The Week in Cartoons, annotated, reviewed, and dissected.

Now that's cartoon customer service!

Let’s get right to it.

First week back from the Montreat joint AACE/ACC editorial cartoonist confab, and it was only a few days later that Canadian cartoonist Mike deAdder was let go (such a sanitary term) by the Halifax Chronicle, where he had drawn for thirty years. Let’s say he was fired, just to be clear.

As part of my.NDA (yes, I have one), I will spare you specific commentary, but it wasn’t because he ain’t cute. He is cute.

So, again, as our profession contracts yet again, so I am grateful for my gigs with Tribune Content Agency, the San Francisco Chronicle, Smerconish.com, and Substack, which is now 40 percent of my income, thanks to you guys.

Here’s the first cartoon.

Creepy drunk fat crypto-fascist Elon Musk, the biggest U.S. Government leech there is, showed up at Donald Trump’s return to his assassination attempt site in Butler, Pennsylvania.

First, what kind of loon does that? How did the family of the accidentally-murdered firefighter sitting near Trump feel about that. What kind of point does this gesture make?

Like he cares. He’s a narcissist.

Musk, for his part, acted like a 14 year old on mushrooms and Red Bull, which he is. He jumped, he exposed his gut (ewwwwwwww, God no, please), and generally acted like he was trying out for the cheerleader squad.

This clown is a pernicious existential threat to democracy, which is not all that popular in his generally racist home country of South Africa, which is where a lot of these proto-Nazis hail from.

Weird.

Weirdweirdweirdweird. And more weird.

Next:

Earlier in the week, Bob Woodward did one of his patented “I’ll wait to reveal some bombshell instead of immediately putting it in The Washington Post” moves. This book, “War”, contained an oh-so-not-surprising-at-all fact that Trump talked to Putin seven times after his presidency. Oh, and he sent him some non-loose Covid-19 tests at the onset of the pandemic, while millions of his fellow Americans couldn’t get them. So people died because of his fealty to Putin, who is said to be obsessed with getting the virus.

Well, shit, buddy, I was obsessed with it, too. I sat inside for 14 effing months because you told people to drink bleach, shove light up our colon, and eat Ivermectin. My hair grew to Led Zeppelin length, and I went blind because I couldn’t go to the opthamologist.

But hey. As long as your Kremlin Slavemaster/Pee Tape Curator/Fellow Mob Boss got his tests.

Next up:

Our former president and current eugenicist asserted, in a very stable genius way, that immigrants have bad genes.

Oh. Like the bad genes your pimp Mack Daddy grandfather brought over from Germany, Herr Trumpf. Also: you did, in fact, have a copy of Main Kampf on your nightstand, per the wife you buried on your golf course as a tax abatement.

Bad genes. Do all those political refugees have bad genes, or could it be the bad genes of your fellow Day One Dictators who run those South and Central American countries?

Guessing here. Stab in the dark.

This was a simple cartoon I did quickly, and I should have made the DNA strand bigger so the words popped a little better. Turned out OK, though.

And now:

This was another pretty simple idea. Probably took 45 minutes or so, but I was facing a real train wreck of a day, so I didn’t slave over the artwork. Usually what happens if I don’t have the time to do a cartoon the way I want, it will probably turn out better and bolder if I didn’t micro-obsess on the shrubbery and grass and went with big, bold colors. Since mostly people read these things on the phone, I sometimes wonder why I bother.

OCD. That’s why.

Do you smell gas? I need to check the locks, and make sure my pens are organized by color and nib diameter. One sec.

OK, I’m back.

I am so tired of the presidential campaigns devolving into seven states, thanks to the 275 or so year old Electoral College, also known as The White Plantation Slave Owner and Tiny State Protection Act of 1789.

Idea: maybe if we went to a popular vote, Trump would go to San Francisco and Harris would go to Mississippi.

You know, democracy and equity.

Naturally, the U.S. Senate is the flip side of this as well. Surprise.

Next up:

This cartoon was a little more like the type of cartoon I like to do. It’s a little busy, but that’s OK, it’s decipherable and clean.

One of my loyal readers noted that I forgot “Grab them by the pussy”, which is true. I forget things. In looking at the drawing, I am not sure where I would put that, but I think it was doable.

Again, the problem with this business is that I have to move these things out the door like Lucy and Ethel on the assembly line. Consequently, I omit things inadvertently.

I am sure there are other anti-woman elements I forgot. I also forgot to drop blue into Vance’s eyes.

I also enjoy drawing cats, which no one is eating. My cats try to eat me all the time, FYI.

Next? This:

Ethel Kennedy died at 96, and this hit me very hard. I will write about this later today in a Substack post.

Obviously, this cartoon is derived from the famous Bill Eppridge/LIFE Magazine photos from the Oregon Coast.

Interestingly, obit cartoons are really rather frowned upon by other major U.S. editorial cartoonists, mostly because they generally suck.

But readers love love love them.

For example, on Facebook, this cartoon got about 800 likes, which is a lot. A solid cartoon will get 150-200. Under 100 is like, yeah, OK, it’s fine.

I really try to avoid Pearly Gates cartoons, and I am also uncertain about what, precisely, an afterlife looks like. You tell me. I’ll give you a free year membership if you can. However, Ethel was a very devout Catholic, so this is for her.

Pretty simple art, but it needed to be. I hit it in Photoshop and it turned out pretty nice, considering. I like to do this “blue wash” effect on these types of cartoons if I think I can get away with it, but because they are very distinctive-looking.

I haven’t seen any other cartoonists do anything on Ethel, which leads me to think I’m oldish.

Next? Here’s a cartoon for the Chron about a fun little story they did on an XTwit account about Snoopy.

A guy who runs a TwitterX account with 19,000 followers decided that he would endorse Trump, and, wow, did the Snoopylandia peeps not dig that.

Good grief.

This was kind of a fun effort I enjoyed, and it delayed my SF mayor’s race cartoon a week, which wasn’t thrilling me anyway. Fortunately my editor Pete has a rather similar sense of humor, so he lets me call late audibles, so I did this.

I didn’t kill myself getting it to look exactly like Schulz drew it, but if I had a crow quill pen, I could have. I did all of this with, wait for it, a Flair pen. When you use a Flair pen, the cartoon needs to be hit with a hair blower on high heat so it doesn’t smear. I like Flairs because you can squash the tip into a thick or thin line, and I do virtually all my lettering with a dime store Flair.

Next:

It’s Fleet Week in San Francisco, so naturally I wanted to draw fighter jets, the secret dream of any sensible manchild editorial cartoonist. It’s third grade all over again.

The mayor’s race is heating up, as they do, and this was the result. I spent quite a lot of time in Photoshop on this, getting those big fireballs right. Probably should have done a bigger, better-illustrated fighter jet in the foreground, but hey. You got the joke, I think. A few more rivets won’t make it funnier.

That’s it for my cartoon week, kids.

*************************

I’ll be doing one more column later today, so you don’t miss me too much. I thank you deeply for your subscription, free or otherwise. If you can clean out under your sofa cushions, that’s about $6.66 per month (yikes—but that’s what $80 per year pencils out to here, and in hell.—J.