Your Week in Cartoons, Annotated by Penguins.

Baby, it's cold outside with those tariffs...

OK, I annotated it. No penguins were harmed in the writing of this column.

First, thank you all for your support. It’s changed my life, just like the penguins. You all contributed to a life-changing experience, and mostly we can’t say that too often. I am a paid subscriber to a few Substacks myself, which I recommended on this site. Check them out.

Let’s get to the cartoons, my benefactors!

Here’s Monday’s Smerconish cartoon:

This occurred to me on Sunday, and I was very excited about the word play. People often ask me what the origin of my editorial cartooning is, and it’s not an interest in art, although I am very much interested in art and cartooning and have been since childhood. I’ll write about the impact of Peanuts on my career sometime.

Permit me a mildly self-aggrandizing anecdote?

Thanks.

When I was in fifth grade in 1970, we all started in a new school in Springfield, Virginia, in a neighborhood called Kings Park.

Kings Park is where a lot of mid-level government workers and military families lived. Many of my friends had military fathers, who were either going to Vietnam, in Vietnam, or coming back from Vietnam.

For example: my across the street neighbor: Navy Commander. Up two houses, Navy Lt. Commander. Next door: Army Colonel. Next house: Air Force Major. Et cetera. I avidly recall a boy on my baseball team’s father returning from Vietnam and going to baseball practice to greet his son Jim, and Jim had not seen his father, an Army Major, for a year. Their embrace and joy still move me 56 years later. I can still see Jim running towards him.

Anyway, I went to Kings Park Elementary from 1968 to 1970. Funny story: my dear friend Tom Meyer, the terrific San Francisco Chronicle editorial cartoonist ( who started in the business exactly the same time I did) also lived in Kings Park, and also attended Kings Park Elementary. His father was an Army Colonel, I think. Maybe a Major.

In 1987, his dad was an Army four star General and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

No pressure.

We had some of the same teachers, but Tom is about 6 or 7 years older than I am, so I didn’t know him, nor had I heard of his family. But he had heard of families of friends of mine.

“Oh, yeah, I knew his older sister”.

Small world.

In 1970, since the baby boom was in full swing, the school district built a new school called Kings Glen Elementary. I was sent there.

One day, my teacher, Mrs. Tannen, announced we would be playing a word game with the fourth graders. I would describe myself as perfectly bright then, but I am quite certain I was and am somewhat ADD. Like many kids like this, I underperformed academically, was pulled out of the top math class, which I found humiliating since I was supposed to be bright.

The fourth graders marched in, and their teacher informed us that we were about to be utterly humiliated, a sensation I was quite familiar with at that point. The questions were ranked: If a team answered the first question, they got 25 points. If it went to a second round, five. Next round, three. And so on.

Their teacher asked this question: name a word that is spelled the same way but, if pronounced differently, has an entirely different meaning. I blurted out, “record and record”. That got us 25 points and the magnificently stunned facial expression of their teacher. We did win.

So I was always really good at little word twists, which is really the soul of editorial cartooning. Word play aren’t necessarily puns, they’re words and phrases inverted and altered.

Some day, I will write about my college career, which spanned 17 years.

Anyway, back to the cartoon.

I had to look up what a termite really looks like, and thank God there was an orange one, so I went with that variation.

A few days later, my dear friend and mentor David Sarasohn noted that Walt Kelly used a similar pun in Pogo: “First termites, second termites, third termites…” I had read a lot of Pogo books, but am not a student of it. It didn't surprise me that someone else had thought of it.

Anyway, enough childhood mawkish small victories. next:

I knew I had to do another third term cartoon the same day, so I came up with this one. Kinda fun. First I went and looked up whether I could even alter Trump to look like Arnold, and I decided I could do it. Hey, I made him into a termite. It’s not an exact copy, and it didn’t matter, anyway. It got the point across. Originally, I didn’t have a word balloon, but it just so happened that this one worked particularly well.

On those days when I have to Smerconish and another one of the same theme, it can get a little stressful. Generally speaking, I try to avoid doubling up for Smerconish, and can avoid it. But the third term story was too compelling, and I came up with a way to differentiate them.

Next?

On Tuesday, I also had two big stories to work with, and one was a surprise: Sen. Cory Booker’s 25 hour record-setting Senate floor speech. I really wanted to do a Smithsonian cartoon, so I did this one first.

When a cartoon has a lot of moving parts like this, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the lettering and the details. This is pretty spare. I mostly did it with a Uniball Micro pen. I knew the color was going to really simple, like a comic book. Again, you can’t visually inundate readers, so I kept the design very spare. I also had spent many happy hours of my childhood at the Smithsonian.

Then I drew this later in the afternoon:

It’s a very simple idea, and, of course, big legged-statesmen and women metaphors are common. The trick here is to make it different. It’s common to see cartoons of presidents too small for their desks, or being in someone else’s big shoes, and so on. I decided to make Sen. Schumer the target of this, instead of Booker vs. Trump, or just do a gag about the duration of the speech.

The hardest part of this cartoon was the shoes.

I find shoes really difficult to draw, but these were close enough. The initial trouble was the color of the shoes, which had colored indigo in between the black ink.

They just looked weird. Too blue. Not Elvis Blue Suede Shoes too blue, but off. So I went through the shoes in Photoshop and hit them with a cooler toned blue/gray.

These are the things I think about.

Next up:

This was my Sunday Chronicle cartoon.

In a few days, I will show you some of my earliest multi-panel Sunday efforts for The Oregonian I just stumbled upon this week.

Obviously, I could have just drawn this for my national clients, but I decided it would fun to make it Bay Area-specific, as Musk is a particularly big deal over there. I thought this turned out quite well, and it was my favorite cartoon of the week.

The most difficult aspect of this cartoon was drawing a tiny MUNI logo, which is kind of LSD-inspired CNN logo. So 1976. I also like drawing fire and explosions, so I had a fun time in Photoshop, the part of my work I find utterly fun, like having a new 64-color box of crayons in elementary school, which is coming up a lot tonight.

I went to Google images and found a MUNI bus photo first. I saw 29 SUNSET and went with it for the cybertruck. People will notice in my adopted city if I mess something like this up, particularly American Journalism Hero and Chronicle Managing Editor for Opinion Pete Wevurski.

Pete and I have a fun relationship. I used an All the Presidents Men line on him when he questioned something I can’t quite remember in the rough:

“This is a family newspaper”—Ben Bradlee.

He responded that the Chronicle was also mentioned in the movie: Bradlee/Robards was telling a syndicate salesman to go “sell it to the San Francisco Chronicle”. Then he mentioned two guys I knew who were old-time syndicate salesmen, both of who were selling back then and still thankfully with us.

That is why I enjoy working with Pete: syndicate salesmen humor. I am going to call one of them this weekend.

Next and finally:

This drew itself, honestly. I hate it when people say that, but it did. Now that Gov. Newsom has become a podcaster, it’s pretty easy to plug him into all sorts of situations, which I will happily do until he leaves office in 2027.

Generally, I like drawing weird monsters, but am not as good at it as Mark Fearing, a brilliant comic illustrator and son of St. Paul Pioneer Press editorial cartoonist Jerry Fearing, whose work I read as a kid in Minnesota. Mark is as good as they get. Google him. Great floor sense and character design, and just the nicest guy ever. He now lives in Portland, so I got to meet him last year. A delightful guy. Chris Britt is also wonderful at weird scary monsters, a true gift. Oh, and he says chickens are funny and he’s about to upgrade to a paid subscription.

That’s all I have, people.

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Hey, You Betcharians! Thank you for the new paid subscriptions and the upgrades, and thank you to Jonathan Alter of OLD GOATS for recommending me. Jonathan is a great guy and longtime Newsweek correspondent. Also: you should read his book on Jimmy Carter! Other YB recommenders you should check out: Gene Weingarten’s The Gene Pool, and Jamie Schler’s Life’s a Feast. NorCal folks should check out Bob Dunning’s The Wary One, my hero. Hey: don’t look at your IRA/SEP and have a great weekend. —J.