Auchtoon!

Originally published in the Ann Arbor News, Bay City Times, Flint Journal, Grand Rapids Press, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Kalamazoo Gazette, Muskegon Chronicle, Saginaw News
November 30, 2014

What you see here is not an editorial cartoon. I just basically illustrated a news story. It looks kind of editorial-ish because it is topical and there is a bit of cross-hatching. For the cartoons I do, it does have the necessary Michigan-spin. Those five bottles represent some of the best Michigan craft brewers. Maybe a grateful brewer will send me some free samples. (Hint. Hint.) I’m guessing there’s a law against that. Probably for good reason. It would only encourage me.

I had an early deadline last week because of Thanksgiving, so I needed to have my cartoon sent in on Tuesday. Monday night the Ferguson case blew up (literally and figuratively) and that really sucked the oxygen out of every other topic I was considering. I was going to make a tenuous Michigan connection by comparing Detroit 1967 to Ferguson 2014, but in the end I couldn’t simplify so much complexity and emotion in a single cartoon. Plus by the time it would be printed on Sunday, I had no feel for where this whole thing was going to go. So with a deadline looming I defaulted to beer. Not proud but intending for better moving forward. (Hey, that last sentence is a decent summary of America’s racial history, huh?)