Sunday morning toons: Public safety pro tip

If you're a cop and you're going to kill someone who is unarmed, and you want to skate on the charges, you can either inadvertently allow yourself to be videotaped or you can be seen putting what appears to be a drop piece by the body, but apparently you can't do both. Any cartoonists who jumped triumphantly on the Walter Scott story from this week (in which a cell video led to an officer being charged with murder) without remembering that the choke-hold killing Eric Gardner in police hands last summer was also caught on video (but the officers walked anyway) might not have made the cut this week.

And, although IANAL, I stand by my position that body cams for police officers are a good idea, but they have to stay on. Shutting off or otherwise disabling a body cam should be the equivalent of refusing a field breathalyzer: Automatic probable cause.

Today's toons were selected from the week's offerings at McClatchy DC, Cartoon Movement, Go Comics, Politico's Cartoon Gallery, Daryl Cagle's Political Cartoons, About.com, and other fine sources of toony goodness.

p3 Picks of the week: Mike Luckovich, Scott Stantis, Darrin Bell, Chip Bok, Chris Britt, Steve Kelley, Jim Morin, Ted Rall, Matt Wuerker, and Monte Wolverton.

p3 Best of Show: Rebecca Hendin.

p3 Legion of Merit: Mike Keefe.

p3 Certificate of Harmonic Toon Convergence (Part 1): Lalo Alcaraz, Robert Ariail, and Rob Rogers.

p3 Certificate of Harmonic Toon Convergence (Part 2): Robert Ariail and Signe Wilkinson.

p3 Gold Medal for Recycling Things That Were Settled in the 1990s: Chip Bok.

p3 World Toon Review: Ingrid Rice (Canada) and Agim Sulaj (Italy).

Ann Telnaes is more optimistic than I am. Or than Sinclair Lewis (albeit imperfectly attributed) apparently was.

Mark Fiore has a message for all you squirrel-eaters: Embrace the apocalypse!

Tom Tomorrow has bad news and good news: God is riled, but he's got other things on his to-do list.

Keith Knight looks at the reason white movie-goers are furious. (Background, in case you don't religiously follow Deadline.)

Tom the Dancing Bug watches as a potentially awkward moment at Scientology headquarters finds its happy ending.

Red Meat's Ted Johnson neglects to mention the safety word. Perhaps it's "barmaid."

The Comic Strip Curmudgeon employs a phrase you never thought you'd see – or at least I didn't: Spidey wordlessly peacing out. Walloping web-snappers: that's not how you get an appearance in the next Avengers movie!

Comic Strip of the Day sez: This is what we've come to. Can't really argue.

But laddie – I've got some better dates! Although you'll find a lot of links that say "The Spirit of '43" was banned, there's no evidence that it happened. The Donald Duck propaganda short, directed by Jack King in that titular year, with Clarence Nash voicing Donald Duck (and an early version, some say, of what would become Uncle Scrooge) and Fred Shields as the narrator, stressed the importance – especially in wartime – of paying one's income taxes. "Spirit of '43" was a follow-up to 1942's "The New Spirit," a joint production of Disney and the US Treasury Department, and in fact uses quite a bit of footage from that earlier film. Still more sketchily-documented rumors suggest that the Treasury Departments laggardly payment of their half of "New Spirit" is the reason that production costs were kept down for "Spirit of '43" by recycling old footage. (Also, relax: the filing deadline was moved from March 15 to April 15 in 1955.)

The p3 Sunday Comics Read-Along: Pearls Before Swine, Doonesbury, Rhymes with Orange, Zits, Adam @ Home, Mutts, Over the Hedge, Get Fuzzy, Prince Valiant, Blondie, Bizarro, Mother Goose & Grimm, Rose is Rose, Luann, Hagar the Horrible, Pickles, Rubes, Grand Avenue, Freshly Squeezed, The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee, and Jumble.

The Big, And Getting Bigger Since We Bent The Rules And Welcomed Back The Departed, Oregon Toon Block:

Ex-Oregonian Jack Ohman almost, but not quite, gets it right.

Very Possibly Ex-Oregonian Jen Sorensen does a Family Circus mashup that (a) the culprits totally deserve, and (b) gets better and better until the final panel.

Matt Bors updates the war on terror. It's mostly going as well as you think, so that's good news.

Jesse Springer frets: There's mental illness, and then there's mental illness. Good luck, Oregon!

Test your toon-captioning firepower at The New Yorker's weekly caption-the-cartoon contest. (Rules here.) And you can browse The New Yorker's cartoon gallery here.