The Week in Cartoons, (Ann)otated, per usual...

It was Ann, architecture, and flag week.

Some weeks fall together oddly thematically, and this was one of them—not in the way a normal person (that’s you) might think.

Let us commence.

My first cartoon was about Jimmy Carter and flags at half-staff.

tThis looks like a pretty straightforward effort. Capitol dome. Flag. Two people. Go home. Right? Sure, if I phoned it in.

Naturally, I have become pretty adept at banging out domes and various DC buildings, primarily the White House. I can pull off these images at a longer perspective, but if it’s closer view, I really need to look at photos.

It’s also important for me to make sure I make my best effort, and revisiting familiar themes and faces is helpful, otherwise the caricatures and illustrations devolve away from a true likeness. I even looked up winter trees last week. Trees are still very difficult for me.

So I actually looked at flag images, as well as capitol dome images.

I learn something new every time I do new studies of, well, anything I draw.

This is a cartoon writing structure I kind of make fun of, sometimes. Unless I do it. Then it’s fine.

“Is it da da da?”

“No, it’s da da da”.

We call this a mistaken identity cartoon. It’s OK to do them, just not three times a week.

Anyway, next:

Detect a pattern here?

Here’s another capitol dome. The original rough was my usual banged-out, get-’er-done dome, but I decided in order for this drawing to please me and work better, it had to be from an upward perspective.

Here’s the photo reference

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These drawings are almost always 8 1/2” by 12, so I didn’t have a ton of space to execute the crowd. It turned out rather well, I think, and hardly even penciled it in on the rough. The second drawing? I just threw it on the copier. I needed the continuity more than the time savings. Interestingly, I showed the rough to my son, who happened to be around. There was an empty third panel. So he said, something about Musk and the billionaires. It was an easy fill-in after that. In retrospect, I should have made the towers look more like they were configured like the capitol dome.

Second-guessing isn’t allowed in this business.

Next?

This was a very quick idea I had, and, again, I didn’t really want to mess around with hand-drawing a map on deadline. I just used a public domain map online. A lot of my colleagues did a similar map, which is fine. Dave Horsey did a definitive map like this when Reagan was president; I think it was titled “The World According to Ronald Reagan”. It was really nicely done. He didn’t invent map cartoons, but props are due.

These “simple” cartoons seem easy, but you’d be amazed how much time you can waste on a copier, filling in the lakes on photoshop, color selection, and so on.

Next:

Back to Jimmy Carter and flags.

I suppose this cartoon performed the best on social media this week. My main issue was making sure the flag was exactly right on the casket. Again, I could have improvised, but these things in particular have to look right to me, or I feel like it’s a fail. It was a close-up view, so I looked at some photos from the Carter Rotunda scenes.

It wasn’t exact, but it was close.

I wasn’t thrilled with the Trump caricature, so I worked with it a bit in photoshop. The mouth was all wrong in ink. Still not all the way there, but got the job done. The crowds I just make up as I go along. I also made up the interior of the Rotunda. Normally I’d consult a photo as well, and maybe even try to get it exactly right. Sometimes it matters, sometimes it doesn’t.

No one ever critiques me along the lines of, HEY! THAT‘S NOT WHERE THE COLUMNS ARE POSITIONED!

You are, of course, welcome to do so.

Next up, California content:

Obviously, disaster cartoons are tough. Naturally, our blowhard new old 47th president fanned the flames.

I still can’t believe he refers to Gov. Newsom in the manner of a 6 year old child, and I shouldn’t be at all surprised. No wonder no one wanted to talk to him at a presidential funeral. The man is a complete mental case. Oh? Did you see fifty five percent of Americans told CNN they approve of his handling of the transition?

That’s the bigger problem here.

Next:

Yes, we have done swearing-in jokes before. The trick is to make it a little different.

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie’s inauguration was Wednesday, but he was a bit overshadowed by the Los Angeles firestorm. Being mayor of San Francisco has to right up there as the most thankless, grenade-filled, no-win elected position in the United States. As Lurie is a low-key figure, I don’t expect to be doing too much about him, but you never know. Mayor Breed certainly was a fixture in my SF work, but she seemed to be more charismatic, a larger personality than Lurie. Lurie’s wife is a longtime top Newsom aide, so she may be more out front than usual. Hard to say yet.

As the no-longer president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, the board called for all cartoonists to envision her cartoon that was killed at WAPO. This was at the behest of Genius © Steve Brodner. Obviously, as a former president, I had to do one.

Here’s Ann’s rough:

Here’s my final:

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Hey, folks: I am deeply appreciative of your subscriptions, and, wow, Ann’s rising tide lifted a lot of boats. Being a paid subscriber gets you no better access (I keep it wide-open, but may add some paid-only features that won’t limit access to free folks), but it keeps me afloat in a rapidly changing journalism environment. I am closer to being fully independent than ever, thanks to you and your paid subscriptions. In other news, that’s it for the week. Have a great evening! —J.