This Week's Sneak Peek

Somehow, I forgot to post a sneak peek last week. Not that anybody missed it, but I do try to post more often than once a week even if it's just to say "Next on Bergetoons...."

So anyway, here's this week's sneak peek, and just a few words to try to clarify something I wrote over the weekend -- or maybe just to walk it back a little. Plagiarism is a serious charge, and I still hope that the Steve Breen cartoon I mentioned is not in fact a case of it. I really like Breen's work, and think he's a very good cartoonist. It is entirely possible that both he and Jeff MacNelly were inspired independently by Winslow Homer's painting. I have no way to know one way or the other.

You would think, moreover, that if he had any recollection of having decided to redraw a cartoon he'd seen somewhere else, Mr. Breen wouldn't risk the opprobrium from his fellow inkslingers by submitting the thing to Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year where anyone who owns MacNelly's Directions is bound to see it.

Plagiar-Vu All Over Again

I just received my copy of The Best Editorial Cartoons, 2012 edition from the publisher the other night. Its founder, Chuck Brooks died shortly after the deadline for submissions, so one wonders how many more editions of the book there will be.

There are more on-line only cartoons in the book than ever before, and a few idiosyncratic choices -- there is only one Tom Toles cartoon, for example (aside from the one in the chapter for cartoons which won awards this year), but five by Chuck Asay. In my humble opinion, Toles is far and away the better cartoonist, but Asay's worldview is more in line with the late Mr. Brooks's.

I was struck by two cartoons: one by Jeff Stahler and another by Steve Breen. Mr. Stahler just lost his job at the Columbus Dispatch over charges of plagiarism -- charges which have relaunched a debate over what in fact constitutes plagiarism. Accusers pointed out cartoons which seemed to echo New Yorker cartoons, although some of the questionable cartoons involved ideas which easily could have occurred to multiple cartoonists independently (what Daryl Cagle calls "Yahtzees"). Cartoonists have also been debating where to draw the line between a plagiarized idea and a common meme.

The Stahler and Breen cartoons in BECY illustrate the murky of this delineation. Stahler's cartoon shows presidents from Nixon to Obama saying one word each of the sentence "We must reduce our dependency on Mideast Oil." To my mind, that recalls a Mike Peters cartoon about the Vietnam War, drawn for the Dayton Daily News and reprinted in Time magazine and other national outlets, in which presidents from Eisenhower to Ford said one word each of the sentence "Victory is just around the corner." (One of them must have had two words, but I don't remember which.) Other cartoonists besides Jeff Stahler have used the same gimmick since -- at least once on the topic of energy independence -- and it just seems to me to be lazy to swipe Mr. Peters's basic idea to rehash it as your own.

Steve Breen's cartoon is more disputable. He substitutes President Obama for the hapless boatman in Winslow Homer's painting "The Gulf Stream." Breen duly credits Homer, as he ought, but I was instantly reminded of the 1974 cartoon by the late Jeff MacNelly depicting President Nixon in the exact same painting.

Is that plagiarism? Just about every editorial cartoonist in the country, myself included, has drawn some parody of Grant Wood's "American Gothic" to comment on every topic from the weather to inflation to marriage equality. The same with several of Norman Rockwell's paintings, da Vinci's "Last Supper" and James McNeill Whistler's "Arrangement in Gray and Black: The Artist's Mother." But any first grader is bound to recognize those paintings to some degree or another, whereas many adults are not familiar with the works of Winslow Homer at all. Some cartoonist, forgotten to history, was the first to draw each of those parodies, and the rest of us have, let's face it, swiped those ideas.

Does the fact that an image is already well-known make it okay for a cartoonist to swipe it? Aside from paintings, many cartoonists have borrowed and re-borrowed many images from movies. I have no idea who the first cartoonist was to draw Toto pulling the curtain aside to reveal the humbug behind whatever politician is projected as the Great And Powerful Oz, but many have drawn that same cartoon since. (There's one in the new BECY about Newt Gingrich, who has also inspired a new round of Grinch Who Stole Christmas cartoons for anybody who missed them back when he was Speaker of the House.)

We cartoonists traffic in cultural images all the time, so it makes sense that we'd reuse images that everybody knows. The tricky part is reusing less well-known images that only Art History majors and other cartoonists will recognize.

Oh, and I have one cartoon in the book, by the way. Most of my favorite 2011 cartoons before the book's deadline were about flash-in-the-pan stories (does anybody remember the Craigslist Congressman any more?) which would have required a paragraph of explanation, so I'm not at all disappointed.

Q Toon: Perry Christmas to All!

This past week, LGBT citizens got a good preview of the choice they have between the major political parties next year. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton stood up before the U.N. to defend the equal rights of gays and lesbians around the globe; and Texas Governor Rick Perry posted a TV ad in which he bemoaned as a Christian that gays can serve openly in the military, but schoolkids can't celebrate Christmas.

And by "celebrate Christmas," he means of course that Christians are not allowed to use the public schools to proselytize other people's children.

Think about it. It's amazing how free we are in America to celebrate Christmas. We can display larger than life glow in the dark nativity scenes on our front lawns. We can send Christ Is the Reason For the Season cards to all our Jewish friends. We can spend our property taxes to put religious messages on City Hall (and if you doubt that, just witness the furor when anybody tries to say No to it). We can wear hideous sweaters in public.

In my other career as a church employee, however, I can tell you that what churches are worried about most this year is that Christmas falls on a Sunday -- meaning that the church will be obliged to hold a worship service that will be attended by the pastor, the altar guild, organist, and an usher doing double duty as the acolyte. If we're lucky, some son or daughter of the congregation who arrived back in town too late on Saturday to make it to the Christmas Eve service will bring Mom and/or Dad to the Christmas morning service.

I was taken a bit aback the other day when I asked one of the talented musicians of one of my congregations whether he would be available to play a song at the Christmas Eve service, and he gave his regrets with the reason that Christmas Eve is "family time." Somewhere along the line, without my noticing exactly when, there has evolved a separation of church and family time.

This phenomenon isn't universal; one of my churches includes a congregation predominantly made up of Mexican immigrants and first generation Americans. I suspect that their attendance numbers on Christmas morning will put the Anglo congregations to shame, even though their Christmas Eve worship service is bound to run well into the night.

I don't mean by any of this to scold. I guess where I'm coming from is that I recently read the church history published in 1956 by a Lutheran congregation somewhere on the border of North Dakota and Montana to commemorate the 50th anniversary of its founding. The book included stories told by those of its founding members who were still alive, and the tales of winter hardship are truly impressive. (One old-timer speaks of how their winters came as such a rude shock to newcomers who were used to the "mild winters" of Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota!)

The congregation hadn't quite finished building their church when a three-day late October blizzard hit; after everyone finally dug themselves out of their homes, they had to shovel feet of snow out from the inside of the church. The first time Christmas fell on a Sunday after their founding was 1910; it would be interesting to know what their worship service was like that day. I wonder if they even had Christmas Eve services. When you recall that back in 1906, these rural settlers didn't have snowplows or lighted highways, their stories of getting lost in the snow at night, unable to get home until dawn broke, are absolutely harrowing.

So anyway, I hope everyone reading this has as much family time as they can possibly stand this Christmas. And if there are any of you who are anxious to Keep Christ In Christmas, rest assured that it's very likely that there is a church just minutes from your house where someone would be more than happy to see you.

Weather permitting.

Qtoon this week: Barney Frank Retires

If a public figure wears glasses, and the public generally never sees that public figure without them, a cartoonist is obliged to draw glasses on a caricature of that person. In fact, the glasses are often an essential identifying feature of the person. But some situations call for the glasses to be off... and the My Name Is ___ label to go on, as the familiar face becomes unrecognizable without them.

Such a wordy cartoon!

Mr. Trump, a True Diplomat

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"Most of the important candidates will come. Huntsman has 1% of the vote. I don't think he's coming. And by the way, Mr. Huntsman called my office a number of times trying to set up a meeting; I didn't have a meeting with him; and then he went on a debate and he said 'I didn't meet with Mr. Trump like everyone else in the room,' so, I'm sure he'll tell the truth about that, because he's a Mormon."

-- Donald Trump, by phone, discussing his very own Republican presidential candidates' debate, on MSNBC's Daily Rundown this morning (around the 2:35 mark):

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

This Week's Sneak Peek

You might not be too far off if you took a guess that this week's Q Syndicate cartoon has something to do with redistricting.

World AIDS Day

I chose not to draw this week's cartoon about World AIDS Day today. After 30 years, I'm not sure what new things there are to say about the disease.

And yet, after 30 years, I'm unsettled as to what image to use to symbolize AIDS. Ten years ago, I used a skeletal death figure, even though many people living with AIDS have reason to object to that as a characterization. (And, in my very limited personal experience, I count among my friends about as many living with AIDS as have died from it.)

In October, 1985, I was asked to draw an illustration to go along with an article about AIDS by Kari Dixon for the student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin - Parkside. For that illustration, I chose to illustrate the pariah effect the disease had in those days, when it was new to the public consciousness and there was no treatment.

(You have heard of Nathaniel Hawthorne, I hope. I certainly expected that a college readership would have.)