St. Wegotfun Day's Sneak Peek

Gaar Williams in Chicago Tribune, April 1, 1924

And to all who celebrate, is that something on your tie?

Something Old, Something New

Today's Graphical History Tour returns to some of my own cartoons celebrating their decennaries this month, but I'm going to shake things up a bit this time and not take them in chronological order.

I'll start with this cartoon drawn for one of the more liberal of the student newspapers at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee.*

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., March 3, 1994

UWM has long had two vocal student groups advocating against each other for Palestine and Israel. The pro-Palestine group posted an inflamatory poster in the student union atrium in response to the Cave of the Patriarch's Massacre, in which American-Israeli physician Baruch Goldstein opened fire on Palestinians worshiping in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, killing 29 and wounding 125.

The Palestinian Human Rights Campaign's poster depicted a sequential cartoon of a Star of David morphing into a swastika. The Jewish student group complained to the chancellor of UWM, John Schroeder, that the poster was antisemitic and should be taken down.

It's an argument reflected in graphic discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at large, and never moreso than today.

If I were to draw a cartoon like this today, I would add a rule that any reference to blood is also out of bounds. You can draw Vladimir Putin as a bloodthirsty monster in Ukraine, or George W. Bush spilling blood in Iraq, or Slobodan Milošević dripping blood in Bosnia. But the moment you try any of that with Bibi Netanyahu, you're trafficking in Blood Libel against all Jews everywhere.

Cartoons by Dwayne "Mr. Fish" Booth and Serge Chapleau

A number of cartoonists have stumbled into the Blood Libel trap since the Netanyahu government's scorched earth campaign to push Palestinians in Gaza into the sea — most recently Dwayne Booth, who draws under the nom de plume "Mr. Fish," and Serge Chapleau of La Presse in Montréal, Québec. Chapleau's cartoon of Netanyahu as "Nosferatu en route to Rafah" was yanked off-line by La Presse this month after howls of protest from the Usual Quarters. The Association of Canadian Cartoonists issued a statement in support of M. Chapleau; he stands behind his cartoon, and La Presse stands behind dumping it.

Mr. Fish's cartoon from last November was singled out as anti-semitic by the right-wing Washington Free Beacon and then criticized by the Interim President of the University of Pennsylvania, Larry Jameson. Mr. Fish has not been fired from teaching his course on cartooning at U-Penn, and no journal that posted "Who Invited That Lousy Anti-Semite" on line has 404ed it with apologies; so I haven't heard any push for the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists to leap to his defense.

for Q Syndicate, March 2004

Moving on: This was a cartoon I drew as a reserve for Q Syndicate, to be released at some later date when I might be on vacation, laid up, or for some other reason fail to get a cartoon in on time. For that reason, the cartoon did not deal with any actual news story; it's not about any particular cartoon syndicate rejecting the work of any particular lesbian cartoonist.

I bring it up today because within cartooning circles here in 2024, some of us are more concerned with the decision by the major newspaper publishing conglomerates to standardize their newspapers' comic pages, because of which decision just about every comic strip currently drawn by a woman has disappeared from print.

Lynn Johnston’s “For Better Or Worse" has survived the purge, but it has been in reruns since 2008. Two other sort-of exceptions are "Luann" by Greg Evans with his daughter Karen as co-author, and "Shoe" currently drawn by Gary Brookins and Susie MacNelly, widow of the strip's original creator.

As Georgia Dunn noted in her strip "Breaking Cat News," "There are more dead men than living women in the funny pages."

Well, it's Holy Week in the Western Christian calendar, so let us open now our hymnals to page ax².

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., March 22, 1984

Back in the 1980's, conservatives upset by the separation of church and school and encouraged by the presidency of Ronald Reagan, were eager to impose prayer on public school students. Not mandatory, of course, but voluntary. 

Fair enough, I suppose. Turnabout, however, is fair play.

Who could have foreseen that forty years later, some tawdry huckster would be hawking Bibles with the Constitution as Apocrypha?

I wonder how many Corinthians it has.

for Q Syndicate, March, 2014

Speaking of turnabout as fair play, it's been ten years since Mr. Fred Phelps shuffled off his fetid coil. Since he based his entire career on speaking ill of the dead — loudly, through a bullhorn, at funerals — it was only fitting to dyslogize him in like manner.

He is risible indeed.

_____________________

* The other main newspapers were the right-wing Times and the Black American Invictus.

Joe Lieberman, R.I.P.

Retired Senator and Al Gore's running mate Joe Lieberman (D/I-CT) has died.

Lieberman ran lukewarm and cold with mainstream Democrats and others on the liberal side of things, so here's the one cartoon I drew of him that best exemplifies that relationship:

for Q Syndicate, December, 2009

Q Toon: D.C. Rider

Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson reached across the aisle to cobble together a stop-gap budget deal to keep the U.S. government running until September. The must-pass deal will probably pass the Senate in time to keep the government from shutting down when the last stop-gap budget deal expires at the end of March.

Johnson needed Democratic help passing the bill, because — let's be frank here — when it comes to running a government, today's Republicans are utterly incompetent.

What else could you expect? Today's Republicans are fundamentally opposed to government, so why would they be good at governing? Most of them hate the government and want to drown it in a bathtub of red ink. They are in Washington to get on TV and own libs and get shares on social media, not to pass budgets and accomplish stuff. 

They can't even accomplish stuff they claim they want when they have it handed to them all put together and tied up with ribbons and bows, like this year's border security bill.

What few Republicans who are actually interested in getting the government to do things are leaving town, and not waiting for the next election. The latest departure is Wisconsin's Mike Gallagher, who has represented the northeast corner of the state since 2017. He has had a 100% vote rating from the National Right to Life Committee and Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, National Association of Manufacturers, Americans for Prosperity, Freedom First Society, and Gun Owners of America.

His approval ratings drop to 92% from the National Rifle Association, 82% from the Club for Cancerous Growth, and 79% from the American Conservative Union; but still, he's no middle-of-the-road Republican-In-Name-Only wishy-washy Alexander Throttlebottom.

But like Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), Gallagher simply couldn't wait to get the hell out of Washington, and is leaving Congress before his term ends. Democrats, expecting next month to pick up the seat vacated when George Santos (R-Living Island) was expelled, would then be only two votes shy of the majority. In other words, if only one Republican were to break ranks and votes with all the Democrats, the result would be a tie, enough to defeat any amendment, bill, or impeachment.

The previous must-pass stop-gap budget deal only passed because Mike Johnson's predecessor begged for Democratic support, which is why Kevin McCarthy is no longer Speaker of the House. Now Johnson has decided he had no alternative but to follow McCarthy's lead. As if to prove the point that Republicans simply cannot govern, Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-Through the Looking Glass) wants to call for a vote of no confidence in Johnson.

And start the tortuous process of electing a Speaker of the House all over again.

Barkeep! A Round for My Friends!

Eric Hovde is vying for Wisconsin Republicans' votes to run against Tammy Baldwin again this fall (he lost to former Governor Tommy Thompson in 2012). He's been out in California lately, so he has been advertising heavily on television this month to re-introduce himself to the voters.

I assume this commercial was not filmed at the "beloved neighborhood bar" he finally succeeded in shutting down after a 25-year effort.

This Week's Sneak Peek

This week's cartoon co-stars someone whom I haven't drawn in a while, and it's not this guy.

That's all I'm going to say about that for now.

Moving on: I've edited a cartoon and blog post from a couple weeks ago to correct an error on my part. An editor questioned my syndicate editors about the name I mistakenly gave Nex Benedict, the Oklahoma teenager who died shortly after other students beat them up in a school lavatory. Somewhere in the process of erasing and rewriting text, I had changed Nex to Dex.

When the question was passed along to me, it came with the suggestion that perhaps I was trying to depict the cluelessness of the politicians talking in the cartoon, or their awkwardness in using Nex's pronouns of choice. 

At first, I thought the editors were confused by the use of they/them pronouns referring to Nex where someone could think the pronouns referred back to "those students." Most of my erasing and rewriting of dialogue had been in effort to steer clear of they/them confusion.

After a few email exchanges, I realized where I had been in error, so I corrected the cartoon and sent replacement files to Q Syndicate in case any client papers are still interested in it now that an official cause of death has been declared.

I apologize to all concerned for my mistake. 

AYBOTYWFYA

Most of my Graphical History Tours of vintage cartoons take us back a hundred years, occasionally fifty. When I dig through my own work, we go back forty, thirty, twenty, and ten years.

But the Big Question facing us today is this: Are You Better Off Than You Were Four Years Ago?

In no presidential election year since FDR has the answer to that question been so stark.

Perhaps you remember March of 2020.

I have very personal reasons for continuing to be upset by the advent of COVID-19: after cancelling regular visits to my parents out of concern about potentially exposing them to the virus, I soon reversed that decision when Mom's cancer returned, and she chose to forgo further treatment.

Waiting in vain for the outside world's crisis to end, we had to postpone her funeral for month after month after she passed.

for Q Syndicate, March, 2020

There are a million other such stories out there, but now you know where I was coming from.

At first, Vice President Mike Pence was put in charge of the U.S. government response to the coronavirus pandemic. The Center for Disease Control's Dr.  Fauci, well-known in the LGBTQ+ community as one of the early responders to the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980's, became familiar to millions of Americans as a leading authority on how "novel viruses" spread and what is involved in creating a vaccine.

for Q Syndicate, March 2020

By the time this cartoon appeared anywhere, hair salons were already shutting down. As were schools, houses of worship, movie theatres, bars, restaurants, bowling alleys, late night talk shows, and — at the height of the presidential primaries — campaign rallies and polling places.

So too was Q Syndicate. Its client publications, dependent on advertising from businesses that were shutting down, suspended publishing, meaning there was nobody to whom to sell my cartoons. 

Turning now to the sports page:

March Madness (the NCAA basketball version) was cancelled five days before the games were scheduled to start. Major League Baseball cut the pre-season short and put the regular season on indefinite hold. (When the MLB season finally opened in July, games were played at first to empty stands and later to cardboard cut-outs.)

Daily newspapers had no news for the sports section other than speculating what teams might have won or lost if they hadn't sent everybody home. I don't know how ESPN, Fox Sports, and all the Tennis/Golf/Soccer/NASCAR/Poker channels managed to fill 24 hours of air time every day; even the ten minutes allotted to sports in every local TV news program seemed a lot to compose.

But they managed to do so anyway.

In spite of having no publisher, I kept drawing cartoons, if only to keep in practice.

And to vent. Venting was vital. It still is.

Gun nuts weren't the only people stockpiling.

Anticipating a breakdown of the nation's supply chain, Americans stocked up on whatever was rumored to be on the verge of short supply — a self-fulfilling prophecy. It started with toilet paper and quickly moved on to bottled water, hand sanitizer, PPE masks, flour, yeast, and even bicycles.

Vice President Pence more or less disappeared from view once Donald Trump started taking the podium at the nearly daily announcements to the media and the nation on the pandemic. The problem with that, of course, is that Trump seems to believe that anything he wants to be the truth can be true if he but says it aloud.

So he stated firmly that the pandemic would be over in time for Easter. "Like a miracle."

Reporters would then ask questions of the health experts standing beside him, who had to come up with ways of telling the nation that the President didn't know what he was talking about without saying that the President didn't know what he was talking about.

What mattered more to Donald Trump was that, while he was starved of the adulation of adoring crowds at campaign rallies, he could crow on Twitter that his press conferences were "a ratings hit" with "'Monday Night Football' numbers."

The pandemic was not under control by Easter. People who still had jobs were still working from home. People whose jobs disappeared couldn't go out in search of new employment. Assisted living facilities closed their doors to all visitors. Soon only hospital emergency rooms were busy. And morgues...

We all remember it, don't we?

Don't we?