Wisconsin Issues

The Business Journal has joined the Los Angeles Times and Baltimore Sun in deciding not to include the editorial cartoon in the redesign of its editorial page in 2006.

Here is my last cartoon for the Beej, set to run on Friday, December 30. (Accordingly, I've written the "30" in the date a little bit larger than usual. By coincidence, "30" is an old journalism term marking the end of news copy.) The editorial this cartoon accompanies lauds Milwaukee philanthropist Michael Cudahy's efforts to open Discovery World, an aquatics and technology museum at Pier Wisconsin, just south of the Milwaukee Art Museum.

At a December 16 "Business Journal Power Breakfast," Cudahy took "strong exception to recent criticism by some local media and radio talk show hosts" that the project is a "white elephant." Googling and looking up old columns by Milwaukee radio blowhards, the closest thing to criticism of this sort I was able to find was a blog entry by Charlie Sykes to the effect that he didn't think much of the project, but if anyone could pull it off, Cudahy could. There were complaints in 2003 by the head of the Milwaukee Art Museum that the Pier Wisconsin design was too similar to the MAM's brise de soleil, but the editorial doesn't touch on that. A Shepherd Express cover article in October, 2005, on the other hand, was fulsome in its praise for the project.

Obsessive readers of my cartoon might notice that one of the children in this last cartoon for the Beej closely resembles the central character of my first Business Journal cartoon, in 1997, for an editorial on prison overcrowding.

And here's a cartoon spiked by editors at the Beej, for an editorial about boardroom diversity in November. Could I edit out the steam room, Mark asked, and the urinal reference? (This illustrates one reason why editorial cartoonists' jobs are disappearing all over the country; editors want something easier to edit.)

Below is another spiked Business Journal cartoon from last May, for another of its editorials skeptical of the need for a proposed medical facility -- in this case, the clinic Aurora wanted to build in the town of Summit. The editors thought this was too sexually suggestive. (Sexually suggestive? Moi? I ended up having to draw a trite, hackneyed cartoon of a sick guy representing health care costs with the mercury geysering out the end of his oral thermometer.

One of my all-time favorite Business Journal cartoons was this one, on the occasion of Wisconsin Gas & Electric's ad campaign publicizing its new name, WE Energies.

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"There are a lot of people who think that people should be able to marry whoever they want or whatever they want."
--Wisconsin Assembly Speaker John Gard (R-Peshtigo-sort-of), at the state Republican party convention, May, 2004.

"I am dismayed that upon hearing my remarks in opposition to gay marriage you have immediately made the rather dramatic leap of suggesting that I am equating homosexuality with bestiality."
--John Gard, responding to criticism of the above statement from the Wisconsin Log Cabin Society. Apparently, he's worried about people marrying inanimate objects or abstract concepts.