Democracy In Action

Looks like even the roadways are free in Iraq.

New Toon: Finish The Job

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I've had this one sitting in the notebook for over a year now. It's actually been carried over through about three or four of them. I never knew how to end it, but with the recent surge it came to me.

More on the surge Thursday.

The Great Glue Factory In The Sky

Barbaro, some horse, was put down today. Big news in America. I saw a clip of the news conference where a woman (the owner?) asked everyone to pray for Barbaro. I'm curious to know how that prayer would go. "Dear God, please don't send Barbaro's horse soul to horse hell. He lived a good Christian life."

Here are some of my favorite headlines commemorating this event:

• Barbaro's death transcends sports (huh?)
• Barbaro: Salute to a champion
• Barbaro's legacy reaches beyond racing world
• Barbaro loved Maryland, and feeling was mutual
  

and my personal favorite:

• Cloning Barbaro

Is the post office going to be closed tomorrow for this? I have some shit I need to mail.

Update: I should have known there would be at least one of these.

War Is Boring #2

The second War is Boring strip is up at warisboring.com. The strip will be appearing every week and a half to two weeks.

I've finally added some links on the right to other places on the web where you can find my stuff. Go ahead and send me a friend request on myspace. I know you have a page.

New Illustration

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This was a recent cover for the OC Weekly. The story was about a gang member who shot some cops and went on the run. When he was later tracked down and killed in a shootout, the cops handcuffed his corpse.

The founding Editor of the OC Weekly, Will Swaim, resigned last week after 11 years with the paper. He cited disagreements with how the New Times chain, which gobbled them up last year, did business.

The OC was my first big circulation illustration client (by altweekly standards) a few years ago. Working with Will was one of my best experiences as an illustrator and what makes this job so cool; illustrating muckraking news stories that had lasting impact on an area, with creative freedom to boot. I had the pleasure of illustrating covers exposing their corrupt sheriff, a priestly pedophile, and a criminal AIDS Doctor.

As one comment on their blog said, "Will Swaim and his paper have been one giant pain in the ass to a county that was in desperate need of one."

New Toon: Slave Wagery

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If we are to believe Right-Wingers, people working at the wage floor should not desire a minimum wage increase because it will hurt them in the long run through inflation and shutting down small businesses from sea to sea. I suppose a wage decrease will help them economically by taking the burden off of a company to pay its employees decently. We all know the altruistic nature of CEOs and how their pay has risen close to 420 times the average employee in the last twenty years.

This comic was inspired by remarks from Jack Clark on the the Blast the Right Podcast (#72).

Next Week: more Idiot Box , War Is Boring, and a full pager.

New Toon: She's In

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I've had Hillary in a few comics in the past, but this is my first one devoted to just her. I'm looking forward to this Presidential Campaign. Not in the yay, look at all the hopeful contenders ready to lead this great nation kind of way, but in the look at all the self-deluded hypocritical scum trying to sell us a steaming pile of bullshit I get to ridicule for the next two years kind of way.

This is one of the only times I've ever drawn Clinton. My caricature is alright, but I think it needs a little work.

The Face From Hell

Gerald Ford's legacy in the cartooning world seems to be that there was no consensus on how to draw him. JJ McCullough of Filibuster cartoons has put together a list of Ford caricatures from Editorial Cartoonists working during his presidency.

Yes, as hard as it may be to believe, there was a time when the editorial cartoonists of America had a president so boring looking he was almost impossible to draw accurately.

New Toon: Madrassa School Veterans for Truth

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After my last post, it occurred to me that I should turn this idea into a comic. There will be plenty of valid criticism of Barack Obama over the next two years. Being raised as a Muslim is not one of them.

Thursday: Workers Strike for Lower Wages

Update: hmmm, Madrassa just means "school" in Arabic even though it does refer to Islamic schools, which means they are the School School Veterans for Truth.

War Is Boring

Journalist and War Correspondent David Axe has just launched the website warisboring.com, a depository of his various freelance writing, blogging, and a comic strip which I will be illustrating based on his recent travels in Lebanon. You can read the first one now. I'm not sure of the frequency yet, but there will be more strips. I'll let you know everything here.

David made his foray into the comics world last year with his graphic novel War Fix, illustrated by Steve Olexa.

Let The Bodies Hit The Floor

This guy certainly has some awesome moves.

Sylvia Brown

A recent comic I did featured Sylvia Brown and I wanted to write a quick thing about her, but didn't have internet access when the comic came out. Well, she's back in the news. Turns out she told the distraught parents of a then-missing Shawn Hornbeck that their son was dead four years ago on--where else--the Montel Williams show. Anderson Cooper has been following up on this story (video).

Sylvia Brown would be the perfect villain in an old comic book or Ian Flemming novel; manipulative and sociopathic, a garish overweight eccentric wench with hideous fake fingernails and a bizarre hairstyle who doesn't display a shred of humanity, just a lust of money. She would never fight much herself, like the similarly shaped villain the Penguin, but have an army of henchmen fight off the hero while she escaped in a helicopter, setting up another psychic hotline out of a dingy apartment she adorns with bead curtains and glass figurines.

anyway....

Watch this.

Madrassa School Veterans for Truth

The hosts of Fox & Friends are some of the few people in the world that I think I would punch in the face if I spotted on the street. They managed to take the America morning show, which relishes in stupid inspirational stories, celebrity gossip, and testing out the latest gizmos and turn it into a full-fledged propaganda effort.

Here's their latest effort to smear any candidate who doesn't appear to fully accept authoritarianism (video at ThinkProgress).

DOOCY: We should also point out that Barack Obama’s father is the one who gave him the middle name of Hussein. And the thing about the madrassa, and you know, let’s just be honest about this, in the last number of years, madrassas have been, we’ve learned a lot about them, financed by Saudis, they teach this Wahhabism which pretty much hates us.

Loathsome

The Buffalo Beast is out with their annual 50 Most Loathsome People in America list. Everyone's there; Here are some descriptions of America's Best:

Lee Raymond: Bears the grotesque physical ugliness of an oligarch born pre-caricatured by Thomas Nast

Alex Jones: A blustery schizoid moron who makes everyone near him look like an ass just for not punching him when they have the chance.

Deepak Chopra: another mystical moron providing a psychic security blanket to soft-skulled suckers.

They include an entry for 'You' every year, but it takes a new dimension this year as you, the American Citizen, was declared Person of the Year by Time.

You: Your whole life has been a pitiful exercise in rote mimicry, a meek subjugation of individuality in exchange for herd approval. Your delusions of "common sense" wisdom stem from an unwillingness to seek information and an inability to critically analyze it. You never hesitate to offer strong opinions on subjects you don]’t know a damn thing about. You]’re willing to believe anything a guy in a suit says on TV, as long as it doesn]’t hint at your culpability in the negligent homicide of your country and planet or otherwise cloud your streak-free conscience. You]’re more worried about friction on the "Desperate Housewives" set than the lack of health coverage at your tedious, soul-destroying job. You have no idea what is going on in the world, and you’re fine with that. You are why democracy doesn]’t work.

So, just go read the whole thing.

Also, they somehow managed a funny interview with Noam Chomsky.

New Toon: Pillow Angel

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Pillow Angel. I assume you've heard. You know, the case involves lots of serious ethical questions I don't know if I'm equipped to answer. I'm not outraged or against what the parents did. I can't say what I would think if my daughter could do nothing but lay there with the mental cognizance of an infant and I had to live with it for the rest of my life. I'm not sure what conclusion I would come to if I were on the medical ethics panel that OK'd the surgery. Apparently, many Americans are well-versed in these complex matters and feel the need to accuse the parents and doctors of being monsters. They are so sadistic and cruel they want to take care of her for the rest of her life. What selfish pigs.

What bothers me the most are the hysterical arguments that go something like "what will they allow next?! euthanizing down syndrome babies?!" No. Shut up.

I thought PA was only going to get bigger but it seems to have been dwarfed by the media's favorite narrative: missing children--recovered ones! The whole week we've been privy to extensive segments on this kid that was found where nothing new whatsoever is mulled over for about fifteen minutes before moving on the something about Rosie O'Donnell. This is why I stopped watching TV in the first place--there's no news on it anymore!

Stumptown

David Wu is my new Congressman. YES!!!

Fit to Print

Daryl Cagle's recent post on how the New York Times deals with Editorial Cartoons is great. For some reason there aren't permalinks that I can see on his blog so go check it out before it moves down.

The New York Times doesn't really have any cartoons (I did a comic about this some months back) but they run a few political comics in the Sunday paper under the name "Laugh Lines"

A number of cartoonists e-mailed me this week with the same question, "Hey, Daryl, I saw your cartoon in the Times, how do I get my own cartoons in the Times?" I regret that the reality behind the big-time political cartooning business is a little disappointing. Here's how it works: dozens of cartoonists around the world e-mail their cartoons to the Times and other "pay-per-use" newspapers who accept unsolicited submissions. It is the same thing with USA Today, send it in and if they run it, they pay $50 - but the Times is a little different. Instead of just paying $50, the Times doesn't pay unless the cartoonist notices that they ran the cartoon and sends them an invoice. The Times doesn't tell the cartoonist that they ran the cartoon and if they don't receive an invoice, the Times saves the $50.

That's how the most respected newspaper on the planet treats cartoonists. Worse than a whore.

All of you have just had a peek into how lucrative this whole thing is. The NYT pays 50 whopping dollars for a cartoon. Now, magazines and even free weeklies with much lower circulation pay higher than that for reprints. $50 for a circulation of over a million is almost as respectable as having the Editors pull down their pants and piss on your face. It's the Times--every cartoonist wants in and most would gladly offer their work for free so they could add "New York Times" to their bio. I probably would. And that's the state of my profession.

New Illustration

A cover for the current issue of the Anchorage Press.

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New Toon: Hall O' Fame City

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This is something a little different than I normally do. I thought I would commemorate my cross counrty move with a comic about my home town, which houses the Football Hall of Fame. I actually went to high school about 50 yards away from it at McKinley, which is named after President McKinley, whose rotting corpse is also in the vicinity. Canton, Ohio is the birthplace of professional football as the first professional league, comprising teams from all over Ohio, was started there. Then it took America by storm. And you get what we have today.

It can get quite crazy here during Hall Of Fame week (the yearly game and induction into the Hall of Fame). I've seen California license plates before. Nuff said.

But nothing compares to Mckinley/Massillon week. The Canton Bulldogs was one of the first teams in that old league and it remains that of my high school. During the yearly rivalry game with the Massillon Tigers (also an original team) things get insane. Imagine two cities and their only purpose is to get their 15, 16, and 17 year olds to play a game with each other. Imagine that Massillon is a small hick town that gives every male child a football in their incubator at Massillon Hospital. Imagine that there are grown men and women who swear nothing but hatred to every man, women, and child born in the opposing town because they have the Victory Bell (don't ask). Imagine those things, but please don't move to Canton and experience them.

Someday I want to do a multi-page comic to show you some of the craziness I've seen. It's the biggest High School Football rivalry in the world. 22,000 people attend. It's the only high school football game Vegas has odds on. The week of the event nothing else exists. There are events everyday; mayoral breakfasts, parades, pep rallies, eating contests, you name it.

Any of this interest you? No? More strips about things you actually give a shit about? Ok. Next week.

e-mail

Same thing happened with my away message when I was gone this time. If you sent me an e-mail recently and i haven't responded, please resend.

Toons!

I had a much needed reprieve from the news over the last two weeks while traveling. I can't say I missed blogs and pundits too much, but I'm glad to get back to cartooning. 2007 should be a good year. I've got a few things going on and will be talking more about those in the months to come.

I did these cartoons in advance before I left. Here they are if you haven't seen them elsewhere yet. Next toon on Thursday.

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I'm Back

I made it out to Portland. Barely. Careful driving a U-Haul trailer through a Nebraska snowstorm.

I set up my drawing table and computer. The rest of my apartment is just a maze of funrniture and boxes right now.

I have more to come. In the meantime, check out this two page comic I had in the Boston Phoenix last week.