Opus 424a (January 13, 2022): Having frittered away several light years of the time allotted to Rants & Raves on the Web last time—I mean, I wrote so much that the boundaries of the usual Rancid Raves had swollen beyond reason—that is, I’d produced more than I could expect even the most fevered follower to read at a single sitting—I trimmed the content to a more digestible dimension by cutting out almost all of the Editoonery Department, promising at the same time to post it all within a week. And so here we are with the promised resurrection of those editorial cartoons. We’ve also added some newsy bits here at the beginning, but most of this posting is editoons. Onward—:

7 COMICS SELL FOR OVER $1MILLION IN 2021

https://scoop.previewsworld.com/Home/4/1/73/1012?ArticleID=256267

In 2021, the comicbook collecting market saw seven different books sell for over $1 million. And not just seven books, five different titles in seven different grades. If that wasn’t impressive enough, the world record for most valuable comic book was set twice in 2021.

            First up was Batman No.1, noted for the debuts of the Joker and Catwoman, and for being the Dark Knight’s first titular comicbook. A high grade CGC 9.4 copy sold for $2.22 million at Heritage Auctions in January. Batman No.1 grabbed another seven-figure sale when ComicConnect sold a CGC 8.0 copy for $1.2 million in April.

            Also in April, ComicConnect brokered a deal for Action Comics No.1 CGC 8.5 featuring the first appearance of Superman for $3.25 million. That sale toppled the record for highest price paid for a comic, which had stood for over six years. The previous record was also set by Action Comics No.1, a CGC 9.0 copy, that realized $3.2 million in an eBay auction in August 2014.

            Proving the marketability of Batman’s first appearance, a mid-grade CGC 5.0 copy of Detective Comics No.27 hammered for $1.125 million at Heritage in June 2021.

            A high grade CGC 9.6 of Spider-Man’s first appearance in Amazing Fantasy No.15 set a new record for highest price paid for a comic when it cleared $3.6 million at Heritage in September.

            The final two books to fetch $1 million in 2021 were both achieved by ComicConnect. First, an Action Comics No.1 in the lower grade of CGC 3.0 achieved $1.6 million. A few days later, they sold a Superman No.1 CGC 7.0 for $2.6 million – the first time the Man of Steel’s self-titled book surpassed $1 million.

            Alison Flood adds that a rare copy of Incredible Hulk No.1, published in 1962, in which the superhero is depicted in his original grey rather than his signature green, was bought by a private collector for $490,000. ComicConnect, the auction site which handled the sale, said it was the most expensive copy of the first Hulk story ever sold.

RCH Fitnoot. Here at the Rancid Raves Intergalactic Wurlitzer, we buy old and new comicbooks in order to read them not to finance a trip to Paris. Or London.

A LETTER TO THE POPE

Sergio Peçanha was disturbed by the Pope’s recent attack on childless couples’ preference for pets, and so he wrote His Eminence, as follows—:

Dear Pope Francis,

I was born Catholic. Long story short, today I am a stray sheep.

            Something you said recently concerned me. You criticized people who don’t have children. You said that people who have pets instead of children are selfish and that pet-parenting “takes some of our humanity away.”

            Coming from the leader of a church that forbids priests and nuns from getting married and having children, this doesn’t seem like something you fully thought through.

From The Editor's Desk at The Washington Spectator

The insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th shook the foundations of our democracy. In his landmark article in The Washington Spectator, Jonathan Winer provides a detailed survey of the crimes committed by Donald Trump and his circle in connection with the insurrection, including the federal criminal statutes they violated and the sentences they will face if convicted.

            The Congress and the Attorney General have vowed to hold those responsible for the assault to account, but to date offenders have been indicted mostly only with trespassing, illegal picketing, disorderly conduct and other misdemeanors. A small subset have been charged with felony crimes.

            The larger question remains, said editor/publisher Hamilton Fish – will any of those responsible for planning, scheduling, organizing, arranging, paying for, inciting, or otherwise causing the January 6 insurrection to occur be indicted?

            These include the senior Republican figures in the Trump administration and in Congress who sought for weeks to overturn the valid results of the election, who pressured state officials to misreport or invalidate the tallies, and who encouraged and provoked the rioters; members of the president’s family who urged violence; the president, whom we now know instigated and incited the assault; and Republican officials in Washington and around the country who promoted the violent overthrow of the government on the day it was scheduled to certify the election results—will any of these individuals face prosecution for their well-documented crimes.

            But as attorney and former criminal investigator Seth Abramson pointed out on Twitter, “there is no evidence whatsoever that DOJ is conducting any large-scale investigation of high-level coup plotters. We have seen no court filings from DOJ to this effect. No cooperation deals. No raids. No subpoenas. No document demands. No device seizures. No interrogations. No howling from powerful Trumpists that they are being targeted simply for being….seditious insurrectionists.”

            Winer, a lawyer and former senior law enforcement officer at the State Department, oncludes his Spectator article with this warning: “Failure by the Justice Department to apply justice to all those whose activities contributed to the insurrection, rather than just to the foot soldiers, risks allowing impunity, rather than the law, to determine the future of our democracy.”

RCH Footnit. All the fuss and fury about what crimes the Trumpet’s supporters might have committed in storming the Capitol notwithstanding, the answer is simple: they committed treason. And the penalty for treason is death.

GRAPHIC NOVEL PRODUCTION SCHEDULES ARE TOO SHORT

—and the Publishing Industry Should Care About It

This article by Nilah Magruder first appeared in The Bulletin No.216 in October 2021. It is longer there; we’ve shortened it here and lightly copy-edited it.

I am a cartoonist. I draw. I write. I draw and write simultaneously. Much of my work these days is in graphic novels. It has fed me and kept a roof over my head for the past few years, but as I near forty years old, and my career as an author is only beginning, I find myself starting to age out of the work as a visual artist.

            It surprises people when I say that art-making is a physical activity. Drawing requires long periods of repetitive movement cycling from the shoulder down through the arm and wrist. Standing or bending over a canvas impacts the legs, back, and neck. My body was up to it at the start of my career, but after ten years, the strain is taking its toll.

            The problem is the production schedules. They’re too short and require too much speed and place too much wear and tear on an artist’s body and mind. The solution seems simple to me: get longer production schedules.

            This notion, however, often receives pushback from editors, publishers, and even agents. Graphic novels are a growing market in many sectors of publishing, but many of those publishers are used to prose and picture books, which are much faster to produce. By comparison, I imagine asking for more time on graphic novels seems unreasonable.

            So, let’s compare. When I entered the children’s book industry, six months was the average timeline for illustrating a thirty-two page picture book. Let’s say I were to expand that thirty-two pages to two hundred pages. The schedule to produce that gigantic book would be a little over three years.

            But graphic novel illustrators are given less time to work. The average graphic novel is two hundred pages, but it’s common for publishers to offer only a year, sometimes even less, to produce it. Why so stingy with production time? ...

            Perhaps it is because larger comic publishers, like Marvel and DC, can produce comicbooks so quickly. Take my miniseries, Marvel Rising, later compiled into a trade paperback of about one hundred pages. That one hundred pages was published in six months. By that metric, it is no stretch to produce two hundred pages in a year, but Marvel, DC, and many other comic publishers hire teams of artists and use a pipeline model to get the work done. It took a team of five artists to draw, letter, and color one hundred pages of Marvel Rising in six months.

            So, what is the right schedule length for a graphic novel? That depends largely on the artist. We all work differently. Every graphic novel has its own visual language to consider. A volume of Dog Man does not involve the same process as a volume of Saga. But I would say that two and a half years for a 200-page graphic novel is a starting point.

            Certainly, artists have done more in less time, but usually at the expense of their health. Injury and chronic pain are common within creative professions. Drawing for long periods is hard on the back, shoulders, and wrists.

            There are ergonomic solutions available for some workspaces, but this does not change the long hours or the physical demands of art-making that result in repetitive strain injury (RSI), carpal tunnel, and other ailments. In this age of screens and digital art, loss of vision is also increasingly common.

            And for freelance illustrators, there’s no company-provided health insurance. The cost of insurance, medications, treatments, aids, and other healthcare adds up, even as an artist’s ability to do the volume of work needed to make a living is impacted. ...

            I believe we can achieve a healthy and sustainable future for the graphic novel market with open communication. ... There’s no one-size-fits-all production schedule for graphic novels. What’s most important is that the schedule matches the artist’s pace.

            As more and more writers are entering the graphic novel space, it is important to remember that artists do not work for writers. Artists and writers are collaborators in the space of a graphic novel, and words do not dominate here. The lion’s share of the work belongs to the artist (graphic novels are a visual medium, after all). Remember, writers, that your words are important, but they’re only a part of the full picture. Art is also a storytelling tool. You can lift some of the burden from artists by advocating that they receive more time and better pay for their essential contributions.

            And artists, do not be afraid to advocate for your own best interests. You are the experts on what is a reasonable production schedule for your style and workflow. Remember that graphic novels only exist because of the artists willing to draw them.

            A healthy future for the graphic novel market depends on open communication between graphic novelists and publishing professionals. Talk to each other and be open to learning, but above all, respect the labor of art. Graphic novels are a beautiful medium when artists are given the time and support to do their best work.

Note: The foregoing has been shortened from the original and lightly copy-edited.

ODDS & ADDENDA

Celebrating its 75^th anniversary, the National Cartoonists Society conducted an auction that raised $54,000 for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital to help understand, treat and defeat childhood cancer and other life-threatening diseases.

Fascinating Footnit. Much of the news retailed in the foregoing segment is culled from articles indexed at https://www.facebook.com/comicsresearchbibliography/, and eventually compiled into the Comics Research Bibliography, by Michael Rhode, who covers comic books, comic strips, animation, caricature, cartoons, bandes dessinees and related topics. It also provides links to numerous other sites that delve deeply into cartooning topics. For even more comics news, consult these three other sites: Mark Evanier’s povonline.com, Alan Gardner’s DailyCartoonist.com (now operated without Gardner by AndrewsMcMeel, D.D. Degg, editor); and Michael Cavna at voices.washingtonpost.com/comic-riffs . For delving into the history of our beloved medium, you can’t go wrong by visiting Allan Holtz’s strippersguide.blogspot.com, where Allan regularly posts rare findings from his forays into the vast reaches of newspaper microfilm files hither and yon.

EDITOONERY

The Mock in Democracy

AS I WAS SAYING a week or so ago when we were so rudely interrupted, our objective in this department is to show how editoonists use visual metaphors and other images to express their opinions about politics and other social matters. Joe Heller supplies a good example in his cartoon at the upper left of our first visual aid, commenting on the biggest news since our last posting — the storming of the Capitol a year ago on January 6. Heller depicts a nondescript mob carrying Trump signs and the Trumpet himself, who is obliterating “the people” from the Preamble to the Constitution and adding “mob.” The image, which shows the mob trampling on the American flag, shows what happens when we substitute a “mob” for “we the people.”

            R.J. Matson’s cartoon deploys two images, the second, by imitating the first, suggests that the House Select Committee on January 6 will not remove the cause of the insurrection: planning for the future will involve the horn-headed insurrectionist of the 2021 debacle. Next around the clock, Steve Sack offers, in the left portion of his cartoon, a diagram showing what happened during the insurrection; at the right, he repeats the language of the diagram but aims it at a different outcome.

            And then Jeff Darcy turns to the investigation of the events of January 6— in particular, the Trumpet’s role in it— and shows, by using Trump’s signature long red tie, where, in his estimation, the investigation will lead: the encircling red tie forms a target with Trump at the center.

            In the next exhibit, Pat Bagley’s images dominate the page. The first shows the classic kid’s preoccupation with falling snow—catching the flakes on the tongue. But that is a harmless undertaking, and the Omicron hovering flake-like over the kid’s head in this image gives the tableau a sinister and threatening aspect that gains metaphoric power by contrast to the echo of the traditional flake-catching effort.

            Next Bagley has a cat doing what cats do with Christmas trees—they try to climb into them and thereby topple the tree. Here, the cat is Joe Manchin, and the tree, labeled with the star atop it, is Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plans, which the cat has upset. The last Bagley cartoon is a visual metaphor for Biden’s effort to tame inflation, which appears here as a lion, not likely to be easily tamed.

            And then Chris Britt uses two panels to make his point. In the first, Joe Biden announces his opposition to daggers at the throat of democracy; in the second, we see that the Trumpet has already removed Lady Liberty’s head with his dagger.  Biden’s announcement is too late: the Trumpet’s treason has been committed.

            Next we have a display of various caricatures of Prez Biden. He’s no fun to caricature because his appearance is just, er, normal. Dick Wright at the lower right does a pretty fair caricature, and Joao Fazenda’s clean lines in The New Yorker at the upper left do a good job of capturing Biden’s nondescript appearance. (I’ve included Fazenda’s Trump, too, because Fazenda’s clean lines are about all there is that’s clean with the Trumpet.)

            With our next exhibit, we take up the issue of abortion. My own opinion on the matter is nearly nonexistent. I’d hate to be in a situation where I’d have to decide whether to encourage a woman to have an abortion or to have the baby because I don’t know what I’d decide. I’d probably encourage the woman to make the choice. But whatever I’d do, I wouldn’t like anyone else (other than the pregnant woman) making the decision for me.

            That means I’m a supporter of choice. And the choice should be made by those directly involved, not some politician in Washington.

            Editoonists take positions all over the map. Gary Varvel at the upper left of the visual aid at hand takes a view that’s opposite of mine. The baby has rights as far as Varvel is concerned. Next, Rob Rogers thinks the Supreme Court is “Trump’s court” and it favors outlawing abortions and letting back-alley operators do the work with an old hanger (which has become the symbol of anti-Roe/Wade). And Walt Handelsman sees “choice” as about to be smacked down by a cascade of dominoes bearing the names of the six “Republicon” justices. Then Dave Whamond turns the issue on its head by making men take responsibility for their part in the process.

            The fate of Biden’s Build Back Better legislation is the topic of our next display. Dick Wright deploys a visual metaphor in which Biden’s BBB is Frankenstein’s monster. BBB is, of course, monstrous, which gives meaning to the metaphor. Matt Wuerker’s imagery is of a bag stuffed with military expenditures with nothing left over to fund child tax credit. The issue turns on a question: kids or war, which is most important.

            Next, Nick Anderson reveals Joe Manchin’s motivation. Representing a fossil fuel producing state, Manchin opposes Biden’s legislation because it aims to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels, which would undercut Manchin’s power base. In the same vein, Chip Bok’s Biden begs Santa to put coal in Manchin’s stocking, but Santa knows that would make Manchin happy, not sad. Manchin’s a coal supporter.

AND THEN, JUST WHEN WE NEEDED IT, R.J. Matson gives the filibuster a palpable reality—a dragon with the face of Mitch McConnell—and accompanies the presence with a few scrambled rhymes from Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” poem. The imagery coupled to the poetry attempts to explain why the filibuster is so feared an institution. 

            Next is Bill Bramhall’s image that explains why the Democrank donkey is losing sleep: he fears the “woke” among progressive liberals in his milieu. And then Mike Luckovich gives a nod to Congresswoman Liz Cheney. The GOP rat confronting her says he smells a rat—that is, himself, aka the GOP. The rat thinks he’s accusing Cheney of being a rat, but nothing about her reserved demeanor suggests anything rodent-like. But with the actual rat, the GOP is all rat, the kind that rats out members like Cheney who vote their conscience.

            One of the ways the GOP manages to stay in power, holding more state governors and legislature majorities than the Democranks, is by gerrymandering—drawing voter district borders in ways that guarantee a population that is mostly Republicon. The national census conducted every ten years guarantees that every state must re-examine the borders of its congressional districts to see that the present configuration accurately reflects the population.

            Gerrymandering is a demonstrably successful maneuver but it often creates misshapen districts like the one in Bill Bramhall’s editoon in the next array. Bramhall’s image is that of a doctor’s office, or, perhaps, an eye doctor’s office. The congressional district that the GOPachyderm sees in his doctor’s eye chart is violently distorted by gerrymanding. And Mike Luckovich takes two panels to show the hypocrisy practiced by the elephank: on the one hand, he says he wants to stop “the steal” (because saying it will make him popular with voters and get him elected); on the other, he gerrymanders to steal the next election.

            While the GOPachyderm is assuring its re-election, the Democrank donkey is in deep do-do because it lacks leadership: would-be leaders are in constant conflict over policy and other issues, as Kevin “Kal” Kalaugher’s image declares: the party cannot get over the finish line because everyone is arguing about the means to that end.

            Then Lee Judge takes just two panels for his geometrically angular characters to reveal the Republicon’s “clear, concise, simple message”: “screw the poor” indeed. The first panel is the set-up for the second, which is the cartoon’s punchline.

            True: screwing the poor is part of the GOP method. But mostly, the party’s official position is to object to everything the Democranks want. And so our government consists of two parties—one proposes and the other opposes. And nothing gets done.

            The Climate Summit is widely supposed to be all gesture and nothing else. A pile of resolutions perhaps but otherwise, nothing. Or so it was perceived in many quarters, as we see in the editoon at hand (the signature on which I can’t make out; sorry). 

            Steve Sack seizes the occasion to draw attention to the tons of plastic swirling around in mid-Pacific. Then we’re back to politics as usual, which, in Phil Hands’ hands, consists of a circular formation in which everyone blames everyone else for whatever predicament we’re in. Next we have Lee Judge’s sharp-cornered creations again, images of the GOPachyderm going from one controversy to another (rather than enacting any legislation).

            The excitement continues in our next display, which, albeit, David Fitzsimmons begins with a peaceful Biden as Santa delivering his jammed-with-goodies infrastructure bill, much to  the consternation of the Trumpet, who didn’t deliver much during his 4-year term.

            Then we take up the vaccination wars, with John Darkow’s images showing how the anti-vaxxer takes a position that echoes the Pro-choicer’s position, albeit on a different issue. The Pro-choicer can see that philosophically she and the anti-vaxxer believe the same.  Probably the anti-vaxxer, convinced that he and only he is right, can’t see their fundamental ironic agreement.

            Then Jack Ohman’s image shows dramatically the contradiction in two positions held simultaneously by QAnon people. (Only Q people could do this.) And then Joe Hellor takes two panels to illustrate how Q people (it’s on his cap) will predicably act in the face of new Covid assaults. Hellor has taken considerably pains to make the Q guy as silly looking as possible. And given the positions he has taken, he is as silly as he looks.

            And now it’s time for a break. After all that hard work, deciphering editoons, we deserve something a little less stressful. Let’s take a look at some single-panel gag cartoons.

I’M NOT GOING TO COMMENT on every toon. After all, this interlude is supposed to be relaxing not taxing. As a general rule, a gag cartoon is a sort of puzzle: the picture doesn’t make any sort of comedic sense until you add in the caption, then—boffo!—the puzzle, the mystery, is solved/revealed, and we laugh in relief that it’s all over.

            Gag cartoons are the haiku of cartooning. The balance between words and pictures is perfect: each contributes its share to the ensuing comedy. The picture without the caption isn’t very funny; and the words aren’t funny at all without the picture.

            So as we peruse the accompanying crop of gag cartoons, keep in mind the foregoing qualifications for a gag cartoon.

            Silent cartoons, on the other hand, don’t have captions. But most so-called “silent” cartoons have words that appear in the picture. There are three cartoons like this in first of the accompanying displays. 

            I told Jason Chatfield that his cartoon (upper left) is the funniest cartoon I’ve seen in ages. Okay: all of these are funny—and funnier than most. But his “Exit” in the art gallery has layers of comedic meaning.

            I love Bob Vojtko’s drawing style, so whenever I see one of his cartoons, I clip and save it.

            Among the cartoons in the second batch, I particularly like the “unspoken word poetry.” Of course, I like them all or they wouldn’t be here. But this one, particularly.

            And in all of these, the pictures need the words in order to be funny.

            Now, it’s back to work.

BACK TO THE VAXX WARS. Tom Tomorrow (aka Dan Perkins) defies the general rules about words combining with pictures to make comedic sense. His pictures in This Modern World are usually about the same from panel to panel—as they are here. So what’s funny? The words? I don’t think so: the words are just repeating the beliefs of the QAnon Crowd on an assortment of pandemic issues—delta variant, mask mandates, the January 6^th invasion of the Capitol, climate change, and science and reality. 

            But Perkins twists the verbal content just slightly. In the panel on climate change, for instance, liberals are characterized as imposing regulations—and loving them! And hellstorms (what are they?) “prove nothing.” It’s all a hoax.

            By the time we get to the end of the verbiage, we’ve begun to suspect that these guys live in another world (just as the opening caption asserts), and when one of them says his research consists of watching “random YouTube videos,” we realize he’s not a serious person. And with that, we also realize that Perkins isn’t serious either. Except that he is.

            Kevin “Kal” Kalaugher shows us in the second panel how the GOP reacts to every new announcement about the pandemic: they shout “Attack Fauci!” ‘Ignore Science!” and “Reject Safeguards!” So when Fauci tells us to be ready, the GOP Rapid Response Team leaps into vocal action.

            Then Mike Lester has a puzzling response to vaccination. The canoe is labeled “Vaxx Logic.” And the two paddlers try. The guy in the back is exercising pro-vaxx logic when he tells the other guy to wear four life vests. Why? “Because I might drown.”

            That, Lester would have us believe, is the same logic as the pro-vaxxer’s demand the everyone get vaccinated because otherwise we might drown.

            In the next visual aid, Jack Ohman shows multiple Joe Bidens continually urging everyone to get vaccinated “and boosted.” An aide standing at his elbow suggests they find a different slogan, and Biden comes up with “Boost Back Better,” an echo of his celebrated “Build Back Better.” This maneuver is supposed to ridicule both the vaccination campaign and the Build Back Better operation. 

            Next around the clock, Rob Rogers takes four panels to expose Republicon/Q “thinking.” In the last panel, our baseball cap wearing Q guy blames Biden for everything even though there’s no evidence that supports this attitude. Typical, in other words, of how opponents of Biden act.

            Next, we take up the Facebook dilemma. John Darkow’s spectacular imagery is laughing at the whole notion of Facebook changing its name—as if a name change would serve a purpose similar to that of a heavily fortified castle on a hilltop. But it won’t. Instead, it makes the name change itself look silly.

            Facebook’s reaction is depicted in the next cartoon (from Mike Peters). With a new name, “Facebook” (i.e., Meta) needs a new symbol. And Peters has found the perfect one: it continues the use of Facebook’s stylized hand but with a new, “meta,” gesture.

            Guns, gun rights, and gun control continue to spring into headlines every time we have another school shooting. Which is often. Once or twice a month. In the peace-loving U.S.A.

            I can’t make out the signature in our kick-off cartoon of the next bunch of toons, but the picture captures perfectly American addiction to handguns becoming, thereby, a visual metaphor for American preoccupation with weaponry. Then Bill Day aims at somewhat the same metaphor with his drawing of a handgun with the trigger-guard in the shape of the U.S.A. Joel Pett summarizes the statistics, and then he turns his comic strip into a jab at Alec Balwin, who accidentally shot and killed a staff member on the site of his latest movie. Then Kevin “Kal” Kalaugher offers a comical version of a gun-crazed American, who is not only armed to a fare-thee-well but belligerent about it.

WE GO INTO THE CLASSROOM SHOOTING GALLERY in our next visual aid. Tim Campbell’s highly eccentric renderings of people provide an image of a normal family, the daughter of which doesn’t want to go to school anymore in fear for her life. An understandable sentiment.

            And then Bill Bramhall shows us the classroom the girl feared, kids crouched under their desks while the shadow of a shooter threatens. Chris Britt’s image of Santa Claus waiting for kids to show up with their gift wishes turns bitter when he explains the absence of children in the Santa scenario with a deadly array of juvenile corpses after school shootings.

            “Our regular treatment of school shootings as if they were an aspect of Second Amendment gun rights means that ‘the recurring horror of mass shootings will be part of American life for the foreseeable future. ... The point-blank slaughter by a troubled young man in Newtown, Connecticut nine years ago officially marked the start of our national acceptance of sacrificing innocents on the false altar of gun rights,’ said Will Bunch at Inquirer.com and John Micek in GeorgiaRecorder.com, reporting on the shooting at Michigan’s Oxford High School.

            Then we get to Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old teenager who used Wisconsin’s self-defense laws to escape punishment for killing four people, all of whom Rittenhouse claimed were threatening him with bodily harm if not death. Phil Hands attempts to point out the fallacy in those laws with an image of Rittenhouse killing Lady Justice, who, presumably, came at him with her sword drawn.

            In our next display, Rob Rogers continues to explore the implications of the Rittenhouse case with a two-panel cartoon that contrasts two shootings that came to trial at almost the same time. Rittenhouse escapes punishment because, Rogers implies, he’s white while Ahmaud Arbery is killed because he’s a Black man jogging. Then Pat Byrnes gives the situation a political aura: his “innocent” shooter who kills Lady Justice because she came at him with a torch is the GOPachyderm. While it’s true that Republicons tend to be law-and-order people who support gun ownership for everyone, it may be going a little too far to make Rittenhouse a member of the Party.

            James Israel, editor/founder of Humor Times, a monthly collection of editoons, sounds a sarcastic note in describing the Rittenhouse affair—:

            The first man Rittenhouse shot and killed was Joseph Rosenbaum, “who had committed the grave assault of throwing a plastic bag with a toothbrush in it at the young vigilante. So, naturally, it was totally appropriate to mow him down with an AR-15 style assault weapon!

            “After that, he shot people who were trying to disarm him. Isn’t it strange how the right-wing meme that ‘it takes a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun’ didn’t seem to apply anymore in this case? The assault rifle-toting gunman had just killed an unarmed man, so aren’t the ‘good guys’ supposed to stop him? That was always the story. But I this case, it was much too inconvenient, so the old saw was suddenly and hypocritically disavowed.”

            All of which is true. But there are other aspects in the situation—detailed last time in Opus 423's Editoonery department—that make Rittenhouse’s circumstance a little more understandable. Go back and read the redlined text.

            Next around the clock, Dave Horsey offers an image that compares Democrantz and Republicons in their campaigns for office. The donkey has passed legislation on bipartisan infrastructure but all the elephant can claim to have accomplished is to oppose doing anything. Then Jack Ohman changes the subject with a picture of Postmaster General DeJoy, an overbearingly fat guy, who is proudly claiming that Christmas, like all our Christmas cards, will be a little late this year due to his planned slowdown in Postal Service delivery.

            In our next array, a Dutch editoonist constructs an image of the manger birth of Jesus if it were to take place at social distances. Sort of ruins the traditional tableau, eh?

            At the lower right, Harry Bliss’s image of a doctor’s office with the doctor looking at a patient’s x-ray is given another meaning when the doctor points out the “racist bone” that the man probably claimed he didn’t have in his body. Then we have Joel Pett’s picture of Jesus opening his Christmas mail and coming upon the card from Rep. Thomas Massie.

            The Massie family Christmas card displays his family of seven in front of a decorated tree, each person “gleefully holding some type of gun,” which is captioned: “‘Merry Christmas! P.S. Santa, please bring ammo.’ A bristling display of weaponry ‘to mark the birth of Jesus Christ— known as the Prince of Peace’—is grotesque in itself,” saith Dean Obeidallah at CNN.com, “and is spectacularly ill-timed” given that it came just days after the year’s deadliest school shooting lin Oxford, Michigan.

            “And Massie isn’t an outlier among Republicans. Compassion and humility now ‘appear to be seen as weaknessses’ in a party that takes its cue from Donald Trump and his belligerent, inflammatory rhetoric. A shameless ‘lack of humanity’ has become the party’s brand.”

            Given the provocation, Jesus’ reaction seems more than usually saintly.

            Harry Bliss, by the way, doesn’t usually do editoons. He has illustrated many books, and produced hundreds of cartoons and 21 covers for The New Yorker. Bliss also has a syndicated single-panel cartoon entitled Bliss that appears in over 80 newspapers in the United States, Canada and Japan. Nearby, we’ve posted a sampling of the kind of gag cartoon he does.

            You can see more Bliss-ful cartoons in a book he did drawing Steve Martin’s gags, A Wealth of Pigeons: A Cartoon Collection; we reviewed it in Opus 412.

            And since we’ve just introduced a variant—gag cartoons instead of editoons—we’ll keep it up for a break.

ONCE AGAIN, we take a break from the ardors of perusing thought-provoking editoons and contemplate the kind of cartoon that is supposed to prompt laughter rather than provoke thought. Lots of Santa chortles this time, all from Mike Baldwin’s syndicated Cornered. But nothing more than merely remarkable except the opener from Ham. His Life on Earth will make you think. Nothing profound, though; just, “How the hell....”

            And now, back to work.

AUSTRIAN EDITOONER Petar Pismestrovic lets us pause to remember Angela Merkel’s sixteen years heading Germany’s government. Then Andy Marlette does some very funny dogs conversing about the high price of gasoline. Next Bob Englehart offers a comically terrifying image about how to deal with unruly airline passengers. Then Gary Varvel deploys a seasonally traditional image to remind us who’s gonna cover all those stimulus checks Biden’s government has been handing out of late.

            In our next visual aid, Bob Arial’s image echoes a famous James Gillray etching of February 1805. Captioned “The Plum-pudding in Danger,” in a “classic display of the arrogance of power” (as the late Draper Hill says in The Satirical Etchings of James Gillray), it shows Englalnd’s prime minister William Pitt the Younger and France’s Napoleon carving out their respective spheres of influence.

            Gillray’s cartoon was prompted by a letter (January 2, 1805) from Napoleon to England’s George III stressing his desire for peace and asking what Britain could hope to gain from war, adding that “the world is sufficiently large for our two nations to live in it,” a peace overture that England subsequently rejected as being a lie.

            “Often copied, reproduced and parodied, this [cartoon] is probably Gillray’s best-known work,” Hill says.

            Modernizing the image, Arial has China’s Xi and Russia’s Putin take the carving parts.

            Then we turn to Andy Singer, who gives us a picture of “petroleum life,” demonstrating our reliance upon such petroleum products as plastic.

            Next is David Horsey, to whom I must apologize for using a bad image of his editoon. He uses a luxurious limosine to characterize the wealth of the hedge fund operators who are buying up the nation’s newspapers, only to fire most of the staffs in order to rake in the resulting surpluses. The first to go is usually the staff editoonist, who is regarded as superfluous in a news operation. And then, having sucked out all the money, the hedge guys sell off the remaining shell of a once profitable newspaper, which is so badly damaged it cannot function. This is actually happening to local newspapers all across the nation.

            And then at the lower left, Keith Knight’s (th)ink cartoon takes a shot at news and social media.

            Our next editoon is one of Ruben Bolling’s Tom the Dancing Bug comic strips, a format that permits Bolling as much space as he needs to pile up an indictment of some political or social ill—in the case at hand, he imagines another world that’s the exact opposite of ours in terms of laws and customs, which are therefore brazenly flaunted. In taking an opposite view of our laws and customs, Bolling manages to ridicule those laws and customs.

            As we approach the terminus of this opus’s Editoonery, we realize that we’ve scarcely given the right wing-nuts any exposure, so we drop in on Mallard Fillmore for some new insights. The daffy duck doesn’t deploy images: he just talks.

            And finally, we bid a fond farewell to Bob Dole. I lived and worked in Kansas for almost ten years, and that meant I’d hear about his latest endeavor regularly. Despite my political leanings in the opposite direction from Dole’s, I enjoyed him. He had a great wit, and he was always popping off some wise crack or another.

            One of his witticisms that’s cropped up in the obituaries about him begins when someone asks him how he feels about a political defeat. Dole said he felt fine. “I sleep like a baby,” he said, “—I wake up every two hours, screaming.” For that crack alone, I give him aselection of obit cartoons.

            We’ll finish this time with a short helping of gag cartoons. Among them is a single panel from Baldo, the Latino-centered strip by Hector D. Cantú and Carlos Castellanos. The character speaking to Baldo utters a pearl of wisdom worth keeping in mind, and so I clipped the strip and have, now, filed it for safekeeping in Rancid Raves.

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