The Week in Cartoons, Annotated by a TACO and a chicken...

Chickens are always funny. But TACOs are funnier.

Well.

Little late to the party here, what with the Recent Unpleasant Distractions and all. Let’s get right to the cartoons from last week.

Finally, the long-awaited TACO cartoon.

While Trump Always Chickens Out, I somehow managed to avoid drawing a chicken. The trouble with this job is that I have colleagues who also have this exact job, and so I have to avoid overlap with my (mostly) east coast colleagues, who have a three-hour head start on your buddy here in California. Generally, I don’t deliberately go looking for my colleagues work, but I see a lot of it in my various social media feeds. By the time a nice fat one like TACO pops up, I have to make sure what I do isn’t like the other 24 cartoons I see on the same subject. Sometimes I deliberately avoid the Major Story of the Day, and look for another subject to avoid overlap.

When I first heard the TACO bit, I immediately thought Trump’s hair looks like a cheap TACO, like the too-yellow ones at Taco Bell. The funniest thing I heard last week was that someone called Reich Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt “Taco Belle”.

The news cycle burps these Free Cartoon Metaphors and Go Take The Afternoon Off things out every few weeks. They’re kind of fun, mostly, but generally they’re a study in virality (is virality a word? I think it is) more than cleverness. I have seen people post some meme that has already done by editorial cartoonists many times prior, and then they’re hailed as great creative geniuses. Bitter?

Yes. Yes, I am.

OK, we drew a taco on Trump. Mission Accomplished (another old GOP presidential meme). Next?

A wreckage cartoon.

I don’t know if I have addressed my love of wreckage illustration, but I am happy to re-oblige.

Wreckage can be tricky. Too vague and it doesn’t look right. Too much and the drawing just gets overwhelmed by busyness, and that’s a fine line. Also: it has to be relevant and realistic wreckage. I always like to throw an I-Beam or two, just for a nice big orange element I can build the drawing around. I am also down for drawing a few upside down office chairs, just to get the party started.

I am looking at this, and now see that I forgot to put in the “T” in the Homeland Security seal, which I was about to fill in when I probably got a phone call. My apologies.

The acting FEMA director, whose name I do not currently wish to look up, said that he wasn’t aware that there was a hurricane season.

Look.

This is how dumb and bad these people are. Period. It’s like the NOAA Administrator not being aware of clouds.

Back to the drawing. Throw in broken glass, wires, spilled coffee, a few big branches through the ceiling, and call it good.

“Good”.

Next up:

Another nice, fat one going 56 MPH over home plate: Sen. Joni Ernst asserted, correctly, that “we are all going to die,” which is, unfortunately, an immutable fact. Another immutable fact is that politicians need to at least pretend to care when they’re at a Q & A.

I have always thought Ernst was a sane Lauren Boebert, just better at concealing her fundamentally bad touch. Being flip about Medicaid in a state where a lot of GOP voters happen to be on Medicaid seems, well, dumb. Iowa is weird; it used to be a fairly solid Purple state, very gettable for the Democrats. Now? It’s not Alabama, but it’s getting there. However, Ernst might accelerate the process of moving Iowa back to the center. I highly recommend Art Cullen’s Notebook Substack out of Storm Lake, Iowa. Art is a great guy and incredibly insightful not only about Iowa, but the world.

Ernst raises a larger question here.

Is any GOP politician now subject to any sort of consequences for the crazy, angry, thoughtless statements they now love to make?

So Ernst handed me another E-Z idea. When I was doing the signs, having grown up in Minnesota (we think of Iowa as Minnesota’s southernmost county), I was trying to think of Iowa-type names.

The obscured name I was drawing was “SVENSEN”, and I should have put it out front. And Doug Johnson and Bob Peterson are staple name items in our parts.

Let’s see what else we got here.

Oh! Musk! Remember when that was a thing? So last Tuesday.

I know, I know: YOU DID MUSK LAST WEEK, TWICE. Well, in the words of a Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid scene, “There aren’t any rules in a knife fight”.

So I did another Musk cartoon, which has barely left me anytime to draw about Stephen Miller apparently losing his wife to the world’s richest man, which, to me, still isn’t a reason to spend anytime alone in a bed with Musk.

I actually inquired about the last panel to my editor, American Journalism Hero Pete Wevurski, because I know it was a little dicey, even for our no-rules friends in the Bay Area. He approved it, and there it is.

Cybertruck Musk AND the Trump he rode in on.

The trouble with Musk and Trump is that they are the two craziest people in their respective fields, and whatever they say today, it likely will be a completely different deal in the morning. If Trump didn’t need to keep Musk at bay, he’d be way more voluble on the topic.

Epstein files? Listen, we all know this creep digs underage girls. Anyone who says they’d date their own daughter is a tell.

What else is in the can?

While it is true that the California High-Speed Rail Authority has been star-crossed, it is also equally true that California is fifty years behind on this. We should have been putting down tracks in 1970, not just in California, and now we are all paying the price. I liked this cartoon, because I got to do a fairly epic wordplay, and it was a blue tone photoshop effort.

“Waiting for Godot” was the first play I ever saw, if I recall correctly. It could have been “The Crucible”, too. It was 50 years ago. Sigh.

I like doing the blue tone if I can. No one else seems to be doing it in editorial cartooning, but it’s very pervasive out in graphic novel land. Sometimes color can overwhelm a good political cartoon, and I also get kind of a nostalgia hit here, because Time and Newsweek used to do all the political cartoons they published like this. It was very exciting to get a reprint in a newsmagazine because it had color. Now, there can be too much color. I am a brush and ink guy, and color seems like a crutch to me sometimes.

I think that’s all I’ve got for the moment, kids. It’ll be an active senior week for me, and I’ll be pumping out the content as fast as I can.

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Hey, YBs! : While Los Angeles is currently under siege by violent kooks (the Trump Administration), I’ll be taking a step back to actually collect my thoughts on this subject for the afternoon. Also, I was completely overwhelmed by your generosity last week with new paid subscriptions. Thank you, one more time. I know, Minnesotans are heavily-Thank You Oriented, but I am truly grateful. Have a great afternoon! —J.

PS: THANK YOU.