It’s awesome, I tells ya.
You can see the full cover image — as well as read most of the story (which is just as written with a sledgehammer as the cover implies) — at scans daily.
In the Minimum Security comic from 8/25, Kranti brings a pie. Click on the fragment below for the full cartoon at comics.com:
In the Minimum Security comic from 8/26, the menu features lapine cuisine:
In the Minimum Security comic from 8/27, Bunnista’s mom commits floricide (thanks to Paul for catching a spelling error!)
In the Minimum Security comic from 8/28, an evil curse proliferates:
In the Minimum Security comic from 8/29, weeds are untamed plants:
The more you click on my cartoons at comics.com, the better the chances they’ll appear in daily city papers, some day in the unknown future. If you like Minimum Security, please see a new cartoon each weekday!
Via Renee and WOC PhD, INCITE!’s New Orleans branch is helping women of color prepare for Hurricane Gustav. And they’re asking for help.
August 30, 2008
Dear INCITE! friends and supporters,
On the eve of the 3 year anniversary of the devastation wrought by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and subsequent government criminal negligence and assaults on the low income people of color on the Gulf Coast, our sisters from INCITE! projects in New Orleans (including the local chapter, the Women’s Health and Justice Initiative, and the New Orleans Women’s Health Clinic) are bracing for the potential landfall of Hurricane Gustav, which is currently projected to hit the Louisiana coast on Monday or Tuesday at a category 4 or 5. Voluntary evacuation of New Orleans has already begun, and mandatory evacuation could be declared as early as today.
INCITE! organizers and supporters in New Orleans have made over 700 phone calls to women of color and their families that make up the constituency of the New Orleans Women’s Health Clinic, working to prepare and implement evacuation and safety plans.
Your assistance is urgently needed to help low-income women of color and their families evacuate safely if need be, stay safe for the duration of the evacuation, and return to the city as soon as possible so as not to fall prey to the pushout that has kept so many folks from being able to return to New Orleans since Katrina. Local organizers are using whatever resources and funds at their disposal to help women and their families evacuate, bond people being held in Orleans Parish Prison out, and support those who make the choice to stay in whatever way they can.
Your support is urgently needed: financial donations of any size are needed and would be greatly appreciated.
Donations online are preferred because we can more quickly send the funds to our folks in New Orleans.
You can send your donation to INCITE online by clicking the button below and putting “New Orleans” in the “Purpose” line:
Or you can write a check directly to WHJI and send it to:
PO Box 51325
New Orleans, LA 70151Your donation will go directly to supporting the hundreds of low income women of color that are the constituency of the New Orleans Women’s Health Clinic.
Once again, the particular vulnerability of low-income women of color and single female-headed households (including folks with disabilities, seniors, undocumented immigrant women, and incarcerated women) has been erased in the face of disaster and overlooked in the days leading up to the storm. Folks in New Orleans women’s prisons are being evacuated to the Angola men’s prison, with little thought for safety. With few resources, facing challenges and concerns for their families of their own, INCITE! New Orleans and WHJI have stepped in to fill the gap. Please send all your support, solidarity, sisterhood and strength their way, and join us in hoping for the safety and well-being of the people who are already suffering from Gustav in Cuba, Jamaica, and Haiti, and willing the storm to subside or veer off safely before it strikes the Gulf Coast.
We will keep you posted as things develop.
peace,
INCITE!
I’ve had a very positive impression of INCITE! over the last couple of years, and this seems like a very worthwhile cause.
The best final installment of a popular comic strip appeared in January, 1996. Calvin and Hobbes hopped on their toboggan to discuss life’s possibilities and headed down the slope into a blank canvass of snow. Eloquent, understated, and poetic. Clearly Bill Watterson had other projects waiting for him on his easel, but he ended his ground-breaking strip with the dignity and respect it deserved.
Charles Schulz wrote a simple thank you to Peanuts fans that appeared the day after he died. The timing was accidental, yet fitting for a man who had devoted 50 years to the strip and his entire life to comics. Sadly, the syndicate continues to run the strip like a zombie cow from which it squeezes undead milk.
Berkely Breathed ended Bloom County on a sad, bitter note. Familiar locations such as Milo’s Meadow showed none of the strip’s popular characters, only a cold wind blowing through. In the final panel, toting a suitcase and donning his flower hat, Opus walked off into the sunset. Of course, Opus came back — not only once, but twice. Breathed has revived a few old faces, most notably Bill the Cat and Steve Dallas. Some characters stay with their creators, demanding new life and speaking with their unique voices on the world as it carries on. Sometimes a creator discovers new reasons to return to beloved characters.
That said, I don’t know what to make of this Sunday’s installment of For Better or For Worse. While I patiently await Josh Fruhlinger’s acerbic assessment, I’ll do my best. It’s a mess. A giant, unattractive, wordy mess. As anyone who has been following the strip in the papers (or through Josh’s curmudgeonly lense), the wedding scene is no surprise. If I had been reading Lynn Johnston’s website, with it’s long-winded character profiles and even blogs from the characters themselves (sure, Achewood does it, but then Achewood is a creature of the InterNetz), maybe I would have been better prepared for panel after panel of “future lives” for each one of Johnston’s increasingly tedious characters.
There was a time — a long time ago — when I enjoyed FOOB. The kids were funny, the humor was grounded in real life, at least insofar as suburbanites experience it. Gentle, yet realistic, Johnston’s humor was grounded in human folly. And as she allowed her characters to age — a bold move, even after Gasoline Alley — they grew more complex and her humor more nuanced. There was plenty of cornball slapstick and schmaltz, but even these were informed by real life. Johnston’s most controversial story line, the coming out of Lawrence, was daring, respectful, and truthful in its depiction of the conflicting emotions families and friends go through when forced to confront their own homophobia.
Somewhere down the line, the strip jumped a shark. I don’t know if it started with the creepy relationship between Liz and Anthony, but I remember the strip slipped into melodrama around the time Johnston killed off the family dog, then replaced it with a nearly identical model. Then Liz got too old to be the cute little one anymore, so Johnston brought in April. It was as if Johnston retreated to the cute kid antics for a breath of saccharine “reality” while the soap opera lives of her adult characters spun into the absurd. Better minds than mine have dissected the self-loathing and misogyny of Johnston’s later writing. I’ll only add that for all of Johnston’s overworked puns, the strip stopped being amusing just as it stopped being realistic.
Well, it’s dead. But, wait, no it’s not! “Please join me on Monday as the story begins again,” Johnston invites. “Looking back looks wonderful!” So it’s the worst of both worlds: a zombie strip — like Peanuts — that it’s creator won’t stop tinkering with — like Breathed, only lacking the nostalgia of the former nor the creativity and relevance of the latter. Switching media, it’s more like George Lucas adding unnecessary scenes and background clutter to Star Wars. Yet even he managed to move on and create new characters and new stories; crappy characters and stories, true, but still new!
Johnston requires a therapist. The comics require new talent, but not until someone finally and completely slays the undead roaming the funny pages.
Tags: LynnJohnston, For Better or For Worse, comics, comic strips, cartoons
Straight from the floor of the GOP convention in St. Paul CNN is breathlessly reporting (do they know any other mode?) the evacuation of New Orleans as Hurricane Gustav. Could Republican strategists be any happier?
Sure, you may think that Republicans would not want to remind American voters of the BushAdmin’s oblivious response to the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina, the incompetence of FEMA, the cronyism that put Michael Brown as head of the organization, and the continued failure of the federal government to save a major urban touchstone of American culture.
But look at this image.
(Hat tip to Brad Delong.)
Taken as Katrina surged over the levy walls and thousands suffered in the Superdome, this picture documents a happy celebration of President Bush’s birthday. Dig in, boys!
This is the image that John McCain must counteract with new images: John McCain monitoring preparations in Mississippi; John McCain comforting evacuees; John McCain touring areas devastated by Gustav; John McCain delivering boxes of food and medicine for hurricane victims. If by the end of the week there is not a widely circulated photo of McCain handing a water bottle to a child in a hurricane shelter, then I have overestimated the semiotic talents of his campaign.
“But,” the naive will say, “that’s politicizing a tragedy!” Of course it is. Why do you think John Edwards launched (and closed) his campaign from New Orleans? It is an inherently political situation. The federal government (not to mention state and local governments) has consistently failed to protect, to care for and to revive the city. Instead the free-marketeers have been turned loose, privatizing the hospitals and the schools and whatever else is lying around. Blackwater mercenaries roam the streets. Most Americans view this tragedy as a colossal failure. Combined with the string of lies and fuckups in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina is the main reason Bush is the most hated President since Nixon — even more than Nixon some days.
The Democrats had a remarkably successful convention. Barack Obama’s acceptance speech drew a stadium packed with 80,000 people and a TV audience of 38 million viewers. McCain followed up with the worst pick for Vice President since Dan Quayle.
None of that may matter should McCain demonstrate through “presidential” actions of engagement and compassion that in moments of national security or disaster he is no callously indifferent bumbler like George Bush. Or, as Wolf “Conventional Wisdom (sic)” Blitzer has just put it, “Have they learned the lessons of Katrina?” The GOP will be arguing the affirmative.
Tags: Gustav, John McCain, George Bush, presidential politics, politics, hurricane
She’s a younger, crazier, Harriet Miers.
Who would’ve guessed that the private contractor who played such a huge part in screwing up the Katrina evacuation, a busing company called Landstar Systems, would now fail to fulfill its contract to supply buses for a Gustav evacuation!
And, what an incredible surprise that Landstar is politically connected to the Bush administration! Who could’ve predicted that such people wouldn’t really give a shit about the citizens of New Orleans!
I’m shocked! SHOCKED, I tell you!
I’m just going to go ahead and repost in full what I wrote on MetaFilter this morning. And then I’m going to make three month’s worth of popcorn because this election be hilarious, yo.
Oh my god, really?
Really?
Look, to be fair, I was halfway through a post last night on my own site about how ridiculous I though all the hard-right Freepers/Cornerites/etc. were harping about Palin. She was basically their new Fred Thompson. But I am seriously dumbfounded that they would have been this stupid.
Don’t get me wrong, on a PR level this is masterful for McCain. He’s killed all the momentum and press coverage about Obama’s amazing speech last night. So I really am amazed they think that one shot at gaining the press advantage was worth the most unbelievably inept VP pick I could have possibly imagined.
Forget even among fields of conservatives in general: is anyone from the McCain camp going to make a convincing case that Palin is remotely close to the most qualified woman in the GOP to be a heartbeat away from taking over a guy who turns 72 today and has a history of cancer? She has been governor- for 18 months- of a state with a population smaller than Obama’s state senate district in Illinois. Her previous office was the mayor of an Alaskan town with a population smaller than 3,000 people. At the very minimum, Obama has sat in on foreign policy sessions and dealt with national and international issues on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Palin has no foreign policy experience. This is literally one step above giving the slot to the winner of a game show.
So in what I can only perceive as a complete fit of insanity, McCain has decided to destroy with one pick the three talking points he had as an advantage over Obama:
Experience: She has none. Palin is utterly unqualified to be president of the U.S. Senate, let alone the country should anything befall McCain.
Celebrity: She’s a former beauty pageant winner who’s done multiple cover shoots for fashion and culture magazines and her claim to fame is being the subject of an article titled “America’s Hottest Governor.” There will be more talk about how she’s attractive than her actual policy credentials. Her gender, in light of her utter political weakness, will be seen blatantly- and rightly- as the novelty McCain picked it for. There is no clearer a celebrity pick for McCain than this one.
Moderate Female Voters: Putting aside for a moment that she’s outrageously anti-choice, if McCain truly believes that what really appeals to middle-age working-class white women is a younger, prettier, but amazingly less-qualified woman getting the promotion that Hillary Clinton didn’t, then I can’t really reflect any greater how utterly deaf to the interests of women the Republican Party is.
Jesus tap-dancing Christ. If McCain wanted a former beauty queen with no experience and a criminal investigation on her record I don’t know why he didn’t just pick his own wife.
I’m just going to go ahead and repost in full what I wrote on MetaFilter this morning. And then I’m going to make three month’s worth of popcorn because this election be hilarious, yo.
Oh my god, really?
Really?
Look, to be fair, I was halfway through a post last night on my own site about how ridiculous I though all the hard-right Freepers/Cornerites/etc. were harping about Palin. She was basically their new Fred Thompson. But I am seriously dumbfounded that they would have been this stupid.
Don’t get me wrong, on a PR level this is masterful for McCain. He’s killed all the momentum and press coverage about Obama’s amazing speech last night. So I really am amazed they think that one shot at gaining the press advantage was worth the most unbelievably inept VP pick I could have possibly imagined.
Forget even among fields of conservatives in general: is anyone from the McCain camp going to make a convincing case that Palin is remotely close to the most qualified woman in the GOP to be a heartbeat away from taking over a guy who turns 72 today and has a history of cancer? She has been governor- for 18 months- of a state with a population smaller than Obama’s state senate district in Illinois. Her previous office was the mayor of an Alaskan town with a population smaller than 3,000 people. At the very minimum, Obama has sat in on foreign policy sessions and dealt with national and international issues on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Palin has no foreign policy experience. This is literally one step above giving the slot to the winner of a game show.
So in what I can only perceive as a complete fit of insanity, McCain has decided to destroy with one pick the three talking points he had as an advantage over Obama:
Experience: She has none. Palin is utterly unqualified to be president of the U.S. Senate, let alone the country should anything befall McCain.
Celebrity: She’s a former beauty pageant winner who’s done multiple cover shoots for fashion and culture magazines and her claim to fame is being the subject of an article titled “America’s Hottest Governor.” There will be more talk about how she’s attractive than her actual policy credentials. Her gender, in light of her utter political weakness, will be seen blatantly- and rightly- as the novelty McCain picked it for. There is no clearer a celebrity pick for McCain than this one.
Moderate Female Voters: Putting aside for a moment that she’s outrageously anti-choice, if McCain truly believes that what really appeals to middle-age working-class white women is a younger, prettier, but amazingly less-qualified woman getting the promotion that Hillary Clinton didn’t, then I can’t really reflect any greater how utterly deaf to the interests of women the Republican Party is.
Jesus tap-dancing Christ. If McCain wanted a former beauty queen with no experience and a criminal investigation on her record I don’t know why he didn’t just pick his own wife.
News… overload…
Too… many… cartoon… ideas….
Of course, the only one of these stories that really matters in the immediate future is Gustav. Whether or not it hits New Orleans directly, NOLA is predicting it will be a Cat 4 before it hits land. Perhaps we could finally all agree that global warming might have something to do with it, considering our shores are getting hit by monster 100-year storms about every 3 years now?
Just a thought…
