My brother gave me this video of my niece, Lola, singing Ironman. It cracks me up, especially towards the end. It doesn't take much to keep me amused, I guess.

Now you're seeing Elena in obsessive mode...

James Buchanan lived with Rufus King for fifteen years. Is is so surprising, then, that there is a plethora of cartoons depicting Buchanan in a dress?

What the heck, I figured I'd post a contrasting image of Andrew Jackson to compare with Nast's Lincoln. First, it's a very strong image. Though it promotes the idea of an overreaching tyrant, even being iconic on a certain level, it's main function is to make fun of the president.

Aha! I'm on the right track with these editorial cartoons. This exploration has given me a great ride through U.S. history.

I of course turned to the resident expert on the subject, Julia. I said, Hey, Julia, guess what your mother's latest conspiracy theory is about... she gave me a nice little history lesson, leaving me pretty well sure of how little I actually know. However, one thing she said really struck me. She argued that the Emancipation Proclamation had been the logical way Lincoln came up with to justify an unpopular and pretty much unnecessary war.

I'm posting the Thomas Nast cartoon which has been argued to have been pivotal to the reelection of Abraham Lincoln.

Nast not only gave us our image of Santa Claus, The Republican Elephant and the Democratic Donkey, he pretty well defined Abraham Lincoln as well. What it comes down to is effective marketing. Prior to Nast, you really didn't have artists capable of selling a product through images. I'm not sure if Nast should be remembered as political cartoonist or marketer.

Anyhow, Nast's work is a sea change in approach from the guys who came before him. If you think of him as a marketer, though, the later disappointments in his career when he insisted on only doing work coming from the heart make a lot of sense.

I'm of course, just using the blog to blow things through my nose, so to speak. However, to my mind, it's an important distinction, to view the anti-Jacksonian "clobbering time" transform into the effective marketing of the Republican vision in the time of Lincoln.

Why the heck I'm thinking about this now...I'm unwinding from the visit from my brother. I did a lot of cooking, some sledding, and a lot of conversating. A good time.

I'm on my way out of the house to stock up on victuals for the big Vira/Steier family hoedown today. Before I left, however I wanted to write this down because it's about one of the most bizarre thoughts I'd ever had. I feel like I'm back in high school on a Saturday night.

It's about Abraham Lincoln.

I've been reading editorial cartoons from the early to mid 1800's. I've written in an earlier blog, that these cartoons seemed to parallel the trend of caning...that is, beating your opponent over the head with a hard object. Drawing pictures didn't draw blood, but had the same effect of making someone see red. Curiously, most cartoons were against the Democrats, who by and large held the presidency from the time of Jackson to the time of Lincoln.

Then came Lincoln. And the war... Was this in fact the ultimate caning, the northern Republicans smacking the southern Democrats upside the head? Putting the upstarts in their place.

Everywhere besides the United States, the issue of African slaves was resolved peacefully. I have to look more closely at the matter, but it seems American cartoonists liked Lincoln. Jackson, such a looming political figure prior to the civil war, has stayed marginalized historically until this very day.

It was also the end of American expansionism, which the Democrats felt almost as a birthright.

Anyhow, it's something to ponder as I wade my way through this cartoon morass.

It's off to the store now. Four year old Boris and five year old Lola are on their way. We still have snow on the golf course and we're all going to go sledding.

I told Kate I'd try to get the Jane Quiet comic finished by Chirstmas, but what I didn't tell her is that this is not Christmas.

My family has always celebrated Christmas on January 7, like the entire Eastern Orthodox world. There are millions of us. When I was younger, missing out on the hyperventilation around December 25 was tough. Celebrating at a different time meant extra days off of school, not bad really, except then I'd have to go into some explanation of why Christmas comes in January. Just another excuse for the other kids to peg me as weird. Quite frankly, I hadn't a clue. If you don't have a clue, look it up on Wikipedia.

Right now I'd like to talk about that feel good movie of the season, Sweeney Todd. I don't know what genius prompted the release of this film at this time of year. Probably some attempt to hark back to the Nightmare before Chirstmas. As a gore hound, my favorite part was watching the lifeless bloodied bodies crunch onto the floor. One after the other . Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. As a music lover, I wanted nothing more than the singing to stop. For pity's sake. Never in my life would I consider buying a CD called "Helena Bonham Carter sings Sondheim". If the dead bodies won't make you sick, the singing will.

The worst thing about the movie though, is that it made us all miss Lydia. The one missing child from this family gathering. She's working over the holidays in Stuttgart. Darn that Hansel and Gretel. What would our professional opera/theater expert think about Johnny Depp's glissando?

On the good side, it redeems my choice of Bad Taste as a movie for the entire family a few years back. Rod was the Steier pushing for Sweeney Todd. He thought it might bridge the middle ground between my love of horror films and his love of music. The only movie that's ever done that was "Cannibal the Musical", a Steier family favorite.

Rod, being Jewish, doesn't even celebrate Christmas.

Peter Brown spent a good deal of Christmas Eve with our family. He had the flight from hell coming in to Hartford, finally arriving at four a.m. when he was due at midnight. When his mom and dad brought him by, his dad joked this is like old times, when Peter spent more time here than at home.

But if it's not Christmas, yesterday certainly wasn't Christmas Eve. We here think of it as the special hanging out at the Steier's day. We have a mini frig full of beers, a nintendo Wii, and massive quantities of left overs. Celebration doesn't get better than that, even if it's not Christmas.

There's the smell of Anise in the Air. Thank goodness for children who like to cook. I sat up here in my studio dinging on my computer while my daughter Julia cooked us all Vietnamese Pho for dinner. What a treat.

Not like I got out of cooking, mind you. No, Rod needed his own meal, so I whipped up some Chicken breast left over from the Chicken Curry Julia made on Friday. That night, Rod ended up with left-over stew. We sometimes have very little respect for him and his allergies.

So this is the holidays here at the Steiers. We play a lot of Wii. Everyone has their own computers. Sometimes Dooz plays a little jazz on the piano. We look at recipe books. Ted drops by to hang with his siblings. We are waiting to see when Peter Brown's plane will actually be landing. The weather's pretty rotten and the airports are crowded.

Oh yeah...Peter Brown...the neighborhood kid who took up residence here at the hacienda back when Doozy and Julia were still in school. He used to be a fixture around here and we miss him.

We've also been checking the papers to figure out the movie we're going to see on Christmas. Maybe Peter will come with us. It's not as good as having daughter Lydia home, but you can't always see a movie with the family you want, just the family that happens to be there.

Goth Scout Keesha is pretty much based on my daughter, Julia, who spent her childhood in a soccer uniform. Getting her to wear a dress was nigh impossible. We couldn't even bribe her. I think the first time we saw her in a skirt, we just about keeled over, I mean the other five of us. I imagine Lydia making some comment linking the dress with puberty. Older sisters can be observant like that.

Julia is presently assistant lacrosse coach at Wilkes University. The entire present story arc comes from the fact that the Wilkes goalie had to leave the university and enter rehab this past fall. Like Keesha, my daughter must sally forth into the great unknown in order to fill the spot prior to the beginning of lacrosse season, which officially starts in January. I don't know what's happening at Wilkes, but I do know that the Goth Scouts have managed to secure their goalie.

Drawing Goldberg, the four armed robot lacrosse goalie, is taking me into new directions. I'm pretty much resigned to the fact that I'll be studying an anime style of drawing quite seriously for the next few months. I've been fighting this for years, but I think it's a highly marketable style and has much to offer. For better or worse, it's worth spending a little time learning pertinent anime conventions.

It's not DIE, Simpsons, it's Die Simpsons, which is German for the Simpsons. I downloaded the German version of the movie off of the internet and have been listening to it in my studio while working. Today, the English language DVD came from Amazon so now I can actually understand what the heck was going on. Boy, did I have it wrong. I thought the movie was about the rapture and the end of the world. I was pretty shocked to find out it was about pollution.

I kind of liked my version better.

It's great having Doozy and Julia around. Dooz has his strike beard growing like all of Hollywood (I wonder if the women stopped shaving, too) We all went out to Pho Boston for some great Pho Boston this afternoon with Alice, Julia's friend, and reminisced about Julia's Junior prom. I spent a week tailoring her dress after discovering that her figure is, how do I put this politely, a bit lop-sided. Not to leave Dooz unembarassed, after the restaurant, we went to the Salvation army where Doozy was acting kind of strangely. I asked him what the problem is and he said he really needed to go home to use the bathroom. Why he couldn't have just said something earlier, I don't know. I think the tendency is to revert back to childhood roles once home again. That was a very Doozy thing to do.

One of these days, I'll make a series of Youtube.com short featuring yours truly reminiscing about the most embarassing moments in her children't lives. Ha! It'll make the Die Simpsons seem tame.

Happy Birthday to Kate! Here's the next installment of Jane Quiet. This is the transitional phase, in which not much happens, but the scene is getting set for the next appearance of the monster. I have to admit, while drawing this, I really wished that I hadn't pressed for a wordless book. I probably could have saved myself seven pages of work.

I've been doing a little reading here and there on cartooning in the early period of American history. What piqued my curiosity was my daughter, Julia's, fascination with Andrew Jackson and the phenomenon of caning. Caning is the act of smacking one's enemy with a cane. The most famous episode happened in Congress, with the caning of a Massachussetts Senator named Sumner in 1856. This is generally viewed as the episode signalling the end of the age of accomodation between North and South. The truth of the matter is that caning had been happening way before this, with anecdotes both within and without congress.

What I've discovered is that cartooning in the Jacksonian period, a time of real acrimoniousness between political factions, was tantamount to a caning. If your really wanted to smack your opponent, you'd get your politically friendly newspaper editor to run the most ridiculous picture saying the most scurrilous things. The advent of lithography circa 1830 made this a relatively cheap and easy thing to do.

There's a great little essay by John Sullivan called "The case of the Good Student: Pictorial Satire in Jacksonian America" which details Russel Jarvis, assistant editor of the United States Telegraph, actually confronting the artist of a certain cartoon, then getting into a serious brawl with the lithographers. His editor, while defending the right to print cartoons, no matter what they say, also managed to get into an altercation, but with an opposing reporter whose ear he severely tweaked.

Of course, there's an entire book called "The Ungentlemanly art" whose title pretty much pegs that pugilistic facet of political cartooning. What I like is the context. That political cartoons have become such an ingrained fixture of American political life is testament to the fact that caning remains with us today, but kinder and gentler.

Now, of course, I've got to explore the big Poppa of caning, the civil war. What was the role of political cartooing then? How much can you smack people with a drawing while they are dying in droves on the battlefields?

Nit picking has special meaning this holiday season, as my niece and nephew were infected with lice, as were all the kids in their social circles. It seems to have become a ritual of passage of kindergarteners and their siblings. Every bottle of lice killer shampoo comes with a little comb. For days after, the parent has to sit and pick out the little nits left behind. It's tedious work.

I have a nit picker cartooning student. For being thirteen, she draws exceptionally well, but all she can see is that her work isn't looking like the more polished stuff on deviantart. This means she erases a lot. I mean a lot. hands and feet especially. This past Saturday during cartooning class, I and her two friends desperately tried to wrest her eraser away from her. The trouble is that though she can see things aren't right, she hasn't the expertise to fix anything correctly.

Most times at this point, I'd tell the student not to worry about making the object look like what you want it to, just make it look cool and passibly like what you want. But sometimes, that's not good enough, and that's when teaching gets hard.

A lot of teachingis comes down to the ability to coax students into overcoming old habits. If you can't draw something, the cure is simply to draw that object a lot, until you get it correctly. For a kid who has her time filled with all kinds of school assignments, social gatherings, and sporting events, the thought of buckling down doesn't make much economic sense. I remember reading about Frank Miller, the creator of Sin City, that at one point he didn't know how to draw cars. Someone told him that meant he had to draw cars, a lot of cars, so he did, day after day, using small models, until he could draw a car in his sleep if he wanted. In short, until she buckles down and actually draws hundreds, maybe thousands, of hands, then she will always be erasing, and fixing, erasing, fixing.

It's tough to tell a thirteen year old kid to give up free time in order to do something utterly thankless and boring. But that's what real nit picking is all about, unfortunately. If you want all the nits out, you have to do it right.

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Wouldn't you know it, just when I'm deep into a storyline about a Mall at Christmas being The Darkest Pit of Hell, news comes out that a Mall in Omaha, Nebraska, in fact turned into the Darkest PIt of Hell, at least for a few minutes. This happened when some deranged teenager with an assault weapon wandered onto the second floor and started shooting people.

I wish I had something clever to say about this, but I don't. A teenager with an assault weapon in a mid-western Mall on Christmas. That's so wrong on so many levels. Nothing I make up can even touch that.

Every Christmas, I try really hard to purchase American stuff for my Japanese friends. I actually succeeded last year. I purchased a wooden pocketbook at the New Britain Museum which was carved in the shape of an American flag. However, this is rare. This year, I purchased a quilt off of ebay. It had a stars and stripes motif. Very neat. When it came to the house, it was in a plastic bag labeled "Made in China." Ditto the little State of Libery and Liberty bell trinket boxes. All made in China. Anyhow, it's pretty darn hard to get American made anything, especially if it's something patriotic.

The father of one of my cartooning students is an animator. Last week he sent me a link to Flip Boom Studiio You can download a seven day trial of a really neat little program for animation. It's very easy to use and offers a good intro to using vectors. The full version costs all of $29.95. Definitely worth the money. Besides being good for kids, it's fantastic for anyone who wants sort of an animation for dummies type of environment.

I'm thinking of learning how to use the more professional Toon Boom Studio. Just shoot me. I already have a crapload of various computer programs waiting for my undivided attention. When it comes to new programs, I'm like a kid in a candy store. You would think that the cost would be enough to deter me, however, Julia can still get her student discount. It would be such a pity to let her graduate without her mother snagging yet at least one more massive cool sounding program with a prohibitively steep learniing curve.