The Week in Cartoons, annotated...

I'll likely do this every week, since many of you aren't on Facebook 24 hours per day.

I loved drawing this. As a Minnesota native and fisherman, I was absolutely beside myself with Norwegian joie de vivre (never has this appeared as a phrase) when Vice President Harris named Gov. Tim Walz. I have written a number of fishing humor books—see them here, if you’re so inclined—so any opportunity to draw a carp or an outboard motor is a vacation day for me.

I sometimes like to throw in little easter eggs, so note the water tower.

Naturally, Trump, orange, mouth size, and carping is a four-fer.

The outboard is from my childhood memories of my dad’s Evinrude. It’s gone, but I have his newer Johnson three horse, which I couldn’t get any hoidy-toidy outboard repair guys in Sacramento to touch. Only Mercury and Evinrude, they all say.

I added the boat license as obvious to me and any small boat person. I’m starting to figure out the Harris caricature, which I have been struggling with for ten years. I think I saw the Rosetta Stone to it, which leads me to…

…this one, which I was rather pleased with. Harris is easy to miss, and I have seen everyone struggle with her look. The pencil rough was better (of course—they always are), but I was happy with her smile.

I built off the WALZ ST. after the stock market burp last week, put her in, got the right caption, which was originally “GROWTH STOCK”. Then Trump was easy as a brother-can-you-spare-a-billion bum.

I threw in the cigarette holder because it was FDR, and YES, I KNOW SHE DOESN’T SMOKE—although she smoked weed in college, much to her Jamaican prof’s dad’s anger about her disclosure, which he felt played into the reggae stoner stereotype.

I did this on Friday morning fast, keeping the Weird Meme alive. I did this with a micro Uniball, with classy Flair Pen lettering. Probably spent an hour on it.

Oddly, there were other stories this week that didn’t involve politics.

Google got its ass handed to it by the DOJ, which led me to draw this. I’ve been watching a lot of Silicon Valley episodes, so I was ready. There was one scene with Guilfoyle sitting alongside some servers, so I did a Guilfoyle face with a more cartoonish hairstyle. Drawing engines is tough, mostly because you may hear from readers who will say, oh, that’s not mechanically accurate. Meh. I like drawing chickens, too. My cartoon buddy Chris Britt and I have a long-running joke about chickens and comedy.

One time about 20 years ago, we had a Who Can Draw the Most Consecutive Chickens in a Cartoon contest. I won, with four, if I recall correctly. If you have something on arms control, you’re probably out of luck.

This is my Chronicle Sunday print cartoon, which took forever—about six hours, and I usually don’t take more than four with this feature. It had to be right: you can’t make up the Ghiradelli sign or wing it on the Golden Gate Bridge. Both required meticulous attention (I did fudge the bolts a bit, and yes, it’s out of alignment). Then I had to look at the Twins jersey to make sure it was true to uniform. I was close. The sea lions: they have be correct, too, otherwise I’ll hear from every sea lion scientist in the Bay Area. An Alert Reader noted I misspelled “Ghirardelli” in the cartoon. Unfortunately, it’s in print now. I am anxiously awaiting the Chronicle readers calling me an out-of- towner.

We call these “lettering mistakes,” as we usually know how to spell things. I sometimes am so hyper-focused on some other aspect of the art that I miss the obvious. In this case, it was the lattice behind the word. Sorry, people.

Finally, I do a local cartoon for the Monday Chronicle, so I chose to do Nancy Pelosi’s new book, which is a hot topic in her congressional district, which includes the San Francisco Chronicle building at Fifth and Mission.

It was a fairly easy stretch to do a book signing gag.

Spent about two hours on it, and kinda dug it.

I also do a cartoon on Monday morning first thing for Michael Smerconish (Smerconish.com—sign-up…it’s a great roundup) at CNN and Sirius XM, and the Trump NABJ Black Job thing was still cooking, so I did this:

I also drew an illustration for my Chronicle column, which is about the political future of Gavin Newsom. I’ll be able to post that on Tuesday, I think. I can’t show it here yet.

Anyway, I will go clean the worm juice off my tacklebox and call it good for the day.

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