Let’s draw some conclusions: The year in Brokelyn cartoons, 2016

This article appears as part of Brokelyn’s “Year in Review” series, which will continue throughout the week. 

Let’s get pen-sive, because we did a lot of heavy ink-ing over the past 12 months, and we got pretty animated when it came to the election results. We may have not liked the final (Gar)field of candidates, but the whole Clinton Family Circus left us feeling on the Far Side of reality. Sometimes it can feel like we don’t understand people out in the Boondocks of America, but the election sure took a Toles on us here in the cities. Instead of Chast-ising some of our fellow Americans, we have decided Tomine our past posts for year-end content today. Let’s Doonesbury the hatchet and review the Brokelyn year in comics: Some of them will make your woman laugh, some of them will just make your Mankoff.

The Newer Yorker

Look we all love the New Yorker, but it’s hard to deny it can be a little … stuffy. Emmet Truxes, an ex-Brooklynite now based in LA, imagined a world of cartoons in the magazine that weren’t just about board rooms, shrinks and husbands stuck in ironic situations on desert islands.

Truxes started the wildly popular Brooklyn Cartoons Instagram account; now got a book in the works and more than 114,000 followers for his cartoons (often one-panel) of life at the intersection of social media, city life, technology and the eternal search for authenticity. Read all about him here!

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I’m wit her 

LOL to the time when people worried Hillary Clinton was kinda shady so we elected a guy who is running an unapologetic kleptocracy just to enrich himself and his children instead! Before the election, our cartoonist Madelyn Owens took to the page to show why she didn’t care Hillary had a less than perfect record, using the analogy of elementary school kickball. See the whole cartoon here and you’ll realize there are still a lot of people to tie up with jump ropes, it seems.

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GOPest control

To take us even further back in time, let’s look at the GOP primary race, which Maddie illustrated using this Republican rat king, ticking them off as each dropped out. Who knew that the end, the final rat left would actually be the most plague-infested one, whose little rat fingers can’t stay off Twitter.

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More like de-HELL-opment

Turning away from national politics and to our own local horror shows: rampant development continued across Brooklyn so much this year that we may actually be hitting a condo glut. Well at least the construction of the literal hellmouth is on schedule, as Brad Pearson illustrated in October.

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Sweater weather

Ever further back, in the carefree days of summer, Brad also invented a product for the sweaty bike rider: the disposable diaper backpack. Compostable, breathable, gross, aka perfect for the modern Brooklynite on the go.

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It’s a Marvel of engineering

And last, we remind you that 2016 brought us a great moment in brand synergy local pride, when a statue of Captain America was unveiled in Prospect Park. That gave Maddie a chance to remind us all that Captain America is a Brooklyn kid, and city kids are the real America. So she created a proposed tribute to Captain Real America. Here’s hoping he can save us for the next four years.

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