There is some overlap in subject matter in these essays, although each approaches the subject from a different angle.

Taken together, the essays take you from Mauldin's hard-scrabble youth in a classically dysfunctional family and his early attempts to sell his cartoons, through parlaying his fame and fortune drawing for Stars and Stripes into a storied career in St. Louis and Chicago. 

Many of the cartoons in this book are taken from the original drawings rather than the published product, so you get to see the edits and compositors' markings along the way. Some captions got tweaked here and there; at least one was changed completely from the original concept.

Awarded the Pulitzer at the age of 23 for his cartoons of infantry men in World War II (the youngest Pulitzer winner ever), Mauldin risked peaking early and fizzling out. Retooling his Willie and Joe grunts for a postwar gag panel lacked the qualities that made the characters so special. But he rediscovered his passion in politics, returning to cartooning after an unsuccessful run for Congress.

His cartoons argued forcibly for the rights of Japanese-Americans, Black Americans, and women (also gay rights, although that is missing from this book), earning him his second Pulitzer in 1958. The Chicago Sun-Times gave the cartoon he drew immediately after Kennedy's assassination the entire back page of the Extra edition, and many outlets sold that paper with the back page up instead of the front page.

His later years are more tragic; an essay by Charles Schulz's widow, Jean, describes how his fellow cartoonists stepped forward when, as featured speaker at the 2003 National Cartoonist Society convention, he was too drunk to take the podium. Hers is a sympathetic account; colleagues I've spoken to who were there recall the episode with some sadness.

(Many of us at last year's convention of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists were brought to tears watching the 2021 documentary about Bill Mauldin's life and work, If It's Big, Hit It. Alcoholism and Alzheimer's Disease in his last years should have been awful enough, but having a jeep fall on his drawing hand and his later suffering third degree burns from his habit of relaxing in a hot bath left him withdrawn and uncommunicative. The film doesn't end with that, so neither will I.)

One chapter that stands out from the typical book of any given cartoonist's work is Christina Knopf's "Bill Mauldin's Legacy in Military Cartooning," which profiles soldier/sailor cartoonists from the Vietnam War to Operation Iraqi Freedom. Some of the cartoonists in this chapter were inspired by Mauldin; one admitted never having heard of him. The works illustrating the chapter include one direct reference to one of Mauldin's Willie and Joe cartoons.

Mauldin's classic cartoon shows a cavalry sergeant about to shoot his own jeep to put it out of its misery because it has a flat tire. The tribute cartoon by Steve Opet depicts a soldier about to do the same to a computer because it's showing an "access denied" screen.

by Mill Bauldin in St. Louis Sun-Times, Sept., 2002

The same cartoon inspired one of mine occasioned by the financial controversies that terminated Palotta Works "AIDS Ride" fund raising bicycle marathon. I kind of screwed up, however, by drawing Mr. Palotta on the left side of the cartoon and his bike on the right — and the western garb took the whole idea back to the practice Mauldin was riffing on of shooting a wounded horse.

The other two times that I've referenced Mauldin's cartoons, I made more of an effort to mimic the source material.

by Dan Liliblum in Chicago Highways Stripes, November, 2016

So when the 2016 election inexplicably went to Donald Berzelius Trump, my cartoon based on the one Mauldin drew after JFK's assassination was in grayscale except for the barf bag and my signature, two items that didn't belong in the original. My medium was india ink rather than charcoal and grease pencil, but I deliberately tried to draw every line just the way Mauldin had.

The only other major difference was that his cartoon was portrait oriented whereas mine had to be landscape oriented.

by Ludmilla Nib in Arizona Post-Dispatch, March, 2021 

I decided to go ahead and add color to this 2021 cartoon. The Mauldin cartoon I based this one on is not in Drawing Fire; the original had the crow perched atop the flagpole and the eagle demanding his "seat back."

Using landscape orientation afforded me plenty of room to add the elephant to the scene. It did, however, force me to draw the eagle smaller than I would have liked.

Well, it wouldn't be fair of me to tease you with my own cartoons and not include any of Mauldin's, so I want to leave you with this one from toward the end of his career. He drew it at the outset of Bush the Elder's Iraq War, and although the book doesn't say so one way or the other, I think this is how Mauldin imagined Willie and Joe would look 45 years after returning stateside.

"Inside It Says the Pentagon Doesn't Want a Lot of Fuss" by Bill Mauldin in Chicago Sun-Times, January, 1991

Edit

This is stuff that only people who really, really like viewing those Drawn In 60 Seconds videos some cartoonists publish of their drawing process.

I draw with pen and ink and don't stop to take pictures of myself every half minute or so, so I don't make videos like that. (Whoops, just lost those videophiles!) But sometimes I post the pencil sketches as Sneak Peeks on Monday. This Monday, I posted instead an edit I drew to be pasted onto this week's cartoon.

After I closed up shop Sunday night and went to bed, I decided I didn't like the mammoths' dialogue in the cartoon I had just finished drawing:

It had no oomph, and before I fell asleep, I thought of something I liked a little better than "Sneaky!" Fortunately, I remembered it when I woke up.

Back in the olden days, I would have had to paint some white-out over the "Sneaky" balloon, wait for it to dry, then carefully draw over it. (White-out tends to break apart under a quill pen. India ink on white-out, moreover, tends to bead together somewhat before drying.)

Now, it's scan, copy, paste, erase the new layer where the old layer needs to show through, merge layers, and voilá! The hardest part was getting the border from one layer to line up with the border of the other.

And wouldn't video of that have been fascinating?

Beshear's Veto

A perennial complaint against editorial cartoonists is that we never have anything nice to say.

So I hope someone out there will appreciate my offering a reprieve from all the cartoons about bloody classrooms, Putin and Xi standing over dead Ukraine, banks crumbling, and David with his DeSantis hanging out.

I'm paraphrasing Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear in this week's cartoon before quoting him directly in the last half of the dialogue. After vetoing the Republican legislature's bill outlawing all gender-affirming therapy for minors regardless of parental and professional medical judgment, Beshear told reporters, 

“At the end of the day, this is about my belief — and, I think, the belief of the majority of Kentuckians — that parents should get to make important medical decisions about their children, not big government."

The vetoed bill, hastily passed at the close of the legislative session, does more than tread on families' personal medical decisions. As outlined by the Human Rights Campaign, the 

• Ban gender affirming care: The bill will prohibit transgender youth from accessing best practice, age-appropriate medical care – care delivered after careful consultation with the young person’s parents and doctors. It would also force doctors to detransition transgender youth who have been receiving – and thriving – under their care plan.
• Force teachers to disclose confidential conversations they’ve had with students about their sexual orientation or gender identity to the student’s parents, even if that would put the student in danger at home: This bill will make it more difficult for LGBTQ+ students to seek assistance from trusted adults in school, and could put children in real danger if they are not safe being out at home. The bill also requires teachers and students be allowed to misgender their own pupils and classmates, and prohibits schools from recommending or requiring any policies on pronoun use.
• Ban transgender students from using school restrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identity.

The first and third provisions listed above were added with minimal notice at the last minute to a bill which originally dealt only with the material in that second bullet point. That allowed the bill to pass through the statehouse's education committee rather than one concerned with health care.

The legislature's bill is a deliberate slap in the face to one of their own members, grieving the suicide of her transgender son just this past December.

"My child is dead, but I have parents from all over the Commonwealth and literally all over the country coming up to me, writing to me, calling me — look, these children exist," [Sen. Karen] Berg tells TODAY.com. "These children have all always existed. They're just asking for a space to be. If I can't use my own life learnings to protect other people, and what am I doing here? What's my purpose?

"I cannot bring my child back," she adds. "But I can help other families. I can."

The Republican General Assembly has already overriden Governor Beshear's veto, and the state Senate is sure to follow.

But I give Mr. Beshear his due for standing up for principle.

And shame on the assholes passing these mean-spirited bills in state after state after state after state after state after state after state after state after state after state after state after state after — well, perhaps you get the idea.

This Week's Sneak Peek

I don't usually offer sneak peeks of dialogue from the southwest corner of my cartoons, but I'll make an exception today. I'll explain further later.

A hat tip to friend of the blog D.D. Degg for suggesting as a possible inspiration for Carey Orr's cartoon (see Saturday) the election to Congress from Milwaukee of Socialist Victor Berger.

Voters returned Berger to Congress in the November, 1922 election; I mentioned him in passing in a recent post about the difficulty the House had electing its Speaker in December of 1923. (The 68th Congress began its session in March, but promptly adjourned for the next nine months.) He was first elected to Congress in 1910, but lost his reelection bid in 1912. He won election to Congress again in 1918, but the House refused to seat him, and he was defeated in his 1920 election bid.

Berger served in Congress from 1923 to 1929. Only five months after leaving office, he died as a result of injuries sustained when he was hit by a trolley car while crossing the street.

My opinion, so far, is that if Carey Orr were specifically referencing Congressman Berger, he would have labeled the Wisconsin eruption with the congressman's name. As it is, Orr didn't even limit his concern to Milwaukee, for its socialist congressman and mayor.

Just the same, Orr could certainly have had Berger in mind as one of several "activities in Wisconsin" that would "bear watching."

We'll stay tooned.

Dairyland Bolshevism?

Every once in a while when I'm cyberleafing through old newspapers in search of a topic for these Saturday posts, I run across a cartoon that makes me stop and wonder what could possibly have been in the cartoonist's mind.

"A Movement that Will Bear Watching" by Carey Orr in Chicago Tribune, March 25, 1923

Usually, such cartoons don't fit in with whatever I've decided to devote a post to, but I was so puzzled by this Carey Orr cartoon that I had to investigate further. The cartoon shows Uncle Sam, ready with a large club, rolling up his sleeve and watching a rising mound of earth from which emanates the words "Activities in Wisconsin." Meanwhile, a snake labeled "Bolshevism" is burrowing into the soil of Russia.

Being from Wisconsin myself, I wondered what rumblings of Bolshevism were threatening to erupt in my home state 100 years ago, so I scoured the pages of Carey Orr's employer to find what had the Chicago Tribune so worried about America's Dairyland.

The Wisconsin-related issue that was the topic of a number of Tribune editorials in March of 1923 was opposition by the Attorneys General of Wisconsin and Michigan to a Tribune-supported proposal to divert Lake Michigan water upstream to make the Chicago River navigable and connecting it to the Illinois River. One such editorial in the March 21 edition was headlined "Wisconsin and Michigan in Error." 

But tying that issue to any supposed Red Menace seems extremely far-fetched. Besides, Orr's cartoon makes no mention of Michigan.

Milwaukee had elected its second Socialist mayor, Daniel Hoan, in 1916; he was popular enough that he remained in office until 1940. Whatever Mayor Hoan was up to in 1923, I haven't found much coverage of it in the Chicago Tribune.

The Tribune did report that Non-partisan League founder Arthur Townley, a former socialist, was barnstorming Wisconsin trying to gin up support for the Farmer-Labor Party. Townley didn't find many takers on his tour; unfortunately, his National Leader had ceased publication at the end of 1922 due to a lack of paid subscriptions, so we don't have Townley's first-person account of his Wisconsin trip.

"It's Getting So Nowadays You Can't Depend Much on Labels" by Carey Orr in Chicago Tribune, March 21, 1923

Wisconsin's Progressive Republican Senator Robert "Fighting Bob" LaFollette was a frequent target of the Tribune's and its cartoonists' ire. LaFollette, shown here in the darkened back room pouring "Russian Red" into "Progressivism" bottles, spoke approvingly of Russian communism — until late 1923 when he went to Russia and saw it in practice first hand.

"My, My, What Won't the Archeologists Discover Yet" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, March 12, 1923

But if Senator LaFollette were Orr's concern in the cartoon at the top of today's post, why not include Iowa? That was the home state of another Progressive Republican Senator, Smith W. Brookhart, shown in our second cartoon at the counter offering progressivism tonic to a dubious John Q. Public, and here in "Ding" Darling's cartoon joining LaFollette's campaign against Standard Oil's cartel and the Sugar Trust. (Ding is riffing on the recent discovery-cum-raiding of Tutankhamen's tomb.)

And why not include Minnesota, home to another of the backroom apothecaries in Orr's cartoon, Farmer-Labor Senator Henrik Shipstead? The fellow farthest in the back is North Dakota Republican Senator Edwin F. Ladd, so why the heck single out Wisconsin when these Pink Progressives were all over the upper Midwest?

"Outbursts of Everett True" by Armundo D. Condo for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., March 27, 1923

Checking my hometown paper, I found banner headlines about an effort in Madison to meddle in Racine's mayoral election by declaring that the winner of the primary would be the winner of the general election. As written, the bill would have also applied to Kenosha and Superior. The Racine Journal-News seemed to believe that the bill was intended to favor Racine's incumbent mayor. If this preposterous and abortive plan was covered in the Tribune, I missed it, but the timing of the March primary suggested a possible motive for Orr's cartoon.

Wisconsin primaries were held on Tuesday, March 20 ― a few days before the Tribune ran cartoon that prompted today's post. Elsewhere around the state, a Labor candidate made it to the general election for mayor of Ashland; three Socialist candidates topped the results for Milwaukee's school board.

On the other hand, neither of Madison's newspapers noticed any surge of socialism as they reported election returns. One would have expected alarums from the Wisconsin State Journal and crowing from the Capital Times. Instead, I found coverage of a bill passed by the Assembly and State Senate to zero out state funding for the National Guard. Maybe that was what had Carey Orr hot under the collar?

Ah, well. I guess we may never know.

Incidentally, the Racine Journal-News's favored mayoral candidate led over the incumbent in Racine's primary. I haven't found the newspaper calling either of them a Bolshevik.

Q Toon: Send Out the Clowns

When I drew this cartoon on Sunday night, Donald "Spats" Trump had teased us with the prediction that he would be arrested by the Manhattan District Attorney on Tuesday.

As we now know, the Manhattan D.A. wasn't quite ready to put Diamonique Don in handcuffs just yet. The threat of MAGA mob action, however, prompted D.A. Alvin Bragg to warn against any efforts to intimidate his office.

For the moment, that intimidation is coming from congressional Republicans, several of whom are demanding an investigation of the the D.A.'s office for what they call a politically motivated prosecution. Three House committee chairs and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy have called for Bragg to turn over communications and documents from his office and to testify before their committees. McCarthy also complained, "You are reportedly about to engage in an unprecedented abuse of prosecutorial authority: the indictment of a former president of the United States!"

So says the political party that hired a prosecutor to investigate charges of realty chicanery in Arkansas, and when all the guy found was semen stains on a dress, they decided, "Okay, then, let's just impeach Bill Clinton for that."

I'm not particularly interested in the whole porn star hush money business in the first place. The alleged transaction in question took place before Trump became president, so we know that he wasn't having Ms. Daniels spank him with rolled up highly classified documents. Stormygate may be great fodder for late-night TV comedy, but it doesn't rise to the level of, say, colluding with Russia during a presidential campaign.

Or pressuring a foreign government to dig up dirt on the family of a president's political rival. 

Or pressuring a state official to pull 11,780 votes out of thin air. 

Or instigating an attempted coup.

But as the most corrupt president in the history of the Republic, Trump is going to be arraigned for something or other one of these days — unprecedented or not. 

The presidential oath of office does not include a free and full pardon for all high crimes and misdemeanors past, present, and future.