Frank's Buffalo Born Babble

Another local cartoon with ubiquitous relevance It’s your lucky day! There’s no “How I made this cartoon” video to sit through, but I will share the crude rough I used to gain my managing editor’s approval. Thanks for reading Frank's Buffalo Born Babble! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. I wish I had made this a cartoon where the setup and payoff are embedded in a single-panel layout, but I was too close to the deadline to work it out.

The publisher of the Niagara Gazette asked if I could infuse some local topics into my weekly editorial cartoon gig, which had been predominantly about Trump and Co., and not in a flattering way. National and world news has overshadowed many goings-on in our own communities, in my mind, and in conversations with many people I know. I have struggled to find local topics that grab a reader’s attention, and if I did, how many readers would give the cartoon more than a “meh”?

This cartoon is not quite wordless—an ideal I strive to hit— but there is definitely no caption. It’s there for the taking, though; the obvious implied caption or headline does not need to be spelled out. There’s no character either, and you can interpret what I mean in two ways. No character, as in no drawing of Trump, and no character, as in a description of Trump. This depiction is a White House remodeling problem with a simple solution, but simple is not always easy.

I will try to maintain a weekly update schedule with Frank’s Buffalo Born Babble, but there will be slinky-like squeezes and stretches from time to time. This installment is one of those squeezes. First, the runup to No Kings Day #3 on March 28. Thanks for reading Frank’s Buffalo Born Babble! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Thanks for reading Frank's Buffalo Born Babble! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Thanks for reading Frank’s Buffalo Born Babble! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. It started with a book of Carl Sandburg’s poems. SOURCE: Respectfully Quoted Thanks for reading Frank’s Buffalo Born Babble! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. In the 1960s, pushback against the Vietnam War prompted several variations on Sandburg’s words as anti-war slogans that appeared on posters, in print, and in songs.

Thanks for reading Frank's Buffalo Born Babble! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. I’m only a casual college basketball fan, so I don’t pay too much attention to the annual NCAA basketball tournament. Aside from acknowledging March’s wild weather fluctuations, the dates for St. Patrick’s Day (March 17) and St. Joseph’s Day (March 19) are what my mental calendar shows for the waning days of Winter.

Thanks for reading Frank's Buffalo Born Babble! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. It just occurred to me that “What’s My Lie?” could have been a golf joke, but I don’t play golf, so I will stay in my lane. I’ve used lots of words in this cartoon, and I’ll get to that subject. Before I get all defensive, let me restate what I have written before: I believe the wordless editorial cartoon is the gold standard. They’re not easy to pull off with great originality.

Thanks for reading Frank's Buffalo Born Babble! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. A battlespace is the modern military term for the total environment where a conflict takes place. Unlike the traditional “battlefield,” which mostly refers to the physical ground where soldiers fight, a battlespace is multidimensional. It includes every factor that can influence the outcome of a mission, integrated into a single unified strategy. Land: Ground forces, tanks, and infantry.

Here’s a 60-second animation instead of my usual 30-second clip, so you can better see the number of changes that happen from concept to finished cartoon. The only change I did not want to make was taking Trump from a big butt diaper-clad toddler to a big butt blue Bermuda-suited toddler, but my editor prefers that I cover up the president.

Thanks for reading Frank's Buffalo Born Babble! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Donald is fond of numbers, especially imaginary numbers. I’m not talking about √-1 = i, everybody’s favorite real imaginary number (think about that). The imaginariest of imaginary numbers is the number of wars he claims to have ended.