Cartoonists With Attitude

Daniel Crafts (the composer) swung through town yesterday. It was great seeing him. We worked a little on opera ideas. It’s on Mars. We’re definitely doing it this next April at PCPA again. We’ll do the first part as a first act, then the sequel as a second act. It’ll be an actual 2-hour piece now and I’ll feel better about charging $20 to see it. We’re re-writing some bits in the first act and we’ll be re-staging it. I can’t believe that I’m putting myself through all this stress again. The grey hairs I got from the first one still haven’t gone away.

Mars. Part-2 takes place on Mars. Mars. Ha.

Good news: I’m doing a signing at Powells on Hawthorne for my new book, Screw Heaven, When I Die I’m Going to Mars (sorry, it’s an Amazon link to How to Be Happy, not a Powells link to Screw Heaven… go to powells.com and search, I guess).

Bad new: my signing isn’t until Nov. 29th. Can I still push Screw Heaven as a new book? At least the opera II will be in full swing and I’ll be able to talk about that.

In Tuesday’s cartoon, Bananabelle is torn. 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!

Atrios posted an observation about Iraq and college students a few days back:

As we round the corner (towards the light!), and head towards the beginning of the 6th year of the great and glorious war in Iraq, it’s probably a good idea to remind ourselves that for students entering college this Fall, the war begin in Spring of their 8th grade year. For those entering their freshmen year next year, the war will have been going on since they were in 7th grade.

For a growing chunk of the population, war has been a normal state of affairs during their formative years.

Something similar occured to me yesterday: The Simpsons has been on the air for eighteen years come this December. With college starting right about now, The current roster of incoming college freshmen across America will be the first generation of students who have lived their entire lives with The Simpsons being on TV.

I suppose it’s almost outrageous to find a way to equate the two, but that really did have me thinking. Bloggers and political writers around the same age as myself have spent the last few months and the release of The Simpsons Movie spending way, way too much time analyzing the cultural and metaphorical impact of The Simpsons- but I suppose that’s because of it being, and now literally with this generation of freshmen, a staple of their entire lives.

What defines something as having a cultural impact is its ability to make you forget just how long its been with you, like a fashion or a brand name or a catch phrase. As we used to quip in film school, “I’m old enough to remember when Bart Simpson was older than me.”

When I’m at the gym and a rerun of The Simpsons comes on, I get slightly freaked out when I realize it’s, for example, the Hank Scorpio episode and suddenly remember that episode was first broadcast in 1996. That’s a nine-year-old episode of The Simpsons.

And Jesus Christ, that’s Iraq now. That’s Iraq for these kids. They’ll be studying for a final in their junior year in May, 2010 and see a clip come up of former President Bush in the flightsuit and that damn banner on the aircraft carrier and put down their book for a moment and think “wow… that was really seven years ago?”

As Atrios said, we have students who saw the start of the Iraq war in their “formative years.” That’s going to be the cultural media landmark for them, and for the rest of their young adulthood. I had a cartoon show. Five years later, they got a war.

D’oh.

Meanwhile, no one gives any credit to my valuable participation in our nation’s espionage program via my visit to the International Spy Museum last Fall.

I haven’t yet seen “The 11th Hour,” but after reading a few articles about the film and talking about it with people who have seen it, it does seem to be an improvement over Gore’s film in that it at least it touches on the fact that industrial capitalism and endless economic growth in general are unsustainable. Although some (most?) of those interviewed in the film contradict that with fantasies of green capitalism.

I wish it would say what’s really necessary though. DiCaprio says industrial civilization is “sick” and “needs healing.” I think it needs to be overthrown and dismantled. Corporations and greed are problems, but they’re not the root of it all. They’re symptoms of a runaway growth economy based on production for exchange (rather than production for use, which, depending on the scale and methods might also be unsustainable, but much less insanely, freakishly destructive) that requires and demands that all kinds of crap be thrown into the market for profit. Even if corporate heads suddenly started to care and became self-denying, that wouldn’t be enough to stop it. They’d be replaced.

Has anyone here seen it yet? What did you think? From what I’ve heard and read, it seems like a good film overall, at least in its presentation of the urgency of the situation. It brings up issues that certainly need to be talked about. Even if it’s short on solutions, or misguided in the ones it presents (good lord, its website even has a version of the ever-present “10 Things You Can Do” list for personal transformation (well, nine of those and the tenth is advice to join one of several organizations) — not that those things are bad to do, they’re great, but they’re sooooooo not enough. And the list of ten things for businesses to do? Don’t get me started on how absurd that is), at least it does provide another way for people to approach and absorb the severity of the problem. The further that sinks into popular consciousness, then the better we can figure out what really needs to be done.

Admittedly, I’m sharing these vague impressions pretty impulsively — I may have other things to say if and when I actually see the film.

In Monday’s cartoon, Nikko freaks out at nakedness. 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!

Here’s a rough. I usually go through about 12 pages where I try out different ways to do the timing. Sometimes I’ll write two version of the dialog in the same panel and pick the one that flows better.

I really like the gesture that one gets when you’re just trying to get it on paper and not worrying about a final product. When I do the final I’m happy if I can get half the energy of the rough.

Cartoon for August 25

If Rudy Giuliani, who spent a mere 29 hours sucking up corpse dust at and around Ground Zero during the months after 9/11, can run for president based on his “heroism”–why not me?

Normally I shy away from “breaking the third wall” in cartooning. This time around, this was the funniest approach, so I went with it. Let me know what you think.

Click on the cartoon to see it larger.

(Original artwork still for sale, now back to regular price. Thanks to this weekend’s buyers!)

“Failed Post-Rove PR Tactics“…