This Week's Sneak Peek

After a decade and a half, is there any new angle on the Defense of Marriage Act?

 Tune in on Wednesday.

This Week's Toon: the Pall Bearer

Cartooning about youth suicide is dicey. It's not funny, and you don't want to glorify one suicide and thereby inspire others. (I'm not even going to link to the story that inspired me to concentrate on this topic, for that very reason.) For this week's oeuvre, I started out trying to come up with some incisive observation for a grieving parent to make, but ended up turning my focus to someone else:

When kids commit suicide, their parents are permanently devastated. Their friends grieve for years, but heal and go on with their lives. But do the bullies who drove them to it even notice? Or do they just grow up and continue to leave their mark on the world by posting insults on internet comment pages?

This Week's Sneak Peek

I was thinking of drawing a Hallowe'en-themed cartoon for this week, but nothing quite came together in that direction. Last week's cartoon will have to suffice in that regard: it wasn't what I had in mind when I drew it, but it would be easy for someone to look at my memorial cartoon for Frank Kameny and see his ghost haunting the White House.

This Week's Toon: Frank Kameny

Readers, the conventional wisdom goes, love cartoons memorializing the recently deceased. Editorial cartoonists, by and large, hate them.

Sure, there are cartoonists like Mark Streeter of the Savannah Morning News who draw obituary cartoons at the drop of a hat. But most cartoonists draw them begrudgingly, usually cranking out a cartoon of a single tear dropping from some object or logo associated with the dead person. Or St. Peter greeting the late lamented at the Pearly Gates with some catch phrase associated with the stiff -- even if the deceased was not a Christian.

(I heard objections to a cartoon I drew after the death of Meir Kahane that showed him storming away from the Pearly Gates upon finding that Palestinians were allowed in. On the one hand, I'm told that there is no Jewish concept of heaven; but on the other hand, where did Jesus come up with the parable of the rich man and Lazarus if the idea of someplace nice where Lazarus ends up were alien to his audience? How do you draw being in the bosom of Abraham?)

Matt Bors has drawn a cartoon mocking the obituary cartoons for Buddhist Steve Jobs which depicted him at heaven's gate. In coming up with a more Buddhist concept of the afterlife, it ends up being less than respectful of the dead, but cartoonists love this cartoon.

This is the second obituary cartoon I've drawn this year (the first being for Liz Taylor); in these cases and several others, I've let the deceased speak for him or herself. This quotation is from a 1965 essay by Frank Kameny titled "Does Research into Homosexuality Matter?" If you are interested in reading the quotation in context, you can find it in We Are Everywhere: A Historical Source Book in Gay and Lesbian Politics.

P.S.: Yes, Mr. Kameny came up with the "Gay Is Good" motto years after he picketed the White House. His picket that day was nowhere near as pithy.

This Week's Sneak Peek

I guess that's it for the cartoons about the Milwaukee Brewers and Miller Park. Thanks to the Brewers for a fantastic year (allowing the Cardinals to score outscore the Rams notwithstanding).

So it's on to more current cartoons here at the old blogstead. Here's this week's sneak peek. For the benefit of any fellow cartoonists visiting this page, let me just point out that those are not the pearly gates back there.

From the Vault: Another Brewers Toon

Of all the cartoons I've drawn about the Milwaukee Brewers, I think this is my favorite.

When Miller Stadium first tried out its new retractible roof, there were some kinks to work out. It screeched loudly, for one thing, and rain got through some areas. I only imagined this problem, however.

From the Vault: A Day Late and a Dollar Short

As we cross our fingers that a return home will somehow help the Brewers overcome Shaun Marcum's pitching, here's a cartoon I drew in November of 2003 to accompany a Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee editorial lamenting the difficulty for a city of Milwaukee's size to assemble a great team under the MLB salary cap.

No lutefisk in this cartoon, although it's another example of having fun naming shops in a mall. (Having background people talking on the phone has been another of my leitmotifs.)