Rejected From The New Yorker

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The Stranger was supposed to be posting these on their blog, but only managed to get up the first one. Now that they've all been printed, I can post them here for you.

New Toon: Generals Against Rumsfeld

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Everyone's lauding these Generals coming forward to call for Rumsfeld's resignation. I've heard the word "unprecedented" over 900 in the last two weeks. How nice of some of them to finally speak up. Only over 100,000 people are dead so far, with us now threatening to bomb Iran. Rumsfeld shouldn't be resigning to live out a nice quaint life. He should be clapped in irons and tried as a war criminal.

I heard the latest General on FOX News making very clear that this wasn't some "anti-war" thing, just a call for a change in leadership. Yes, we wouldn't want to be against the war, would we? Not that I would expect them to be peaceful, they're people who have trained their whole lives for war. They just want someone who is better at leading them through it all.

I can't blame 'em though. I'd want someone more competent waging my unprovoked war of aggression too.

Recommended Reads

Tales To Demolish #3 is out from SparkPlug Comics and it is his best so far in the series. In the latest issue, the main story is 'mammalogy' which details the secret war that has been waged between reptiles and mammals, from the beginning of time to a present day battle royale on a volcano (where else?). It is followed up by several strange short stories. If you are into offbeat humor, check it out here.

Anti-Semitic Cartoon Contest

via Comics Reporter. Different from the Iranian Anti-Semitic Cartoon contest, this is the Iraeli Anti-Semitic Cartoon contest.

You can read about it here and view an entire gallery of them here.

What do you say we go back to my place?

Attitude 3 Pre-Order!

Attitude 3 is coming out very soon and you can now pre-order the book from me and I will ship it to you when my copies arrive (sometime in the next month). All copies ordered through me will have a sketch in them.

The new book, edited by Ted Rall, will feature interviews with and cartoons by 21 web cartoonists including Idiot Box, Perry Bible Fellowship,Big Fat Whale, Diesel Sweeties, Partially Clips, Cat and Girl, Fetus-X, Fighting Words, and XQUZYPHYR & Overboard among others.

I've also put together the Bodaciously Valued Comic Pack: Attitude 3, both collections of Idiot Box, and 3 Car Pileup 1 and 2. 272 pages of comics for only $18.95 (not $19.00!). You would actually have to have something wrong with you not to buy this!

New Toon: Dee Nye - The Creationist Guy

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Not my most subtle punch line ever, but it's hard to be subtle with these creationists types. The new discovery of the Tiktaalik is the 479th nail in the Creationist and ID movement coffin (I came across a different, incorrect spelling of the name initially and thus, it is spelled wrong). As always there is a complete lack rudementary knowledge on the subject of evolution. You can wade through their denials here, here, here, here, and here.

Ted Rall and Ruben Bolling also touched on the fossil.

Random stuff

• Katrina Vanden Heuval writes in the Nation on the minimum wage:

  Last Sunday, the New York Times reported that--for the first time--a full-time worker earning minimum wage cannot afford a one-bedroom apartment anywhere in America at market rates......a system where a full-time worker making the minimum wage earns $10,500 annually, while "last year the CEO of Wal-Mart earned $3,500 an hour. The CEO of Halliburton earned about $8,300 an hour. And the CEO of ExxonMobil earned about $13,700 an hour.
  

• What happens in the modern age when you kill a ten year old girl, rape her, and chop her up? People leave hundreds of nasty comments on your blog.
• A controversy over at Cagle's blog regarding an nice little Easter comic from Mr. Fish. And by controversy I mean a bunch of people writing him hate mail.
• Tom Tomorrow goes to bat for alternative cartoonists and the Pulitzer, which he suggests could be called the "Pulitzer Prize for Daily Newspaper Editorial Page Preferrably Single Panel Cartooning."

Idiot Box in Pittsburgh

For the first time since the strip began, Idiot Box is no longer available in Pittsburgh. The paper I was running in, The Front Weekly, has not published an issue in a few months. If you are viewing this and live in the Pittsburgh area, please write to the City Paper (the remaining free weekly) and try to bring Idiot Box back. It's important that I get into print publications even though my strip is available online. I get to reach an audience that would never otherwise find me and then there's the actually-getting-paid-for-this thing. You can e-mail the Editor, Chris Potter, here.

More Good News

Nice to know we're leaving a small footprint in the most hostile country on the planet.

U.S. Building Its Largest Embassy in Iraq

The fortress-like compound rising beside the Tigris River here will be the largest of its kind in the world, the size of Vatican City, with the population of a small town, its own defense force, self-contained power and water, and a precarious perch at the heart of Iraq's turbulent future.

The new U.S. Embassy also seems as cloaked in secrecy as the ministate in Rome.

"We can't talk about it. Security reasons," Roberta Rossi, a spokeswoman at the current embassy, said when asked for information about the project.

The spokeswoman can't talk about it. No doubt it took a six-figure for her to muster those seven words.

The 5,500 Americans and Iraqis working at the embassy, almost half listed as security, are far more numerous than at any other U.S. mission worldwide. They rarely venture out into the "Red Zone," that is, violence-torn Iraq.

More On Beer

The PBR cartoon got me thinking about a beer I encountered long ago in college, when I lived in Pittsburgh.

In Pittsburgh you can't just waltz up in a store and grab a 40 oz. Beer is only sold at distributors by the case. A little inconvenient for dates, but no one in the 'burgh drinks less than 15 beers a night anyway so it works out fine. In my experience, these places also have no problem selling cases and kegs to small children. At the place I used to get brew, teenagers would be lined up at the counter with a cop standing right there...he never batted an eyelid!

So anyway, as you know the college kid must make sacrifices in the quality of beer they drink due to financial restrictions. The greatest cost value was a beer called "American" that cost $7.00 for a 30 pack. I never stooped so low as to buy it, but I tasted it once. It was essentially canned water.

The slogan on the can was "A FULL BODIED PURE AMERICAN BEER, QUALITY BREWED TO CAPTURE THE SPIRIT AND STRENGTH OF AMERICA, " which doesn't really say much for this country.

Recent Comics

A lot of brilliant comics have been popping up lately. Have at it:

• Jen Sorensen documents the amazing ability of people able to simultaneously hold opposing beliefs.
• Lucian The Sanguine Garbageman comes across a find.
• Tom Toles is on point (as usual) with the latest fossil finding.
• Perry Bible Fellowship goes cave exploring, making me yearn for my childhood of couch cushion fort building.
• Derf busts on America'a fat asses (this link will change soon).
  

New Toon: Your Guide To Pabst Blue Ribbon

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I had this one sitting on the back burner a couple months and finally decided to do it. The cult of popularity around Pabst Blue Ribbon among young hipsters who prefer Fat Tire and Guinness baffles me. I guess it's the faux-blue collar look they're going for, not sure. I do know it takes an amazing amount of mental acrobatics to think it is good while being a beer snob and despising all other cheap domestics. Don't get me wrong here, I'm definitely a beer snob. I just don't make exceptions for PBR.

In case you don't live in internet land, the seemingly random Chuck Norris reference has to do with the growing cult of popularity around him as well. There's the random facts thing and then there's the shirts. You know, last month it was Thundercats, next month it'll be Richard Simmons shirts. Until every eighties reference has been exhausted. The most popular shirt is WWCND (What would Chuck Norris Do). While poking around his official website, I found exactly what the actor would do:

The actor says the Holy Spirit has filled the emptiness he had and has given his life new meaning. He is now an advocate for getting the Bible back into the public school curriculum.

Not cool Chuck.

Parade Of Originality

Anyone remember when I drew this cartoon?


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It got some attention and was posted on Cagle's blog and got me listed on the site. Now with the revelation that Bush OK'd the leak of Valerie Plame's name a whole slew of comics at Cagle have been unleashed on us with Bush literally leaking water. Get it?! He leaked!

Another roundup on the site recently has got me scratching my head. The incident with Cynthia McKinney punching a police officer. The cartoons listed on Cagle are all virtually identical and--without any subtlety--seem to say the same thing: Cynthia McKinney is a fat black bitch with fat black bitch hair. See for yourself.

UPDATE: I also wanted to point out this cartoon by Glenn McCoy. Please note the metal detector going off even though she ran around it.

Savage Nation

Michael Weiner (aka Michael Savage) has urged all patriotic Americans to start burning Mexican flags. Show those vermin who's boss. Via Media Matters, I suggest listening to the audio:

Unless we say "No" to illegal aliens waving the Mexican flag in the street, by burning the Mexican flag in the street across America. That's right, burn the Mexican flag on your street corner.....Do that, burn a Mexican flag for America, burn a Mexican flag for those who died that you should have a nationality and a sovereignty, go out in the street and show you're a man, burn 10 Mexican flags if I could recommend it.

I'll not get into the actual politics of this and just assume everyone reading is not completely fucking insane: Where do we all get these Mexican flags from? I've never seen one in Ohio. Unless you are Hamas and just have fifty flags for every nation on Earth in a warehouse ready to burn at a moments notice this plan just isn't realistic. I mean it's not like we have Crazy Ali's House of Flags over here. Of course, this is coming from a man who would like to see people who burn the American flag imprisoned.

It would be a hell of a lot funnier if Savage wasn't the third rated political talk show in America (right behind the insightful Limbaugh and Hannity).

Rejected From The New Yorker

I've done a series of gag cartoons inspired by the New Yorker that are running in the Seattle Stranger over the next four weeks. Here's the first.

New Illustrations

I've been trying for a little more texture in some of my illustrations lately, as opposed to flat color. Not much in the way of preliminary sketches, none of them are very interesting. I was going to do a long post detailing how I did the old baseball look for the New York Press cover, but I lack the energy.

Basically it's comprised of about five different drawings; the characters, pencil shading on tracing paper converted to a half tone, the diamond pattern, heads drawn larger and separately, and a bunch of creases scanned in from an extremely old comic book. If you look closely you can see I knocked the CMYK plates out of calibration to replicate shitty old printers.

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For the OC Weekly:

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And in case you are wondering what I am doing drawing pictures of black people screaming "nigga", it was for an article on campusprogress titled Ixnay On The N-Word.

New Toon: Undocumented War Profiteers

I don't have any commentary for this cartoon. But if you missed it I posted an April Fool's cartoon a few days a go.

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Pray For Me

Fom Friday's New York Times:

Long-Awaited Medical Study Questions the Power of Prayer

Prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery, a large and long-awaited study has found.

And patients who knew they were being prayed for had a higher rate of post-operative complications like abnormal heart rhythms, perhaps because of the expectations the prayers created, the researchers suggested.

Because it is the most scientifically rigorous investigation of whether prayer can heal illness, the study, begun almost a decade ago and involving more than 1,800 patients, has for years been the subject of speculation.

Of course, even having this study is ridiculous. The ones who are inclined to refute these findings don't believe in science anyway.

Jehovah's Witnesses regularly come to my door and I talk with them all the time. Yesterday we were talking about the concept of heaven and when I asked where heaven was the woman told me "physically up". As in a physical place in our reality. I pressed her and asked if heaven was on a planet or freefloating, if time and distance were no hindrance, could a spacecraft reach it. In her entire life (70+ years) she admitted to never once wondering about the reality of it, she just knew it was there.

Kitchen Potato

Ever wish you could open your television and get a Klondike Bar during commercials? Thanks to LG's new 13 inch television with 21 cubic feet of refrigerator attached to it, you can do just that.



From the company's press release:

LGE has just unveiled a TV refrigerator-- a TV and refrigerator combined―in Europe following its launch in USA. This is in line with LGE's efforts at putting forth visions for home networking appliances such as Internet refrigerators and Internet air conditioners.

and then later:

Moon B. Shin, vice president of overseas sales & marketing of LGE, said, The TV refrigerator allows housewives to enjoy music, movies, satellite broadcasting, and cable TV in the kitchen, enhancing their pleasure and convenience. For instance, housewives can order food and kitchen items from home shopping channels and also cook dishes while watching cooking shows. He went on to say, You may wonder about the price. The product is more expensive than buying a refrigerator and a 13-inch LCD TV separately. Nonetheless, I am confident that consumers will choose the TV refrigerator because they will be proud of owning this innovative product.

New Toon: Confessions of a Right-Winger

"Immigrants and faggots
They make no sense to me "
-Axl Rose

My sentiments exactly! This whole immigration debate has got me rethinking my liberalism. What a bunch of pussies! I'm sick of being associated with them. Below is my first comic as a right-winger.

I'm not the only one that's seen the light. Ted Rall, Mikhaela Reid, Scott Bateman, and others have all made cartoons praising Bush.

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