So, the next step up is, do we publish humor about founding leaders? For example, this cartoon about why Martin Harris was Joseph’s scribe only briefly.

This is one of the very few cartoons I could find about Joseph Smith published in Sunstone. It seems that, for the most part, we stayed away from pictorial humor about him—except for this one, published in 2011, which was during my tenure, and we all know how irreverent I am.

But we had plenty of fun with Brigham Young.

Brigham got cast as Santa Claus on the back of many an issue where he encouraged readers to give “presents of mind” by giving friends a subscription to Sunstone.

He was also portrayed on the cover of Sunstone, looking over Peggy Flecther Stack’s shoulder as she types.

So, we see that most of Sunstone’s humor focused on the masses—on either congregants or low-level leaders. And if we implied higher level leaders, we kept them vague. We largely stayed away from founding church leaders—except Brigham Young.

So let’s kick it up one more level. Above general authorities, above past church leaders, we have heavenly beings. Interestingly, this seemed to be a great place to play. The Grondahl books are filled with cartoons about angels and other postmortal beings, including ones who have reached the celestial kingdom. But note that they are all stock characters.

But here we see one where Moroni is named, where he is sticking his head out of a hat and telling us that heavenly artifacts such as the seer stone run on batteries.

So what do you feel when you look at this cartoon? Does it feel like it’s closer to the sacred area than the other ones? Like the one about Martin Harris, it takes place in actual church history. There really was a time when Joseph was using his hat and seer stone to compose the Book of Mormon. And, at the time this cartoon was published, the Book of Mormon was getting a lot of hype from the hierarchy about how it was the keystone of Mormonism.  And, if we take the Joseph Smith History literally, then Moroni is a real person and could actually be made aware of his portrayal in this cartoon. How would he feel about it?

I think you could make a case that this cartoon is mocking Moroni and church history. It has Moroni and Emma in a funny situation. It has Moroni’s head in an incongruous place—not at all heavenly or angelic. And it implies that sacred things run on mundane technologies, such as batteries. Is this making light of things which are sacred?

We’ll explore that question in the next post.