Berge’s Cartoon Blog: Jagged Little April

Today’s Graphical History Tour continues rummaging through the dusty files of cartoons from my salad, appetizer, and cheese course days.

Last week’s GHT left off with a cartoon marking the tenth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, so let’s start off with this cartoon marking the twentieth.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., April 20, 1995

My cartoon was an homage to the famous one of LBJ showing off his appendicitis scar by David Levine. I was commenting that we were still arguing over what the lessons of Vietnam were. Did we need to stop getting involved in domestic disputes overseas? Or was the problem that we failed to commit to overwhelming force?

It was a debate the U.S. was having in the absence of an International Communist Threat. The fall of the Soviet Union was supposed to herald the End of History, whatever that meant; yet our supposed Peace Dividend had already been partly spent in the the former Yugoslavia and in Haiti.

One of my highly respected colleagues cast some shade on editorial cartoons that pay homage to classic editorial cartoons. I’m as guilty of that as anyone (I’ll note that he and I have both ripped off Bill Mauldin’s Weeping Lincoln cartoon). I guess if there is a rule about such things, it is to avoid copying someone else’s idea that is already an overexposed meme on the internets.

I say that as someone who once cartooned Bill Clinton as a bunch of dancing screensaver babies.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., April 13, 1995

Sticking with April of 1995 for a moment but turning to a local issue: Milwaukee Aldermen Dan Schramm and Tom Nardelli objected to the Common Council settling a lawsuit by the family of Konerak Sinthasomphone to the tune of $850,000. Sinthasomphone was the 14-year-old Laotian-American boy returned to Jeffrey Dahmer’s clutches by police officers Joseph Gabrish and John Balcerzak on May 27, 1991.

Schramm blamed Dahmer’s victim for having put himself in danger, and Nardelli cast aspersions on his parents. We’ll never know why Konerak didn’t keep his distance from the man still on parole for drugging and sexually assaulting Konerak’s older brother; we do know why Gabrish and Balcerzak chose to believe the white serial killer rather than the Asian boy with a hole drilled through his skull or the Black women who called the police for help.

Can’t we talk about something more pleasant?

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, April 8, 2005

Jumping ahead to April of 2005, here’s another local issue cartoon. Sort of. 

Before getting into the topic of the cartoon, I just want to point out that I spent a lot of time and effort drawing in black around all that verbiage on the chalkboard. The verbiage isn’t white-out, or white ink, or gesso, it’s all absence of black ink. Oh, sure, I could have simply filled the space with black in Photoshop and superimposed the repeated sentence in Comic Sans. But we here at Bergetoons honor our commitment to bring you only the highest quality, hand-crafted cartoonistry.

I drew this cartoon before our present government made white supremacy official policy and DEI a dirty word. The editorial page of the Business Journal (at least twenty years ago), like Lt. Governor Barbara Lawton, was quite in favor of promoting diversity on corporate boards, and this character appeared in several of my cartoons accompanying those editorials. 

Here’s an earlier cartoon featuring the the fictional board of Gibson, Gibsen, Ibsen and Gibbs:

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, June 13, 2003

No Photoshop cut-and-paste in that cartoon, either.

Moving on to April, 2015:

for Q Syndicate, April, 2015

About all that stuff I said about handcrafted artisanal cartoonistry and being above filling drawings in Photoshop, um, just forget that.

Once I decided that I needed to start sending out cartoons in living color, there was no way I was going to draw two versions of every cartoon: one in color and one in grayscale. Nope, nuh-uh! All the colorizing for one and halftones in the other is done in Photoshop to one black-and-white scan of one drawing.

This cartoon followed an early morning incident in March in which an unidentified man dressed in a construction suit tried to enter the White House grounds through the gate at Pennsylvania Avenue, but was stopped by Uniformed Division officers and taken into custody. Also that April, a man who had jumped the north fence onto the White House lawn in July pleaded guilty to trespassing on restricted grounds.

More seriously, the previous September, an Iraq War veteran named Omar Gonzalez had made it all the way into the White House through the North Portico doors, where he overpowered a Secret Service officer. He ran through most of the main floor before getting tackled by a counter-assault agent. He was later sentenced to seventeen months in prison.

That’s it for another Graphical History Tour. Please return your seats and tray tables to the upright position, and remain seated until history comes to a complete stop.