Tag: Christmas

Trump After Trump #44

Trump After Trump Comic Strip 4-panel strip

Another Christmas Episode: Pence Gives Don-Don His Gift

It was a revelation to invent Don-Don, the little, stuffed version of Trump with yellow yarn hair and a perpetual yell on his face. And, because of how much fun I have with Don-Don, it’s hard not to just make little toy versions of everyone, but today I make an exception.

Wouldn’t it be cool to make fabric doll versions of each of the nine Supreme Court justices? I don’t want to go there in real life, but I like the results in ink.

Today’s comic speaks for itself, I think. I get feedback from time to time that suggests that my comics are not delivering the meaning that I think I’m crafting; but that is a big part of why I’m drawing Trump After Trump: I want to get better at the unique and super-fun language of cartooning.

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Trump After Trump #43

Trump After Trump Comic Strip 4-panel strip

Introducing Father Michael, the Reinvented Mike Pence

Saul had his moment of transformation on the road to Damascus. Anakin was christened Darth Vader by Emperor Palpatine, who himself is also known as Darth Sidious. Natalie dumps Scott Pilgrim and soon emerges as the Clash at Demonhead frontwoman Envy Adams.

Renaming a character is often part of a greater physical and spiritual transformation. When Mike Pence retires from politics and relaxes for the first time in decades, he grows a spontaneous, full, bushy white beard and seems to be stepping into a new role as an ancient prophet.

I drew and inked this on Election Night 2020 in the United States. Biden has gone to bed and told us to keep the faith. Trump is about to step out and speak to supporters. There is no outcome to this election yet, but that doesn’t mean you still can’t have some fun with the Pence and Trump characters that I’ve been exploring for the past, like, five months.

In fact, the kind of political stress we are feeling at this moment is the reason I started this comic in the first place. This comic is a fictional road map for the actual Donald Trump to conduct himself in the event of a loss. And here are the steps:

  1. accept defeat
  2. make a nice concession call to Joe Biden
  3. spend the lame duck period being self-centered instead of sowing confusion, doubt and resistance
  4. move on

Whether Trump wins or loses this election, I nurture a hope that he might one day – the sooner the better – recede from public life and move on to other interests that don’t include whipping Americans into a divisive, partisan frenzy.

So, let the story roll on!

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Trump After Trump #42 (Sunday)

Trump After Trump Comic Strip 4-panel strip - full-color Sunday comic

Merry Christmas, and the Reason for the Season

I am writing this on October 31, 2020, on a physically-distant Halloween. On this day of candy, horror films and minimal trick-or-treaters expected, it’s funny to have spent the last week in the headspace of Christmas in a fictional Oval Office, where apparently Trump and Mike Pence spend the morning exclusively in each other’s company. But, comic universes are sometimes compressed for simplicity.

Today’s strip plays around some more with Mike Pence’s Christian identity and public image. It’s also fun to exploit what I see as the large gap between white Christian support of Trump and his words and behaviors which are not Christian in any way that I’m familiar with from my upbringing.

Also, if we have a heavily-bearded Pence now, why not just go all in and make him one of those Sunday School worksheet Bible men!

Did you know that these Sunday, full-color strips take me as much time and energy as it takes to make the 6 preceding black-and-white, four-panel strips? I wonder if I need to streamline, and make the Sunday edition smaller. It’s worth pondering. Every three weeks, I spend about seven days worth of mornings, evenings and weekends making these colorful monsters. I hope they appear easy and fun to you, and that I’ve left not a trace of the labor it takes to put one of these together.

Happy Halloween and Merry Christmas to all y’all!

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Trump After Trump #41

Trump After Trump Comic Strip 4-panel strip

Pence Has a Beard and He’s Not Afraid to Use It

Christmas is two months away at the time that I’m publishing this comic, but it is only four days away in the timeline of this comic strip. So the question isn’t “Why are you already doing a Christmas comic?” but “What has taken you so long to do a Christmas comic if your comic strip is currently taking place in December?”

The first three panels of this strip wrote themselves, but the punchline was hard to write. In the end, I feel like I got to the heart of what I wanted to say – whether or not it’s funny is for you to decide.

And what I wanted to address is how the ideas of Americans coming together, listening to experts, considering evidence and being humble and graceful as we tackle our problems do not seem like things that Americans are likely to do right now. Moreover, I think it’s funny that Don-Don’s wish would be nonsensical to Trump, and that Pence would frame coming together as everyone becoming Christian. I remember being a Christian teen and having similar thoughts: if only every person in the world would just accept Jesus and become Christian, then we would all get along, etc.

Also, if Don-Don is a doll where exactly is his Christmas wish coming from? Is it a subconscious voice deep in Trump’s brain? Is Don-Don real? Is it destined to be a mystery?

Finally, Pence’s beard is real. See the last comic.

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