New Toon: Global Orgasm for Peace

I'm gone till Monday. Here's a comic:

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It's so silly, ineffectual, and pointless it had to come from the left: It's the Global Orgasm for Peace! We'll all have an orgasm on December 22nd and....and, oh yeah, we'll stop war! If banging on an upside down pickle bucket isn't getting the world's attention, it must be time for more drastic measures....like a synchronized orgasm!

Now, at this point you may be inclined to scold me, "they just want to raise awareness" and "they have good intentions" you say. No, it's much more than that:

The intent is that the participants concentrate any thoughts during and after orgasm on peace. The combination of high- energy orgasmic energy combined with mindful intention may have a much greater effect than previous mass meditations and prayers.

The goal is to add so much concentrated and high-energy positive input into the energy field of the Earth that it will reduce the current dangerous levels of aggression and violence throughout the world.

I think I speak for everyone from atheists to jihadists when I say "what the fuck are you talking about?"

They plan on having this event annually (why not daily?) on December 22nd " leading up to the December Solstice of 2012, when the Mayan Calendar ends with a new beginning." In case that seems a little ambiguous to you, Dec. 22 2012, is the new age movements' apocalypse, when the Mayan calendar ends which means absolutely nothing unless you're this idiot.

Now go buy stuff.

The War on Baristas

Also known as the Global Struggle Against Coffee Extremists but whatever, I have a new collection coming out. Nothing spectacular, just a little self-published hand stapled deal. It features 16 of the twenty or so comics I did for the Seattle Stranger in recent months. Get one in the store.

I have it set as Pre-Order right now because I don't have them all made. I'm not pretentious enough to think there's a demand to pre-order my little hand stapled books, I just wanted to get the Paypal set up before I leave for the weekend. Also, that cover design isn't final.

Off To Portland

I'm headed out to Portland tomorrow morning to look at apartments. it's about time I finally escape from Ohio.

So it was interesting to catch an article (via CP) that has to do with Portland, atheism, and the Art Institutes (where I went to school), all reported by the Portland Mercury (a client). According to an atheist student, he was expelled for getting in a religious discussion.

Suspension of Disbelief-Art Student Expelled—For Atheism?
By Amy Jenniges

In the classroom that day, Averill says one young woman was talking about her belief in energy layers and astral beings. "I jokingly asked her if she believed in leprechauns. It turns out, she does. They live on another energy layer,"
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Averill says he wasn't trying to disprove the other student's religious beliefs, but "to convince her not to insist that they were scientifically proven."

The student, apparently offended, complained to the teacher. Averill was called into a meeting that evening, he says, with the Art Institute's dean of education, associate dean, and the dean of student affairs.

Read the whole thing.

Shop

$5 DOLLAR SHIRTS!

Buy a high quality shirt for someone you know for only $5 and make them think you spent a lot more on them for Christmas.

Johnny Cash must remain at $15 but everything else is 5 bucks. I designed and pulled these shirts myself and everything is printed on American Apparel except for the GOP shirt. Check them out in the store.

New Toon: Peaceful Quagmire

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If this comic looks familiar it because I did almost the exact same strip a few weeks ago for the Stranger. That's one reason why I did two this week--I didn't want to be lame and just hit you with something identical. I redid it because I liked the idea and wanted my altweekly readers to see it. And the idea I had planned on using was done by another alt weekly cartoonist right before I sat down to draw, leaving me with the deadline jitters.

Insane Holiday deals in the store.

And you know you want to look at my Thanksgiving themed Weekly Woofs.

Next Week: Orgasms for Peace!

Random stuff

• Today the ACLU has released more information about the government spying on Anti-War groups. My next comic for them will be out next week and deals with this.
  
• I have a cartoon in The Best Political Cartoons of 2007.
• The new Tom the Dancing Bug is a classic.
• I agree with Jen here.
  

New Toon: A Lesson Learned

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Bush finally made it over to Vietnam this weekend and said that indeed Vietnam does teach us a lesson for Iraq, “We’ll succeed unless we quit.” Will he ever get it?

Got another cartoon coming on Thursday.

Don't forget you can order Attitude 3 or any of my collections from my store. Want something cool for the Holidays? Order a print or an original cartoon.

Political Correctness on PCP

From the Guardian:

A Spanish town council is to fight machismo on the streets by decreeing that half of all road signs and traffic signals show silhouettes with feminine attributes, such as a skirt, ribbon and ponytail, instead of just the striding man.

"This way we will do away with the sexism that until now has also existed in traffic signs in which only masculine figures appear," Rosalina Guijarro, in charge of traffic and citizen safety for Fuenlabrada, a Madrid dormitory town, said yesterday.

Hmm, yes. Way to stick it to the chauvinists. Perhaps some of the figures should be overweight. We wouldn't want the people to feel they had to attain an unrealistic figure from the fascist traffic signs. Besides the fact that this is all silly, the "Pedestrian Crossing" sign doesn't have any features exclusive to men. I see a head and four appendages (no hands?!). How nice of them to include bowties and skirts on the women. Maybe she could be carrying an oven mitt for even easier identification.

The purpose of traffic signs are for instant readability, not imposing sexist rule over a population.

The backlash against those smug little crossing men is the brainchild of a town council run by the Socialist and United Left parties, which usually focus on better known forms of gender discrimination.
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Last year, the government added a clause to civil marriage contracts that required men and women to share the housework and childcare.

Men and women probably should share the same housework, but how exactly does the government plan on observing and enforcing this law?

New Toon: America Wakes Up...

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...well, some of America. Most people just don't bother to vote. Countries that provide the day off for election day have the highest turnouts in the world. Of course many other democracies actually have a multi party system, which probably encourages people to go out and vote for someone that actually represents their views.

Don't forget you can order Attitude 3 or any of my collections from my store.

New Toon: Do Not Be Joyful

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Bush said it to the terrorists. It goes for everybody else as well: soldiers wanting to come home, people working for $6.00 an hour, and anyone concerned about the environment.

New Toon: Science and Morality

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I have been batting around something on the topic of religion and morality for a while and when the Ted Haggard scandal hit I decided it was time to tackle it. Religious people, especially those of the fundamentalist strain, are certain that morality comes from their God and religious texts. If society abandoned their religion, utter depravity would rule the globe. Let's put aside the fact that many societies and cultures have developed outside of the Bible. Let's also put aside the fact that if you actually read the Bible you will be subjected to all manner of barbarisms. Let's just look at the scientific community, which has to be the largest segment of non-religious people in our society. And we do see a difference, it's just not favorable to the religious moralists.

Today's strip is the last of the strips I'm doing for the Seattle Stranger. I may even make a little collection of them to sell at conventions and through the website for anyone that would want them.

Editorial Cartoons

As far as forcing metaphors go in editorial cartooning, this one takes the cake.

This recent cartoon by randy Bish of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review is coming under fire by outraged veterans. This reminds me of the furor over a Toles cartoon on Rumsfeld. Some people have an inability to understand political cartoons. (via Comics Reporter)

And here are some actual good cartoons from Rall, McFadden, and Sorensen.

New Toon: If Folk Were Like Rap

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As you probably know, Rap suffers immensely from highly successful and lauded artists who rap about nothing but materialism, misogyny, and murder. Even the so-called socially conscious rappers are still nothing more than egocentric homophobes. Amongst Gansta Rappers, it seems a status of how "real" you are to repeatedly brag about how you hooked your neighborhood on crack hustling before you got into the rapping game. You can make excuses by saying these are the realities of the inner city, but previous forms of music that came from the Black community--Gospel, R&B, Soul, Funk, Blues--are absent the violence and braggadocio.

I really like me some good rap; Wu-Tang, Kool Keith, Del, etc. but I don't think this artform is even close to reaching its potential. People have written endlessly about the materialism of rap, but the thing that bothers me the most is the self-referential lyrics. There are whole songs, even whole albums, that are simply rapping about how good they are at making albums! When was the last time you heard a Radiohead song that talked about how well their albums perform and how Modest Mouse and Built To Spill can't even touch them because their the kings of this shit?

Nas, who is considered one of the best rappers and not...fake, had an interview in the latest issue of Rolling Stone to talk about his new album Hip-Hop is Dead. Sounds like it may actually contain some criticism of the industry. But then, after talking about how he is making the music for a film called Blood Diamond--which is about fucking Blood Diamonds--he says this:

Nas: ... I just got a big, giant rope with a chain and a gold King Tut piece with yellow diamonds and emerald green shit.
Aren't Diamonds just another superficiality of hip-hop?
No, they're a status symbol of royalty. And royalty figures in hip-hop wear status pieces.

New Toon: The Modern Editorial Cartoon

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There is a story that's been percolating in the small world of Editorial Cartooning over a Harvard Crimson cartoonist accused of plagiarism. Numerous cartoons of hers seem to be copied directly from comics posted on Cagle.com. This Crimson article links to the cartoons in question. Daryl Cagle has written that he doesn't think it's plagiarism, just another cartoonist coming up with lame ideas:

Regular readers of our site know about Yahtzees, a term I coined to refer to times when five or more cartoonists draw the same gag at the same time. The Kim Yahtzee isn't drawn at the same time, it trickles in over the years as cartoonists independently get the same, banal, trite idea. Editors are as much to blame for this phenomenon, because they all want the same thing from cartoonists: Jay Leno style funny jokes about the news that convey no opinion at all. Newsweek magazine is an ugly culprit, reprinting opinionless gag cartoons, week after week. Editors suffer from group-think, all wanting the same thing from cartoonists, who should all fit into the same little box. Time Magazine does it too, and with all of the hundreds of cartoons to choose from every week, they often print the very same cartoons in their cartoon round-up that Newsweek does.

True, but I'm not so quick to dismiss her comics as merely lame instead of plagiarized. Some of the similarities are hard to explain away. But Cagle issued a challenge:

I can take any reputable cartoonist and find cartoons that are similar to his cartoons, drawn earlier by other cartoonists, that make as good a plagiarism argument as the case being made against this poor student cartoonist.

I accept.

Am I reputable? I don't know, but I'm listed on Cagle's site.

New Toon: Peaceful Quagmire

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Get To The Booth!

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Here is a board game I did for the Cleveland Free Times. Hopefully, this comic can be ignored in a week for being alarmist when everything runs smoothly with the elections. Blackwell is so far behind in the polls there is no way he could steal it if he wanted to, but I anticipate the same problems we saw in 2004, whether deliberate or just the result of an incompetent bureaucracy.

Brian McFadden of Big Fat Whale also has a boardgame in the Boston Phoenix this week. Do great minds think alike or just communicate through invisible quantum forces? Perhaps board games are just easy to think up.

New Toon: Meet Some Candidate

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I've been listening to Meet the Press as I work on Sundays (available as a podcast!) and they have been hosting a debate every week between candidates in the Senate races. Politicians aren't known for their honesty, especially during campaign season, but non-answers, weasel words, and pointless attacks have been taken to new heights in recent weeks. I was particularly disappointed with the debate between Mike Dewine and Sherrod Brown, running for Senate here in Ohio. And by "dissapointed" I mean "made my ears bleed".

Dewine and Brown talked for a half hour straight (usually over each other) and managed to say nothing substantive at all. Every question directed at them was flat out ignored as they launched into the horrible things their opponent had done to make us less safe from terror and who hates the troops and the American worker more. I've seen five year olds display more civility and intelligence.

Check out the store for books and shirts.

Worst Congress Ever

Matt Taibbi's new article in Rolling Stone gives a nice overview of the 109th Congress. It really can't be stressed enough how criminally corrupt they have been.

These past six years were more than just the most shameful, corrupt and incompetent period in the history of the American legislative branch. These were the years when the U.S. parliament became a historical punch line, a political obscenity on par with the court of Nero or Caligula -- a stable of thieves and perverts who committed crimes rolling out of bed in the morning and did their very best to turn the mighty American empire into a debt-laden, despotic backwater, a Burkina Faso with cable.

And later, he details the working habits of the 109th Congress and manages to suprise me. This Congress has worked only 218 days (combined between the house and Senate), the least amount in history:

Those who actually work on the Hill will tell you that a great many of those "workdays" were shameless mail-ins, half-days at best. Congress has arranged things now so that the typical workweek on the Hill begins late on Tuesday and ends just after noon on Thursday, to give members time to go home for the four-day weekend. This is borne out in the numbers: On nine of its "workdays" this year, the House held not a single vote -- meeting for less than eleven minutes. The Senate managed to top the House's feat, pulling off three workdays this year that lasted less than one minute. All told, a full fifteen percent of the Senate's workdays lasted less than four hours. Figuring for half-days, in fact, the 109th Congress probably worked almost two months less than that "Do-Nothing" Congress. Read the article.

Cash Rules Everything Around Me

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Johnny Cash shirts are back! I only printed a very limited number so order now.

If you want one in XL, I'm sorry to say I'm already out. But you can e-mail me [idiotbox -- at -- mattbors.com] and I will put you on the list. If these sell enough I'll reprint more and be sure to get a greater amount of XLs.

New Illustration

A cover for last weeks' Texas Observer. In print, the sign reads "Welcome to Prisonville". The article is on Raymondville, Texas, a small town that has become infamous for housing four prisons:

Their town is home to a privately run, 1,000-bed state prison; a county-run, 96-bed jail with space for federal inmates; a private, 500-bed federal jail; and a recently opened private, 2,000-bed detention center for undocumented immigrants that is a crown jewel in the Bush administration’s border-enforcement policy. The four facilities are clustered on reclaimed grazing land, a bustling village of razor wire and guard towers across the highway from downtown Raymondville. The 3,600 prisoners—one-third of Raymondville’s population—who reside in this penal colony represent the heart of the area’s economy.

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