Comic Strip of the Day.com

Gimmie an "S"! Gimmie an "O"! Gimmie a "T"! Gimmie a "U"!

Jack Ohman gets the lead panel today largely for having done a cartoon before the State of the Union Address that did not assume he knew what the speech would say. I saw several that I suspect involved ouija boards and guessing and going to bed early.

I had the NPR coverage of the speech on last night as I crashed, and I dozed off from time to time, but I caught the main points, I think, and then I checked out the coverage this morning, and it pretty much confirmed my impression of the main message:

Republicans rule and Democrats drool.

 

There is no Constitutional requirement that the President make a State of the Union speech. Article II, section 3 simply says:

He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper; he shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers; he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States.

We can deal with that "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed" thing another time, but the point is that not only does it not have to be a speech but there's nothing requiring it to be annual. "From time to time" could be every two years or every two weeks. 

We went nearly 125 years before Woodrow Wilson decided to make an actual State of the Union Address, and I don't know how it went that year, but it's been a big pep rally for as long as I've been aware of it.

Having gone to a Catholic school at which football played a disproportionate role, I am quite familiar with the way religion and pep rallies can merge, though I'd add that, while I saw Pat O'Brien reprise Rockne's semi-apocryphal "Gipper" speech to cheering throngs, I don't recall any pep rallies where half the Fieldhouse was full of silent, sullen Southern Cal students.

Though I enjoyed the games themselves, I went to my last pep rally sometime sophomore year, which is to say, as I was turning 19, which I mention because I heard chants of "USA! USA!" last night and it reminded me of drunken freshmen.

At least they weren't building pyramids in the aisles, or, if they were, the NPR commentators didn't mention it.

Anyway, it was a chance to boast and cheer and make outlandish promises about the upcoming game, and if you're one of those serious types, you might want to read this, but, beyond that, hey, four legs good, two legs better!

Oh, and you may want to stay off the airfield tonight, because the White House has made a deal to get rid of all that Egyptian cotton.

And what's good for Manafort & Miller Enterprises is good for the country!

 

Juxtaposition of the Day

(David Rowe)

(Ann Telnaes)

Yes, I also noticed that bizarre reference to "clean, clean coal," which I guess either means we've begun mining for diamonds or that Dear Leader is once again being led around by the nose.

Hillary Clinton called for laid-off coal miners to be educated for new jobs in their home regions, but Trump won because he promised they would go back to mining coal. Which very, very few of them have. 

But now he's got a great idea which maybe Hillary should have thought of: Vocational schools to teach people job skills.

Anyway, the President is correct that we are now exporting energy, and that's good.

Of course, we are also importing energy.

In fact, as it happens, we're currently importing more energy than we''re exporting, but that's just negativity and we should fire anyone who is so disloyal.

And so we're going to make it easier to do that, too. 

 

We've got lots of work ahead to fulfill our priorities, and Jeff Boyer illustrated this before the SOTU speech: We must keep our country safe from people who weren't born here.

The first thing we need to do is build a wall between the US and Mexico to keep Salvadorans from simply walking across our border to Long Island, and five-year-old children from walking from Poland across our border to Michigan and becoming doctors.

Because Americans are dreamers too. 

 

Watch your inbox

I'm sure all our inboxes will now begin to look like the one in xkcd.

At least, when you give some good cause a few bucks and then are continually spammed for more, it doesn't cost them money. I wish I had never donated to a few that decided my contribution would best serve the world by being pissed away in junk mail and postage.

It makes me disinclined to donate to anyone, given that I'm at a stage of life where I can't just throw money around.

But I particularly resent politicians who allow phony "polls" to be put on Facebook in their names -- polls that purport to collect opinions but, at the end, are simply collecting money.

It's bad enough to let your professional fundraisers make me disinclined to donate to you.

Don't let them make me disinclined to trust you at all.

 

And yet there is hope. Sort of. Maybe.

Plato spoke of the prisoner who escapes the cave and discovers the nature of reality, and tries to persuade his former prisoners to join him in the light.

Existential Comics updates it for our times, in which any truth that doesn't involve blowing things up is not really very compelling.

He does link to a more traditional telling, and, though the allegory comes up often, it had been a long time since I'd actually heard it in its entirety:

 Reality ain't for sissies.

The midway is only half way

Anne Morse Hambrock asks the right question, though it is less about what the Learning Channel puts on than why they are successful.

That is, the Learning Channel has discovered that you can't bring in viewers with interesting documentaries but you can do so by mounting a freak show. And numbers are the point, so out comes JoJo The Dog-Faced Boy.

JoJo -- Fyodor Jeftichew -- is described in this Wikipedia article as a "sideshow performer," his "performance" being to bark and howl as Barnum described his subhuman existence in the wilds. In fact, the article goes on to say, he spoke three languages.

And he was a second-generation freak: His father, who had the same odd affliction, had toured with circuses. And perhaps they could have been very good blacksmiths or farmers or storekeepers, but they probably made more money letting people stare at them and selling little souvenir photos like the one here.

It was their choice, just as it's the choice of a topless dancer to let men pay to stare at her breasts or the choice of a prostitute to let men pay to get even closer. 

It's up to the public to decide what they will pay for.

There are no prostitutes where there are no johns, and there are prostitutes in every culture around the world.

And while there is a difference between buying a ticket to stare at JoJo and dropping a penny in a beggar's bowl, there would be neither inspiration porn nor poverty porn if it didn't make people reach into their wallets.

It's a good question to put to God, because the followers of the Book -- Jewish, Muslim or Christian -- are challenged by their religions to consider such things, and I suppose there'd be no reason to challenge them if they didn't so often come up short.

There was a time, however brief, in which we were ashamed that we'd ever had freak shows in this country.

We were also ashamed that we'd ever laughed at Jerry Lewis, and marveled that the French considered him a genius. We preferred the intellectual comedy of Lenny Bruce, of Shelly Berman, of Bob Newhart.

Maybe you needed to be there, because we're back to laughing at people who pretend to be clumsy, stupid and socially inept -- or perhaps may actually be -- and we tune in to watch freak shows on the Learning Channel and several other cable outlets and when they aren't bizarre enough we go to Youtube.

So here's a misprint on a ticket to tonight's State of the Union visitors' gallery, and it's not only hilarious but proof that Donald Trump is an incompetent president.

Because of course he personally checked off on the proof sheet. Or maybe it was a Cabinet Secretary, so it's still, really, his fault.

If it were simply the work of some low-level printshop employee deep in the bowels of the Capitol building, that wouldn't be funny.

Unless the Learning Channel decided to start a show called "America's Funniest Fuckups" in which we would howl over stupid people in crappy jobs.

At which point it would be hilarious, by acclamation.

 

Juxtaposition of the Day

(RJ Matson)

(Marshall Ramsey)

Can't lay it out much more plainly than this, and don't overlook those stock ticker abbreviations on Matson's cartoon.

But the success of the Dow doesn't mean a damn thing to the guy in Marshall Ramsey's cartoon and, if you believe it does, you're part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Bob is not a freak. He's just a normal guy, though maybe that's his only jacket and tie, right there, that he only wears on special occasions.

There are plenty of normal people who look like Bob, and, when you focus on the freak show, you take attention away from them.

I saw three cartoons from cartoonists whose work I respect that were about how the "real" State of the Union is how Melania Trump must feel over the Stormy Daniels thing.

Hurray! Hurray! Step this way! Did you think it was an ideal marriage? Were you under the impression that he was a good, faithful and attentive husband?

Only one thin dime, the tenth part of a dollar, step right this way!

And here's a washed-up political hack reading a passage from "Fire and Fury" on the Grammys! Hilarious!

Right here on our midway!

 

Meanwhile, Pat Bagley offers a re-write of How A Bill Becomes A Law, and it's a helluva lot more important than whether the Trump marriage could become more dysfunctional.

At this point, you may well be asking, "Who pissed in your cornflakes?" and so I will tell you:

Franklin Foer has taken a giant whizz in my corn flakes.

His Atlantic cover story, "The Plot Against America: Paul Manafort and the Fall of Washington" may be the most chilling piece of reporting I've read in several years.

We all have this sense that we're not being heard, that only the plutocrats have a voice in our government, and that it wasn't always like this.

Foer traces where things went off the rails, and if you think Trump just sprang from the foolish anger of grubby people in roadside diners far from where you get your macchiato, you are missing the picture entirely.

"Have you no decency?" wasn't the end. It only signaled a pause.

I was surprised, a year or so ago, to learn that Roy Cohn, a villain I associate with the McCarthy Era, was around long enough to be an active influence on Donald Trump. The McCarthy Era wrapped up before I entered kindergarten, and Trump is only a few years older.

But I'm far more stunned to see the thread that Manafort represents, stringing together the Reagan Revolution and Iran/Contra and the mobbed-up disintegration of the Soviet Union ... and the State of the Union today.

Go read it.

Because the Dog-Faced Boy is just part of the sideshow.

Manafort performs under the Big Top.

Monday Mop Up

Having appropriately devoted yesterday to the passing of Mort Walker, here are a few Sunday cartoons I might otherwise have run, starting with this hail-and-farewell from Piranha Club.

Bud Grace is his early 70s, so I don't begrudge him the retirement, but I'm certainly going to miss the strip, which appears to be petering out in dailies, the Sunday having offered the real estate for a good-bye.

Piranha Club has often been featured here, not because it threw me a punchline I hadn't expected but for quite the opposite reason: It's one of those strips with a bold kind of Bob Newhart sensibility that offers a completely predictable gag and dares you not to giggle. And I always do.

As with the (real) Bob Newhart Show, this approach requires a solid cast of well-defined characters and a sense of timing that operates with a safecracker's touch. 

And -- whether it's Howard Borden's latest dilemma or Effie's latest octopus delight -- part of the fun is that you know what the gag will be and you're almost ashamed of yourself for laughing, and yet you do. It's like getting the giggles in church.

I read a lot of strips, but I'm going to miss this one.

 

By contrast, yesterday's Soup to Nutz made me laff because, while it's a really stupid joke, it's also an eminently sensible one, which is how a lot of the gags in this strip work: A "Hey, wait a minute ..." application of logic to illogic.  

While it has become hip to make gags about Clark's glasses being a lousy disguise, it's hardly the biggest problem with the whole idea. One of many genius pieces in the 1978 movie was how Christopher Reeves made Clark into such a sniveler that Lois looked past the fact that he was a muscular hunk.

By contrast, DC comics would respond to reader questions with editorial explanations that were far less convincing than Andrew's.

I was in the right place at the right time by being 12 when Marvel began pumping out superheroes who weren't as transparently ridiculous, because Peter Parker arrived just as I was becoming old enough to be bothered by the illogical world of DC superheroes. 

For instance, don't get me started on those damned androids, because I had noticed that every time Superman was defeated and killed, it turned out to be another android. In the early 60s, the Fortress of Solitude became just a giant warehouse full of freakin' androids.

But puberty was a great time to introduce insecure, neurotic, incredibly fallible superheroes.

 

Speaking of which ...

I'm not likely to be awake long enough to hear Dear Leader's speech tomorrow night, though by next year, I'm sure watching it will be mandatory.

However, Pearls spared me the trouble, because I'm pretty sure this is how preparations are going, or, will be as soon as himself finishes his morning meetings, as Mike Luckovich depicts.

In the Olden Days, the press would get an advance copy of the speech and then would listen and make corrections in the text whenever the President substituted a word or phrase. Now they read along and wait for the moment when he goes completely rogue and they can tear up the rest.

Although it's more fun when you don't have the advance text because then you get to just watch and try to guess where he's gone off the rails.

Maybe I'll make coffee.

I'd hate to find out Wednesday morning that he went full Belushi and I missed it.

 

Confession Time

Today Tom Toles touches my conscience and, as a good patriot, I feel I should disclose that, not only is there a secret society among journalists, but that I am a member of it.

Though now that newspapers are laying off their copy editors, I suppose there is nobody under 40 in the Order of the Occult Hand anymore, there being so few uptight arbitrators of style left past whom to slip meaningless drivel.

And it's no fun writing meaningless drivel when nobody tries to stop you.

 

Sweet Sorrow

Pros and Cons hit me with a particular memory this morning and, while it's been over 30 years, it might still be painful except that it wasn't all that painful even at the moment.

Shopping for therapists is often a search for someone who agrees with you, and a couple searching for a marriage counselor often often often comes down to each partner looking for the Qualified Expert who will turn to the other party and say, "Your spouse is correct. Straighten the hell out."

Leading to the above.

However, in our case, when we sought counseling, I thought of a fellow I'd had on my radio show, which was like taking your problems to Judge Wapner or Dr. Oz. He was very charming and articulate and we jacked around for several weekly sessions about life and stuff, only it started to get more and more into his philosophy and less and less into our difficulties.

Finally, we hit the point where we needed to transition from "how to fix it" into "how best to dismantle it," and we told him so.

And he got pissed. Seriously.

He was more upset over his failure to convert us to whatever hippy-dippy bullshit he was peddling than he was upset that our 13-year marriage was ending.

Walking out of the building together that day was one of our last good bonding experiences for several years. I can't remember if we actually laughed, but we shared a lovely "What the hell was THAT?" moment.

The dude had a gift.

 
Wumo offers a more stark view of how one handles the unraveling. 

Neither of us actually purchased a lawnmower, but, if we hadn't had a lawn, one of us might have.

Pros & Cons is more realistic, but this one hurts more because the fact that everyone does it doesn't make it any less painful. 

 

Mort and Beetle

Mort Walker died yesterday.

He was 94 and so was allowed to, but he certainly made the best of the generous slice of time he was given.

While he created several strips, including "Hi and Lois," "Boner's Ark" and "Sam and Silo," he will be best remembered for "Beetle Bailey," which debuted the day after Mort's 27th birthday, on September 4, 1950.

I'm sure you can find lots of coverage, including this solid piece from the Washington Post, so I thought that, rather than try to outdo anyone, I'd simply run an interview I did with him for the Glens Falls Post-Star in 2003, and then a few Beetle strips from the (so far) 68 years of its run and a few odds and ends I came across in the course of digging those up.  

The interview was a lot of fun and I hope some of that comes through:

*******

Beetle Bailey has put in far more than his 20 years.

So has Mort Walker, but don't look for either of them to be retiring.

"Oh, they try to get me to, sometimes," shrugs Walker, whose "Beetle Bailey" is more than half a century old. "But I enjoy working too much, and I've still got the energy to keep doing it."

In fact, he's got a little more energy recently and feels the strip shows it. "I think it's improved since I gave up drinking two years ago. I think the line's steadier now than it was before."

He has made one recent change, adding his son Greg's name to the strip, but it's a courtesy rather than an announcement.

"I'm starting to sign his name along with mine," Walker says, "but it doesn't mean that there's anything different going on. He's been working with me for 2S years."

Walker laughs about his work schedule. "I hate to tell you how I work. I get up and have breakfast and then shuffle over to the Barcalounger and sit there until I have an idea."

Pressed for details, however; he admits that there's a little more to it than that. He pencils the strip, meaning that he roughs in the layout and characters, and then Greg inks it, adding detail. As for writing, he does most of it, but both his sons contribute to that, as does an assistant who has been with him for 45 years.

"We meet once a month to go over all the ideas and vote on them," Walker says. "Then the final decision is up to me."

He chuckles. "I use most of my own. I seem to like them better!"

Walker grew up in a creative family. His father was an architect, but also created impressionist paintings, wrote poetry and kept a farm. "He would get up every morning and write a poem," Walker says.

Walker's mother was a talented artist and would illustrate the poems, which ran in the Kansas City Star. Walker's father became poet laureate for the state of Kansas, and the Walker family was steeped in art.

"We didn't have a radio or telephone, and there was no television," he says. "We'd sit around in the evening and draw. I also kept a diary every day, starting when I was 5 years old."

"Beetle Bailey"· started out in 1950 as a strip about a college student, but the Korean War changed that. "A lot of editors said that they were drafting college students and Beetle was not so bright, so it didn't seem he'd have much chance of getting out of it."

Walker was reluctant to put his character in the Army, because he'd seen how many Army strips had faded since World War II. But he put Beetle in uniform, "and I kind of liked it," he admits.

When the war ended, he let Beetle go back to civilian life. He even gave him a sister, Lois Flagston, whose husband, Hi, was supposed to clash with Beetle. Oddly enough, that strip was a hit as "Hi and Lois," but readers didn't like the idea of Beetle out of uniform, and he went back in. (He still visits his sister occasionally.)

That would not be the last time Walker yielded to reader preferences. "One thing I pride myself on is that this is not some artistic thing I do to please myself," he says. "If readers don't like something, I'll change it."

Most famously, he raised the neckline of Miss Buxley, the general's secretary, lowered her hemlines and changed her from a vacuous sex kitten into a competent, thoughtful character. In the process, she went from being an irritant to female readers and became a favorite among them.

Meanwhile, General Halftrack himself has quit leering and even cut down on his drinking about the same time a certain cartoonist did.

Today, Mort Walker devotes a great deal of his energy and resources to founding a museum of cartoon art. There have been false starts and problems. The museum began in Greenwich, Conn., then moved to Rhinebeck (Dutchess County) and went from there to Palm Beach, a move Walker now says was a mistake. He now plans to move the museum back to New York and is working on a deal for a site.

Presumably, these efforts are squeezed into his schedule somewhere between the breakfast table and that Barcalounger.

***

Now for the comics and other stuff. Click to embiggen as necessary.

Here's Beetle as a student, Oct 6, 1950, but the paper that was running it apparently didn't take care of its archives very well, so I couldn't find a clean copy of the first enlistment strips in March of the following year.

However, he did pass his physical on March 19, 1951.

I've heard that the strip was struggling in its first year and that sending Beetle off to the Army boosted it significantly. I can't verify that, but I can tell you the strip became a whole lot easier to find.

My understanding is that the guys you meet in boot camp are only temporary friends and I don't recognize any of these people, but this  gag made me laff. Note, by the way, that he's wearing a different uniform than his buddies who are dressed to turn out for the exercise. Walker wasn't so persnickety later, but the gag wouldn't work if Beetle hadn't been trying to change clothes.

A year after the strip launched, Beetle is definitely in the army, and he's farming army humor in these early years, though it becomes more generic as time goes on.

A different anniversary was March 13, 1952, a year after he enlisted and apparently earned himself some leave and a chance to go home, grab some grub and get back into his civvies.

On Sept 4, 1952, the strip was two years old, and Beetle had not yet assembled the cast of characters we're familiar with beyond Killer, but they gradually appeared. Here's some evolution, as seen in Sept 4 strips -- or close, when Sundays or Labor Day intruded -- from that first decade:

(1953 - the Captain has a lot of refinement to go through, but that's him)

(1954)

(1955)

(1956 -- At this stage, Fuzz is more babylike, while Otto is more fierce and more doglike)

(1957)

(1958 - I'd forgotten that Rocky was originally a hood.) 

(1959 - still a doggy dog)

Let's ramp things up and start going by fives:

(1965 - The characters are assuming their familiar looks now, and Sarge has begun his campaign of purposely annoying Lt. Fuzz)

(1970 and Halftrak's henpecked misery is an established gag point.)

But other things were going on by now, and I kind of wish I'd been around Clearfield, Pennsylvania, for the fair, because this sounds like a really good exhibit.

And Mort had other things going on, including the introduction of this character:

(By Sept 4, 1975, the designated hitter rule was had been around for two years, but the mayhem had been around even longer)

In 1980, the Pantagraph of Bloomington, Illinois, used the day's strip as an illustration for a story about Beetle's 30th anniversary. (I'm guessing it came from King Features with the press release, shaded and sized for the use.)

There's a lot more to say about Mort Walker -- not just his other strips but his other major contributions to the industry, but that's a book. And I'm sure someone will write it and it will be worth having.

While we wait, I'll close out with a few divisible-by-five anniversary strips and thanks to a guy who did a lot for comics.

(1985)

(1990)

(1995)

(2000)

(2005)

(2010)

(2015 -- Hell, when your 65, anybody can write your diary a week in advance)

Thanks, Mort.

Saturday Short Takes

No particular theme today, so we'll kick off with Richard John Marcej's reflection on his new (finally!) job and the commute thereto.

I genuinely don't understand commuting. I'm okay with getting on a train and doing your morning newspaper routine while you head towards the office, and my uncle had a variant where he would drive into DC in the dark and then read his paper in the car while everyone else was bumper-to-bumper.

But it's that bumper-to-bumper I don't get. I don't know if it's because I'm country or because I'm a bit claustrophobic -- both are true -- but I was visiting a friend in Oakland once and she lined us up to go over the Oakland Bay Bridge and I damn near went nuts from the inching, inching, inching forward.

And this was on a Sunday afternoon.

I know folks in the country with insane commutes, but it's because they found the job after they owned the house. Like RJM's temporary commute, it's necessity, not choice.

I did, at one point, live 12 miles from the office, which made it hard but not impossible to nip home for lunch and to let the dog out. Most times, I've been no more than five or six miles away. 

Y'all commuters are crazy, and perhaps it's the commuting makes it so.

 

Speaking of country matters ...

Today's xkcd is kind of sad and could really touch off a rant if I were in the mood.

But I get plenty of chances to rant about the urbanization of America, since cartoonists regularly do strips about how nasty camping is and how scary it is to be out where the animals dwell and the cell reception is spotty.

And even when city folks try to report on nature, they don't always make sense. There was a report on NPR yesterday that swatting at mosquitoes will teach them to leave you alone. The individual mosquito, that is. Seriously.

And if you catch snowflakes on your tongue, you won't have to shovel the driveway.

There's nothing new in the feeling that we're losing -- have lost -- connection with the natural world. Urbanization was the catalyst for both Boy Scouting and the summer camp movement just before the turn of the century, and Theodore Roosevelt used to hand out copies of Robert Burrough's nature books to inner city kids, hoping to inspire them one day to at least leave the city long enough to take a look.

In any case, I live in a "city" of 13,531 people, which isn't all that urban, but it's still city enough that, when I get out into the country at night, the sky takes my breath away.

Maybe some future president should walk around the inner city handing out copies of "Cosmos."

 

As for those mountain lions ...

Here's another episode in the continuing theme of separating reality from cartoon setting in Sherman's Lagoon.

Megan is a shark, not a mountain lion, and there's a big difference in that the mountain lions only eat their neighbors. If people would quit pushing their suburban developments up into mountain lion neighborhoods, they'd remain mysterious and scary.

The people, that is. 

 

And other scary things

Retail has been featuring a conference call that was supposed to spike the store closing rumors but has only made things worse, which is what conference calls are for. This is the first strip in the arc, and it's worth following through.

The pre-call chitchat reminds me that the only thing more annoying than having to set aside time for one of these asinine calls was setting aside the time and then waiting around for it to actually start. I mean, if you're going to waste my time, at least do it actively.

 

Here's today's episode and we still don't know what stores are closing but we certainly learned how low morale is across the company.

I never heard this kind of unguarded, disloyal chitchat, but I do remember that the best part of a conference call was when someone who was trying to be productive would put the conference call on hold, forgetting that their newspaper had hold music.

You want to hear management get pissy? Give them a dose of untraceable hold music to try to talk over.

 

Timing!

I don't know what kind of lead time prevailed in 1954, but, given that strips had to be mailed in to syndicates, processed, and then mailed out to papers, I'd suggest it was astonishingly bold for Buz Sawyer to mention Hurricane Hazel by name in a strip that ran the day after she was proclaimed a hurricane.

Roy Crane would have the list of names, of course, but having picked the right one for a strip that dropped on a specific date is impressive, though Hazel was pretty far from "380 miles east of Key West" at the point.

She caught up.

Boy oh boy did she.

 

And this

Real Life Adventures on the real life adventure of adopting a dog, and they could certainly have done worse. The person who wanted a laid-back dog and got an insanely active one has a lot more to regret.

I had working dogs when my boys were little and they all ran around the yard all day. Then, when the boys were older, I began getting hounds who were content to snooze on the couch with me.

At our unfenced park, the dogs are all great because otherwise they'd run away or they'd get into fights and be unwelcome.

But I see many dogs in town -- fenced or leashed -- that were available for adoption for a reason, and not every adoption agency is clear about those reasons.

My next dog will likely be an adoption, but it's critical to know whether you're dealing with an agency that's eager to make good matches, or one that's eager to place dogs.

Obviously you can't just ask them. 

But 15 years is a serious commitment. Proceed with caution.

 

Friday Follies

Pig doesn't get it right, but, then, Pig not getting it right is a pillar of Pearls Before Swine, so I won't take this personally.

In real life, the only people who can successfully work from home are workaholics whose compulsions keep them on-task, and I'm not sure that's as healthy as eating bonbons all day. 

Working 9 to 5 was good for me, but I still used to pop in on my days off, sometimes for 15 minutes to check something, sometimes for an hour or two if I found it. But at least there was a wall -- however easily breached -- between "work" and "home."

And "9 to 5" was only an estimate anyway, given that I wasn't flipping burgers or welcoming people to Wal-Mart. Jobs in the white-collar sector involve tasks that don't fit time clocks, and, by the way, I read that the bulk of new jobs being created are of that sort and not in sectors where you can down tools and go home and have the next guy take over.

In any case, while a 9-to-5er may be able to work from home occasionally because of illness or whatever, I suspect that most people who work from home regularly are, like me, contractors and not employees, so it doesn't matter if they are sweating over a keyboard or eating bonbons as long as the job gets done.

To bring this to relevance here, I know a lot of cartoonists who maintain studio space, in part so their families can run around the house making normal family noise, but also in order to set up that distinction between being home and being at work.

And I suspect their bonbon consumption is indirectly proportional to their income.

 

Alex takes a swipe at a real event in Britain. I had heard that there was some sort of all-male get-together causing a stir, but the actual account of what went on at this annual pigfest is well beyond appalling.

Scroll down to the part where it describes the instructions for the "hostesses" -- including a lot of college girls looking for a quick waitressing sort of gig -- and don't miss the part where a former trustee of the group only misses his cliche by saying "shocked" once instead of twice.

Though, mind you, there was a full-page warning in the program against sexual harassment of the hostesses wink wink nudge nudge know what I mean?

The joke today in part being a play on Clive's well-established wimpishness, but also that, while the charities have declined the money raised, I rather doubt it will be refunded to the hogs who bid on the auction items.

Not even the package that offered plastic surgery and suggested you "add spice to your wife."

Oink.

 

Gotta say, Kevin Siers dropped this one at the right moment.

There were several reactions to the Keystone Kops moment when the President told the press corps that he was happy to be interviewed by Mueller and would cheerfully do it under oath, which was quickly followed by his attorney -- Christy Matthewson or Tris Speaker or somebody -- explaining that what the President actually meant was "I'm gonna shut up now."

That comedic event, however, took a more serious direction later in the day when it developed that Dear Leader had, indeed, attempted to fire Mueller and was prevented only by the White House counsel threatening to resign. Even someone as imperfectly hinged as Donald Trump is not interested in repeating the endgame follies of the Nixon administration.

In any case, the response has been twofold: One has been to recount all the times between June -- when this internal showdown took place -- and today that various spokespuppets for the President, as well as Dear Leader himself, have denied any intention of firing Mueller.

The other has been mockery over Sean Hannity's  -- and of course Trump-and-Friends' -- loyal collaboration.

In any case, we'll see more cartoons along these lines in the coming days, but Siers hit it first and, in this business, that counts a lot towards hitting it best.

 

The opposite happened to the flood of "missing texts" cartoons that went woefully out of date when the damn things turned up after all. 

But I still like Matt Wuerker's take, because most of the missing FBI text messages cartoons I saw were from the rightwing point of view he mocks: All het up over the missing texts but totally ignoring and denying the Russian connection.

When the texts turned up -- apparently simply hard to find and not erased -- it was nearly as sad-trombonish an ending to the panic as we had when it emerged that the Super Secret Trump Haters Society had simply been a joke, with the laugh on the humorless, gormless, clueless nincompoops who didn't get it.

Although we must continue to remember that there is a solid body of Deplorables who will believe anything, their faith buttressed by the assurances of a combination of Russian trolls and White House propagandists.

And if you think that's a harshly partisan statement, look at the record.

And if you look at the record and still think it's a harshly partisan statement, climb in the basket with the rest of the Deplorables.

 

Helluva note when a raging nihilist like Ted Rall offers the most intelligent suggestion for all this, but, really, if the President is going to start running campaign ads for 2020, why shouldn't the Democrats ramp up their efforts?

Maybe there's something in their bylaws that says they're not allowed to strike back. It would certainly explain the 2016 campaign, wouldn't it?

The National Democratic Party is in danger of becoming one of those places where everybody uses the parking lot, but nobody goes into the building.

Here's what I mean:

Mike Marland depicts a more formidable challenge, down at the grassroots rather than emanating from the penthouse.

 

Next time, DNC, don't give us the same old same old:

 

Topics well handled

We'll start with the least significant but most fun piece, Joe Heller's reminder that next Wednesday in the early early you can catch a Super Blue Blood-Moon Eclipse. 

He left off the "blood-moon" part because it's kind of silly: The moon gets coppery red in a total eclipse so that "blood-moon eclipse" is an overly dramatic way of saying "total eclipse."

Though at least it avoids a phrase that makes some of us giggle.

Here's what I wrote for my gang out in Colorado.

So now you know. Adjust to your time zone. Those on the other side of the International Date Line won't get a blue moon because it will be February.

The death of Hugh Masakela inspired a lot of the usual obituary tributes among cartoonists, including at least one of him showing up with his trumpet at the Pearly Gates, but Victor Ndula stepped forward with a simple, eloquent thank-you to a man who harnessed his incredible talent as a powerful tool in the fight against apartheid.

 

Also in the category of excellence from overseas, Greek cartoonist Spiros Derveniotis offers this explanation of how gentrification works.

There it is, and I have nothing to add.

 

More technique notes:

Terri Libenson pauses in a Pajama Diaries story arc to offer this fourth-wall-shattering obituary for Jill's grandmother-in-law.

Libenson maintains an unusual lack of distance between herself and her cartoon protagonist, enough to establish that she's exaggerating for comedic effect, but not so much that her readers don't realize that she is riffing on her own experience.

I've seen her speak twice (here and also here), and, while it would be bizarre for most strip cartoonists to drop in a note from the creator like this, her readers seem quite clear that Pajama Diaries is, in fact, a sort of fictionalized diary. 

It's tricky to try to draw distinctions between her work and that of Lynn Johnston, and it's not a matter of heirarchy, but simply a reflection of the times and certainly a case where, without FBOFW, there would be no Pajama Diaries.

But, first of all, FBOFW was about a housewife, drawn by a cartoonist. Pajama Diaries is about a commercial artist and is drawn by a commercial artist, albeit one turned cartoonist.

Second, Johnston put a gap of a few years between her life and her strip, partially for her kids' privacy, but also to let events mellow into a more well-considered narrative.

Pajama Diaries is hot off the lives of the Libenson family and there is a rawness to the reactions that makes a difference in how readers relate to her.

Johnston is the wise counselor who assures you that others have been there. Libenson is the pal you moan and groan and cuss with.

Which means that she can step out of character to offer a reflection on having killed off a continuing character in her strip without it seeming to be jolting.

 

Speaking of friends-of-the-blog ...

... and how they do what they do, Ann Telnaes's  "Trump's ABC" has hit the bookstores, and Michael Cavna sat down with her for an interesting article about how the whole thing came about.

I'm used to seeing artists post videos of how they draw, but that seems mostly of interest to other artists. This insider look is more about concepts, and is less insiderish than discussions of nibs and paper and such.

Go have a look.

 

Juxtaposition of the Day(Jimmy Margulies)

(Mike Luckovich)

Two very different commentaries on the latest (yawn) school shooting.

Margulies makes more of a joke, because the NRA already has the solution to this problem: Bigger magazines.

Though as lack of funding forces schools to increase class sizes, there's a kind of race going on there.

It would be nice if, a half century from now, young adults would giggle over their grandparents' memories of lock-down drills the way the young folks snark at our duck-and-cover drills.

The difference being that sometimes today's kids get to put their training to use and we never did, which is why today's kids even exist. But I have heard people in my generation talk about how scared they were by those drills and how the possibility of nuclear war hung over their childhood.

The only time I was particularly worried was during the Cuban Missile Crisis and that passed. Still, what must it be doing to our kids to have these regular reminders, emphasized by, yeah, this could happen in your school tomorrow?

Meanwhile, as Luckovich's cartoon notes, instead of solving that real problem, our leadership gins up non-existent threats based on the fact that we've always been at war with Shitholia.

I like the lack of specificity in his depiction: They are some place different, but no place in particular. It's their "differentness," after all, that makes them the target of the racist chickenhawks who lead our government.

 

Plus this:

Rob Rogers knocks one over the wall with this melding of the insane conspiracy that inspired the movie "I, Tonya," and the insane criminal conspiracy currently unfolding among Dear Leader's promoters and enablers.

I haven't seen the movie, but it's had good reviews despite a few people on my Facebook feed wondering if Nancy Kerrigan considers the event comic. Well, maybe one day we'll find all this FBI bashing funny, too, but right now it feels like part of the conspiracy to keep the Deplorables from ever accepting the facts of the case.

Meanwhile, what I remember is that the affair caused Newsday to produce one of the first blatantly faked photos on a tabloid not sold in grocery store checkout lanes, while Rogers' metaphor gains strength by the fact the Harding finished not first or second but eighth at Lillehammer, after interrupting her program in tears, complaining of a loose boot lace and begging the judges to be allowed to start over.

Times change, but cheaters cheat and whiners whine.

 

And we let them.

 

... and when did they know it?

(Signe Wilkinson)

(Scott Stantis)

We'll start with a juxtaposition over the US Gymnastics scandal, in which the team doctor has been revealed to be a long-term sexual predator who abused the little girls entrusted to him.

I was going to say "in case you hadn't heard," but you've heard or perhaps you don't want to hear or perhaps you need to curate your list of friends more thoughtfully.

I saw one of those "Why is the media talking about this instead of that?" complaints on Facebook about two weeks ago, which alleged that nobody was covering the abuse scandal. My response was that I'd heard of it.

Facebook is tinkering with its algorithms, but what won't change is that what appears on your page is not determined by what "the media" covers but by what people -- especially your "friends" -- pay attention to.

That applies to Google News as well, but Google News casts a wider net, if only because it has categories that must be filled, such that you will always have X-number of health stories, even if the vast bulk of people are fixated on the Oscar nominations.

In any case, it was covered but was humming along below the surface until the victim statements began.

I'm not much on victim statements in general but in this case they vaulted -- no pun intended -- the story into prominence, in part because they were so unrelentingly, horrifyingly similar, in part because so many came from famous names.

Signe Wilkinson is running to keep ahead of the story because, while she is absolutely right, the executive board of US Gymnastics has resigned, so whatever they may have done to deny things has fallen apart.

Or is just beginning to, because sponsors are running away and so whatever moral guilt the team feels is compounded by the kind of damage that can't be denied.

Except maybe by Michigan State, which is deeply involved and has begun their own floor routine, based on the protest that this isn't at all like the Penn State scandal.

Which it's not, because a lot more MSU administrators knew about it, and a Penn State assistant coach blew a whistle nobody at MSU was apparently able to find.

The Detroit News quotes a former MSU gymnast:

“A monster was stopped last year, after decades of being allowed to prey on women and little girls, and he wasn’t stopped by a single person who could have, and should have stopped him at least 20 years ago,” Denhollander told The News last week. “He was stopped by the victims, who had to fight through being silenced, being threatened, being mocked, by the officials at MSU who they appealed to for help."

Which is the kind of thing that will put Scott Stantis on the case, because he was an abused child and has no patience, and plenty of fury, for those who make excuses and deny and will not see.

There are all sorts of places this story could go: I haven't been a fan of the Olympics since they went pro in the 80s, and I also have a problem with the sexualization of little girls in our overall society, but the algorithms are changing my news feed and now I'm reading about the Pope's visit to South America, where he apologized for the sexual assaults on altar boys by clergy.

And then apologized for defending one of their most prominent abusers.

Keep those pens out, gang. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, this is not the end of the story. It is not even the beginning of the end of the story. But it might be the end of the beginning of the story.

 

Meanwhile, in International News

Canadian cartoonist Graeme MacKay notes the finalization of the Trans Pacific Partnership despite our withdrawal from it. It's only fair to note that Hillary Clinton flip-flopped famously on the pact, but generally opposed both it and NAFTA, though she might have bitten the bullet and gone along on pragmatic grounds.

Pragmatism has its place: One observation I've heard is that our withdrawal from TPP allowed China to buttress its position as a major player in the world economy. 

 

China has also taken up some of the slack in Africa, as Kal Kallaugher notes.

I don't know if this is good or bad for Africa. My grandfather visited there in the 1950s, evaluating chromium mines for Bethlehem Steel, and the exploitation of Third World countries bothered him. Several decades later, he remarked that "one of these days all those little brown people are going to ask 'Where's mine?'"

Well, nobody listened then and nobody's listening now, and so I guess we should let China have the bad karma.

And the rare earth elements and the economic advantages. 

Hey, I'm all about good karma. But I didn't vote for the guy who promised to resuscitate our manufacturing economy. 

 

Meanwhile, back on the topic of abusive relationships, Andy Marlette notes the cancellation of FLOTUS's plans to go to the Davos conference with her hubby.

He's too flip about it for my taste, and I think he's flat wrong in suggesting that Trump is anxious to make amends, but then, as the song says, nobody knows what goes on behind closed doors.

A lot of people who hate Trump throw barbs at Melania, too, but I'm inclined to back off, because I haven't read their pre-nup and have no idea what she's dealing with.

I'm also inclined, whatever the flaws of Michael Wolff's book, to believe the part about Melania not wanting any of this.

I respect that she refused to jerk her son out of his school mid-year, and my guess is that, given how little she courts the limelight and however she feels about her marriage, she's not enjoying the hoopla over this betrayal.

And, no, there isn't enough money in the world to compensate.

Never was.

 

(There's a verse in this, the original, you might have never heard before)

The Crowd of Unknowing

 
Several cartoonists were able to get their pens moving in time to pick up on the end of the shutdown, but I particularly like Clay Bennett's take because of its sweeping, enigmatic tone.

He's treading on dangerous ground, because it's easy for anyone to take a gratuitous Will Rogers slam at government being useless.

In fact, we've gotten to where we are today by having a demagogue rally the dumbasses who delight in accusing Congress of being useless and dishonest and blahblahblah, those barstool geniuses who know everything except what Congressional district they live in and how a bill becomes a law and minor things like that.

We are dysfunctional, however, and it's fair to say so.

Still, I admire Bennett's restraint: Some observers are getting way out ahead on this resumption and reading their own issues into it.

Mark Streeter lays out those intertwining issues: Having nailed down a few things -- including CHIPS funding -- the great unaddressed issue is DACA, and the compromise for Democrats was in trusting the GOP to bring the matter up for a vote, though adding a time bomb in case of deception, while the real force behind the shutdown was the utter lack of leadership from the Executive Branch.

It's not helpful that rightwingers are lying about DACA, or that the President's re-election committee (Re-election already?) put out a hateful ad that conflates DACA recipients with the mythical brown-skinned murderers that keep Trump's racist supporters awake at night.

And when you see cartoonists, commentators and even elected representatives repeating the confusion between shadowy illegals and the highly regulated, highly screened Dreamers, you do have to wonder if they are simply too lazy to learn the facts or genuinely dishonest and making an actual effort to confuse voters.

But that's a bit like checking a driver's blood-alcohol level after he's slammed into someone.

It doesn't change anything.

 

As for the lack of coherent leadership, Michael deAdder captures it readily: As some Congressional leaders have had the courage to say, it's very hard to legislate policy when the President is incapable of deciding what he wants and then sticking to it.

Something that has emerged in the last 24 hours or so is that, whatever the shortcomings of Michael Wolff's book, Howard Kurtz -- whose loyalty to conservative causes made him leap from CNN to Fox -- has a book coming out that echoes the chaos Wolff described.

As that Washington Post article says

Kurtz ... writes that Trump’s aides even privately coined a term for Trump’s behavior — “Defiance Disorder.” The phrase refers to Trump’s seeming compulsion to do whatever it is his advisers are most strongly urging against, leaving his team to handle the fallout. 

Nor is the team holding together well: We now hear rumors that Trump is tired of being guided by John Kelly and wants to replace his chief of staff with someone more compliant.

I think Nate Beeler, who generally steers to the right, has the most apt take on what is going on inside the White House.

When you elect a TV star for president, you get a TV star, not a politician, and, to repeat, Ronald Reagan was an actor but, by the time he got to the White House, he had already served multiple terms as head of the Screen Actors Guild and as governor of California. 

In this case, it reminds me of a long-ago TV Guide article that addressed rumors of issues at "Wonder Woman," in which a studio source exonerated the male lead without naming names by simply noting that it wasn't Lyle Waggoner who was throwing his hairbrush across the set.

We know who the prima donna is on this show. 

And, as Jeff Danziger suggests, the scramble to get out from under his legacy is going to be competitive. For General Kelly, maybe a public sacking wouldn't be the worst ending to the farce.

But farce it is, and Danziger's Great Scorekeeper is marking down how they played the game.

As is Tom Tomorrow.

I'm on record as saying that the chaos and dysfunction in the current administration is such that "bland restatement" cartoons are no longer effective, but here's one that barely nudges the needle of satiric exaggeration in order to make a solid point.

Is there nothing this man can do that his retainers will not cover for? And, while Tom Tomorrow calls him "Grovellin Mike" and depicts him as being doubtful and ashamed of going along with things, Ann Telnaes offers no such kindly interpretation: When Pence denies that Trump had sex with a porn star and bought her silence, Telnaes demands to know how he could possible know that?

This is not "loyalty" but "complicity," and, coming from a man so strait-laced that he won't be alone with a woman, it is a shameless act of pure, inexcusable dishonesty.

Here is where Mike Pence's form of Christianity and that under which I grew up diverge: We both were taught that Jesus forgives sins, but we Catholics were tied into repentance and reform.

For us, the best death would be to be hit by a bus while leaving the church after making confession, though, if no priest were near, you could get by with a sincere act of contrition before death.

Many Protestant sects have a more sweeping view, in which sins are forgiven as long as you accept the Lord and live a reasonably righteous life. 

But there is a corrupt corner of Protestantism in which forgiveness is so constant and ongoing that it doesn't matter what you do. This not only allows for bigotry, miserliness and other things forbidden in the Gospels, but for Pence's confident declaration about facts that he has no way to verify and plenty of reason to doubt.

He'd better hope that those who preach the Gospel of Prosperity are right, and that the unemployed, homeless bum who spoke of helping a pagan victim of a mugging had everything wrong.

 

Looks like that ol' shoe fits real good:

A Brief Discursion into Business Matters

Tom Falco is letting his print subscription to the Miami Herald run out and will subscribe to the digital edition.

He writes:

I don’t remember ever not receiving a daily newspaper delivery, even from when I was a child. But the newspaper is not arriving! I’m paying for it but it doesn’t come. We had a problem last month, it sort of got fixed, but it’s happening again – no newspaper delivery.
I can’t understand how a major metropolitan newspaper can’t get the newspapers out! Where are those newsie kids when you need them?

As it happens, I once switched from print to digital for much the same reason, and the disappearance of those delivery kids was a part of the issue: The paper where I was working became entirely delivered by drivers.

And the driver working my route didn't want to have to drive up my hill in the snow. He thought dumping it at the curb would be sufficient.

The kid who had the route before had not only walked it but put my paper in the door on the porch so it would be dry.

And it didn't smell like it had been locked in a car with a chain smoker. I was only five blocks from the paper. Folks outside town could probably have wrapped a fresh salmon in it and had lox by dinnertime.

Anyway, the digital version was always dry, I didn't have to clear off a table to read it and I didn't end up with a couple of pounds of newspaper to recycle each week.

And let me point out, as Tom does, that an e-edition is a complete replica, not simply the online version of the paper.

I get access to the e-edition of the Denver Post because I freelance for them, and this is Sunday's front page, or, rather, the top part of it. You can display the entire front page but you can only read the headlines in those proportions, so, to actually read something, you zoom in to "width" or closer.

The more important point is that, as you see at the bottom of the page, you are getting the entire thing, not simply a selection of articles. You scroll through just as you would the print paper, and then zoom in on whatever you want to read. (And click on the jumpline to go to the rest of the story.)

Extra benefits are that you can create your own digital clip files, email an article to a friend, go back a few days or a few years to check out something you missed and, if you don't mind auto-translations, read the paper in any of a large number of languages.

And you can zoom in on your comics to read them at an appropriate level of magnification. (Remember comics? This is a blog about comics!)

This isn't intended as an ad for e-editions, though, if you are tired of fishing papers out from under the sofa, you might consider it.

Rather, it's a conversation about the future of newspapers and is yet another episode of my banging my head against the wall, because every paper I know with an e-edition charges roughly the same for it as they do for home delivery.

Despite not having to print it and despite not having to give the delivery person a cut between 25 and 33 percent of the subscription price.

I understand that newspapers are losing money, or, at least, that the Wall Streeters who own them are not getting the dividends they'd like, but it strikes me that their unwillingness to set a bargain price for the digital edition is a prime example of why they are failing.

Granted, they're trying to climb out of a deep hole they dug themselves.

Newspapers were blindsided by Craig's List, but they could have responded in a timely manner if they hadn't sat around conference tables pondering it, and, really, ditto with the entire online experience.

The idea of giving away content for free in the first place was idiotic and the only thing more idiotic is trying to make up for it now by charging too much for access.

This isn't difficult: The cost of producing 100 digital papers is the same as the cost of producing 100,000 digital papers, so set a price that encourages volume, ferchrissake.

And stop trying to save money by cutting back on things people want, which is simply a variation on, "The food here is terrible -- and such small portions!"

Because who subscribes to pamphlets?

 

I do think people should subscribe to their local paper, but they make it hard for me to justify.

I passed over an Edison Lee last week, and I'm know I'm toying with the Prime Directive here, but it's one of my favorite strips, so forgive me.

There's no way one of today's papers would break a window and, in fact, I don't think you could throw it from the sidewalk to the porch unless you put a rock in the plastic bag.

At which point you could break a window, yes.

TThe paper I edited in Maine was tiny, it only came out twice a week and it only covered one rural county.

However, it was a terrific newspaper.

We had no wire service, but we had a platoon of what I called "little old lady columnists" -- most of whom were little old ladies -- who wrote about what was happening in their towns, including who was home from Iraq and who had a birthday party, but also what was being done to repair the bridge and what the local school board was up to.

Their hyperlocal coverage, augmented by the county-wide work of my staff of one news reporter, one sportswriter and myself, meant that everything in the paper mattered to the people who lived in our circulation area.

Here: This is how it worked.

If all newspapers were like that, there'd be no crisis in the industry.

How I miss Richard Thompson!

 UPDATE: To all of which Charles Peattie adds this.