Drink and Draw: San Francisco

I enjoy reading political cartoons. I try to hit Cagle's Index once or twice a week. I definitely prefer them over the serialized cartoons. Sometimes I have an idea for a political cartoon and will write it down with the hope that I will draw it up. Never happens, thankfully. When I go back and read them, 99% are crap. It's a good thing I don't spend more than a few minutes to write them down.

I thought this one was kind of clever, so it was my "assignment" to myself for last nights Drink and Draw. Obviously, I'm not following the layout rules for a typical cartoon. But if you look at it as more of a storyboard, it might work well as an animated cartoon similar to Mark Fiore's work. Whether it's clever or not, I will leave to you readers.



I've noticed this particular hairstyle that seems to pervade our "civil" servants: bulletproof and parted from the left. I've always found it really offputting and creepy. It's completely unnatural, but I suppose not many politicians have the cojones to pull off a "Junichiro".

Well, these hairstyles inspired me to figure out a political cartoon. The hair became the central theme, so I thought of hair salons immediately. Being a damn liberal from Atlanta, the pols I seemed to focus on were the southern Republicans. Dixiecrats was a term with which I was familiar. Pretty extreme types, they were. And the hair salon that first popped into my head was Supercuts, whose tagline from a few years ago was "As Stylish As You Want To Be" or something similar. And there you have it. I just mixed the names together and the toon wrote itself.

Being the Cagle's junkie I am, I've noticed that a lot of the cartoonists pick the same theme week by week. It's like they're some kind of hive mind, those political cartoonists. There might very well be a cartoon out there somewhere in the world that draws upon the same themes mine does. And if it does, I apologise Mr/Ms Cartoonist. I know how tough it must be to come up with an original idea for these things EVERY FRAKIN' WEEK and I definitely don't want to steal a professional's thunder.