The threat (illustrated)

(Cartoon by Herb Block, from The Washington Post, June 17, 1949.)

Tuesday typo & 'toon

Flagg Day

James Montgomery Flagg's iconic image of Uncle Sam turned 96 years old yesterday.

Although most of us know the stern, finger-pointing Uncle Sam from the 1917 U.S. Army recruiting poster, he first appeared on the cover of Leslie's Weekly magazine over the caption, "What Are You Doing for Preparedness?"

Among the artist's other patriotic characters was the distaff Columbia. Flagg's Uncle Sam personified American power, authority and resolve, both at home and abroad, while his Columbia evoked Liberty, industry, unity, complacency -- human qualities, human aspirations, human failings.


In short, Uncle Sam embodied the U.S. government and everything it represents. Columbia stood for the People.

Of Flagg's many propaganda illustrations, perhaps my favorite is a menacing-looking Uncle Sam holding a pistol, from a 1917 Leslie's cover. It was captioned, "Get Off That Throne!"


I'll close with one more American propaganda image from the World War I years. This one was created not by James Montgomery Flagg but by renowned illustrator J.C. Leyendecker, a poster promoting the Boy Scouts of America's 1917 Liberty Loan Campaign.

I'd like to post this at work

(I clipped that image from page 26 of Two Faces of Communism, a comic book published in 1961 by the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade of Houston, Texas; the organization is still around today. In the first frame, dig the Commie foreman with the buggy whip.)

Let's not show this to Glenn Beck, ok?

Now that I have your attention (or Catholics' attention, at least)...

In 1947, as the Cold War dawned, the Catechetical Guild of St. Paul, Minnesota published Is this Tomorrow: America Under Communism! It's a graphic snapshot of the paranoia that marked those years.

The Roman Catholic church in the U.S. was most concerned about religious persecution, of course, but the Catechetical Guild used the comic's plot to weave a tapestry of fear -- racial strife, confiscation of guns, indoctrination in the schools, dictatorial rule and more.

Fundamentally, Is This Tomorrow collected everything that Liberty-loving post-war Americans were afraid of -- rightly so -- and ascribed it all to a bogeyman called "Communism."

If the Catholic guild's extremist strategy sounds familiar, it should.

In our own time, Liberty is under siege. Yes, the threats are real. Our challenge is to think critically about what we face, to separate facts from fears and to act in the best interest of the country we love.

[By the way, Pappy's Golden Age Blogzine has posted scans of all 52 pages of Is This Tomorrow -- click here.]

A sign for these times

(Adapted from the now-iconic "Keep Calm and Carry On" propaganda poster, produced during World War II by Great Britain's Ministry of Information. For some entertaining background on the poster, click here and here. To create your own parody, click here.)

Ridicule (illustrated)

As I posted that last 'toon, a sendup of the iconic Gonzalez Flag of the Texas Revolution, it struck me -- for all of the truly consequential liberties stolen from The People, will it take an attack on the Big Gulp to get citizens off their complacent asses?

That's a sad commentary. Then again, whatever it takes...

Doc Watson: 1923 - 2012

"Just one of the people"

Levon Helm: 1940-2012

Posted on levonhelm.com yesterday:

"Levon Helm passed peacefully this afternoon. He was surrounded by family, friends and band mates and will be remembered by all he touched as a brilliant musician and a beautiful soul."

Levon Helm was an American treasure, his talent and energy gifts to us all. I haven't the words to express my respect for the man, my love of his music or my sadness at his passing. Safe travels, brother.

T&A in government comics, revisited

Incomparable illustrator Will Eisner created the character of "Connie Rodd" for the U.S. Army's P*S Magazine. A blonde bombshell, oozing sexuality and delivering double entendres at every opportunity, she drew young GIs into the dry subject of preventive maintenance.

P*S is still around, available online even to us civilian types. And Connie continues to grace its pages -- sort of.

Over the last few decades, political correctness has robbed the once-alluring character of her original appeal. Today's Connie Rodd (right) is patently asexual, shaped by hyper-sensitive ninnies from a tart into a token.

Once again, we've lost more than we've gained.

Today feels like a good day to annoy all those who prefer a less interesting world, a world stripped of humor, color and curves. To that end I'm pleased to offer a tribute (below) to the real Connie Rodd, in the form of P*S centerfolds from 1970 and 1972.

And the Oscar goes to...

I urge readers of KintlaLake Blog to take 15 minutes to watch this video, "The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore." I find it wonderfully touching, inarguably deserving of the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film it won last night.

But is there a KintlaKitty?

Catharsis in the comics

In today's edition of The Columbus Dispatch, many of the regular Sunday comics commemorate, in one way or another, the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Flipping through these colorful back pages this morning, I was especially touched by several of the long-running strips, the ones that trace back to my childhood and beyond -- Beetle Bailey, Hägar the Horrible, The Family Circus and others.
Dean Young still writes Blondie, the classic 'toon once drawn by his father, Chic Young, from 1930 until his death in 1973. I have no doubt that Dad would've approved of today's strip.

Wallpaper: McGuffey Lane

Here's a page torn from my sketchpad -- a simple image, massaged a bit in Photoshop, becomes an appealing desktop background.

Wallpaper for a Centennial

[Adapted from the 1914 edition of U.S. War Department Pamphlet No. 1866: Description of the Automatic Pistol, Caliber .45, Model of 1911, with Rules for Management, Memoranda of Trajectory, and Description of Ammunition, 1917 printing. It's available as a pdf and in other formats at The Internet Archive. The U.S. Army adopted the John Browning-designed Colt M1911 a century ago last month.]

Putting a Capp on comics

I'll conclude my peek at government comics with two on Civil Defense.




The FCDA tapped cartoonist Al Capp to draw Mr. Civil Defense Tells About Natural Disasters! (1956) and Operation Survival! (1957). Capp's well-known "Li'l Abner" shows up on both covers, but only as bait -- the stories inside unfold in locales other than Dogpatch, populated by amusingly stereotypical 1950s characters.

These taxpayer-funded 'toons are intriguing slices of the early Cold War years. From our present-day perch they're naive, perhaps, but I find their simplism entertaining and, in a way, quite instructive.

As I've said, "The older I get, the simpler I like it."

T&A in government comics

I know it's hard to imagine, but political correctness hasn't always been with us. Witness these examples, clipped from military "pamphlets" -- informational comic books, really -- that were issued to Vietnam-era U.S. Army soldiers.

The illustration above appears in Troubleshooting Equipment in Combat Units (DA Pam 750-22), published in 1973. "How to Strip Your Baby," below, comes from the 1969 edition of The M16A1 Rifle: Operation & Preventive Maintenance (DA Pam 750-30), which I highlighted in yesterday's post.

The latter, especially, is just priceless.

There's a lot more where those two came from. If you're interested, the best repositories of government comics I've found are the University of Nebraska Libraries' Image & Multimedia Collections and the Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries Digital Collections.

But alas, Will Eisner is dead and political correctness is alive and well, so we'll not see the like again. You can take my word for that.

M16A1 comic book (1969)

[Click here to download a .pdf version from the University of Nebraska Libraries' Image & Multimedia Collections. For more government comics, click here.]

Congressional quack-off

Well, we didn't have to wait for the new Congress to be seated -- we have our gridlock now.

Oh, there's plenty of actual governing to be done in this lame-duck session -- taxes, unemployment benefits, START, DADT and the rest. This month could be our legislators' audition, if you will, a time to show the People that they can collaborate in our interest.

Fat chance.

GOP leaders, feeling their post-election oats, refused to devote even two hours to meet with Pres. Obama and ranking Democrats. They strutted afterward for the obligatory photo-op, certainly, just long enough to pay lip-service to bipartisanship. They even took time to assert right-wing censorship of art on display at the Smithsonian.

And then, with all that's at stake here and now, Senate Republicans found time to pen a letter to the chamber's majority leader. The gist:

"...we will not agree to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed to any legislative item until the Senate has acted to fund the government and we have prevented the tax increase that is currently awaiting all American taxpayers."

In other words, Republicans will block everything else until the Senate votes to extend the (so-called) Bush-era tax cuts.

It's a political tantrum, a shameful partisan stunt. While it keeps an intellectually dishonest promise not to raise taxes, it flouts fiscal conservatism and lacks any semblance of economic credibility.

Calling the prospective failure to extend tax cuts "job-killing," invoking a pithy old GOP chestnut, presumes that the cuts created jobs when they were implemented -- they didn't, they haven't and (if they're extended) they won't. I find it hard to believe that anyone still subscribes to "trickle-down economics," since it's never, ever worked beyond the anecdotal.

And just like Dems' wish to turn federal unemployment benefits into another entitlement program, extending the tax cuts effectively adds to a deficit Republicans pledged to reduce. The perpetual practice of spending money we don't have -- by both parties -- is fundamental to why our nation's economy is on the road to ruin.

Any meaningful proposal to fix what's broken must be the product of collaboration among factions now preoccupied with the next election cycle. Neither side would get everything it wants -- which would be fine, since neither side has a monopoly on good ideas. Their solutions must incorporate both cuts in spending and increases in revenue.

No, I'm not excited about paying higher taxes, nor am I looking forward to (for example) working years longer before drawing Social Security. But if I want my country to be here for my spawns and their spawns, that's what it'll take. There are no other options.

Time is short, too -- we have two years, maybe less, to get our national barge turned around. And that means that we've already elected the representatives who will (or won't) do what's required to save our country.

I don't think they can. Even if they could, we wouldn't let them.

Governing is crippled by politics. Economic recovery -- like everything else, it seems -- is poisoned by ideology. We're screwed.

I ache for my country.

Through artists' eyes

"I may not know art," as the saying goes, "but I know what I like."

The KintlaLake home never will be mistaken for a fine-art gallery. When my wife and I blended our households a few years ago, however, the work of a few bona fide artists did make the cut.

While visiting friends in Vermont in 1999, I was given a personally signed Cynthia Price lithograph as a birthday present. The artist herself, whom I'd never met, was there to share in the impromptu celebration, which included a champagne hayride (only in Vermont) and other surprises.

These days, Cynthia's work hangs just off our kitchen, where it daily rekindles warm memories of cool rides through the New England countryside.

Michael Lichter has combined his love of motorcycling with his immense artistic talent -- so not only do I admire his photography, I'm also insanely jealous of the man. I had the privilege of working with him on an exhibition of his work several years ago, we became friends, and we still connect occasionally at motorcycle shows.

A large print of "After the Storm," arguably Michael's signature image, adorns a wall in our living room, and it remains one of the most evocative and inspiring photographs I've ever seen.

Each summer, the city of Columbus hosts a giant outdoor arts-and-crafts show, and it was there that I met Massachusetts-based artist Bruce Peeso. Having moved back to my native Ohio a year before, I found that Bruce's work captured perfectly the joy I felt in being home again.

Many of Bruce's paintings reflect what I'd call a "pillbox perspective," and I recall telling him so at the show that day. He smiled and told me that he preferred what a woman once said about the unusual format: "It looks like you're trapped inside a Coke machine, and you paint while looking out through the coin slot."

After much debate -- all of it between my head and my heart -- I ended up taking home one of Bruce's originals, and dear as it was, I've never regretted the decision. Each time I gaze through the artist's eyes across that rural landscape, it reminds me why I'm glad to be here in the heartland, my home.