Cartooning the postmortem...

I hope cartoons will help us make it through this 😬

This was one of those weeks.

Actually, it was worse than one of those weeks.

Cartooning helps keep me sane in tough times and I hope my cartoons — now and in the future — help you, too.

The morning after Trump’s victory, I was pretty useless. It felt like a really bad hangover or when you wake from a nightmare.

Wednesday night I gave a talk to a small group and didn’t show any Trump cartoons, just plenty of other material, which felt great — there are themes, issues and events that are bigger than Trump.

Meanwhile, as different aspects of the election, exit polling and punditry proliferated, so did cartoon material.

Have you noticed how most of the pundits and pollsters seem to know exactly what went wrong, immediately after the election?

Sure, there are lessons from exit polls and election outcomes, but there are so many contradictions in this election, it’s mind-boggling and will be studied and parsed for generations.

Keep in mind, no one knows exactly what the hell is going on.

This is of course an awful outcome and we’re entering a time of extreme chaos, but — at this moment at least — I feel reinvigorated and ready to keep going and persevere amid the madness.

I want to keep cartoons, humor and satire in the equation while shining a spotlight on racists, fascists, lying hypocrites and the misguided people who voted for them.

So even though like many people, I wanted to crawl under a rock once Trump won, after a short bit of downtime, I felt recommitted and ready to go.

I know I won’t always be ready to go — regular breaks from all the mayhem are important if we’re going to be in this for the long haul.

Take a bike ride, go to the beach, play with your kids, unplug for a bit . . . then come back and keep working to change this madness.

Thanks so much for supporting my work, I’ll be back here soon with reports from my JSK Journalism Fellowship at Stanford, where I’m studying disinformation, deep fakes, artificial intelligence and polarization. (Timely, no?)

Thanks again, and hang tough!

-Mark