Cartooning Truth to Power

(Continuing a reverse-chronological look back at a cartoon strip for a small universe)

A few strips fiddled with the idea that club presidents actually had
power and needed lampooning. One erstwhile commander in chief
politicked mightily for something nobody much remembers anymore, but this strip had such a lousy caricature of him nobody had a clue what the cartoonist was going on about...

...another president much more realistically undertook the office with the stated objective to be the club’s Millard Fillmore. Parenthetically, something weird’s going on with the number of fingers on the characters.

A club dedicated to entertainment and performance had only one guaranteed source of amusement...

...and in general terms, the club also had one rule of engagement—if you really want something done, you’ve got to do it yourself—only then you’ll find out why the last guys screwed it up so badly...

If power really wanted truth spoken to it, the powerful would read cartoons avidly. This is an untested political theory.

Cheese Diversions

(Continuing a look back at a comic strip for a small universe)

It was the winter of ’99-2000.
The club was feeling the loss of its two great lights and still carrying on, festooning, garlanding and tippling as Christmas and New Year’s approached.
It seemed a little raw to have the strip feature our departed friends, so a couple of other resident curmudgeons made an appearance for a short series that got its start from some larky Green Room banter during those well-lubricated millennial holidays. Ol’ Chardie was getting ready for his 70th birthday party. And he really did have a cheesewheel the size of an SUV tire.

This was a rare instance where actual names were used (protecting the innocent presupposes there are innocents)—and in the strip below the cartoonist digressed even more than usual in drawing style to invoke some club caricatures for the spoof. The guy who concocted the idea of the Weremouse is betrayed below by gratuitously bad dialog

...But the weremouse gag segued ultimately back to our prime protagonists... and inevitably golf...

...strictly speaking, we kind of left Chardie in the wilderness, but he loved being a weremouse for awhile.

Back in the 90s

A certain theater club in Manhattan was a little over a hundred years
old in the 1990s, and with “Comedy” in its name, it was begging for a
comic strip. Two guys were conspicuous lead character choices.
They were and were not amused.


Smoking was pretty commonplace in 1998 when this strip happened:

...referencing some political peccadilloes of the time—

...while the smoking thing was beginning to look so last century...

The strip ran in the club newsletter, and paralleled a show running at the time, “Terra Nova.’

...but golf was a competing passionate preoccupation

...that insistently recurred — golf being golf...

But our flesh and blood inspirations were not to see the millennium, and each died within a year of one another— not that that could impede their immortal memory for us...

At the top of the clubhouse stairs, this accompanies a memorial photo of them:

...while the strip continued to run whenever the spirit moved its peripatetic cartoonist...