Your Week in Cartoons, Annotated...hoo boy.

Another seven days in Crazyland.

The flurry of silliness, ego, kooky proposals, off-the-cuff remarks, and various Trump brainfarts hasn’t even reached a crescendo yet, and we’re less than three weeks into this kabuki theater of the absurd. Before Trump was inaugurated, I would tell people that I thought Trump II would be more shitshow than anything else. It’s worse than I thought, and that’s saying a lot.

Oh, but the egg prices.

Which are up, not due to Joe Biden.

Let’s take a look at the cartoons this week, just to kill time between the next goofy news story.

I had been chewing on this idea for a few days, which is frequently the case. I just couldn’t quite pull it together until Monday (was it Monday? I forget, it’s so nutty—time loses all meaning).

I was working on this, and tried a multi-panel approach, which also would have worked, but I decided on the simple approach instead, which ignites the Single Panel vs. Multiple Panel conversation I have with myself most days.

Editors like single panels better, and I still have to take them into consideration, plus I have a lot of time constraints these days as well. One thing I really try not to do is the couple watching television and commenting cartoon, which is a now-familiar editorial cartooning approach. I’m not saying haven’t done it, but a cartoonist could do that every day. It used to be movie parodies, which you could also do, or a Pearly Gates cartoon, which you could do every day as well.

Generally speaking, I do one or two multiple panel cartoons per week, and definitely on Sunday for the Chronicle, which is almost invariably multi-panel.

I really like doing multiple panel cartoons, and sometimes they’re fairly easy to execute.

Except when they’re not.

I take a lot of time with my Chronicle Sunday cartoon, and try to use most if not all of a day to execute it. I’ll sit down on Wednesday and try to get the rough drawn, but sometimes it’s just eight hours of agonizing. I’ll get to that part toward the end of this piece.

This was my third—yes, third—cartoon I did on Monday.

One thing I really hate drawing is grass, and any golf joke is invariably going to involve grass. I didn’t spend a whole lot of time on the grass on this one, but one thing I do know is that I’ll never get reader criticism about how I draw grass, trees, or any associated foliage.

“Hey! That hydrangea is all off!”

Never get that.

Artists will note that I use what’s called a “dry brush” technique, which is a skill I learned early. Jeff MacNelly, the great editorial cartoonist for the Richmond News-Leader and the Chicago Tribune, used a dry brush technique, and he even showed me how to do it. He also used to do his originals in non-photo blue pencil, which I found to be onerous. Sometimes it wasn’t non-photo at all, and it’s impossible to erase. So I switched to pencil pretty early in my career. Now that we all do cartoons in Photoshop, or even on iPads or Wacom tablets, it’s pretty easy to clean up stray pencil lines.

Back in the day (when was that day?) I would do a full pencil rough first, then put it on a light table and trace over it. Now I just do the rough right on the Strathmore, adjust it as needed during the inking process, and call it good. I wish I only had to do three or four cartoons per week, because that would free up time to screw around all days with the roughs. Artists often say they prefer their roughs to the originals, because they’re looser. I do a fairly detailed rough on the Strathmore, particularly on facial expressions and mechanical objects. Trees? Hardly at all. Houses, very. Grass, meh. No. How hard is it to draw grass? It’s just time-consuming.

I did this cartoon in response to the ongoing wipe-out of federal employees, and Trump’s insistence that they mostly stop remote work. I work remotely, and have done so since the pandemic. Since I don’t have an office anymore, it’s not my first choice. I lived very close to my offices in Oregon and in California, went in, hung out, did my work, and went home. Now I’m at home all the time.

Upside: I get a lot more done because I am not distracting myself or others with my endless extroversion. Sometimes I feel a little draggy because I don’t have a lot of social interaction these days, so I make myself have lunch or coffee with people a few days per week. I think I went out three times this week, and did not really leave the house for two days.

Downside: I miss the idea exchange and bouncing concepts off of my colleagues. I am pretty much my own editor these days, and generally know when something works, or not. Occasionally I will call other writers and cartoonists and say, hey, is this anything? I try not to do it too much with cartoonists, because then they want to do that with me, which can be distracting. I’d say every month or so, I might text a photo of a rough to someone or two. I have a few people I do this with, but sometimes I find it hard to discuss my concepts in the way that I need to. So I just stay in my little foxhole. Being an artist is not a social event, generally. I’m an extrovert trapped in an introvert’s career.

Next?

This is an “illustration” which also happens to be a full cartoon idea for my Chronicle column. I haven’t sent it out in syndication yet, because it hasn’t appeared in the Chron yet. The column was on my father’s career as a federal employee, and how he wasn’t a “villain,” in the words of new OMB Director and architect of Project 2025, which Trump asserted he really didn’t know anything about.

This is the biggest Trump lie of all—and he’s an expert, facile prevaricator. Now that we’re in an era of half the American people actively enjoying being lied to, God knows who really cares at this point, during the active scrubbing of inconvenient history.

Elon Musk is showing up in cartoons almost as much as Trump is, which seems odd to me. I see five of the seven this week include Musk, for example. I also note that Musk is on the cover of Time Magazine, owned by the Trump neo-enabler who also owns the formerly-progressive Salesforce, Marc Benioff.

Nothing will upset Trump more than that, because he’s obsessed with Time Magazine. Once a mighty magazine, it’s now mostly like all of the other legacy print outfits: decimated. In fact, Trump had fake Time covers made of himself and hung them at Mar-A-Lago. The only time you hear about Time now is when they have an interesting cover.

Next up:

The DOGE punks caught my attention, but there have been so many subjects I’ve missed because of time constraints and energy (J6 pardons, blah blah blah). Turns out of one of these little darlings is avowed Hitler lover. Oddly, that disqualified him and he left. You’d think that would be a nice addition to his qualifications at this moment in American history. Anyway, these kids are just doing to the U.S. government what Musk did to Twitter, which is simply eviscerating it.

I expect that what these swine are doing will be ruled illegal, but for now, watch your Social Security and Medicare.

Also: that foreground chainsaw isn’t exactly correct, but I just shaded over it so no one would notice. That’s kind of BS move, but, again, I simply didn’t have time to spend a half over redoing it in Photoshop. You have my apologies.

I was talking to a major painter friend of mine yesterday, and we were discussing drawing anatomy. I have never take an anatomy class, and I know I should have. Nor have I taken university-level courses on art. I am completely self-taught. I’ve studied art and techniques on my now, of course, but I am not a remotely-trained fine artist. Probably would have helped earlier on. One thing I do now is loosen up my wing nut when I am drawing anatomy, and it usually works out passably enough. My painter friend suggested we hire a model to draw, and I said, well, probably can’t hurt at 64 to do that for the first time. I have no idea how I would do with it.

Next:

This is my Sunday Chronicle cartoon. Turned out pretty good, and I had been working on a delta smelt idea for a few days (working = mulling it over). Then I read that Gov. Gavin Newsom spent 90 minutes at the White House with Trump, and I immediately seized on that as my Sunday. On Wednesday, I was confident I could write this with my eyes closed, I didn’t bother with one pencil line until Thursday morning. It helps to give yourself as much time as you can to think about even a two-foot-putt idea. So I waited overnight.

A lot of my Sundays have “fourth wall” jokes. This one had me addressing readers about labeling the dumpster, just in case you didn’t know it was a dumpster. I probably shouldn’t have done that, but being a little self-referential doesn’t hurt. At this point, I think I have a good sense of my audience, and it’s not a mass audience anymore. I almost labeled the label “fourth wall,” but I didn’t have the space.

Oh. I forgot my Smerconish cartoon:

I am still kind of struggling with how to draw Musk. He’s so unusual-looking, it’s hard to choose which angle to draw. His mouth is usually set and expressionless, and his eyes are dead-looking. His facial mobility is non-existent.

I know I did a lot of “OCCUPY (whatever)” gags, but I work with what I have.

The color in this kind of reminded me of the way Time and Newsweek cartoons used to look 40 years ago, so it was fun to do. It was very exciting in the early 80’s to be reprinted in the news magazines, because they were in bold colors that we didn’t do in newspapers. It was all black and white, which I honestly prefer and may have mentioned last week. I was trained to do them that way, and wish I could still do them like that now.

Well, that’s about it for now.

Occupy the inside of your head for the evening instead of the craziness. I’ll be here enjoying my toothache, which can’t be addressed until Tuesday at 8 AM.

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Hey, You Betchans!: Long week on every level. I saw a few old friends this week, and that helped, but these teeth of mine. Sigh. Anyway, thanks for your new subscriptions, paid or unpaid. Pushing close to 7,000 subscribers now, which I find heartening and sobering all at once. Have a great weekend. —J.