DownWithTyranny!: Speaking of Steve Jobs's passing, we do know he's not in Christian heaven, don't we? Plus Bob Mankoff offers a cartoonist's Jobs tribute

Probably I was the only viewer of this cartoon who didn't
who didn't pick up on what's wrong with it, right?

"It may be hard to remember how transformative the Macintosh was when it débuted in 1984, but it changed my life."

-- New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff, in his
newsletter/blogpost tribute to Steve Jobs this week (see below)

by Ken

I'm sorry I didn't notice Daryl Cagle's Monday blogpost on his Cagle Post cartoon website in time to incorporate it into my post last night prompted by the passing of Steve Jobs. Actually, when I finally did notice it, I got stuck on the Nik Scott cartoon he heads with, reproduced above, because although I must once have known that Jobs was a Buddhist, the fact had long since slipped my mind. (Most everything seems to slip my mind these days. More and more often, I no longer know just what it is I know. Or knew.)

I think what really got my attention, though, in an abbreviated version of Daryl's post was the reference to the passing of George Carlin. Yes, I suppose George would have had quite a lot to say about the heaven into which so many of his eulogists plunked him. But then, George would have had a lot to say about all sorts of stuff. I'm still steamed about the fact that he's stopped.

Christian Heaven for Buddhist, Steve Jobs

By Daryl Cagle | October 10th, 2011 | 49 Comments

My Australian cartoonist buddy, Nik Scott, reminded me that Apple’s Steve Jobs was a Buddhist, which makes the many heavenly cartoons that were drawn after his passing rather, erm … off the mark? That’s Nik’s take [in the cartoon I've put at the top of this post -- Ed.].

We often see editorial cartoonists imposing Christian imagery on non-Christians when they die. (After all, only one religion can be right, huh?) Comedian George Carlin, a famous atheist, found a Christian heaven in many editorial cartoons. When Beatle George Harrison, a Hindu, died, the editorial cartoonists drew dozens of cartoons with George showing up in Christian heaven.

Perhaps it is insensitive to impose your own religion on someone else when they die – but what the heck - readers and editors love it. Among the cartoonists we syndicate, the Jobs Pearly Gates cartoons were the most reprinted.

Here are just a few of the cartoons -- including the one above -- that Daryl chose to include with this blogpost. (You can click on any of them to enlarge.)

What's remarkable is how many of the commenters on Daryl's post (the 49 is as of this morning) talk up, down, and around the simple point he's making, apparently without getting it. In fairness, there are naturally a few sane, lovely comments.

MEANWHILE, BOB MANKOFF OFFERS HIS PERSONAL
JOBS TRIBUTE: A CARTOONIST'S COMPUTER HISTORY

Regular readers know how much I look forward to New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff's weekly newsletter-slash-blogpost. His tribute to Steve Jobs takes the form of the story of his history using computers for cartooning. (You can sign up for the free newsletter on the magazine's home page. I can't find a weblink for this week's, but here's last week's "Drinking Games," Bob's tribute to prohibition -- inspired by Ken Burns's PBS Prohibition series -- as chronicled in New Yorker cartoons. I'll add the link to the new post when I can.)

Bob starts with a cartoon he produced in pre-Mac days, drawn for Saturday Review in 1982 on a Radio Shack TRS 80-Model III -- and includes a picture of that ancient beast. ("That it could do anything at all with 16K of memory is a marvel.")

Three years later, however, he had acquired an original Mac ("with 128k of internal memory and a 400k disk drive"; again, a picture is included), and he produced this cartoon:

"Amazingly," Bob tells us, "you could draw on it with this thing called a mouse [he includes a contemporaneous Mac ad trumpeting the wonder], in Mac Paint. "In practice," however,

it wasn’t so amazing -- it was like drawing with a bar of soap, and the cartoons didn’t look very good on a dot-matrix printer. When I showed them to Lee Lorenz, my predecessor as cartoon editor, he wondered what the point was. I had no good answer then, but I liked the Mac so much I wanted to come up with one.

His Plan B, to "draw the cartoon on paper and get it into the computer," hit snags. "Trying to stuff them into the disk drive didn’t work," but he discovered that with an early handheld scanner he could scan a drawing in a mere two passes; "then the software would stitch the image together."

As scanners got better and Macs more powerful, I began store all my cartoons on the computer. From this it was not much of a leap to think I could store all my friends’ cartoons, too, and sell them, which is how the Cartoon Bank got started twenty years ago.

Bob rattles off a coterie of fellow Mac-devoted New Yorker cartoonists, and signs off with "this cartoon that Danny Shanahan sent in as a trbute to Jobs":