Attitude 3 signing at MoCCA

I will be at the MoCCA Art Festival June 10-11 signing copies of Attitude 3 at the NBM table. I'll only be at the table for a few hours a day, I'm not sure of the exact times yet. A slew of Attitude alumni will be there, including Ted Rall, Jen Sorensen, Mikhaela Reid, Keith Knight, Tim Kreider, Stephanie McMillan, Brian McFadden, August Pollack, and you get the picture.

If you won't be there, you can order a signed copy of the book through my site.

50 Superheroes

Comic artist Elijah J Brubaker is in the process of posting drawings of 50 superheroes on his blog, along with commentary. It's pretty funny stuff. He rants about the many things that don't make sense about superheroes or things that we have all wondered. For instance, Hawkeye:

we can kill people or animals from miles away now, why would I want to use a bow and arrow to fight Galactus? After all this is said and done you'd think Ol' Hawkeye would have been ground into paste by now right? I mean, hasn't Hawkeye ever encountered someone with a gun? Let alone Doctor Doom (for instance) Wouldn't someone like magneto or even the fucking mole man just rip Hawkeye a new ass in minutes? You can only distract people with a purple costume for so long.

Found via Comics Reporter.

Cartoonz 4 U

maTim Kreider, of The Pain--When Will It End? comics, gives a hilarious account of submitting his cartoons to the New Yorker in person to Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor, in Rejected From the New Yorker.

It is not easy to draw a New Yorker cartoon. (Indeed, as the title of this collage implies, I have failed to do so.) David Foster Wallace once described them as having "an elusive sameness." The usual subtext seems to be self-congratulation on (disguised as self-deprecation of) New Yorkers' trendiness, superficiality, and materialism. The typical reader response to one is a barely perceptible lifting at the corners of the mouth, and perhaps a murmured, "Mm." They have to be clever; droll, even.They must never actually be funny. Read On...

You may remember I did a series of the same name recently, although mine were not formally submitted and rejected. Check them out.

And check out these other recent comics:

• Slowpoke shows us Post-Ironic Cutism and other Aesthetic Movements To Come.
• Big Fat Whale shows how hilarious Global Warming can be.
• Ted Rall hips us to the dangers of Al Kidda.
• Mikhaela shows us conversations Bush isn't listening in on.

New Toon: The Da Vinci Code Activity Sheet

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Who would have thought the major threat to an 1800 year old institution was a blockbuster novel? When setting dissenters on fire is no longer an acceptable option, call for a boycott. Heaven Forefend people watch a fictional movie that suggests an alternate history!

Unfortunately, it takes a sensational thriller or movie starring Tom Hanks to even get people exposed to the notion that Christ may not be divine. Catholic scholars are quick to point out the historical inaccuracies of the book; if only they would apply that rigorous skepticism to their own faith.

I don't know if Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, but I do lend more support to theories I know are physically possible. A man can marry a woman and have kids. A man cannot be born from a virgin, walk on water, and rise from the dead--that I know of. Extraordinary claims need to be proven with evidence. I don't see any hard evidence supporting the theory that Jesus was divine.

Oh, and buy Attitude 3! It's more insightful than The Da Vinci Code and funnier than the Bible.

My Space

I never thought I'd be one to have a blog and these days I'm a regular blogadeer. So it was only natural that I would give in and get a myspace account. I really despise these social networking sites, but I figured what the hell, it might lead to some new readers.

My page is here. So send me a friend request or whatever. If you regularly visit my site there isn't anything new to see there, it's just some of my comics. I spared everyone from a list of my top favorite 300 bands. The only information you can gather is that I'm a Virgo, which I can't seem to turn off. Why does it have to put our astrological signs? Do people really believe in that stuff? Don't answer that.

For the record, this man wearing a gas mask was the first Editor with the vision to run my comics...

Also, check out my buddy Ed Piskor's comic about myspace. It is, of course, viewable on his myspace page.

Lawntocracy

I received an e-mail from Robert Mattson about last week's comic Lawn Order. He is a playwright who created 'Lawntocracy', a ten minute play about American's obsession with their lawns. I read the thing and it's pretty damn funny. Looks like we both played off of the 'I Have A Dream' speech.

The description of the play from his website:

Frank and Vincent are next door neighbors. Frank is in his 40's and white. Vincent is in his early 30's and black. One day Vincent realizes that he doesn't live in a democracy. He doesn't live in a meritocracy. He lives in a lawntocracy, where a man is judged by the color of his lawn and not the content of his character. A brief comedy about what you lose, and what you gain, when you grow up and move to the suburbs.

Sweet Reason!

From the Humanist News Network's advice column Sweet Reason:

Dear Sweet Reason,

This may seem a little ridiculous or out of your usual tenor, but my boyfriend is bothered by me saying, “Oh god!” while we are having sex. He is an ardent atheist, while I consider myself to be more of an agnostic. I’ve tried explaining that this is really a moot point, but he seems really bothered by it. I keep hoping he will forget about it, but he just keeps bringing it up. Honestly, it’s the last thing on my mind. But when we’re done, he wants to engage in some kind of discussion and I just want to go to sleep.

Read the response here.

Ironically there are two groups who want to get 'Jesus Christ!' and 'Oh My God' out of their vocabulary: hardcore atheists and people who believe your soul will burn in a lake of fire if you use the Lord's name in vain.

New Toon: 2006 Scandal Report

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Running in this week's Cleveland Free Times

New Toon: Lawn Order

As you can see from the banner on the right, Attitude 3 is now on sale. Order from my store and get a signed sketch inside. I also have a big package deal with all of my books.

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We have a problem in America. We are obsessed with our lawns. Having an overgrown lawn in the American suburbs will draw the evil glances of the entire neighborhood. It seemed in my youth that once a week was a good standard, but now I have noticed many people around me mowing every three days. They aren't even cutting anything! You can't even tell what has been 'cut' and what hasn't. The difference only detectable in their mind, in their endless quest to keep their lawn at golf course levels of uniformity.

Lawn mowing is an X-treme was of time. First of all, the grass always grows back so I just don't see the point. Cutting the lawn is less productive than watching it grow. At least when you watch grass grow you aren't paying for it. I can't imagine the amount of resources that are used on this futile act. I would estimate billions of dollars a year are spent on water, gasoline, and fertilizer. I'm busy. Aren't you? I don't have time to be bothered with things like mowing, shaving, and getting my hair cut.

But I guess you can get around that by paying someone to mow it for you.

I never realized how crazy people are about their lawns until I worked part time with a friend mowing lawns last summer. People need them edged, bagged, mowed in particular directions, and every spare leaf and grass clipping blasted out of existence with an obnoxious leafblower.

Adventure in Neo-Conservative land

Last week I made a rare trip to the bookstore. I picked up a copy of Adbusters and The Weekly Standard, perhaps the most polar opposites of political magazines. Adbusters is an anti-consumerism, well-designed slick, while the Weekly Standard is the hard right weekly edited by Bill Kristol, President of the Project For A New American Century.

I decided to give them a try and figured (in the case of the Standard) I may gain some valuable insight to war hawks. The lead editorial by Bill Kristol had my head spinning. He lays into quotes from Condoleeza that aren't war-centric enough for his Ravage The World mind:

hawks will worry that proclaiming "Iran is not Iraq" signals that the Bush administration is now terrified even to threaten the use of force against terror-sponsoring dictatorships seeking weapons of mass destruction.

Yes, everyone's big worry is that were afraid Bush won't rush to war with Iran.

"The Security Council is the primary and most important institution for the maintenance of peace and stability and security"--of course that's not true. But what's the harm in saying it? It creates goodwill as the United States goes through the Security Council process. Sure, that process won't lead anywhere. But then the Europeans will finally see that they've got to join us in serious sanctions.

I'm kind of surprised he even calls for sanctions here, instead of immediate shock and awe. Finally, it ends:

Much of the U.S. government no longer believes in, and is no longer acting to enforce, the Bush Doctrine. "The United States of America understands and believes that Iran is not Iraq." That's a diplomatic way of saying that the United States of America is in retreat.

I'd certainly hate to see us on the offensive.

Google Video

I really can't wait until I can use Photoshop on one of these.

New Illustration

This was to be a cover and page and a half spread for the OC Weekly, but it was killed due to lack of space. It's a shame because I think it's one of my best pieces, but it at least was published in the online version of the article Baghdad Diaries. The woman at the table is Eileen Padberg, a "Republican political consultant from Laguna Niguel until two years ago. That's when she dropped everything on something like a lark, but more sober given that it involved moving from the relative tranquility of Orange County political infighting to a real, brutal killing zone, to help Iraqi businesswomen."



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The Editor knew exactly what he wanted-Padberg at the center of a table in Iraq with a character representing the major 'groups'; civilians, soldiers, detainees, clerics. We decided a 'Last Supper' approach would be the best way to have all characters facing the viewer. Everything was handled in this one sketch with virtually no changes.

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The only major change I made was to the American soldier, from flipped out to a more pensive just-been-through-some-shit look. To get the right texture for his hair and the dirt on him I sketched in pencil on a piece of tracing paper and added it over the coloring in Photoshop. I also added a myterious hand on the shoulder of the General, looking at his map of Iraq as blood begins to soak into it.

The Atheist's Nightmare - Part II

(Via God is For Suckers) About two weeks ago I linked to Ray Comfort explaining how the banana was irrefutable proof of intelligent design. He was confronted about this on the Hellbound Alleee Show and conceded that he was wrong:

Hellbound Alleee : I'm just saying that, that there are very few plants, and we argue - with some environmentalists a lot who don't believe in bioengineered food, because all, because most of the food that we eat of course is farmed, and is done through horticulture, and we've engineered these - these fruits and vegetables to be more tasty to us. So actually, the banana seems to be not, not made by God at this point, it's more like um, what, what came first, the banana or the hand ? [laugh] You know ? Man took the banana and made it better for man.

Ray Comfort : Okay, you've got that one. You can have the banana.

Francois Tremblay : WE WIN ! WE WIN ! WE'VE WON THE BANANA !

The Nightmare is over. Ray Comfort is pretty influential to the Rapture Right and is the inventor of the Banana Theory, something creationists actually use as something that's legitimate.

God is for Suckers is also reporting on the how the Ground Zero memorial "pledged to permanently display the two pieces of steel left standing in the shape of a cross after the World Trade Center collapsed." They comment:

Many triangles, especially ones created by workers' shovels leaned against debris during lunch breaks, could easily of symbolized the element of fire in the Paracelsian alchemical tradition. However, since the Christocentric workers ignored such clear messages from Beyond, any Alchemists who lost their lives at the World Trade Center may never have closure.

A Prank For The History Books

The Buffalo BEAST (America's best fiend) pulled off an amazing double prank on the Mayors of Buffalo and Ottawa, whose hockey teams are facing each other in the playoffs, calling each of the Mayors and pretending to be the other one. In the first call, the Buffalo Mayor was propositioned a wife swap which resulted in his wife actually being put on the phone(!). Next up was the Mayor of Ottawa. He took the bait, believing the call was authentic, and was suprisingly enthusiastic about what they proposed:

We're irredeemable cynics who like to believe we've mapped the entire genome of rottenness and venality. And then we encounter something like this: a sitting mayor seriously considering fixing an NHL playoff series in exchange for jobs, without so much as blinking. For all our misanthropy, we were unprepared for that.

And they have it on tape. The story, transcript, and audio is here.

Attitude 3 Signing in Cleveland

Attitude 3 should be in stores by the 15th of this month. You can pre-order a copy from me here and I will put a sketch in it.

On June 15th I will be signing copies at Mac's Backs on Coventry Road in Cleveland (map) . Brian McFadden of Big Fat Whale will also be there. The exact time is not yet known, but it will be in the evening. There is also some street fair thing going on that night, so you can get drunk and spill coney sauce all over yourself. Probably.

New Toon: Idiot Box-The Most Trusted Name In News

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I like doing these USA Today parodies once in a while (previous ones here and here). It serves as a dumping ground for jokes and ideas I can't stretch into a strip. I had something planned about the various new scandals (Kennedy crash, hookergate, etc), but it is being worked into a full page strip for the Free Times. Check back next week for that. You can read the tiny type of the articles here.

In regards to the headline at the bottom referring to Native Americans singing the National Anthem in Mohican, I'd like to know if conservatives would actually have a problem about this. Recently, a resolution was introduced in the House affirming that the National Anthem be sung in English. Laura Bush was already before it before she was against it. But the Spanish version doesn't seem to be something immigrants cooked up last week in their War On Freedom. An ABC article says:

On the other side of the debate, supporters of the "Nuestra Himna" version of the national anthem point out that, according to the Library of Congress, the United States Bureau of Education commissioned a Spanish-language version of "The Star Spangled Banner" en español way back in 1919. That was before the English version became the official anthem in 1931.

Like most things Right-Wingers drum up as the pressing issue of the day, this is a complete non-issue intended to rally the racist wing of the party (not a small wing) and get them to the polls. Much like the getting out the I-Hate-The-Queers-Vote in 2004.

9/11 Report turns into graphic novel

It's a giant leap from "Jughead" to "The 9/11 Report."

But that didn't stop a pair of veteran comic artists from bridging the gap -- turning the dense, painful breakdown of the horrors of that morning in 2001 into a more digestible form: the graphic novel.

In a bold effort to depict the tragedy of Sept. 11, artists Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón illustrated simultaneous events side by side on the page, using the timelines of the hijacked planes as laid out in the 9/11 commission's findings, to chilling effect.

New Illustrations

I've been drawing a lot of anthropomorphic animals for covers of the Anchorage Press lately. Enjoy.

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New Toon: Unsustainable

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We are 5% of the world's population and consume 25% of it's oil, leaps and bounds more than any other nation. We drive gigantic gas guzzling cars, drive three blocks to our friends house, and have a lot of our goods and food shipped to us from the other side of the planet. When gas prices go up, it seems unthinkable to some that perhaps a cost saving solution would be reducing our consumption. Somehow we think we are entitled to use all this energy and are shocked--shocked!--when the reasonably expected results of our policies start to take a turn for the worse.

Calling our way of living unsustainable would be an understatement.

Beside the obvious of moving to get off oil and use renewable energy, we need to reduce our consumtion. Brazil is set to become energy independent in 2007, running all their cars on Ethanol. I fear the problem with this model for us is that our consumption is so outrageously high it would take fields the size of South America itself to produce enough ethanol to get Americans to work (each in their own individual car).

The Object Of My Displeasure

This Andy Warhol painting kept me up late last night. It haunted my conciousness, a testament to Intelligent Design that won't stop assaulting me with its pure logic. I took pills, drank three pots of coffee, but I still dozed off, like one of those kids in a Nightmare On Elm Street Movie.

A part of me died.

If you are wondering what the hell I'm talking about, see the post below.

Bananas: The Atheist's Nightmare

Irrefutable proof of Intelligent Design is all around us. Just watch this video clip.

Comix!

I heard they weren't just for kids anymore...

• Alliteration bonanza from Fighting Words: Crusty McCrochety, the Cantankerous curmudgeon.
  
• Big Fat Whale brings us Those Wacky Religions.
• August tests right-wing illogic.
• Jens writes of the burgeoning Wal-Bank business.
• Ted Rall reminds us just how much we've accomplished.
  

New Illustrations

I've updated my portfolio with a new set of illustrations and put a new page in for my commissioned comics work. Here's a Bukowski I did for the Anchorage Press. I'll probably color this and add it to the portfolio when I get a chance.

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And one for the Boston Phoenix on that whole cell phone thing I keep hearing about.

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Learn To Laugh

A few months ago I did this cartoon, making fun of the laughter training the Pentagon is doing with military families. Steve Wilson, who appears in the comic, wrote me to clear up what he saw as an unfair representation of his organization. He is Founder and "Cheerman of the Bored" of the World Laughter Tour and The Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor (AATH), both non-profits. The original USA Today story can be found here.

There is a better --more accurate-- point of view that you might consider, and I would love to talk to you about it.

There is value in maintaining a sense of humor. Your livelihood depends on it, so I cannot imagine you would want a reputation for hating laughter. Humor and laughter can make the un-bearable a bit more bearable; and, they are hallmarks of successful coping and recovery. Humor can also be used to hurt, and it can distort facts. I wonder, is there any way you could use your talent and wit to set the record straight?

I have been serious about laughter and humor for a long, long time, having some remarkable successes in applying humor for its beneficial purposes in many unique settings. I have been working with Col. Scott (now retired but still at the Pentagon with Family Support programs) for about 3 years to bring 'therapeutic laughter' to the mix of coping skills for military families. The USA Today article didn't do him justice. He is a person with a big heart and an officer with a tough job that he works at sincerely.

Unfortunately, lacking balance in some key respects, the USA Today piece was incomplete and inaccurate, but an un-distorted story may not have made front-page news. When you added your take to an already warped report the problem for us was compounded.

Steve Wilson, Founder, President and Cheerman of The Bored(tm) World
Laughter Tour, Inc.
www.WorldLaughterTour.com
Home of the Original Certified Laughter Leader Training
"Look for the Happy World logo to be sure it's a World Laughter Tour program."

I certainly am not against laughter, but the whole article seemed so over the top. I mean, "learning to walk like a penguin, laugh like a lion, and blurt ha ha, hee hee, and ho ho." What does that even mean? Military families DO need laughter because it probably isn't funny when your family member is risking their life everyday. The Pentagon's association with this I see as a little disingenuous. Perhaps if they did not send young people into battles in unnecessary wars they wouldn't have to worry about making them laugh.

I agree laughter is a great mechanism to use in the psychological recovery of people. I tend to think there are ways to avoid their conditions in the first place. I also agree with you that humor makes the un-bearable bearable. I find many events in our political scene these days un-bearable and so I make fun of them.

I found "Scotty" Scott's comment a little callous. In his quote he is essentially saying military families have no reason to laugh, that's why his program works! Well, why don't they have a reason to laugh? It was this theme I found in the USA Today article to be unintentionally funny and absurd. Every one just seemed happy-go-lucky and never questioning WHY their work was necessary.

Steve also informed me that "Scotty" Scott has shown the cartoon to "top brass" at the Pentagon. We here at Idiot Box are very proud to entertain Pentagon War Planners and hope they got a good hearty chuckle!

How did Steve find the comic? Obviously, no expert on laughter doesn't have a subscription to the Funny Times.

Living With War

You can stream Neil Young's new anti-war album from the internets.