The Week in Cartoons, Annotated Against My Better Judgment...

This is what we do.

Well, kids, another long week, so let’s get right to it.

Here’s Number One:

Not gonna lie. This is one of my main objections to this clown, which is having to bless him with my attention. This is what he wants, what any narcissist wants: attention. I hate to give it him, so this was a cartoon that should have featured a cowering 64 year old with a grey ponytail.

I was sick of this SOB in 2004. In 1994. When I first heard his name.

I had been carrying the Art of the Ordeal pun around in my brain pan for quite a long time, so this seemed to be a good time to dump it.

Next:

Noting, as I do, that climate is going to be one of the first victims in The New Regime, and that COP29 was happening, I saw Trump as his own belligerent weather system. Wonder what his view will be when Mar-A-Lago just becomes a Mar or a Lago? I’m sure he will say something like it’s not underwater, it’s a hoax, an illusion, a conspiracy so immense, a lie, and a seawall will then go up immediately prior to The Deluge, like it did in Scotland, where, apparently, he thinks climate change is real when it relates to his golf courses.

This was a draw water week, so this is wave action that was repeated later in this series.

Note the Carp Mouth, which I certainly didn’t originate but am more than happy to share from my increasingly-shrinking coterie of fellow editorial cartoonists. I think Nick Anderson pretty consistently uses this mouth. Seemed useful here as a blowing pipe.

Anyone got a microphone to fellate?

Next…

One of my cartoonist buddies, A Major Guy With Two Pulitzers, texted me on Wednesday with the words:

“Matt Gates?!!! I can’t even. He is the biggest dick in U.S. politics not named Trump".

My first reaction was, yeah duh. But why is he texting me about Matt Gaetz?

Of course, he is the biggest dick in U.S. politics besides Arnold Palmer, but what up wit dat?

Then I did the Google.

I think my talented friend, who shall go almost named, texted me about 1:11 PM.

Naturally, being fast and hating Gaetz, I turned this around in about an hour and sent it out at 3:32 PM. That’s a pretty quick turn-around considering. Normally I always want more time to do the art on these things, being a crosshatch aficionado, but I had to get it out the door. That’s the job.

I did fuss over his caricature a bit in Photoshop. These are always the tough ones because maybe you don’t quite have his caricature memorized, but one has to get a solid likeness. I’d say this was a B to B plus effort, but it’s small. I was able to have a little time to hone it electrically. That’s old dude verbiage.

Got quite a nice reaction from readers, even if I hesitated a bit —barely—about referencing the Underage Girl Thing, which Very Moral Christian Nationalist Speaker Mike Johnson doesn’t want you to know about, specifically. Why? Hmm. Trump is one of Goetz’s fellow trollers. Ask Jeffrey Epstein.

Oh, you can’t. But wait for the Ghislaine Pardon.

He’ll do it.

Next:

Another cabinet appointment that even Trump’s transition guy said wouldn’t happen: The Heroin Junkie Fearful of Needles Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. got HHS, which is the third wackiest appointment of the week.

Had to get the bear in there, people. De riguer.

The operative word in these appointments is junk, and not Arnold Palmer’s junk. DO you see an emerging satirical point of departure here?

The French fries took forever. I loved drawing Trump distended face. Have you noticed his new weird —still love the word—combover? It starts in the middle of the crown of his head. There’s more swirls in that hairstyle that John Hancock’s signature.

I met Kennedy when he was kinda sane, and this outcome is so tragically antithetical to what his wonderful father stood for.

I won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award in 2009, and I now hesitate to mention it because some people might think it associated with this pile of steaming paranoia.

Next? Well…

This my Sunday Chronicle cartoon.

My son, who is an amusing fellow and a very good comedy writer, was brought in on this one as a major consultant. We had a bad premise, originally, so we batted around adjustments for ten minutes before we could write for it. We finally came up with this premise, which was pretty easy to write towards, the sign of a good set-up. He came up with the Transamerica joke, and I came up with Snow White Supremacist joke after he said, oh, gotta do Disneyland, and then we kind of jointly heed the rest. He didn’t dig the Cyber AF One gag, so he made it Air Force X. I did the rest.

I was working on a Hollywood sing gag, and he was right: there was nothing obvious.

Anyway, we came up with this one.

Next…

SF local: SF Muni faces a $33 million shortfall, and they are talking about dramatic reductions in cable car service.

That ain’t gonna be good for downtown San Francisco tourism, which is in the dumps now anyway.

I realized I never had ever, one time, drawn a cable car.

I might remind you I have drawn for the San Francisco Chronicle for 16 months.

Anyway, they are really hard to draw, and if you screw it up, you are going to hear from every Alert reader South and North of Market.

Turned out OK enough.

Finally:

This is an illustration for my Chronicle column tomorrow, which I will post. I like simple ideas, and I got it down to two colors. Nice. Fast. Clean.

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That’s it, people. I’ll post again tomorrow. Have a peaceful weekend. Thanks for the financial and moral support. Here for you! —J.