Cartoonists With Attitude

If you’re looking for something to do this weekend, and live in the Boston area, check out Somerville Open Studios. My pal and roommate Greg will be opening our doors to random strangers. I don’t know if I’ll have time to do much mingling, but if I do, I’ll be around Sunday, selling books and originals if anyone’s interested.

The outrageous Sean Bell verdict is still weighing on my mind. And I am getting really, really sick of people in the media and in person falling all over themselves to have sympathy for the undercover detectives who shot an innocent black man 50 times.

They say it is SUCH a hard job to be a police officer. It is just so SCARY. They were just SCARED, and DISORGANIZED. The implication is: wouldn't ANYONE be SCARED of an (innocent unarmed) black man?

We always hear this after incidents of police brutality. dNa sums it up at Racialicious ("On Sean Bell: fear is cause for slaughter only when victim is black"):

The Bell verdict will only cement the NYPD’s indifference to wasting black life. They simply aren’t held accountable. All they have to do is say they’re “scared”, and the media sympathizes, because they’re scared of us too.

You know, if being a cop is such a hard job, why not take one of those nice easy jobs?

Like the EASY job of being the mother or father of a (murdered innocent unarmed) black man?

Like the EASY job of being the fiancée or daughter of a (murdered innocent unarmed) black man? (see above photo)

Or the EASY job of being a little black boy who will someday grow up to be an innocent unarmed black man?

Doing a search on some of the history of police brutality cases in NYC, I came upon a moving NYTimes piece ("Police Shooting Reunites Circle of Common Loss") about the way that the families of the victims have formed a friendship network based in shared pain, and the Sean Bell funeral was cause for a painful reunion:

“I don’t know what I would have done without them,” Mrs. Dorismond, a Haitian immigrant who came to New York at 18 to study nursing, said of the relatives of Amadou Diallo and others who died in encounters with the police. “Nobody can understand that pain but me, Mrs. Diallo and the others. When it was my turn, everybody came.”

They had come and been there for her, rushing to her side to introduce themselves — at her son’s wake, at his funeral, at the protests on the streets. Amadou Diallo’s mother, Malcolm Ferguson’s mother, Nicholas Heyward Jr.’s father, Abner Louima himself.

Save your sympathy for the real victims, please.

Click to enlarge

More like Primary Fatigue. Really, all I do want to talk about is Battlestar Galactica. I don't want to hear any more of Hillary trying to prove what a bomb-hungry hawk she is, or Obama going out of his way to sing the praises of bipartisanship (otherwise known as "letting Republicans have their way"). Nor do I want to hear anything any more of those gazillion weird racist smears and internet rumors going around about him. And I especially do NOT care about flag pins.

There are a lot of valid points made in this Feministing post about Grand Theft Auto IV, but I guess I'm going to have to wade into the muck and label myself gender-equality-ignorant by saying I think a lot of the arguments presented are really, really silly.

That GTAIV doesn't offer a "female perspective" or "gay-friendly elements" to the plotline is honestly the biggest one for me. By the nature of Rockstar Games trying to make a realistic storyline, the action is going to be inherently misogynistic. The protagonist is a Serbian illegal immigrant trying to make his way up in the world of a parallel-New York city underworld. I think there are a lot of fields where gender and sex-orientation equality have made vast improvements; urban organized crime isn't exactly one of them. (For the record, Rockstar's previous game was last year's Bully, which does allow the protagonist to choose sexual advances toward both genders for various advancements in the plot)

The argument about violence against women is also curious. The major complaint here seems to be "you can kill strippers" and "you can kill hookers." This is technically true, in that you can kill everybody. While there are missions and objectives that are central to your character's interaction with various characters, I've seen no reports or reviews of the game indicating that specifically injuring or killing a prostitute is a play requirement. Yes. You can kill hookers. You don't have to. This also applies to men, children, animals, and an infinite number of other elements in the game.

That doesn't dispel the main argument about the game though- clearly, GTAIV is misogynistic. So is A Clockwork Orange. How you respond to that movie and whether you choose to view it or not is completely up to the individual. But suggesting that either the game or any movie "could have been done differently" is pointless. This is what the creators wanted to make.

None of this suggests I don't think a gender or orientation-neutral crime game wouldn't work. (Gabe & Tycho at Penny Arcade had a hilarious discussion in their podcast a few weeks ago about how much better a game Army of Two would have been if the protagonists were gay instead of, well, vile, offensive women-hating misogynists). Nor does it mean I think it's a great game for kids of all ages- I'm behind the ESRB 100% on this, and any parent who lets anyone under 18 near this thing is a freaking moron. But complaining about the game being what it is ignores the fact that, well, it is what it is.

Given the more common use of female characters in video games, GTAIV is in a way almost refreshing in making the misogyny at least relevant. The exploitation of women in the game is a theoretical focus of the storyline and the environment to which your character is attached. That honestly seems far more understandable than the typical fighting game in which the creators claim it's "for girls too" because three of the eighteen selectable players are either a half-naked Amazon with impossibly large breasts or a half-naked schoolgirl with even more impossibly large breasts. GTAIV features elements in which a male character playing a violent criminal can commit violent crimes against women. Bloodrayne was an action platformer which was promoted with digital images of its star character naked in Penthouse. Which of these is really the more unnecessary feature?

I didn't believe it was physically possible for people to actually be this stupid.

I didn't believe it was physically possible for people to actually be this stupid.

"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must pay for all they get. If we ever get free from all the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and, if needs be, by our lives, and the lives of others."

-- Frederick Douglass, 1857


My interpretation of a scene from his autobiography, describing his early life:

In the Minimum Security comic from 4/30, Chip goes on his second date. Click on the fragment below for the full cartoon at comics.com:



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