Cartoonists With Attitude

It’s long overdue–I got rid of my splash page, and moved this blog over to plain old www.mikhaela.net. Please update your bookmarks and blogrolls accordingly!

My brother just told me that our grandfather has an entry on imdb.com, and that I’m mentioned in it (under the subhead “trivia” — hmmm). The bio doesn’t mention that Opa (what we called him — “grandfather” in German) created the first animated film in Germany ever.

Here’s what it says:

Biography for
Hans Fischerkoesen (I)

Date of Birth
18 May 1896, Bad Kösen/Saale, Germany

Date of Death
23 April 1973

Birth Name
Hans Fischer

Mini Biography

Hans Fischerkoesen was born Hans Fischer in Bad Koesen, Germany. A sickly child, he was encouraged by his parents to indulge in such indoor activities as drawing and puppetry. His asthma kept him from active service during WWI, but he did work in a hospital near the front. His experiences there haunted him for the rest of his life. In the 1920s Fischerkoesen turned to advertising, developing earlier animated cartoons for German merchants. He later established his Fischerkoesen Studio in Leipzig to produce advertising animation. After the Nazis passed an edict in 1941 declaring most non-German art “degenerate”, Fischerkoesen was forced by the German government to relocate to Potsdam, near UFA studios, and began producing theatrical cartoons. Despite governmental control, Fischerkoesen managed to keep his productions free of Nazi propaganda. When the war ended, Fischerkoesen was imprisoned by the Soviets as a possible Nazi sympathizer, despite the fact that he had been a member of the Underground. He was released after three years imprisonment, and later escaped to West Germany, where he re-established his advertising animation studio. Fischerkoesen spent the remainder of his life working in advertising, receiving many awards for his work.

IMDb Mini Biography By: Mike Konczewski

Trivia

Father of Hans Fischerkoesen.

Grandfather of cartoonist and political activist Stephanie McMillan (author of the “Minimum Security” comic strip).

Today a pair of green and black parrots came down into the yard — a first! Usually they stay high up in the trees. This time they wanted jatropha seeds, which are good for birds but toxic for humans. They walked along the thin branches and picked the pods and held them in their little feet fists, breaking them open with their beaks and loudly crunching the seeds. So cute!!!

As I’m at the computer right now, a gecko keeps peeking out from behind the book shelf, coming out a little and then running back behind it. S/he’s done that about ten times in the last ten minutes. S/he’s one of the very pale ones with big black eyes, who walks with a fascinating twisty style.

Latest comic - click here!

Few of you are checking in on this lovely Memorial Day so I’m hopeful you won’t mind the comic’s a tad tardy today. As far as I’m concerned I promise new comics on Monday and I’m keeping to it. One of the main reasons is actually a funny story: I had to drive up to my old home in New Jersey practically every weekend this month: first for my brother-in-law’s bachelor party, then for Mother’s Day and my mom’s graduation, and then again for the wedding on Friday, which I am still recovering from. If you’re ever interested in being emotionally stirred to the point of your legs failing, look no further than a rendition of Come What May via my brother’s girlfriend, delivered mid-ceremony with an impact that blew away even the follow-up act, which is only more impressive when you consider his special talent is talking personally with Jesus.

Anyhoo, the running gag I had all month was how much damned driving I would have to do, and how pretty much everything would go kerplooey if anything went wrong with Roland the Headless Saturn 4-Door. So the oft-repeated line I made, even to the day of the wedding, was “just don’t let anything go wrong with the car until Saturday. I don’t care if on Saturday morning the engine explodes from the hood and shoots twenty feet into the air, just as long as it happens after the wedding.” I’m sure you can imagine just where this is going, and are merely left only to wonder what exact time on Saturday morning I found my car unable to start. I haven’t ridden Amtrak in a few years now; it’s a shame there’s still so little support for it I have to pay half an iPod to ride home on it. So while it will not technically be May next Saturday, you will be pleased to know I’ll be making yet one more trip north to pick the car up from whatever the mechanics are doing to it to make it not explode. I’ll be the guy on the bus ready to kill the first thing that looks at him.

That all said, you have noticed I’ve been out of the loop for a tad, so I’m catching up in one big burst with all the latest things I as a liberal have been accused of secretly wanting to do through, usually, democracy. Buy some crap and join the list.

In Monday’s cartoon, Bunnista asks an obvious question. Click on the fragment below for the full cartoon at comics.com:

The more you click on my cartoons at comics.com during 2007, the better the chances they’ll appear in daily city papers in 2008. If you like Minimum Security, please see a new cartoon each weekday!

I missed this but apparently The New Yorker has been making short animated versions of “classic” cartoons . I have to question the need to laboriously convert cartoons that take two seconds to read into cartoons that take ten seconds to watch. I mean, why not convert all their “classic” essays into dowloadable audio read by James Earl Jones? C’mon New Yorker, lose that Old Media obsession with words printed on paper.

I received the following from Julia Dawson of the Miami Clinic Access Project:

***********************************************************

Here’s a trailer for a film about MCAP: http://www.snakegirl.net/MCAPvideo.htm

For more info about MCAP: http://www.myspace.com/miamicap

***********************************************************

Julia also sent this update:

*Dear Pro-Choice Activists,*
**
*Saturday, May 26, 2007 marked the start of our second year defending A
Choice for Women clinic in Kendall. *
**
*MCAP clinic defenders and the anti’s both arrived at 6:00 am, and soon a
light rain was falling. Neither our clinic defenders nor the religious
fanatics were deterred by the 3 or 4 showers throughout the morning. Police
officers from MDPD arrived about 6:15 am. The anti’s had the center swale
by the clinic driveway, and set up their large signs in hopes of
intimidating women arriving for appointments. We set up our bilingual Keep
Abortion Legal banner across the street, and also stood with our signs at
the entrance to the parking lot so that women arriving could see there were
pro-choice activists there to protect them from the anti’s. *
**
*As a result of the priest who repeatedly tried to take pictures of women as
they left the parking lot 2 weeks ago, police considered the safety
implications of both defenders and anti’s going into the driveway while cars
were trying to enter or exit and announced that no one would be allowed to
go into the driveway. This greatly reduces the possibility of someone
getting hurt by being in the driveway with moving cars, or a driver being
distracted by an anti trying to get them to stop and take their literature.
It also reduces tensions created by the anti’s efforts to interfere with
clinic patients. *
**
*The anti’s were obviously upset and angry by the new police rule, and two
of them targeted our defenders holding our banner across the
street, standing right next to them and trying to get them to respond to
their arguments against abortion. When they would not leave our defenders
alone, police stepped in and told one that he would be arrested if he didn’t
stop, and made both of them move away from our activists. *
**
*We left shortly after 11:00 am when all the women who had come for
abortions were safely out of the clinic.*
* *
*What would women in the US do if abortion were made illegal? We have only
to look at Ireland to see what women there have to resort to, and what may
be in our future if the religious extremists get their way.*
**
*WE NEED YOU TO DEFEND A Choice For Women Clinic!! *
**
*Please do your part to protect women’s reproductive rights this coming
Saturday.*
**

In Friday’s cartoon, the guinea pig tells Nikko how to solve life’s problems. Click on the fragment below for the full cartoon at comics.com:

The more you click on my cartoons at comics.com during 2007, the better the chances they’ll appear in daily city papers in 2008. If you like Minimum Security, please see a new cartoon each weekday!

Subject Line: “Monster Schlong Action Alert”

New Cartoon Collections by FORs:

If you’re in the market for some interesting, hard-hitting political cartoons, please check out two new books by my friends Mikhaela Reid and Masheka Wood. Mikhaela was in “Attitude 2″ and Masheka is up and coming. Both are self-published, so every dollar (well, most of them) goes to cartoonists at a critical time in their careers. Come on, support new talent, folks! Ordering information, etc. follows:

Mikhaela and Masheka’s Books:

Attack of the 50-Foot Mikhaela! Cartoons by Mikhaela Reid (Foreword by Ted Rall).

Bushies are bum-rushing Cheney’s secret bunker! Ex-gays are quaking in their closets! Abstinence educators are shivering in their shiny silver purity rings! Greedy CEOs are heading for the hills and Minutemen are bolting for the border! Cartoonist Mikhaela Reid is on the rampage—and no hypocrite is safe! Attack features 150 of Reid’s greatest cartoon hits, plus rarities, odds, ends and behind-the-scenes commentary! Available June 4 at Lulu.com!

Deep Doodle: Cartoons by Masheka Wood.

Masheka Wood takes you deep into the warped, candy-colored recesses of his brain as he tackles a variety of social, political and just plain grody targets. Here are Wood’s “Not Just Knee Deep” cartoons, assorted illustrations and a delicious dose of old-school comics. Prepare to lose your mind—or your lunch! Wood’s work has appeared on MTV, The New Standard and Jackson State University’s art exhibit, “Other Heroes: African American comics creators, characters, and archetypes.” He is a 2007 Glyph Comics Award nominee for ‘Rising Star.’ Available now at Lulu.com!

Mikhaela and Masheka’s Book Tour:

Click on any of these events for more details or view the calendar here.