Here's the back cover to Jane Quiet. I had expected to be a little fancier than this, but I was really happy how it came out, simple though it is. I took my initial sketch into Photoshop and then used the Stamp filter, like I did for the front cover. It gives some interesting effects, a little like a woodcut or something. I kind of like the random nature of the lines. I'm going to have to try to get that effect using pen and paper, just for hahas.

I left quite a bit of room for text. Then again, it looks fine without any text. The idea of a silent back cover appeals to me on some level.

Here's the newest Jane Quiet Cover sample. I decided not to go for the painterly look, but a rather staight forward design. I'm a lot happier with it. For one thing, I could control the process while making this a whole lot better than when I used Photoshop like it were a box of crayons. It pretty much shouts that Jane Quiet is associated with the Occult. I substituted skulls for monster, but I did leave a pair of eyes hanging in the darkness. It's a tried and true sign that there are spooks up ahead, I know. I know.

I worked on this cover for Jane Quiet yesterday, but I'm not sure I like it. I used the computer to paint, something with which I'm not very confident. I'm not sure I'm keen on the composition either. I really want a spectacular cover. I'll give it a second go tomorrow.

Th..th..th..th..that's all folks!

Hooray!

This is cartoon from the campaign of 1840. I thought it was apropos to the Goth Scouts on account of candidate Polk smoking a little voodoo pipe and conjuring up all these little creatures.

The wordiness of the cartoon makes me think of Tom Tomorrow or the cartoons of Ted Rall. I'm not quite sure what this observation says either about contemporary editorial cartooning or about modern politics that there's a return to this nineteenth century cartooning convention. I wonder how many literate voters in 1840 were able to wade through this dialogue. Obviously, like the cartoons of Rall or Tom Tomorrow, these cartoons were geared towards a public sophisticated to read but not too sophisticated. They still must have enough earthiness to respond to the hilarious sight of Martin Van Buren's face on the body of a rat.

The need to convince the greater public of a certain point of view is kind of interesting on a whole. The entire political history of the United States from Andrew Jackson up until Lincoln seemed to be a series of lame compromises which in the end made nobody happy so the entire country up and fought a war. It's this need to satisfy an entire contingent of people, of making certain quarters happy rather than getting anything done, which is probably the weakest part of democracy. On some level, all these endless nineteenth century word balloons form an endless blah blah blah signifying nothing. The real energy of the country was being expended in the physical acquisition of territory. The campaigns and the political cartoons put a democratic veneer on what in fact had been an imperial expansion...sans king.

Even today, cartoons are hard pressed to give a real assessment of government action. Rather, they exist as a chorus reflecting the popular mood, just as they did in the nineteenth century. Take for instance our current economic crisis. It should have been obvious to everyone that when the early Bush administration consisted mainly of individuals either invested in, sitting on the board of, or having been lobbyists for the Enron Corporation, that pretty much the chances of an economic crises during a Bush presidency were pretty high. But no, Arab fanatics seemed to have a more universal appeal for much of the cartoonists working in the twenty-first century.

Well, I'm kind of digressing now. But can't you just see George Bush sitting in the magic circle instead of Polk with little dollar bills circling him and the Democratic congress going chanting something about tax rebates. It's a universal American truth that politicians will do just about anything to get elected which is why the best cartoons are all quite recyclable.

This is a cartoon by Louis Maurer, showing the divide in the Democratic party. Like everything prior to the civil war, it split along lines either for or against slavery. The run up to the civil war was nothing if not a series of missed opportunities and tragedies. I trace the underlying cause to the three fifths compromise. The south wielded power way out of proportion to its true voting population as a result. It allowed a handful of people to become undeservedly self important. They thought they could boss an entire country around the way they bossed their slaves.

With this in mind, I want to mention the grotesques found in antebellum cartoons. The donkeys in this cartoon, for example. Maurer just stuck a human head on an animal body. It's very primitive, but then quite apropos to the gathering horror. In a few years, Thomas Nast will transform editorial cartoons into a much more palatable friendliness. Boss Tweed might have been corrupt, but he was kind of cute, too.

There's something genuinely terrifying about the antebellum cartoons. You can almost feel the artists struggling to create something out of nothing the way the the country itself was struggling to define its borders and its population. There were no references for the idea of a party pulling itself apart, so the artist created an image out of his head. Political cartoons, after all, exist not as vehicles to communicate nebulous, universal truths, but ideas specific to a time and a place. It's a tall order. As a result, these early cartoonists created very primitive images of supposedly sophisticated political leaders. Primitive and grotesque, I might add.

By the time of the Civil War, the United States had gone through tremendous changes. Forget the obvious. My friend Cheryl took me on a tour of some cemeteries. Even the concept of how to bury people had evolved. At the same time that Nast's more aesthetic cartoons were gaining in popularity, cemeteries were being transformed into parks where the general public could picnic among the tombstones.

Times they were a changing.

I've been interested in private military companies ever since reading PW Singer's book on the subject. I had no inkling of the role private military had in the rapid expansion of U.S. territory leading up to the time of the Civil War until I started researching political cartoons.

Take this cartoon, for example. It shows the blockade of Round Island by Zachary Taylor, preventing the private army of Narciso Lopez from making its way to Cuba. (Lopez did eventually make it to Cuba, where he and his army were executed) The freebooters themselves are seated at a table making commentary about other Latin American countries.

There are a few ironies here.

First, the impetus for expanding The United States borders South came from the slavery supporters hamstrung by the Missouri Compromise. In short, the United States, bastion of democracy ,felt a militant need from some quarters to enslave thousands more people given enough land to do so. From a political point of view, such expansion would upset the balance of power in the United States to favor the slave States. From an economic point of view, gosh darn it, you can make a heck of a lot of money by owning slaves. Just think of slavery enriched presidents Taylor and Jackson and Jefferson. It didn't even matter to the pro-slavery people that a state might not even have the economy to support slavery. A theoretical pro-slavery state was just fine, thank-you.

Naturally, you can't have the U.S. military declaring war on every country, so these freebooters nicely took up the slack. Meanwhile, you had American negotiators trying to get the Spanish king to sell Cuba to the United States. James Buchanan, future president, was one of these. He hobnobbed with the anti-monarchists while in Spain, which was kind of a stupid way to suck up to the person who actually owned the darn piece of land.

This leads to another irony. I heard John McCain being lambasted for not being more vociferous in his opposition to the confederate flag. Prior to 1860, the American flag stood for slavery, as it had done all along. Everyone picks on the confederates, like slavery had never existed prior to 1860. Sometimes the confederacy becomes a scapegoat for our own historical total redface moment.

Private armies can be a tricky business. Literally. When William Walker declared himself president of Nicaragua in 1954, he promptly ticked off industrialist Cornielius Vanderbilt, whose company supervised the transportation of goods in Nicaragua. Vanderbilt cut off supplies to Walker, Walker's grip on Nicaragua loosened, and he was captured and executed.

This should have been a lesson to the South. Northern Industrialists were on the march and they weren't about to compromise with anybody.
I

The next three posts are all new Jane Quiet pages, working towards that ending.

Meanwhile, as I'm writing this, there is the sound of bathroom walls being demolished. I have a huge dumpster in my driveway. The house is undergoing yet another round of remodeling. I'll be taking the opportunity to use the dumpster, going through the house and weeding out all the junk. I'm a packrat and this process will be painful. But necessary.

I've been doing a lot of weeding with the Goth Scouts strip. Notice I've eliminated noses from three of the characters. Noses just seemed to take away from the Chibi cute factor. Also, the noses tended to float on the faces. It's one less complication. I'm pretty happy with all the changes.

Here are the next four pages of the Jane Quiet comic book. It's been a long time coming. We're in the home stretch.

I was working way too fast on these last pages, trying to keep to some self-imposed deadline. After finding myself completely dissatisfied with the outcome, I went back, reworked a lot of what I did, and relaxed. It may take a little longer, but I'm enjoying myself. Hopefully, this approach will make for a better product as well.

I love this cartoon. According to one of the books I'm reading, the election of 1840 was the first truly modern election. Basically this means that the masterminds behind the candidates figured out that stumping and giving out freebies might just get the rabble to vote for your man.

One of the tactics used by Whigs consisted of a large ball being rolled into town. Once the public caught sight of this ball, the words "Tippecanoe and Tyler, too" painted on its surface, crowds would follow it down to where the party organizers had set up E.C. Booz Distillery casks of Old Cabin Whiskey. Amid the ensuing festivities, politicking would begin and the happy crowd would be like putty in their hands.

Naturally, the Whigs won the presidential election. Alas their candidate, the hero of Tippecanoe, William Henry Harrison, died a month or so after giving a two hour inaugural speech. If you ask me, a two hour speech by a politician deserves death. There's a wonderful quote by William Cullen Bryant who said he regretted Harrison's passing "only because he did not live long enough to prove his incapacity for the office of president." Tyler took over and proved himself a Whig in name only. He in fact was what would come to be known as a "doughface", a whig with southern sympathies. John Quincy Adams simply referred to him as "His Accidency". I think the only thing about Tyler that kids learn about in school is that he's the guy referred to by the neat slogan "Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too" and as president, he's the guy who preceded Polk.

The presidential election of 1848 pitted two generals against each other. On the Whig side, was Zachary Taylor, a guy who had never been in politics, while on the Democratic side was Lewis Cass, who had long been in politics, but a general rather briefly, during the war of 1812.

One would think that the long years of service to the United States would have served Cass well, and that maybe Taylor's years in the military might not be exactly the type of experience needed in a country fairy well divided along partisan north south lines by this time. However, the American public had by 1848 been already pegged as a gullible bunch. The well organized Whig forces decided to deal with Cass's military record by reducing it to a matter of ridicule as witnessed by the speech of a certain congressman on the floor of the House of Representatives:

"He (Cass) was not at Hull's surrender, but he was close by; he was a volunter aid to General Harrison on he day of the battle of the Thames; and as you said in 1840 Harrison was picking huckleberries two miles off while the battle was fought, I suppose it is just a conclusion with you to say Cass was aiding Harrison to pick huckleberries."

And who was the congressman swift-boating poor old Lewis Cass? None other than Abraham Lincoln.

The speech goes on to compare Cass's record with Lincoln's own. I think Lincoln's military career lasted about half an hour, just long enough for him to climb on a horse and fall off. But Lincoln fully acknowledged this. Moreover, by comparing himself to Cass, he could in fact milk his meagre military record for all it was worth. I don't know much about Lincoln, but I would never mess with this guy, which is exactly what the largely Democratic South did a few years later.

There's one more thing noteworthy about this cartoon. The name Cass seemed to provoke many cartoons with referrals to "gas". For cartoonists back in 1848, this name was a godsend, much like Richard Nixon's four o'clock shadow, or Bill Clinton having been caught with his pants down in more recent times.

This a quote from the book from which I pulled this image: "When Mrs. Stowe published Uncle Tom's Cabin, Mrs. Mary H. Eastman promptly answered her in Aunt Phillie's Cabin, or, southern Life as It is."

Revisionism has been a part of American political discourse for a very long time. Just this morning, I read a Bret Stephens op ed piece in the Wall Street Journal touting the end of American divisiveness over minorities. This he did in the context of poo-pooing the achievement of Barack Obama. However, I seem to remember an episode of the McLaughlin group not a month ago in which Mitt Romney's Mormon religion had been fairly well trummeled. One wonders what planet these people are on.

Stephens was pretty much trying to do the same as this cartoon. The argument pretty much goes, hey, things are fabulous the way they are! If you think diffently, just look at the other guy...

What this cartoon really points out, however, is that despite its cutting edge self-image, America seems to forever be a few steps behind its Eurpoean peers. When this cartoon came out in 1950, slavery had been by and large eliminated from the west. Meanwhile, America not only persisted in owning slaves, but its democratic party seemed hellbent on taking slavery to the ends of the earth, much as Bush is currently doing with democracy, I might add. In 1856, William Walker, mercenary, declared himself king of Nicaragua. President Pierce with his 1854 Ostend Doctrine, demanded to buy Cuba from the Spanish King. I might point out, that while negotiating with the Spanish king, Pierce's representatives made a point of hobnobbing with contemporary anarchists and democracy-promoters. In short, what a bunch of jerks.

Of course, we did eventually join the rest of the west, but not before clobbering each other in the Civil War. Sometimes Americans have to be taken kicking and screaming into the future.

This is how I feel about the current Healthcare debate. About five years ago, in that post nine eleven time when every right wing mental case decided they own the world, I had an argument about health insurance with a colleague of my husbands. His eyes bulged, the veins on his neck stood out :"Don't go there...don't go there!" he screamed at me, before I even made my point.

Like this cartoon, most opponents of Universal Healthcare will point to the British and say "YOU DON"T WANT TO BE LIKE THEM!" Somehow, we're all supposed to feel good about things just as they are. Last year, a friend of mine without health insurance ended up sewing up her husband's badly cut elbow with simple needle and thread. She didn't seem too rollicking and happy. Her husband sure wasn't. He ended up with a bad infection, cured with some pharmaceuticals borrowed from a neighbor.

Anyhow, Universal Healthcare is inevitable, expecially since the dixiecrats who made the Great Society what it was are now all Republicans. It just remains to be seen just how much America kicks and screams before getting there. I doubt we'll have another civil war, but then Americans can be really stupid sometimes.

Well, I called my mom and my brother this morning to wish them both a Merry Christmas. That's about the extent of the celebration. I didn't manage to finish the Jane Quiet book like I had hoped. The last few pages have been pencilled, so the inks shouldn't take all that long. A week maybe. Then I'll have to work on a real bang up cover. A cool color rendering of the monster.

I got some bad news about the anthology in which my work was supposed to appear. Diamond turned the publisher down saying that anthologies don't sell. I can attest to that. I've still got umpteen hundreds of copies of Slapped Together comics sitting around the house.

Since the current Goth Scouts strip is in the middle of a Dog Whisperer influenced series, I thought I'd post my latest political cartoon. There was an article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal likening Huckabee to European Christian Democrats. The author went on to spook the WSJ's conservative readership by saying that a Huckabee led government would be "a faith based goverment" and a "large government bureaucracy." Where has this guy been for the past eight years?

Wall Street Journal op ed pieces crack me up.

This is a Christmas postcard my friend Megumi sent me. I named one of my Goth Scouts after her. Along with the postcard came pictures of her daughter, Midori's, wedding. Boy, did that make me feel old. Megumi and I became friends when Midori was just three. Our kids all went to nursery school together. In my mind, Megumi and I have stayed the same age as when we first met. Anything that brings a reality check also brings a little shock. OH MY GOSH ARE WE REALLY THAT OLD?

I started cartooning after Megumi returned to Japan with her family. Lo and behold, when she learned of my ambitions, she sent me a picture she drew for her tennis club. I still have it taped to my drafting table. It put my artwork to shame. Megumi has a great sense of humor. For the one year we were neighbors, we had a great time, despite the language barrier.

I have no idea what the postcard says, but I can guess. Still and all, I plan on bringing it with me to the World of Concrete Industrial show, which will be attended by many of Rod's Japanese business associates. I would like a translation.

I've got the postcard pinned to the bulletin board in my studio. It's simply fabulous.

E.W. Clay was part of the Jacksonian wave of political cartoonists who rode the newfangled science of lithography to glory. He did a series of cautionary tales trying to scare the abolitionists into realizing the folly of setting the slaves free. Here I'm posting one of them.

A few things came to mind when I first saw this cartoon. First, the most conservative of current supreme court justices happens to be a black man married to a white woman. Second, the product of a union between black man and white woman presently campaigns as a democratic candidate for president.

Ooh. Scary.

No, what's really scary never really quite made it into any political cartoons. I'm talking about the fact that our brilliant forefathers, scientific, learned men though they were, figured that every negro counted as three fifths of a man. Not a quarter of a man, not three quarters, but three fifths. We recognize Jefferson as the author of the Declaration of Independence, but who the heck remembers the name of the genius who decided this three fifths business? Julia and I did a perfunctory bit of research. We think it was Madison, but we aren't sure. I'm not saying he proposed it, mind you. It's one thing coming up with a bad idea, it's another to make it part of the law.

I was brought up thinking that the three fifths compromise was some kind of racist business, but in fact it solved a problem for the slave states. It's called wanting your cake and eating it, too. If slaves had no value as human beings, then the southern states would be stuck with something like one representative in congress each. However, if you counted them as full human beings, that representation zoomed up to pretty much half the entire House of Representatives. But you couldn't do that, because they're SLAVES, so they came up with this three fifths, the magic percentage able to put Southern power into the government without the messy necessity of actually paying people to do work.

If Washington were Solomon, which obviously he wasn't, despite the persistent myth, he'd have cut off the legs of every slave just to make sure the three fifths number were accurate. Then let the southerners decide what's better, having three fifths of a negro, or a one hundred per cent man.

But no, this is not the way of the world. Getting back to the cartoon, it came out about the same time that abolitionist literature was being illegally burned by the U.S. mail with the tacit approval of the president. Sadly, back then breaking the law was higher moral ground than having your daughter marry a negro.