Extremists invoke as holy writ the proposition that “the power to tax involves the power to destroy.” Even reasonable people accosted by the tax man cite the 1819 warning of Chief Justice John Marshall as the wisdom of the ages.

Jugum’s an assistant chief counsel for California’s Board of Equalization. I called him expecting an unctuous defense of confiscation. Instead I found a sportsman. In a nutshell, his position on taxing newspaper art is a jaunty what-the-hell-it’s-worth-a-try. He laughed at the notion that the tax defies the Constitution (that’s what got him on the subject of plastic Jesuses). But he volunteers that by other standards the tax is a little ridiculous.

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The BOE did this: It stormed Creators and demanded sales records going back to the syndicate’s founding in 1987. “There were threats of “We’re going to close you down. You’re dragging your feet,”‘ Creators’ attorney Brian Oxman tells me. “It was rather belligerent. That’s how taxing authorities are. They need their information. They rattle their sabers until they get it.”

These milestone cartoons–and many, many more by Herblock and other Creators-distributed cartoonists–were displayed in the teeming three-ring binder Creators turned over to the BOE. Newcombe’s favorite exhibit is a page from the Los Angeles Times. The Times carried side by side a Luckovich cartoon chiding Connie Chung for her interview with Newt Gingrich’s mom and an Edwin Yoder column of identical intent (though infinitely less visceral impact). By the BOE’s lights, Luckovich’s zinger was taxable; Yoder’s treatise wasn’t.

Yet a problem you think you’ve solved, I said.

This seems to be what Jugum’s banking on. “We’re applying ancient concepts in a new marketplace,” he conceded. California created a sales tax in the 1930s, but then it gave newspapers a break. A regulation still on the books forbids the taxing of artwork transmitted to newspapers by “impressed mat.” This was a sort of blotter-paper engraving that reigned in the era of the letterpress but disappeared a quarter-century ago. Now art is mailed to clients on camera-ready sheets of paper.

“I do see it as the camel in the tent,” said Newcombe.