The Week in Cartoons, Again...

My annotated analysis of my own work, plus you don't have to go to Go Comics....

I’m watching Eva Longoria while I’m typing this.

This is fine.

So, anyway. Here are the cartoons.

I drew this for Smerconish.com on Monday morning. The Medal of Honor/Trump story broke over the weekend (I think, I can’t remember), so I was weighing whether to do this for Smerc or put it out in national syndication. I always give Smerc my best shot, and this was my best idea at 6:12 AM.

I liked doing it. I love drawing medals, and I love drawing the flag in the background. Interestingly (or not), I find drawing and coloring flags very time-consuming, but I gotta do it. In Photoshop, I try to to use my paint bucket a lot, and hitting all those crosshatch lines usually works out, but sometimes I have to really zoom in and hit those stray lines, which can take forever.

When I was a kid, we used to call crazy people “mental,” but I don’t hear that much now. I tell people (and aliens from the Ring Nebula) that this job is all about wordplay and not really much about drawing.

Had I had a little more time, I would have done a better job on the medals and the lettering, but we gotta move theses things out the door pretty fast, and the lettering was good enough for government work, as my government-employee father used to say. He also said, close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades.

OK, let’s look at this one:

This is my favorite delusion of Trump’s: that he’s handsome.

He was never handsome. He looked like a guy who jacked cars in Atlantic City when he was younger, or some clown who had a 2.1 at P.S. 256 in Queens who was going to City College because his parents didn’t want him around the apartment all day reading Mein Kampf.

Trump, who is the world’s oldest punk, isn’t handsome. Venality leaks out of his nostrils and his hair, and I say this as someone with dramatic hair, is stapled to his forehead.

Tres handsome.

So I started with his fat face, and worked backwards from there. I was looking at the Jabba the Hut thing, but I thought that obvious, and I don’t think I’ve ever draw Jabba the Hut anyway. I saw a few Jabbing Memes after his remark, so I was glad about that.

There was some goofball intern at my former newspaper who tweeted a memo she had made and said, “I should be a political cartoonist.”

Well.

Baby, a meme is not a cartoon, my darling little 22 year old from Berkeley living off your folks’ credit card.

A cartoon is more than that. It gives you a feeling, like a novel, because it is art and not stapled together on an app. Speaking of which, watch out for AI in cartooning, which is already threatening graphic novel artists.

I finished the rough, put the alien snake bursting out, laid down some orange goo, carefully making the ripped blue serge look right.

This took a long time in Photoshop because the colors needed to be exactly right.

Next:

This cartoon was very simple, and I probably got it done in 45 minutes, which is really fast. The original is ugly. There is only one actual drawing, which is the first panel. I then threw it on a copier, hit “3”, and pasted them on and manipulated the red E around with a Uniball, then zapped it in Photoshop (zapped is a technical term).

The grass took the longest. I hate drawing grass. It’s very time-consuming, and it has be done correctly. I love drawing foliage, but not trees.

This was probably the cartoon that got the biggest reaction, and while it is so very clever, it just kind of ratifies people’s mood more than anything else.

I’m always glad when people like what I do.

OK, now…

I drew this pretty quickly.

I can draw the Kennedys from memory, so I didn’t have to look at photos. Jack’s arm is a little off; I had multiple distractions and phone calls while trying to get this done by three. I made it: 2:59 PM.

I decided to go with a flat, bold background so that the figures would pop. The original thinking was a black background, but it would have eaten the black brushstrokes on the edges of the faces. Bad.

I always have to look at the ‘We The People” lettering before I do it. This version was fast but passable. Not great. I was in a hurry, again.

I probably liked drawing the burn barrel the most. The feet are a little rushed, too.

I liked how Trump turned out. RFK Jr., the madman, not as great, but hey. I have to get these things out. I don’t have time to do an oil painting.

Finally, this:

I talk to my Chronicle editor Pete Wevurski most days, and, if we don’t, we’re sending each other memes, which are not cartoons, but are certainly amusing. I’ve been trying to get my Sunday cartoon done by Wednesday night/ Thursday morning. I decide to do Steve Kerr, because he has a Bay Area angle, which I am always trying to hit with my Chron work. I do a column, two cartoons, and a column illustration each week. I spend about 20ish hours on this, depending.

Pete is a former Tacoma News Tribune sports editor and covered the Pittsburgh Penguins for the Pittsburg Post-Gazette. He’s sports-attentive. I had to talk to my son the NBA expert a lot about this, in the sense of hey, give me themes about Kerr and the GSW.

So I started this rather late in the afternoon yesterday, got the rough down about 4, and then took a photo of it to send to Pete. He approves these, usually with yet about line that should be included, and I usually agree and try to throw it in.

I liked “Coup Dreams” but I didn’t have the space it deserved, so it’s pretty rough.

I’ll probably do one or two more tomorrow (at least one), but I am pretty sure I am going to have to turn around a column first thing after the Harris acceptance speech, which I am watching now.

She’s doing great, but I wept during the Walz speech.

Thanks, Gus.

If Emhoff was weeping and saying, “that’s my wife,” maybe I would.

I’ll do a wrap-up tomorrow on the convention at some point when I get all this other stuff done.