Your Week in Cartoons, Annotated in 100 Days...

Feels like 100 years.

Yet another week in paradise, amirite?

Each passing week brings some new calumny, assault, insult, or sheer vengeance to the American people. I don’t know how you’re processing all this, but my strategy has been to become unusually knowledgable about the NBA and keeping my fly fishing equipment in my studio. It helps. Also: work helps. It’s the best therapy, honestly, and you get to read my musings, at least.

Let’s check out the week’s output.

First, the Smerconish cartoon.

Our tatted drunk creepy-to-women SECDEF/Weekend Fox Second Stringer decided to put a makeup studio by the Pentagon press room, so that his body art is nice and fresh. You need to make sure that Christian Nationalist ink is nice for the cameras.

“Lipstick on a Pig” is a common editorial cartooning trope, so it seemed particularly apt to fall back on this. This was a pretty quick effort, mostly because my Monday cartoon has to be done pretty early. But it worked out fine.

Yes, I thought of “Hogseth” and decided it was too much.

You’re probably wondering/not wondering how I color those tats green. I do them in black ink, and then I just hit them with a paint bucket tool and ZAP! They’re green. Same thing with the white lettering with the black background. They start out black and white, and then I reverse them. Doesn’t take too long, and then I can hit the letters when they’re a little fuzzy. Sometimes Your Cartoonist isn’t that great at erasing the pencil marks, particularly since I’m kind of blind in my left eye (cataract). So I just erase the Photoshop image and it works out fine.

Oooooo! I turned up the light on the monitor now, so now I’m not as blind.

Anthropomorphic human conversion works well, and sometimes, well, not that great. This time it was passable enough, but sometimes cartoon subjects really lend themselves more to animal treatment. Trump as a carp is solid, for example. Orange, the carp mouth, and just stick a DJT hairline on it, and we’re good to go.

Next?

Let’s stick this San Francisco MUNI cartoon in the mix. It ran on Tuesday in the Chronicle. MUNI is $330 million upside down, and they’re currently scrambling to make up the difference. If I published this last week, my apologies. Let’s move on.

The First 100 Days was the early theme of the week, so I jumped on that, which permitted me to draw Franklin D. Roosevelt. When I draw FDR, I try not to get locked into the classic Hat-Cigarette Holder-Big Grin photo reference, which is the way he’s typically portrayed. I just found some garden variety photos and worked off that. Again, a pretty quick drawing, but I like the simplicity of the art and the idea, anyway. I always think of different ways to draw something about 48 hours after I’ve published it. Any cartoonist will tell you that they wish they had 24 hours to ruminate on their roughs, which is not really a luxury I currently enjoy. This time it was I should have at least throw in some drapes or picture frames. On the other hand, the idea required simplicity since it’s entirely dialogue-driven. Maybe this was the smart play.

Let’s see if we can find a more complicated drawing in this pile. Oh, yes. Here’s one.

My son and I were talking about the 60 Minutes situation, where their executive producer resigned because billionaire nepo baby Shari Redstone (who inherited Viacom, the parent of Paramount, from her father, Sumner Redstone) wants to sell Paramount—which, interestingly owned CBS Radio in the early 1930s. Adolph Zukor, the Paramount founder, decided to sell back then.

That was a bad idea when he mostly had good ideas.

Shari wants to pass Paramount on to yet another billionaire repo baby, Larry’s Ellison’s son, David, who, I am sure, earned every single penny he ever made by his own widdle self.

Right.

So Shari, being the entitled nepo chickenshit that she is, started meddling in 60 Minutes content, which led the executive producer to resign.

Scott Pelley then busted a cap in Shari’s nepo baby bottom for this sort of thing, which was a true act of journalistic courage.

Anyway, my son said, hey, you should draw the 60 Minutes stopwatch as a melting Dali clock.

I said, why yes, youngest child. It is a good idea.

I then spent a day trying to figure out precisely how to do that. I settled on doing the full painting, which is not called “Melting Clocks,” but “The Persisitence of Memory”, which was my I-Was-This-Years-Old-Moment that I learned the painting was not called “Melting Clocks”.

I did enroll in an art history class at Portland State, which was taught by New York Times columnist and failed Oregon gubernatorial candidate Nicholas Kristof’s mother, who was an art history professor at PSU.

I respect Nick a lot, and I kind of dug his short-lived bid for governor, where he naively thought he could circumvent normal political process, like not sucking up to every single interest group.

But his mom lecturing in a hot classroom at eight at night caused me to feel so very, very sleepy, I had to drop the class.

I did keep the textbook by HW Janson.

I gamely set out to reproduce this more-complicated effort, and was able to get through it with only minor chest pains. It was pretty labor intensive, but I was happy how it worked out. Plus: I got to draw Edward R. Murrow, which was a first, and he’s back in the news thanks to George Clooney’s play on Broadway. If you’re interested in Murrow, check out Murrow: His Life and Times, by A.M. Sperber. I read this about 30 years ago, and Sperber was a Pulitzer finalist for this effort.

Someday, I’ll write about the exquisite agony of being a Pulitzer finalist. OK, it’s worse not to be a finalist. I have a friend who was a Pulitzer finalist for his great book (I don’t want to blow his cover) on a former president. I asked him how he felt about that, and he said, it’s OK. My son won the Pulitzer last year.

Ahem. Yeah, that is indeed mitigating.

Ok, let’s move on.

Kind of a fun little effort for my boy Pete Wevurski, American Journalism Hero and Managing Editor for Opinion at the Chron. I was a bit fatigued by Thursday, having turned in my column a little later in the week than usual (I like to have that done by Monday afternoon or Tuesday), so I was a little slow on the gag writing. Oddly, I knew I was going to do this subject Monday and even pitched it as a column. AJH Pete said, hmm, maybe do that as the Sunday cartoon.

I then spent hours trying to think of the gawddam final panel.

Finally I mentioned this to Pete, who said, oh, you should do Trump and Zamboni One. Now, Zamboni One is hilarious, but maybe better for Prime Minister Mark Carney, who handed the Conservatives their ass last week. I watched the results on CBC with my CBC mug in hand. I thought, hey! A free and fair election! Let’s check it out.

I adapted Pete’s Zamboni thought and it worked. I tell people like you that these things are like snapping Legos together, and I just needed one more Lego.

OK. What’s next?

Former Vice President Kamala Harris gave a Major Speech © in San Francisco on Wednesday, which I also considered as a column for the Chronicle (I went with Schiff instead, and will post this weekend).

John Kovalic, my longtime Wisconsin cartoonist buddy who does Dork Towers, congratulated me on the fact that I didn’t use the copier to reproduce the first panel, a common strategy in editorial cartooning. I told John (who is a black belt or something in karate?) that I wish I could claim artistic purity, but the fact is, my copier printer was out of ink.

So I put the first panel up on my window and traced it with a pencil, and then inked it. It was pretty close, but a cartoonist like John can tell.

I liked the first likeness a bit better, and the second likeness was a bit off.

Harris has been shining the state of California on for months about whether she’s going to run for president or governor. She said she’d wait until the end of the summer to decide, kinda freezing Katie Porter , Xavier Becerra, Antonio Villaraigosa, and all the other candidates at 3 percent out of the loop until August.

Look, I think Harris would be a fine governor, and a fine presidential candidate. Nothing personal. I just think she should get into the race now if she really wants to be governor.

My guess is she doesn’t. Also: I’m wrong a lot. Read all of my columns from last fall.

What I’m hearing is that the big donors are cool to her running for president, but are enthusiastic about her running for governor next year.

Anyway, kids, I’m going to take a break. I’m in Eugene, Oregon for the night, so I need to relax.

Have a great weekend!

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Hey, YBs!: I’ll limit my message here to something short: thank you for supporting my career. Period. Probably my Chronicle column up tomorrow, and that’s it. Have fun tonight. —J.