The Week in Cartoons, Annotatedish...

Here's the week's pile, kids!

It was an action-packed week for this editorial cartoonist. Some weeks, there are simply too many ripe subjects, and there’s just a fixed amount of time (thanks, Einstein and Hawking). Some subjects go by the wayside because of my writing responsibilities.

Anyway, here’s the first cartoon:

This was for Smerconish.com, which has to be done on Monday, so that’s my first effort of the week. Sometimes the art is a little bumpy on Mondays, but this turned out OK. I can actually see and feel the difference in my brush stroke by Wednesday, because I’ve been getting my reps in on Monday and Tuesday.

While Trump didn’t actually say anyone was controlling the weather, his handmaiden MTG was more than happy to say this. MTG is Trump’s id, and I sometimes wonder if she runs Krazyland stuff by his people as a trial balloon.

I liked the twister here, and Trump’s expression. I can never draw Trump smiling, because it’s so…weird. Unnatural.

Next? This:

This ran Monday in the Chronicle. I’m not sure if I posted it last week, and if I did, I will minimize my text here. Fleet Week is a San Francisco tradition in October, and I think tourists love it and residents hate it because 413,299 cats and dogs freak out whenever an F-18 zooms over at 600 MPH.

I am now pretty quick about drawing the Golden Gate Bridge, which seems to show up in every other SF cartoon. The quick and the dead, you know.

One of my best friends, Lucinda Hitchcock Cone, a great Bay Area actress (she won whatever the major award is over there), and her grandfather was the chief architect of the bridge. She has shown me very cool notebooks from the era. Still knocks me out. Oh, and her dad was a major San Francisco City Hall reporter at the Examiner back in the day. He was very close to Sen. Feinstein. She carried a clipping of his in her wallet at all times, I’m told.

Next:

This was my first cartoon for Tribune.

I was playing off Trump’s weird (yes, again) decision at a rally (I think it was in Erie, PA) where he just decided to stop answering questions at a “town hall” (Bund rally) and do a 38 minute playlist. He did his “I’m a 78 year old senile white guy dance move newbie” bit, which looks like his hips are fused and he can’t really hear any music to speak of.

I enjoy drawing Trump’s tie doing its own thing, and I think I did some weird (yup) ties in the next few cartoons. I’m obsessed, what can I tell you?

Next up:

This is the best art I’ve done in a few weeks, and it’s because I had some time to mess around with the color. Doing color in Photoshop is harder than it looks, so I really took the time to get the lighting right. This cartoon addresses the kooky shit that he spews at his increasingly mental ill rallies, which have all the production values of a WWE/MMA match combined with the Mr. One Flew Over The MAGA Nest vibe.

I like drawing animals except for horses, but I was very careful on the photo references in drawing a wolf baying at the moon.

Also: I should have said “Enemies from within” instead of “Enemies of the people”. I caught up with that discrepancy in the next cartoon:

I ‘m glad Vice President Harris did this interview, but she should have really let these people have it. Since she’s the Democratic nominee, what do I know? I’m just some schmoe on a green couch in Sacramento.

I was surprised that the MSM described her performance as “testy,” given her opponent should be tied up on a cart like Hannibal Lecter, his hero (weird). She seemed like she did fine considering the plastic-faced Trump shill who interviewed her continuously interrupted her.

This is yet another cartoon with a lot of blue in the background. I find this work great online, but can get a little muddy-looking in print. Oddly, I do not really consider print quality much anymore, since mostly we all run on the Internet Tubes now. Yellow is tough in print, and a cartoonist buddy advised me it would be better if I didn’t make the balloons yellow, which I don’t do now because of print considerations.

If I had my way, these would all be in black and white. Not because I’m a Luddite, but because the ability to do black and white is a skill. Photoshop can be fun, but it’s also kind of a crutch.

Now we’re in the San Francisco stretch of the program.

This was about the 135 SF commissions, boards, and advisory bodies (I have no idea what the legal difference is between any of them). A friend who serves on one of those ratified my worldview, which is nice. And she’s nice.

I accidentally made the poor man’s beard yellow in the last frame. My apologies.

Proposition D would “reform” the system, but, hey. What’s another commission? Speaking of commissions, here’s a commission I did:

Guess what this is?

It’s a drink coaster for the Citizen Hotel, where I have a nice relationship with doing house art from time to time. I even designed the rooms keys.

I suppose some MAGA guests didn’t like my more D-friendly stuff, so this is as ecumenical as I could make this with our throwing up a little in my mouf.

Originally, I had drawn two elephants. It looked great until I noted that Democrats are donkeys. Um.

So I did a pencil rough over the elephant mistake, ran it through Photoshop, and viola. OK, sometimes Photoshop is great.

This is about BART ridership down dramatically, and how BART is trying to get the numbers up. That’s unlikely given that so many The Citiers telecommute. A few major companies have an order to get many of them downtown three times per week, but that’s not enough according to BART.

More unintended consequences, people. I like working at home, mostly, because I am very productive. Downside: I feel isolated and need the humming to get ideas. So I make a lot of calls and try to go to lunch a few times per week to get some homo sapiens DNA time.

I liked this considering I did it fairly quickly, and I will be first to note that my editor, Pete Wevurski, suggested the Free Popcorn. I always enjoy working with Pete, because he has the soul of an editorial cartoonist. He always has fun adds and is good to bang things around with.

Finally, this is an illustration for my not-yet-published column on Trump at Coachella, where he indulged his hobby of making fun of someone fifty times smarter and more ethical than he is, Rep. Adam Schiff.

Oh, Schiff is a triathlete (who knew?), so that how you keep that neck down, dumbass.

That’s it for the moment. I’ll put up another column on the movie “The Apprentice”, and my Chronicle column on the immediately above subject when it posts.

Have a greet weekend!

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Folks, you’re keeping me alive doing this Substack, and I really love doing it. If there’s any way you can chip in, fantastic. I’m keeping the access open for now, and I thank my Freebies, too. If you’re digging it and you have some scratch, I’d be in your debt. If not, I’ve been there. —J