Your Week in Cartoons, Annotated.

Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Well, another week in Crazyland. Let’s see what I burped up last week.

Here’s the Smerconish cartoon.

Seems like a long time ago, already.

Have you seen the little bumper sticker for liberal guilty Tesla owners, who were Trying To Do The Right Thing by purchasing an EV? I don’t know what to make of that. It’s like saying, well, I own an AR-15, but I only use it to kill squirrels. You’re either in or out on this one. Chevy sells EVs. Check em’ out.

I canceled my Twitter account the day Musk bought it, and I don’t Tweet out about what a jerk Musk is while doing so, which is what all of the current Democratic leadership seems to be doing. I got more followers on Bluesky in two months (9,000) than I had on Twitter, anyway.

As for Musk’s party, I keep vacillating between him becoming a Democrat again and giving them the $250 mil, and this little effort of his which isn’t going to elect anyone. Polling suggests only four percent are open to his party, but I suppose it could swing a few GOP house districts. That’s probably his only intention anyway.

What else we got here?

Here’s our boy doing the weather bit again. You will recall his miraculous re-positioning of a Gulf of MEXICO hurricane heading to Florida, and he willed it away with a few Sharpie strokes. Genius, really.

Does anyone now not think Trump seems far more mentally impaired than Joe Biden? Biden was slow but almost utterly coherent, but this guy just says crazy stuff you’d hear coming out of a mental ward.

Re: the camera. A few years ago, I was doing a fun little bit as a local “celebrity” news anchor in Portland with Laural Porter at KGW-8 in Portlandia. Laural was very nice, and I managed to get through it with a few read-throughs and a new appreciation for how hard it is to read off a teleprompter. I noticed the camera, which was robotic, was way smaller that I remembered them. In fact, I think Laural was controlling the camera by remote.

Not wanting to look like I was out of it (I kind of am, a lot of the time—my son had to explain who Billie Eilish is to me, which was embarrassing), I looked at some pictures of the newer cameras online. I’ll keep working on them going forward. Didn’t have time to do a full execution.

Next?

Now that 47 has changed his tune on Vladimir Putin, I thought it ironic since his minion Vice President James David (JD) Bowmanvance had yelled at Zelensky in the Oval, and another one of his FOX News media toadies ( who is dating Marjorie Taylor Greene ) questioned Z’s clothing choice in the Oval. So I came up with this.

Originally, the drawing rough was just of both of them from the waist up, which I don’t like to do unless I’m pressed for time. I wasn’t, so I drew it again with whole bodies and some nice columns. As I have said many times here, I like having a nice drawing with perspective if I can. I’m also more accurate in my caricatures if they’re smaller, honestly, and I was really struggling with Zelensky’s likeness in the larger rough. So, Honey, I shrunk the presidents.

Remember my chats about getting red into the drawing? I saw I didn’t have any red at all, so I quickly executed a little American flag to get a little red popping in there, and that helped.

Next up:

This was my favorite cartoon I did this week.

First, I got to draw Ike, which I…um…enjoy. You thought I was going there.

I was.

Anyway, me likey Ike, so I did him juxtaposed against Mr. Anonymous, our masked fascist. Simple, but worked well, even if I drew them from the waist up. Sometimes it’s called for.

Not sure I get the mission for ICE anymore. I think when you take their budget and increase it 20 fold, the intent isn’t going to be benevolent. Someday, soon, one of these untrained anonymous clods will kid a child in a raid, and then, maybe, some people will wake up, because right now, they’re getting exactly what the want: brownshirts.

Yeah, I said it.

Speaking of brownshirts, my dear friend Adam Zyglis of the Buffalo News ran a cartoon that I thought was really rather good: a MAGA guy being swept away in Texas. I have done similar stuff on FEMA over the past year, and the nutmeg MAGAs decided to threaten Adam and his family over the cartoon, leading to the cancelation of a public gallery show of Adam’s work.

They should not have canceled it. They should have a SWAT team there, which we had in Columbus at the 2015 AAEC Convention after the Charlie Hebdo murders. That’s all these bastards understand. Steel meets steel.

What else did I do? I can never remember.

Oh, yes. This:

I think we can now safely assume that Gov. Gavin Newsom is kinda sorta officially maybe going to run for president.

I have always had my doubts that Newsom would ultimately decide to do this, and I have had more than one serious California political journalist say the same thing. It’s fun to be an undeclared presidential candidate, way more than actually slogging around Des Moines in the winter.

Newsom went to South Carolina “at the request of the South Carolina Democratic Party”, and he did. This was the clearest sign he’s actually going to run, to me, and I am still wondering how Vice President Kamala Harris fits into his and other plans.

I’m also kind of thinking (I'm tentative today) she won’t run, either.

For the record, I think Newsom could win the nomination and the election. I’ll write about this soon. The main reason is that he’s a national media star, and people like that. Note I didn’t say “will”. I said, “could”.

What else did I do?

This was the illustration for my Chronicle column, which, as it turned out, doubled as a cartoon. I know I’m splitting hairs here, but I define a cartoon as being able to stand alone. An illustration needs to be alongside the column. Simple, right? Mostly. FWIW, I sent it out as a cartoon.

I realized I hadn’t drawn Epstein before (I know, right?), and this illo got pumped out fast (that’s daily journalism, folks), so maybe I could have done a better job on his likeness. I’ll have more opportunities soon.

Finally, this is a California cartoon I did for the Chronicle for this week. The Trump Administration filed suit against California, again, and wants us not to have humanely-raised chickens. However, 62 percent of California voters voted for the humane cages, so if Trump loves states having control, bug off.

Have a great week!

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Hey, YBs! Sorry for the delay. I was in Reno watching my stepdaughter give a Salvation Army sermon. She did great! Anyway, I’ll be back again shortly today. Have a great afternoon. —J.