The Week in Cartoons, Annotated

It was all-Trump, all the time. Again.

I did a rather disportioncate number of cartoons about Dear Leader Donnie Full Diaper last week. Normally I have a little more flexibility in my subject matter, but these people served up one softball after another traveling at 14 MPH across the place. So I did them.

Let’s check out the Smerconish cartoon, which seems so very long ago.

I liked this one. Simple, and Mar-a-Lago happened to have eight letters, which I found highly convenient, for once. Alert Readers suggested that there was something dreadfully wrong with this drawing. Can you see what they’re talking about?

The hands are too big.

I saw that, but I gotta make a living here.

Sometimes the simple ideas are the best ones, my fetish about perspective and light and detail be damned. I got a deadline here, people. Out of the the way, you swine, a cartoonist is coming (you know that’s a B. Kliban cartoon, right? Good).

Next up? Hmm.

This:

Here’s our old friend, the Constitution cartoon.

I have variations on this since this orange spray-painted loon took the oath of office he apparently didn’t read. Maybe they don’t teach that to the guys who took Trump’s SAT exam.

You may note that when possible, I like to draw Trump’s silly hair as it actually looks. I wouldn’t even call it a comb-over, really. It’s like some sort of physics experiment. How many hairs can you arrange so it creates the illusion of hair? I mean, does this guy do his own hair, or does he have a hairstylist? Kudos to them for the gravity-defying ‘do, but, good God, at some point, we all have to give it up. I stopped coloring hair during the pandemic because it started looking like Trump’s around Week Three. Trump has asserted that he uses Just For Men, but come on, man, in the words of the 46th president.

Drawing the actually constitution doesn’t have to be exact, but it has to be close. Thank Yahweh that it didn’t need to be that large. I have seen many cartoonists do a work-around on this, and it’s really difficult. Sometimes they just scan the image of the constitution in and adjust it for perspective in Photoshop, which I am simply too dumb and/or lazy to execute.

Next up:

Although everything is a blur to me in my career now, I think I did this one later the same afternoon. Again, a pretty simple idea, but it worked out OK, considering.

I was pretty sure he said “two dolls”, as in it was OK for someone else’s precious daughter to get shortchanged at Christmas because of these idiotic tariffs, but I note, without irony, that Trump gave his granddaughter a Tesla.

But hey, let the other little granddaughters get by on two dolls and a few pencils. You know, making America great and all.

Merry Christmas, suckers.

Trump was apparently kidding about all those high prices during the campaign. If there was cake, he’d let them eat it. And cake wasn’t cake back then. It was crappy bread.

Surprise.

Did a little overhead perspective here, just to make myself feel better about a simple drawing. I don’t know why I am self-flaggelating here over simple ideas. Many consider them the ultimate cartoon, and I like them. But I also like to flex my drawing muscle once in awhile. Let’s see what I did next. I have no idea.

Oh. This.

Kinda dug this.

I wish I had a bit more time to fuss with it, but it turned out fine. A lot of cartoons aren’t instantly there, and I have to admit I sometimes am not exactly sure what the punchline is when I start the inking. It always comes to me, but sometimes I will even change the caption in Photoshop after it’s inked. Not very often, but you need to know the truth.

I am an Antiques Roadshow fan, so I was delighted to finally have an opportunity to do this one.

Now, why Trump and his buddies want to gut PBS is something of a mystery to me, as I suspect, for example, a lot of Red State Folks watch things like Antiques Roadshow and many other fine PBS programs. Even if he manages to cut the funding, it’s a surprisingly small number, I think ten percent. That just means KQED and all those other public stations are just going to be more insistent and annoying during Pledge Week, which is going to stretch to Pledge Millennium, based on what I was hearing this morning. Egh. Guess I should pony up.

You know, like I ask you guys to do. I’m a lot like PBS. You can watch it with my compliments, but a little drop in the violin case helps. Thank you for the promo time.

Next?

The second, and I mean, the second I heard that Trump wanted to “re-open” Alcatraz after 62 years is beyond me. People always assume Trump has some sort of grand strategy with this stuff, but I think he’s just usually in some sort of sundowning fever dream. The late Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy closed it back in 1963, because it was falling apart then—pipes, blah, blah, blah. Now Alcatraz earns $60 million per year on tourists for the National Park Service. What government program makes money?

That one.

I guess I have seen all the Alcatraz movies. I love looking at it when I’m in The City, but I’ve only been out there once, I think. Maybe twice. It’s really terribly run-down, and one would have to bulldoze it to make it a functioning penal facility. That’s how bad it is. I think they should should get rid of it, myself.

I loved drawing the little bird. People love talking animals, and so do I. I helped but OR-7 and Gov. Jerry Brown’s dog Sutter on the map, and I saw just how attached people get to anthropomorphic cuteness.

What else we got here?

This:

Prison-obsessoid President suggested that we turn California’s Travis Air Force Base into an immigrant detention center, which didn’t go over well with Rep. John Garamendi, who is quite expert at expressing indignation. Before I drew this, I had to go look at the actual sign, because, again, people would notice it wasn’t right.

I was delighted to see that it more than met my expectations for spray-paint humor.

Spray-painting stuff is now a time-honored trope with editorial cartoonists, who dearly love to do this sort of thing. It’s very satisfying; it’s like we actually get to spray-paint something with no consequence. Who wouldn’t want to do that?

I actually knew a tagger about 30 years ago, and he was really unable to explain why, precisely, he thought it was OK (he was a shoestring family member I only met twice). He was arrested for it, so I suspect that curbed his artistic impulses when it came to defacing private property. Yes, there are some cool tags, and it makes train travel more visually interesting, but I absolutely do not condone any of this, unless I am drawing a cartoon.

Then it’s fine.

Anything else?

This was technically an illustration for my column on Trump’s re-ordering of the post- World War II foreign policy/military dynamic in Europe. I drew it very quickly, made sure that it had a yellow background because it pops nicely on your phone, which is where most people seem to look at cartoons nowadays.

The hyphen in V-E gave me a bit of pause in this drawing, but I jumped on it anyway. I was originally going to do the sailor kissing the nurse in Times Square bit, but then my history brain told me that was V-J Day, and would be noted by people, including my editor, American journalism hero and former Army Lieutenant Pete Wevurski, who is always right.

Unlike me.

Looks like that’s about it for now. Gotta get this failing contact out, and, again, my apologies for the tardiness.

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Hey, YBs: Got a lot to do today, so I will not bore you with my tedious loquacious manner. Have a great afternoon!—J.