Cartoonists With Attitude

This is sort of delicious.

Please enjoy Disgusting Lyric of the Day. That is all.

This is a depressing plug… Basically – it’s how newspapers have cut comics. I do like his solution though.

Just posted a series of gag cartoons on the ACT-I-VATE website. Check ‘em out.

Louis does some quick thinking!

And if you like Louis, you must like kids, so you'll want to donate to Haitian relief (and possibly win original Tom the Dancing Bug art, specially drawn for you!).  Act Now!

This week's Tom the Dancing Bug included a feature on How to Draw Doug.  But DID YOU KNOW ™ there are other methods?  A previous installment of How to Draw Doug:

And don't forget the Tom the Dancing Bug Haitian Relief Challenge!  Because you're better than that! ™

Which sounds like a confused Indiana Jones movie.

Anyhoo, page 2 of “Out to Sea” is up at Wanderlost. I really enjoy drawing these giant waves. I think that may be my whole motive for the story, an excuse to draw huge undulating mountains of water full of foam and darkness. All for a little pig to ride upon.

Don’t worry — there is actually a story to go with all of that.

And the last strip for In Contempt. I discuss my reasons for this decision below the cartoon post, so please read it if the thought of a Contempt-less world leaves a little hollow spot in your soul. It does mine, honestly. I wish I could clone myself to do all the stuff I want to do. But who would feed him? He’d eat all my cookies!

I want to elaborate here on my caricature project. Mostly I want to develop a portfolio to send out to local pubs and get some illustration jobs. A little side money. But it’s also an artform that has always intrigued me, at least when it is done right. The idea entered my head (with some prodding from Barry Deutsch) after David Levine died a couple months ago. I have always loved his work, the acidic bite of his pen and ink, his elegant cross-hatching, his ugly yet apt exaggerations of distinctive features. His only rivals to my eye had been the great Stephen Brodner — whose water colors are beautifully gritty and sense of form like a Bob Clampett cartoon on acid (which says something); Pat Oliphant, when he’s not being a racist shit; Ralph Steadman, to whom many owe a huge debt, including Brodner; and Barry Blitt, who got into trouble for satirically combining all of the crazy racist paranoia about the Obamas into one New Yorker cover during the election. Those guys are my models. There are other great ones, but these artists put the poison in the ink well.

I predict lots of platitudes about jobs, spending freezes, and kissing the asses of human-jizz-stains like Lieberman and Baucus. At least this shit won’t be pre-empting Lost.

This would be a great event to go to.

TENACIOUS D and Friends STAND WITH HAITI at The Wiltern.
February 2.

1/50th of the country realizes that the government gets more money to pay for things by raising taxes.

Golly, I wonder if a paranid whackjob breaking the law (a second time) might be a cautionary tale to the media to not squeal with glee over a rich white kid heavily doctoring video meant to wreck an organization that helps poor black people because they think it’s amazing journalism.

To answer Marshall’s (possibly rhetorical) question, though, here’s what they were thinking: that they could get away with it. It’s really that simple, no more, no less. O’Keefe already broke the law once and got away with it. He is being sued for his ACORN stunt by multiple people. It is illegal to do what he did, but he got away with it, partially because he attacked an incompetently-run organization that was incompetently run by black people trying to help black people, and partially because the outcry over what he doctored a video to “uncover” in the minds of a largely-racist and largely anti-Democrat noise machine overwhelmed that fact.

Our nation has a history of paranoid whackjobs, separated into two distinct columns of praise and ridicule solely by success. Linda Tripp got away with it. Nixon would have gotten away with it if his insane crimes actually revealed overwhelming dirt. And if a guy tackled Obama at a campaign event claiming that the president was secretly one of the aliens from “They Live” and it turned out it was true, no one would care about his crime either. Crimes of the paranoid are simply a gamble. They pay off if you are right. They usually don’t, because they’re insane.

The most startling bit of this, however, is how O’Keefe horrifically is defending himself as a “journalist.” Of all his actions, that’s truly the one that needs to be fought most vocally and viciously because it’s the one that sets the most dangerous precedent, and of all his actions I actually find the most irrational. Breaking the law, doctoring footage, tampering with sources, and manipulating your story for a preconceived conclusion are all examples of not being a journalist, or at the very least, a bad one.

I don’t know why this is so hard to interpret. O’Keefe is rich, white, Republican, and as Oliver North and G. Gordon Liddy prove, trying to do something crazy and illegal is not much of a risk in the long run when you have that going for you.