CSotD: The Battle of Everywhere
Skip to comments
Matt Wuerker posted an unusual query on Facebook the other day, and, as you'll see at the right, he got 133 comments and, as you'll see above, he got a pretty good cartoon out of it.
I don't know how many words Eskimos, or Inuits for that matter, have for snow. In New England, we get by with a generous handful – powder, slush, corn snow, etc. — plus quite a few variations, not all of them printable.
Then again, a woman told me yesterday that she and her daughter had planned to spend a day skiing, but it turned out to be six degrees F and the surface was ice and so they stayed inside and watched Netflix, which is not always an option open to people living north of the 60th parallel, hence the need for more precision.
Ditto for those who live amongst the trumperies, which is pretty much all of us.
No problems with cold weather for Steve Sack, because he's been on fire lately, and I only regret that he didn't run this cartoon a day earlier, because I would have juxtaposed it with Ann Telnaes's piece that also made creative, as opposed to predictable and tiresome, use of the Twitter logo.
I don't blame Sack, of course, because he was constrained by the timing of Comey's testimony. Comey and others had earlier indicated a lack of evidence for Trump's paranoid fantasies, but he hadn't said it in detail, under oath.
And, as Mike Thompson suggests, sometimes the timing of these revelations matters to the interested parties.
I'm not buying the idea that Trump's delusional tweets are part of some master plan. I tend to agree with Tom Toles, who says in his latest blog posting that the guy is simply unbalanced, and with Tom Tomorrow's suggestion above that we're simply chasing our own tails in trying to find logic in it all.
While we do need to figure out how we got here, in order to make sure it doesn't happen again, I think the main effort going forward is how to go forward.
The scariest "tiger by the tail" element here is that, when Lincoln was elected, the people who went batshit and turned against the country were conveniently located in one large region and, even then, it cost 625,000 lives to sort things out.
It wasn't all geography: When I was doing research for a children's story involving Confederate POWs in the north, I learned that, if they could get out, they could get home. There were plenty of sympathetic doors they could knock on, even up north.
But the fact remains that we were able to operate on the ancient model of large groups of men in uniforms lining up and shooting at each other.
That isn't how war works anymore and hasn't been since — what? Algeria?
Bear in mind that, while Dear Leader's approval rating is rapidly declining, his core group of supporters have a deplorable inability to process facts, and that they share his paranoid world view, possess a large supply of firearms and are geographically scattered.
It won't be as easy this time as whisking Spiro away and then producing logical, legal evidence that dictates removing Tricky Dick and putting good old Jerry Ford in place to calm everything back down.
And if you think climate change is an inexorable crisis we need to plan for, you should calculate the timeline on this one, too, because Nixon was only the flood, and this is starting to feel like the fire.
The Times They Are A-Changin'
Wanda isn't the only person writing a children's book these days, as cartoonists hedge their bets by going over into the area of graphic novels.
There was a flood of bad children's books by non-writers — chiefly Hollywood types — a few years ago, most in sing-song verse having to do with baby animals wandering around asking adult animals for directions. A few were not absolutely horrible, which earned them great praise.
At the moment, children's literature is awash in fart and vomit jokes for the 10-and-under crowd, and equally dominated in the middle-school sector by socially significant novels about racially diverse, sexually divergent refugees with terminal diseases and learning disabilities.
I'm only being slightly sarcastic. As someone who assigns children's book reviews, I look at this stuff coming in and wonder, geez, if this is what they're publishing, what on earth are they rejecting?
(And, thanks to self-publishing, I get to find out!)
But on a serious level for cartoonists, one thing I'm seeing is that writing a solid, successful syndicated cartoon does not always translate into writing good graphic novels.
It's just not the same skill set, and, while it's a smart place to look for your next gig, you have to approach it as a new job and not an extension of what you're already good at.
Meanwhile, in More News Guaranteed to Bring You Right Down, Mike Lynch reports that — apparently as part of Bob Mankoff's retirement — the New Yorker will no longer host those legendary sessions where cartoonists gather to show their latest gags.
His thoughts on the old practice are worth a visit, but it's a shame. I don't know how much it will change the face of gag cartooning, but it's like realizing that you're too late to attend a Grateful Dead Concert or Mardi Gras and get the same vibe you'd have gotten if you'd been there before it was cool.
Only I guess now it's not even gonna happen in an uncool sense.
And Tom Richmond confirms the rumors: Mad Magazine is headed for the West Coast, where nobody speaks Yiddish. I'll bet Arthur the Avocado dies in the back of the U-Haul before they get to the Mississippi.
Thanks for dropping by. Glad I could provide some laffs.
Here: Take a deep breath
(Yesterday, I heard a chemo patient in her 60s say "Just gotta keep on keepin'
on," and I thought, "I remember when only people in their 20s said that."
Then realized it was about 40 years ago.)
Comments 3
Comments are closed.