Political cartoon: Trust Us, We're Doctors

Hey patrons! I drew this cartoon for Barry last month. I'm really happy with how it looks, so I'm sharing it here, along with our original Patreon post. The comic I drew for Jonathan Baylis' next issue of So Buttons will debut at Small Press Expo in a few weeks. There's a sneak preview at the bottom!

I love drawing a "thingie through the ages" comic. They take a lot more time to research than a comic set in one period, though. I had about 30 tabs open while I was drawing this!

I know that we'll always see fashion through a present-day lens. For example, someone might see flannel and wide-legged jeans as "90s fashion" instead of "clothes that indicate a high schooler is into grunge music, smoking pot, or is just on stage crew," which was what that meant in my high school in the 90s.

That said, I have a specific pet peeve: when a period film is thoroughly researched and lovingly presented, everything is authentic and gritty except that the leading lady's hair and makeup looks Good ™. Dare to make historical characters look a little funny!

The ideal woman has VERY SLOPEY SHOULDERS, okay?

I'm really pleased with the graphics I drew around the captions. I got the idea for them when I saw this old ad and thought that the leafy pattern could nicely fill the space to the right of "1850."

I realized that every panel was in danger of having dead space at the top, and I thought that different colors, textures, and shapes would be a great way to indicate different eras. The 1912 and 1928 graphics also come from advertisements; the 1970s one just lives in my brain. Barry found this design blog to help with the 1996 graphic. Just seeing those colors and textures brought back vivid memories of notebooks, magazines, and TV commercials!

Barry writes:
Dylan Scott wrote an article on Vox entitled "The One Big Unanswered Question About Ozempic." Ozempic seems to take away urges, and not only hunger related urges. And no one seems to know what that means yet.

“What are the very long-term effects of these drugs? The literature will say, ‘Well, there isn’t really bad long-term effects because some people have been taking it for diabetes for 10 years, and they don’t have bad effects,’” Kent Berridge, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan, told me. “And I think that’s a fair argument. But then 10 years is not 20 years or 30 years.”

Maybe twenty years from now, we'll all agree that Ozempic is great. I'm certainly not advising anyone not to take it; that's a decision individuals have to make for themselves. But miracle weight loss drugs don't have the greatest track record.

In the same article, Scott brought up a study which - I'm pretty sure unintentionally - underscores the need for caution.

Research has consistently found that weight loss tends to be more sustainable when it includes behavioral changes in addition to pharmaceutical interventions.

The link goes to a 2005 study in the highly respected New England Journal of Medicine, "Randomized Trial of Lifestyle Modification and Pharmacotherapy for Obesity."

(Contrary to Dylan Scott's claim, the study isn't about "sustainable" weight loss. In fact, it only followed subjects for a year. It's a study of how effective different weight loss approaches are, not how well they're sustained.)

They found that pharmaceutical plus "lifestyle modification" (exercise, talking to nutritionists, etc.) led to more weight loss than other approaches - 26 pounds loss, versus 15 pounds for those who only made lifestyle modifications. (Although keep in mind, it's likely most of the subjects regained the weight in the long run.) The study concluded that "the results underscore the importance of prescribing weight-loss medications" in combination with lifestyle change.

26 pounds - that's amazing! And this was in 2005! So why isn't everyone today losing weight taking that miracle pill?

Because the miracle pill in question was sibutramine, also known as Meridia, and it was banned in 2010 because it was causing patients to have heart attacks and strokes.

In 2005, doctors were recommending sibutramine for weight loss. In 2010, after doing no one knows how much damage, sibutramine was banned. And now it's forgotten. We've gone through this cycle a lot.

---

Horrifyingly, all the treatments mentioned in this cartoon were real historic weight-loss treatments. And honestly, we could have done twice as many panels. Here are some links in case you'd like to read more:

The Seesawing History of Fad Diets

History of Slimming Diets up to the Late 1950s

Fad Diets and Weight Loss: From the 1800s to the 1930s

Deadly Diet Culture Throughout History

---

It's me again!

So, Jonathan Baylis writes autobiographical comics and hires different artists to draw each of them. I've known him since my very early comics days when I was working on cruise ships and living in Brooklyn between contracts. He's always very thoughtful about which artist he brings to each comic. I wasn't looking for extra work this summer, on top of my day job, my work with BikeLoud, SuperButch, watercolor postcards, and a monthly political cartoon. But Jonathan contacted me and said, "I wrote a 4-page story about bonding with my late mother over musicals, specifically the original film of West Side Story," and I was basically like, "GIVE ME THAT SCRIPT, IT IS MINE, I'VE BEEN TRAINING MY WHOLE LIFE FOR THIS!"

Thanks, as always, for supporting me on Patreon.