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Daily Lobo cartoonist Juan Tabone’s uncensored, unapologetic style has evoked cheers and jeers from the University community illustrated in his work.
Since he started drawing, Tabone’s cartoons have reflected his taste for the visceral.
“Me and a friend used to do this Tom-and-Jerry-style cartoon where we’d draw each other getting run over by trucks and beating each other up, stuff like that,” Tabone said.
Tabone drew his way through high school and college and worked as a syndicated cartoonist as well as a video store salesman, a deli delivery-van driver, a research coordinator and a fast-food server. He currently works for a research group based in Boston that pays him to act drunk in bars and find out if the bartender will serve him.
Tabone drew three editorial cartoons per week for the Daily Lobo last year, and this year he’ll draw a comic strip for the paper that will run four days per week and every other Monday
The characters in his cartoons won’t be running each other over with trucks, but Tabone won’t hesitate to take shots at University administrators when he feels their professional conduct warrants it.
In his editorial cartoons, Tabone expresses the absurdities he finds inherent to graduate-assistant programs, student debt and nepotism within the University.
“The last 30 years have been rough, so as a result, my political views have been shaped by that,” he said. “When you realize that 90 percent of the media espouses a reactionary conservative worldview, I do feel that to some extent we need to push back.”
Tabone said he often receives negative feedback about his cartoons, particularly when he pokes fun at religion. People often write letters to the editor criticizing his cartoons, and he said he never takes the critique personally, but respects the fact that readers took the time to stand up for their views. Last year, Tabone even caught the attention of David Schmidly, the president of UNM at the time, when the Daily Lobo published Tabone’s editorial cartoon depicting former ASUNM President Jaymie Roybal as a literal “kiss ass.” In the cartoon, Schmidly’s bottom was covered in kiss marks. Schmidly wrote to the Daily Lobo calling the cartoon “tasteless” and “mean-spirited” toward Roybal.
“I don’t claim to be perfect or right 100 percent of the time, maybe 99 percent of the time — I’m kidding — but I do try to consider their point of view before I draw another cartoon,” he said. “At the same time, if you do that all the time, your stuff’s going to get watered down, you’re not going to be clear about your points and it’s basically going to be worthless.”
Tabone’s new strip features seven characters — Maddie, Trixie, Irving Gaffney, Ph.D., Falcon Eddie, Nick, Duh-Wayne and Don Pancho — and caricatures UNM using some creative license. He said he based many of his characters on friends he has, and most of them include aspects of himself.
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“Not only are the characters certain archetypes and certain means of getting a point across, but it’s also from personal experience,” he said. “I’ve seen a lot of things for many years.”
YEAR ZERO:
Maddie is an exasperated teaching assistant who is trying to get through graduate school and also works at Don Pancho’s bar, on top of everything else. She’s a smart-ass, she’s politically aware and she’s a strong feminist.
“She’s kind of the grounding of the strip in a lot of ways; she’s the focal point, if you will, around which the strip revolves,” Tabone said.
Trixie, with her tiny dog Pickles, is a Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton archetype, and serves as an opposite of Maddie. Her uncle is the vice president of an unknown UNM department, so she gets through school and work without much effort. Trixie giggles and rolls her eyes at pretty much everything until she gets what she wants. She is not impressed with Don Pancho’s, the bar where Maddie works, because it isn’t a hip club with light shows and DJs.
Professor Gaffney is an aging, tenured professor who has lost motivation for his subject and is more concerned with staying hip and cool, like many baby boomers. Maddie does all of his teaching work for him, while he ponders bleaching his butthole.
“It really shows the abusive nature of the TA system or the graduate-assistant system — it’s indentured servitude. It’s pretty rough,” Tabone said. “Also, he represents the older generation, the baby boom generation, a very pampered generation.”
Falcon Eddie is a happy-go-lucky student who loves to say “Uh, extreme, dude.” He enjoys a range of activities from extreme napping to extreme horseshoes, and is more instinctual than intelligent. He is not self-conscious at all.
Nick is a quiet kid who is a lot more intelligent than he looks. He has a thorough understanding of history and is fairly jaded and cynical about the world. He would probably attend a protest. He owns minimal gadgets, except for his Game Boy — he refuses to own a cell phone. He is the male counterpart to Maddie.
“Nick’s an interesting character because he’s very aware of where he is in history,” Tabone said. “So he sees through the game rather than wins it, and that’s where he comes in. He understands systems and how they work, he understands history and how it works, he’s really more intelligent than he appears.”
Duh-Wayne is a resident tea-bagger, a major conservative reactionary and not very smart. He doesn’t get his information from too many places, maybe Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. Tabone said he often represents America’s more base instincts and reactions to the changes that America has been experiencing since the ‘60s.
“I’m hoping to make his character more sympathetic as time goes on, but for the time being he’s definitely a character that leans far to the right, feels cheated by the social advances of the last 30 or 40 years,” Tabone said.
Don Pancho is the owner and chief bartender of Don Pancho’s, where many of the characters work and hang out. Don probably inherited it from his father and keeps the family business going, and he’s older than the kids. He has a little more perspective on things and thus he’s a sounding board for the characters and their issues. Every week there will be a new band playing there, and Tabone said he has an endless list.
“I’ve got like 100 silly band names stacked up,” Tabone said. “You talk and you put a couple of words together that sound good, sound like a goofy band name, so you write them down.”
