I was flipping through some of my oldies and I noticed something interesting … that I was drawing cartoons about social distancing and the coronavirus pandemic issues that sports are dealing with now, and I drew these cartoons 25 years ago!
I used to draw an advertising and sports comic strip that ran weekly in USA Today across the top of one of its sports pages. This was a strip called “Out of Bounds” that I drew for SEGA. The ads were wide and thin. Each one had to be drawn on deadline to be topical with the sports news of the day, and the advertising agency had to approve it in advance, so my deadlines were tight. And each comic had to promote a SEGA Sports product.
What I found interesting, looking back on these, is that my gags were most often about reworking sports so players could play online and fans could participate online, without physical contact. I guess this was just the natural gag, since I was selling game systems, but it struck me funny that I was 25 years ahead of my time.
Here are a couple of examples from baseball and football season.
Of course, those people in the stands are just paper cutouts.
The more things change, the more they stay the same!
(That Cleveland Dawg Pound needs masks and more distancing.)
— Editorial cartoonist Daryl Cagle lives in Montecito and runs the CagleCartoons.com news syndicate, distributing editorial cartoons to more than 850 news sites and newspapers around the world, including Noozhawk. Contact him at editor@cagle.com, follow his blog at www.darylcagle.com and follow him on Twitter: @dcagle. Click here for previous cartoons. The opinions drawn are his own.