The Week in Review, Annotated by Kristi Noem's boyfriend...

Buh bye, dog killer...

Well, let’s get right to it.

This seems like awhile back, doesn’t it?

This was yet another Monday morning where some huge thing happened, and I don’t want to work on the weekend. I also have a big writing load, so that makes major news on the weekend have to be really, really major.

There is a threshold for me to get up and break up my weekend, and here is the criteria:

Assassination or death of major figure.

Something that happened to astronauts.

I’m thinking.

Now, having said that, I certainly was thinking about this idiotic illegal war all weekend, and that counts. But it has to be something really catastrophic. This war is indeed catastrophic,. but knowing Trump, we can’t know whether any given Catastrophe of Choice isn’t just a TACO Trump one-off, and I am not going to live on Trump’s whimsical schedule. He control enough of my life and yours already, and sometimes your intrepid content creator has to watch the NBA, golf oddly, or go fishing. Otherwise, I go nuts, can’t get good ideas, and can’t sleep well. You don’t want that.

Anyway, this is a serviceable cartoon. I drew the planes from memory, and threw the Wag The Don logo on the bomb. This is an example of adding a little soupçon in a cartoon, a nice little side gag that sometimes is better than the main idea. If I can’t get you right off the bat, maybe I can get you with the little details.

Here’s a good example of a little detail cartoon.

Some idiot—I can’t recall already—said last week that Vance was the coolest-ever Vice President.

I’m sorry, but what the actual you-know-what?

Ever hear of Thomas Jefferson? He was a Vice President (under Adams), Secretary of State, wrote the Declaration of Independence at age 33, and also was an accomplished Renaissance thinker, writer, and University of Virginia founder and president.

Oh, and president of the United States.

But hey, Mr. Flexible Ideology/Resume Frat Boy is cool.

Theodore Roosevelt? Cool. JD Vance? Dork/dweeb/twerp. (Hi, Nancy!). So I got to draw his sofa/lover, and all the other uncool Vance accoutrements. He also originated this stupid eating-the-pets bit. I love drawing Vance’s cyborg blankness, so I put a one and a zero in where his big baby blues were.

Ugh. This guy. Ugh, again.

I loved drawing this piece. I think it’s pretty idiosyncratic, which is when I am happiest doing this job(s).

Here’s another:

Some weeks, when I have done too-fast art, I try to get a little more detailed in my drawings for the next week, to assuage my Norwegian Minnesota guilt/angst about not drawing at the level I want to. I was delighted to be able to draw this, because I love drawing space stuff.

Pretty simple idea: we’re all living in Trump’s detention center/war zone now.

I was able to mess around with my Photoshop spray tool and otherwise have fun with it.

I made sure to put the shadows on the planets, too. One reader thanked me for including lowly Pluto, which had been de-planeted awhile back. I am a Pluto fan, since one of my favorite books as a child was “The Search for Planet X”, about the discoverer of Pluto, astronomer Clyde W. Tombaugh.

If I had known he was alive in the 1990s, I might have sought him out as a hero. One of my boyhood ambitions was to be an astronomer, and I still have a rather nice 8” Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope, which I haul out in my surprisingly open-skied backyard. In fact, I would only buy a house where I had a full sky view. So I was serious about this in 1970.

Maybe I will write about this sometime. I knew more about Mt. Palomar than I knew about Mt. Hood.

Here’s yet another cartoon:

I really wanted the caricature to sing, so I minimized the color. I wanted the lines to do the job. I love color, but as an old school BW artist, I like to do these, too. I used a Uniball. My brushes were hinky that day (couldn’t get the point right, there was clotted ink, blah blah blah).

I have to say I wrote the first four panels easily, and I spent maybe an hour thinking of the last panel. That’s why building in a little thinking time is a good thing. I can get there: sometimes it just takes a bit longer.

Note the combover in Panel 2.

On Friday morning, I decided I could get this out fast (it was prior to hearing Noem was fired, or whatever happened), so I banged it out in less than an hour.

Now, any longtime fans know I love drawing animals testifying, and have done this for years. I did one last year with Bobby Junior’s dead baby bear and his brainworm testifying. Look for more whenever an animal is in the news.

There’s an inside joke in here: Mr. Puppy.

Mr. Puppy is an actual dog who belongs to my dear buddy John Hageman. John is the coolest guy ever (he’d be a great vice president, too), a retired Army Lt. Colonel, and we all love Mr. Puppy. I even made a Mr. Puppy mug. Mr. Puppy is a little imp, a kind of chihuahua mix with a severe underbite. So I named her dog Mr. Puppy, even as I heard later her dog was not named Mr. Puppy.

I also put some refreshing hay down so the goats can get it.

Our GuvGav has a new memoir out, and I decided to illustrate some of the fun little vignettes which populate the book. I also took liberties with a fellow cartoonist you may recognize.

I tried to do this with VP Harris’ book, but it got too wordy, so I pared it down.

Anyway, I read and mostly enjoyed the Newsom book. There’s the link. Buy mine first, though: he’s got money to burn. There are some painful, poignant moments. There are, um, omissions as well. But hey. I’d omit vast tracts of my life from my memoir, too. I am considering writing one, but not for the retail market other than the way I did the last one.

While we’re here, I am considering doing a Newsom collection soon.

I think that’s it for the week, folks. Gotta draw several more today. My Steyer column should be up soon, and then I can post it here. Lost of content this week, and I am interviewing Rep. Katie Porter on Thursday. I am mostly interested in her time in Iowa, honestly. But I will ask Serious Political Journalist questions as well.

Have a great week!

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Hey, YBs! : Gotta hit it now. More later. —J.