Todays' Candorville cartoon and more

Why the mainstream news wants Lemont to come back

Adjusting to the darkness

I flew to Chicago a few weeks ago, because I needed to go to Milwaukee. It’s not that I had bad aim, it’s that I wanted to roam a little. I was excited by the chance to drive an hour and a half from Chicago to Milwaukee on a freeway clogged with another region’s traffic instead of my own. I planned to take random exits off the freeway along the way and explore whatever unfamiliar cafes, or bars, or comic book stores, or restaurants might be waiting for me along the coast of Lake Michigan.

The train from O’Hare reached the Alamo Rental Car depot just as the sun began to set. It was setting an hour earlier than it did on the West Coast, something I hadn’t anticipated. It took about fifteen minutes to familiarize myself with all the knobs and buttons in the Toyota Highlander, to set up CarPlay, and to point my GPS to the Aloft Hotel in Waukesha. By then, the sun was gone and rain had begun pouring.

After missing a turn and almost heading into deep red Indiana, I headed North. Chicago’s city lights slowly receded into a shrunken smudge in my rearview mirror, and the street lights lining the freeway became few and far between. That’s when I expected my eyes to adjust to the darkness so I could see the landscape and the towns

and the Great Lake to my right. But a sound wall along too much of the freeway obstructed my view. For what felt like miles, I suspected interesting signs may have been glowing through the gloom and the downpour just on the other side of the wall, out of my sight.

After a while, the streetlights vanished altogether, and all I could see were the distant and dim tail lights of another car. I couldn’t see the road, so I followed the light. But the driver sped up, and their tail lights shrunk away from me into the distance. I would have to match their speed to keep following them. I’d have to careen through the darkness while buckets of rain poured on my windshield, on a road I could no longer see, at ninety miles an hour.

Just weeks earlier, America had voted for Trump, MAGA, Project 2025, revenge, deportations, persecution of trans Americans, and the deletion of Black people DEI and history critical race theory. They’d chosen a trajectory for our nation that may lead to its mutilation or even its end. So it struck me, this drive was a perfect metaphor.

The light I’d been following was now gone. I slowed to a crawl. Half a mile later, a pair of familiar glowing yellow arches erupted into view. Angels didn’t begin singing, and a beam of light didn’t flow over me and carry my car safely off the freeway, but it was something like that.

After missing a turn and almost trapping myself between two big rigs at a rest stop, I pulled into the McDonald’s parking lot. I turned off the wipers, turned off the headlights, shut off the engine, and listened to the rain battering the Highlander’s roof. After a moment, I closed my eyes, decided not to think about how I put myself in that situation, ignored my frayed nerves, and drifted to sleep. The metaphor was complete.

The Talk

The next day, I drove to the University of Wisconsin at Waukesha to speak to students and faculty about my graphic memoir The Talk. I was perhaps the final author who will ever speak there. They’re one of several UW satellite campuses that Wisconsin is shutting down to save money. Meanwhile, in totally unrelated news, the construction of a new juvenile prison in Milwaukee is still moving forward.

I didn’t have to give a speech, which was a relief because I’d only had so much mental bandwidth left. I’d just drawn a few editorial cartoons as a wake for America in the wake of America voting for its own euthanasia, and I was working on the first chapter of The Talk’s sequel. So I was grateful this would be a Q&A.

More than a few of their questions revolved around The Talk and other books being banned. They cared. They were offended that arrogant, white supremacist mobs in khaki shorts or yoga pants were raiding school boards across the nation to dictate what they could and couldn’t read. They asked what the vote meant. They asked about the coming persecution of Trump’s critics in government and the Media. They asked about the future of cartooning in America’s newspapers. Their earnestness and their questions were encouraging. My answers, on the other hand, were not.

Poking the bear

One of them asked for advice on breaking into cartooning. I told them that if they’d asked me that years ago, I’d’ have answered differently. I’d have given them my journey as a roadmap they could follow. They were familiar with the “long story short” version of that, which I’d covered in one of the later chapters of The Talk.

Long story even shorter: Persevere for years, and make a name for yourself as a freelancer to a handful of major newspapers. Then use that to make your work stand out from the more than 6,000 others who submitted their work to syndicates every year. The syndicate will then sell your work to (hopefully) hundreds of newspapers, and you’ll have a career.

But not anymore.

Hundreds of newspapers have folded since I became syndicated (it’s not my fault, I swear). Hundreds more have been scooped up by just a handful of enormous chains. They’ve slashed the comics pages, and some have homogenized them across all their cities and states, ostensibly to save money.

The future of newspapers - and especially the future of comic strips and editorial cartoons in newspapers - was bleak even before they began prematurely capitulating to Donald Trump and his fascist movement. Comic strips could survive a handful of cancellations a decade ago, because it would mean we’d lose a handful of papers. These days, a handful of cancellations by the chains that bought those papers could mean we’d lose them all.

About half of my clients are now owned by large chains. Just two of my other newspaper clients provide much of my income. To (hopefully) not incur those papers’ resentment, I’ll refrain from naming them. Let’s just call them “Joe” and “Mika.” Joe and Mika seem to have concluded that Donald Trump’s strength in the polls meant he was not an aberration after all. He was the embodiment of a shift in the nature of Americans, toward the fascism they had spent nearly a decade warning Americans about. And what business sense is there in continuing to warn a populace about something they’ve come to realize the populace actually wants to see happen.

They announced they will, from now on, be “fair and balanced.” They’ll just call balls and strikes, and leave the opinions to the readers. They’ll stop poking the bear.

I won a Pulitzer for poking that bear, and I don’t plan to follow Joe and Mika’s example, not in my editorial cartoons, and not in Candorville. To me, that would be obeying in advance. Timothy Snyder warned about that tendency in On Tyranny, his study of societies that descended into fascism in the 20th Century.

“Lesson #1: Do not obey in advance.

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy. Perhaps rulers did not initially know that citizens were willing to compromise this value or that principle. Perhaps a new regime did not at first have the direct means of influencing citizens one way or another. After the German elections of 1932, which brought Nazis into government, or the Czechoslovak elections of 1946, where communists were victorious, the next crucial step was anticipatory obedience. Because enough people in both cases voluntarily extended their services to the new leaders, Nazis and communists alike realized that they could move quickly toward a full regime change. The first heedless acts of conformity could not then be reversed.”

I refuse to obey in advance. I’m damn near fifty years old, but I still have enough smart-assery left in me to keep speaking my mind for as long as I can still hold a stylus and an iPad. I’ll never stop punching bullies. So I told the students I can see the writing on the wall.

All that said, I’ll always walk you home at night, and hopefully enough of you will return the favor, because I’d rather not lose anything.

The advice

That’s one of the reasons I began this Substack newsletter a couple years ago. If the chains decide to cancel my political cartoons and Candorville - or to cancel the comics page altogether (as some of them have already done with editorial cartoons), I don’t want that to be the end. My goal is for subscriptions to completely match newspaper income before that income vanishes. I want everyone who enjoys my work to be able to find it and support it directly. And I’m beyond grateful to those of you who’ve chosen to do so. If a few hundred more of my 2000 (and growing) subscribers join you, I’ll be able to do my best Mel Gibson impersonation (minus the bigotry) and say “you can take my newspapers, but you cannot take my audience.”

Do not adjust to the darkness

I advised the students to skip newspapers altogether, and create their own Substacks. Reach people directly. If they build their own platforms, they can say whatever needs to be said without fear of cancellation by companies that may believe that what they say is either harmful to their interests or opposed to their beliefs. And if they do start their own Substacks, I’ll promote them here, to help them begin their own journeys. Hopefully, that way they’ll be able to keep poking that bear to death long after I’m gone.