Trophy
I rarely sketch out my cartoon ideas before I begin work on them. Nearly always, I picture it in my mind. I have a good imagination. Maybe too good. I can disappear into it for hours at a time. My political cartoons begin as imagery that just comes to mind as I read about, or think about current events. Occasionally I’ll grab one as it passes by, and work on it, entirely inside my brain. When I actually start to draw something, I almost always approach the paper seeing what I want to draw clearly and exactly in my mind. This is pretty much how I draw and paint everything, the only difference being when I paint I will do a quick color study first.
As the fight over California Proposition 8 approached voting day, I had two cartoons already done inside my head, one of which I hoped I wouldn’t have to draw. Had the vote gone the other way, I might have just waited until the weekend to do the other, more light-hearted one. It might even have stayed on the drawing board, like so many other half-finished cartoons have this past year. But this pretty much expresses how I feel right now, and I just had to get it out now. I have nearly two months of vacation time stored up at work, and I took the day off (mostly…I still had things I had to do from home) so I could get this out of my system…
Copyright © November 5, 2008 by Bruce Garrett
All Rights Reserved.
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It’s horrible to say it…but I have a new-found interest in doing these now. And…more spare time to do them since I’m not visiting people I know down in Washington every Friday-Saturday now. But that’s another spill-my-guts-out story for another time…
November 5th, 2008 at 9:33 pm
Great cartoon!
But I thought the LDS was giving us the finger.
November 6th, 2008 at 2:56 am
No, they were cutting ours off and that’s the brutal image people should be associating with them after this. Thousands of devoted, loving couples have just been forcibly divorced in California and while the Mormons weren’t the only ones working hard to make that happen, they were by far its major bankrollers. And this has been the pattern in nearly every western state that has seen this fight. They bankrolled Arizona too this year.
The religious right has taken center stage in this fight, but it’s been the Mormons who have given it most of its money and lent it their vast ability to organize at the grassroots and they’ve done it all for a decade now behind the scenes. That needs to change. Stories of Mormon persecution of gay people within their ranks are legendary, but they are not widely seen as the major threat to gays in general that they are. They need to be known as the hate group they are. Nearly every anti-gay constitutional amendment west of the Mississippi has their name on it, and quite probably a lot of the others do too.
November 6th, 2008 at 7:10 am
18,000 couples, I think it was. That’s 36,000 people, plus many of them had kids.
It amazes me that a church whose founder advocated polygamy could set itself up as a "defender" of traditional marriage.
November 6th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
I’m still so sick about this. I drew a picture to celebrate the win on election day, guess that’s youthful optimism for you.
I can’t believe they won by saying "think of the children". The idea that kids will catch the gay if they’re exposed to gaiety in kindergarten. It’s so rediculous, I can’t believe they still got mileage out of that. But they did.
And the irony of the Mormons redefining marriage for everyone else is just too much. WTF.
November 6th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
I drew a picture to celebrate the win on election day, guess that’s youthful optimism for you.
I had a celebratory cartoon worked out too…along with the one I eventually drew. At some level you just have to prepare yourself for whatever happens, and it was a way of keeping my mind preoccupied and grounded. Too many unresolved What If’s can stress a person out. I needed a few Then This’s.
I have another one worked out for next Monday. I’m going to see if I can try and get back into doing these on a weekly basis again. I was thinking of you actually, when I was working on this one, and how you said once that you liked how I still worked with the "traditional" tools even in this day and age. The thought came as I had to make a decision on how to proceed, and I decided to do it "the old fashioned way".
I hadn’t done a political cartoon in over a year and suddenly I needed to just get this one out and I bypassed every new CAD toy I’d ever tried for the past couple years and just went right to the drawing paper and board. The finished cartoon is pretty much exactly as you see it here, with just a few minor Photoshop touch-ups and the text added. The background is powdered charcoal laid on with a coarse dry sponge. I put a frisket film over the hand and arm while brushing the background on. I guess at my age I have to stick with the basics as I know them, and add the new tools to that little-by-little, rather then try to re-learn everything. And even then the new stuff you learn will never be as familiar as the old stuff you grew up on. I’ve so many years of experience doing it this way that it’s just intuitive now and I don’t even think about it. I’m still at the stage with the new tools that I have to think about how to use them and that kills me creatively, and time-wise.
I have a really nifty time saving "cheat" on the cross-hatching I do in A Coming Out Story that literally saves me days of work. But that’s about the only time the new computer drafting tools actually save me time. I’m still much faster doing it the old way.
As I said…it’s horrible to think that I’ve gained anything creatively from the Proposition 8 vote. But sometimes you need a shock to awaken something inside. I want to get back to doing the political cartoons again. And of course, there’s A Coming Out Story. Part of the rhetoric on the anti marriage side was about, as you said, exposing school kids to homosexuality. But some of those school kids are gay. One of the points I want to be making toward the end of A Coming Out Story, is how adults really need to think about what keeping the topic of sexual orientation under wraps like a dirty secret does to gay kids.