"Palin Protocol"...?

Last week's New 52: Futures End included this strange, unexplained reference, which I'm going to present in context here.

It is the year 2020, and superhero-turned-tech entrepreneur Mr. Terrific and Batman Bruce Wayne had previously collaborated on the creation of some sort of advanced A.I. called "Brother Eye." Terrific has been talking with it, but seems to be unaware of the fact that it's developed some form of sentience, and/or has been compromised by space-faring machine intelligence Brainiac, who is currently trying to remove Manhattan in tact from the planet Earth in order to add it to his collection of stolen cities.

Readers know that in the future, Brother Eye will go all Skynet on planet Earth, conquering it and turning its superhumans in murderous cyborg enforcers, which is why the Batman of the future sent his protegee Batman, Terry McGinnis, back in time to the year 2019 (the goal was 2014, in order to stop Terrific and that era's Batman from creating Brother Eye in the first place, but the time travel screwed up).

So, in New 52: Futures End #42, drawn by Scot Eaton and Scott Hanna and written as always by the four-man writing team of Brian Azzarello, Jeff Lemire, Dan Jurgens and Keith Giffen,, Batman confronts Terrific about Brother Eye, and sticks a flash drive into a nearby computer, issuing the command "Initiate Palin protocol," apparently in an attempt to shut down Brother Eye.

Here's the scene in question, in which Batman's final line appears as a "voiceover" to the next scene, in which Terry McGinnis fights a murder-borg from the future:

So, uh, what exactly is the Palin Protocol, and why is it called that?

Presumably this week's Futures End #43 will show what it does, but apparently it doesn't explain why Batman (and/or Azzarello and company chose that particular name). I can't think of any DC characters attached to the name Palin, nor can I find any by Googling. More tellingly, Robot 6's DC expert Tom Bondurant didn't come up with a DC Comics-connection to the name either, joking in last week's "Futures Index" that the odds that it refers to Monty Python are almost astronomically low.

So I guess we have to assume that the "Palin" in "The Palin Protocol" refers to the number one Goolge search result for "Palin": Sarah Palin.

But what's it do, and why is it called that?

Does it translate Brother Eye's commands into complete, undecipherable gibberish, thus rendering it impossible for Brother Eye to communicate with any other systems?

Does it convince most other computer systems that Brother Eye just isn't qualified to take control over them by demonstrating Brother Eye's inexperience, ignorance, mean-spiritedness and limited world-view?

Does it make Brother Eye quit half-way through the path it had previously committed itself to?

Does it cause Brother Eye to abandon its professed ambition to become one of the most powerful forces in the world by convincing it that it would be really, really hard and not much fun to get there, and/or by convincing Brother Eye that it could make much more money if it pursued a career as a reality television star and cable news special commentator?

I guess we'll have to wait until future issues of Futures End to find out. Finally, the series has produced a cliffhanger I'm actually interested to see the conclusion of!


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By the way, as long as I posted that page in which Mr. Terrific tells Batman he spoke to "God," did that strike anyone else as super-weird? Mr. Terrific II Michael Holt was, in the pre-Flashpoint DCU, rather pointedly atheist, which made interactions with ghosts and The Spectre and other supernatural characters and conflicts particularly uncomfortable for him.

Did he lose his atheism in the New 52 re-boot? (I didn't read his short-lived solo series, and his faith and worldview didn't really come up in any of his appearances in Earth 2 or Earth 2: Worlds End that I've read). Or is that the point of the scene, that his interactions with Brother Eye and/or Brainiac have so-changed him that they converted him from atheism to belief in a God, even if it's a super-powerful alien machine intelligence rather than the God most people who believe in God might think of (Not that that's a uniform concept, either, but I'd bet very few people who believe in God believe that his real name is Brainiac).

Groundhog Day comes but once a year...

Monday night I turned to Google Image to help me find some photo reference of a groundhog emerging from his hole to see (or not see) his shadow, and I came across this cartoon from last year, by Rob Rogers of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.It’s a really nice drawing of a groundhog completely freaking out, but it was strange to see a political cartoon from that long ago, divorced from the news of the day by almost a year, and realize it didn’t really make all that much sense any more…at least, not as much sense as it would probably have made when it was originally drawn and published. I guess President Obama proposed a pretty large budget last February…?

Another 2010 Groundhog Day cartoon I found mentioned a Toyota being unable to stop, which was still a big news story last year around this time.

As holidays go, Groundhog Day is a pretty fascinating one to watch America’s political cartoonists play with, as it features a set of fairly universal iconography that can easily be applied to pretty much any topic, but unlike say, Christmas, Easter or Thanksgiving, the iconography is extremely limited: Groundhog, emerging from hole, shadow, seeing or not seeing it, six more weeks of winter, or not. Those are the puzzle pieces cartoonists have to rearrange, remix, or swap out for something.

Let’s head on over to Daryl Cagle’s Political Cartoonists Index which, of course, has a dedicated Groundhog Day gallery, and see what cartoonists came up with this year. Cagle’s own cartoon is…weird. It features President Obama either dressed up in an adorable little groundhog suit, or as some sort of mutant human/groundhog hybrid, emerging from a hole. Given the shortness of his arms, I’m assuming it’s the latter. Why is Obama a groundhog? I don’t know. Watching the ritual is a man with an elephant’s head. That’s probably the symbol of the Republican party, expressing his disbelief in the groundhog day superstition, but he looks so strange there, interacting groundhog with a man’s face, instead of a man with a donkey’s face. Henry Payne of The Detroit News similarly features Obama as the groundhog, but rather than groundhogizing the president, Payne simply has President Obama emerging from a hole in the ground, which struck me as much funnier, simply because of the absurd incongruity of the president emerging from a hole n the ground. (The mailbox seems kind of like unnecessary overkill, cluttering the message though; are any of Payne’s readers likely to not recognize who that man is supposed to be, or that he’s behaving in a groundhog like fashion? By naming him “Obama Hog,” it kind of raises questions about whether that is the president or, just some guy who looks like him and has his last name for his first name).

Bob Englehart of The Hartford Courant provides another cartoon inserting President Obama into the Groundhog Day ritual, but here he’s one of the top-hatted Inner Circle guys who pulls the groundhog out of the ground, rather than as the groundhog himself.This groundhog isn’t Punxsutawney Phil, but is instead named Health Care Reform, an unusual name for a groundhog, which he has apparently had branded across his torso. Given the torture he must have endured, perhaps the arrow that claimed his life in this image came as a relief…?

No, “Health Care Reform” probably isn’t his name; it’s what he’s supposed to symbolize in this cartoon, via the proud, lazy tradition of straight-up labeling something as something else in a political cartoon. Why is Health Care Reform being shot with an arrow, every time the president holds it aloft? I don’t know; the president’s health care reform hasn’t yet been shot down in a meaningful way. So far, House Republican’s passed a purely symbolic We Sure Don’t Like This measure, and a few federal judges in lower courts ruled it unconstitutional, but it will ultimately be up to the Supreme Court to make that call.

Of course, the arrow itself isn’t labeled, so we have no way of telling who it is that keeps shooting Health Care Reform to death.

Whoever it was, it wasn’t Sarah Palin.As we can see in Atlanta Journal-Constitution cartoonist Mike Luckovich’s cartoon, she doesn’t use a bow or crossbow, but a high-powered rifle.

Englehart isn’t the only cartoonist to prominently feature a dead groundhog this year.

John Cole draws one face down in the snow, its little legs sticking straight up in rigormortis, with a guy in a top hat asking another guy in a top hat, “What does it mean if he succumbs to hypothermia?”

Bill Schorr also drew a frozen-to-death Groundhog in this repeat from last year:I like this one a bit more, as the groundhog may have frozen to death, but he froze to death in a funny way, and his death seems easily reversible: Just thaw him out, and he’s good to go.

Jeff Darcy of The Plain-Dealer has a groundhog stuffed and mounted above some guy’s mantle:For some reason, this dude decided to not only mount the head as a trophy, as is usually the case with the taxidermied corpses hunters display in this manner, but he includes the forelegs as well, making it look like the groundhog died while trying to wiggle its way through a too-small hole in the man’s wall.

The weapon the fellow in the Darcy cartoon used was a shovel which, incidentally, is what the gentleman in Brian Duffy’s cartoon plans to brain the groundhog with: Are these before and after images of the same drama?

And if you find yourself wondering what happened to the rest of the groundhog’s body after the shovel guy cut off its head and forepaws to mount on his wall, it was, of course, roasted and eaten by hobos:Rick McKee of the Augusta Chronicle has the groundhog whispering to the Inner Circle that global warming is a crock:The Inner Circle top hats are obviously pretty freaked out about this; is it the message, or simply the fact that the groundhog is speaking to them? (This groundhog has something in common with Spider-Man).

My personal favorite of this year’s crop of groundhog cartoons is Larry Wright’s, which seems to feature a pissed off groundhog, with his few groundhog possessions tightly packed into two tiny groundhog-sized suitcases, moving out of his hole in the ground, presumably because it’s been foreclosed upon, or he can no longer afford payments to his, um, hole in the ground: Now that’s a true sign of a terrible housing market and worse economy—when even a hole in the ground is too expensive. Where is the groundhog moving too? Presumably somewhere not as nice, but what’s sort of living space is less nice than a hole in the ground?

Finally, there’s this one from Randy Bish of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, which I believe may also be a repeat, as it looks very familiar:It raises a lot of questions, like, why are those top hats and the groundhog looking at a blank, black monitor screen? What is the dear’s computer plugged into? And who wouldn’t want to see see deer replaced with robot deer during hunting season? Wouldn’t hunting robot deer be sort of awesome? Hell, I’m a vegetarian and former member of PETA, and I’d take up hunting if I could shoot robots.

Actually, I was most curious about this hole robot groundhog thing. Is it for real? It is! Awesome.

Last week's comics news...this week!

First, I apologize for the lack of posting lately. A daily comics blog, a week-daily comics blog, a day job, trying to sell freelance writing, making one's own comics, sleeping, eating, showering and attempting a social life now and then sure does eat up a lot of time, and EDILW unfortunately isn't always at the top of that list of priorities. I do try to make up for my lack of frequency with verbiage, though.

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I don’t link to Alan Kistler’s Agent of STYLE columns at Blog@Newsarama as often as I should (nor as often as I mean to), in large part because most of the link-blogging I do is at Blog@ already. But I really like those columns; they’re probably my favorite feature at the site at the moment, although I do like that Caleb Mozzocco fellow’s stuff.

Kistler’s latest is a piece on Spawn, presented as a Q-and-A with Spawn. In addition to being a fun little piece, it was a surprising and informative, because I guess I never realized Spawn’s costume changed at all.

If you ever find yourself with a lot of time to kill on the Internet—say, you’re working, for example—check out the Agent of STYLE archives. Is your favorite character in there? Probably.

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The occasion that apparently inspired Kistler to look at Spawn’s wardrobe was the release of the 200th issue of Spawn last week.

That’s a lot of issues of Spawn.

I was a teenager of just 15 tender years when Image Comics originally launched, and while I never read any of the founders’ Marvel work, I was intrigued enough by all the Creators First rhetoric and Todd McFarlane’s exaggerated style to pick up the series.

One of the things I found most appealing about McFarlane’s art was that it combined attributes of two Batman artists I really liked, and Batman was my superhero gateway drug.

See this picture?
McFarlane drew ridiculously massive capes and amounts of any projecting or billowing material the way Kelley Jones does and did, and he gave Spawn Kelley Jones’ Batman-like claw/paw hands.

I’d have to go through back issues with a scanner to find good comparison’s between Norm Breyfogle’s art and McFarlane’s, but I used to see a lot of similarity in the artists’ work—in that cover image at least, the speedlines and the bats that look like Gothic origami suggest are similar to things one sees in Breyfogle’s art all the time.

(It honestly confounds me that Breyfogle never became as popular as, say, McFarlane—his work is stylistically pretty reminiscent, although much, much better on a foundational/storytelling level, and it also shares similarities with Andy Kubert’s, who I think would have been a fine Batman artist if he ever had time to draw more than an issue or three every year or so).

I read Spawn’s origin story, which I believe lasted four issues or so, as McFarlane had it drip and drab out. Then there was something about a child serial killer and/or rapist that was probably my first experience with superhero decadence that struck me as ultimately pointless (Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns, Arkham Asylum, Swamp Thing, Killing Joke…those books were dark and decadent, but they also had stories and ambitions that justified going to dark places. Spawn didn’t).

McFarlane brought me back with that spate of issues with guest-writers—Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Frank Miller and Dave motherfuckin’ Sim—and I think I read another issue or two before it felt dark and pointless to me again.

That’s just about my entire history with the character, barring the two Batman crossovers—the Miller/McFarlane Spawn/Batman and the Doug Moench/Chuck Dixon/Alan Grant/Klaus Janson Batman/Spawn: War Devil.

Miller’s story was extremely weak, but it was a pretty big deal at the time, to have Miller writing Batman one more time. I liked McFarlane’s art quite a bit—he does a pretty great Batman, and his take on the character is the one I like the best (A Breyfoglian one, where there’s a real man in the suit, but he’s wearing a suit of exaggerated art).

War Devil wasn’t great any shakes either, but it was interesting that all of the Batman writers at the time had a hand in it, making it seem very official (If they did that today, there would be what, a dozen writers involved….?), and it was great fun to see Janson drawing Spawn. (Well, those two comics and a truly awful live-action movie and a not so hot animated series on HBO).

Someone could probably do a nice overview article on McFarlane and Spawn and the impact they’ve had on the industry and comics during the course of those 200 issues, but I can’t, given my limited experience and exposure.

I’ve occasionally thought of checking in on Spawn, but now I wouldn’t even know where to begin—the big Image founders crossover series written by Robert Kirkman seemed like a good place, but I’m not sure where that comic is at now in terms of release/completion (And I study the new release lists pretty damn thoroughly every week while writing Twas….).

Now when I think of McFarlane and Spawn, I mostly just think of toys, baseballs and legal battles with Neil Gaiman, but I wonder if McFarlane helped introduce any teenagers to Alan Moore or Dave Sim (and if that was the start of Moore’s work on various Image-related franchises…?). He did introduce the direct market to Brian Michael Bendis in a big way and now it’s kind of hard to imagine Marvel Comics and/or the direct market without Bendis in it, isn’t it?

Fun fact: McFarlane is now so far off my personal radar that I actually had to look up whether it was “McFarlane” or “MacFarlane,” while I’ve now written about J. Michael Straczynski so often that I no longer need to look his last name up.

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Have you seen this yet? The bizarre sexual objectification of Sarah Palin is a topic way too broad and icky to get into at any great length of level of sincerity here, but it’s weird that it hasn’t stopped yet.

The cover looks like one of those old fake nude images you’d find on the Internet if you searched for “Jennifer Aniston + nude” in 1998, where Aniston’s head would be photoshopped onto a naked model.

And the details are a little…much.

Honestly, I can’t think of a single nice thing to say about Sarah Palin, but that cover just strikes me as unfair to her in some way. Which, in a way, is fine—Sarah Palin is certainly unfair to everyone else all the time, after all—but it makes me feel sort of sad and embarrassed for whoever made that image, the creators of the interior story, Antarctic Press for publishing the book, and comics in general.

The worst part is that I think writer Fred Perry and artist Ben Dunn are some pretty creative, pretty talented guys, and the very existence of this book strikes me as…tragic.

If you look at the interior artwork, you’ll see from Dunn’s nice, manga-inspired work that he and, uh, whoever did the pin-up of a woman with glasses in lingerie aren’t exactly basing their art on Palin at all. Other than that she wears glasses. Like Palin. And millions of other women.

The story doesn’t seem like it has any real familiarity with Palin at all either. Here’s the solicitation from Previews:

Energy catastrophe has struck worldwide! Massive oil spills, nuclear meltdowns and more leave us desperate for viable energy sources to rebuild global society and technology. Inspired by a little tea party, Sarah Palin hits upon the answer: steam power! She begins the "Steam Initiative", touting geothermal energy as the cure for what ails ya. The heads of Big Oil and Nuclear Power are less than happy with this trend, and they send their agents to do in the Rogue Republican.

Uh-huh. Sarah Palin, whose big national debut included a passionate cry for oil drilling while fans chanted “Drill baby, drill” becomes a champion of geothermal energy over oil and nuclear power, huh?

Steam Gore sounds like it might be more in-keeping with the subject matter, but then the point isn’t to actually have a comic book that has anything to do with the title character so much as to mix a couple of bizarre fetishes onto a cover and hope there are enough suckers willing to spend $4 on it.

And no one jerks off thinking about Al Gore (probably not even Al Gore).

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Have you seen the new Wonder Woman line of cosmetics yet? The Beat has the most thorough discussion of them, including pictures of all the products, that I’ve seen on any of the big comics blogs. Probably because Heidi MacDonald is a girl.

What’s most interesting to me is that Michael Allred did some promotional art, and he draws a hell of a Wonder Woman, shown fighting a Ray Harryhausen-esque Medusa. Have I already added Mike Allred to the list of people who should draw Wonder Woman? No? Let’s do that now then, shall we?

Mike Allred should draw Wonder Woman. (Mike Allred should draw everything.

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So what have we got so far?

People Who Should Draw Wonder Woman:
Adam Warren
Paul Pope
Kate Beaton
Jamie Hernandez

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The best and biggest news of the week (sorry, Flashpoint) was undoubtedly that Drawn and Quarterly would be publishing Kate Beaton’s online strips.

I was quite impressed with how Tom Spurgeon summed up here appeal:

The comics industry is a much more jaded place than it was a quarter-century ago when readers in almost religious fashion sifted through new work in what seemed like a constant pursuit of new talent. That Beaton has hit in today's crowded marketplace with comics fans both traditional and new, fans hardcore and casual, as significantly and completely as she has, I think speaks to her special, obvious and widely appealing talent.

You know, I’ve never met anyone who didn’t like Beaton’s work. I’m sure they’re out there—everything is hated by someone somewhere—but I’ve yet to see some contrarian on the comics blogosphere or an anonymous commenter say “Kate Beaton sux."

I am surprised it’s taken so long for one of the bigger publishers to take on Beaton (I understand there was a collection with a small print run previously—so small I could never buy one), and I am surprised that it’s D+Q. I’m not sure why I’m surprised; I guess I just sort of assumed it would be Dark Horse who eventually printed Beaton comics, based on the fact that they’re the one’s publishing Achewood, Sinfest and some of the other more popular Internet phenomenon cartoonists (Dark Horse also included at least one Beaton strip in one of their MySpace/Dark Horse Presents projects/collections).

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Andrew Garfield looks fine as Spider-Man to me. I like that they’re giving him what looks like a new costume, too. I think the more distance the new set of Spidey films can put between themselves and Sam Raimi’s, the better—it will serve both sets of films better to differentiate as strongly as possible, so that they’re not constantly being compared to one another. The tendency to do so will be ever-present of course, but I would think producers would want to minimize that tendency in the audience members.

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This past week or so saw a lot of poring over sales data by smarter people then me, and a lot of analysis of that data. I posted links and made a few passing remarks on some of those posts in Linkarama columns, but had intended to offer some wore well-constructed thoughts at too-great length later on.

The problem was, every day or so another person would chime in with some compelling-seeming information, and I fell further and further behind on my plans to comment.

So why don’t you check out MacDonald’s round-up on The Beat, she links to all of the major analysis stories I noticed in the last week or so. She titles her post “Creators Are King,” but I wonder if maybe it shouldn’t be “Cross-Media Is King.”

—Erik Larsen noted that nine of the top ten graphic novels of 2010 were creator-owned, but Sean T. Collins noted that nine of those ten were also bolstered by either heavily promoted films or TV series. And those nine spots were taken by only three different books/sets of creators—Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim, Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s Kick-Ass and Robert Kirkman/Tony Moore/Charlied Adlard’s Walking Dead.

If you look at Walking Dead and Scott Pilgrim, both were clearly successes before live-action adaptations entered the picture, but it’s just as clear that the adaptations helped immensely. Kick-Ass is a little trickier in that it never really existed without at least the expectation of Hollywood adaptation attached, since plans for a movie were announced around the time the first issue rolled out. Actually, Bryan Lee O’Malley wasn’t that far into his seven-volume series when buzz regarding the development stage of the movie kicked in.

In other words, those three would probably have been successful without other-media adaptations, but they wouldn’t have been that popular…and maybe not have been among the top ten books of the year.

—The fact that 26 of the best-selling single issues from DC Comics were either written or co-written by either Geoff Johns or Grant Morrison is a nice feather in those particular writers’ caps, but should be pants-soilingly horrifying to everyone else at DC. (More horrifying is if you factor in Brian Michael Bendis and realize that, as Collins says, “The ENTIRE INDUSTRY is a three-man operation.”)

It’s worth noting the importance of the media tie-in here, too. Morrison’s main focus at DC is the Batman franchise, which is one of the two franchises that sells well for DC and can compete with Marvel’s franchises. Batman, of course, has benefited from cross-media promotion almost constantly since the mid-’60s or so, and we’re currently between the biggest superhero blockbuster of all-time, The Dark Knight, and it’s in-development sequel, while Batman: Arkham Asylum and its sequel stoke video-gamers’ love for Batman and Cartoon Newtork airs Batman: The Brave and The Bold.

Johns’ big focus is the Green Lantern franchise, DC’s only other franchise that sells well for them and can compete with Marvel’s better-selling franchises, and which is about to spawn it’s first live-action would-be blockbuster film.

—Green Lantern’s popularity has long struck me as strange, and I’m still a little weirded out to see Hal Jordan on Hostess snack cakes or sneakers, given his decades of sub-Aquaman level of acceptance by the population at large (That is, civilians). Additionally, Green Lantern comics have never really been all that big a deal until about 2005, when Geoff Johns got involved.

Because of that, the Green Lantern brand’s current popularity seems particularly fragile to me, similar to the way that, say, Thor’s does over at Marvel. GL has always been an essentially second banana sort of character (if not a third banana), and while it’s nice to see him graduating to the A-List, it also seems like something that could be snatched away really quickly. Say, by a movie bombing, and/or turning out as terrible as the trailers for it make it look.

It’s certainly possible that the recent rise in Green Lantern’s popularity has more to do with the essential wish-fufillment concept of the character, the magical aspects of an artifact that you could earn simply by being a good enough person—no smarts, physical training or supernatural origin needed—that can transform you into a superhero finally catching on.

But that seems sort of unlikely. Green Lantern has been around since 1940…catching on in a huge way 65 years later? How often does such a thing happen? Is it more likely that the GL franchise owes its popularity to Geoff Johns, the approach to comics-making he has and how it resonates with what’s left of the mass comic book audience at this point in the industry’s history, that Johns’ influence has managed to make the fiction DC Universe revolve around his Green Lantern comic and the excitement over a movie? (Or perhaps that DC’s main Green Lantern comics has been its most consistent, least tampered-with and often best-drawn comic for so long now…?)

The Collins post linked to above mentioned that DC is putting a lot of eggs in just two baskets. I wonder—and would probably worry, if I were at DC—if there’s a Green Lantern popularity bubble, which means a bust is on the horizon.

It seems like it would behoove DC to start priming another second banana for the sort of promotion to the A-List that they gave Green Lantern halfway throughout he last decade. Unfortunately, that seems like it was as much a happy accident as something that could be repeated—otherwise DC would have a lot more hits then they do now, and a lot fewer books selling below 25K or so.

It seems like the company has at least been trying to replicate that formula. They had Green Lantern: Rebirth creative team Johns and Ethan Van Sciver try Flash: Rebirth (Although one essential difference probably hurt the latter a bit—the Green Lantern miniseries was about the event of Hal Jordan coming back to life and resuming his role as Green Lantern; the Flash miniseries was about what happened to Barry Allen after he came back to life and resumed his role as the Flash in the pages of another book), had Johns write a new Flash series and are now attempting a Johns-helmed line-wide crossover centered around The Flash the way Blackest Night was centered around Green Lantern (more on this below).

Brightest Day seems to be folding an Aquaman: Rebirth and a Martian Manhunter: Rebirth type of story into its narrative.

I guess the next character to attempt to Green Lantern would be Wonder Woman, although DC’s been trying to revamp her unsuccessfully for a while now, and nothing’s seemed to stick since Greg Rucka’s left the book years ago.

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So how about that Flashpoint, huh? Blog@ rounded up all the teasers here (teasers that Chris Sims had some fun with here), DC’s Source blog revealed some logos/symbols paired to taglines here and finally here’s a little trailer-like series of panels announcing the creative team of Geoff Johns and Andy Kubert.

It sounds like the story will deal with someone—a Reverse-Flash, presumably—running around through time, changing significant events to prevent DC’s superheroes from becoming who they are at the moment.

That particular schtick seems extremely familiar, and I know we’ve seen lots of riffs on what if The Waynes weren’t murdered, or what if Superman’s rocket landed here, there or somewhere else, or Krypton never exploded at all and so on. Much will therefore depend on where Johns goes with it and what he does with it; I assume it’s the context leading to those changes that will make or break the story, moreso than whether or not we’ve seen stories where Batman’s parents were never murdered and he never became Batman or not.

Right now my main concern is this: Will Reverse-Flash be able to travel through time to help Andy Kubert stay on schedule, or is this going to be yet another big DC crossover event story where they announce an artist who starts the series and fails to complete it?

A more dastardly crack I've never heard...

How utterly bizarre is the inclusion of Archie's line of dialog in this panel from Archie #616, given that it's the issue of the comic with this cover? That can't be a coincidence, can it? Certainly they teach other mathematical subjects taught in high school, don't they? Ones that don't share names with Sarah Palin's children?

Why did Palin resign? Only Palin—and political cartoonists—can know for sure

It's common knowledge that if you have bad news of national interest to report, the best time to do it is on a Friday afternoon, as most reporters and editors are on their way out of their offices for the weekend, and it's extra-hard for any news organization to throw together the sort of thorough coverage they'd be able to manage on a weekday morning. And if you really want to downplay that bad news you have to give, better make it the Friday before a holiday weekend, as the major media types are likely to already have called it a week, and the general public will be less likely to pay attention, since they'll be busy celebrating their holiday.

That's why Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's decision to announce her resignation 4:30-ish last Friday, July 3 seemed so suspect. Well, that and the fact that despite talking for about ten minutes, she never actually explained the rationale for her decision, at least not in a way that made any sense. And that the announcement runs counter to all of here stated (and conceivable) goals. And that the announcement seemed hastily thrown together, with her performance being closer to the cringe-worthy Palin-during-an-interview than the Palin-delivering-a-well-rehearsed speech (and her press secretary was in New York City at the time of the event).

Of course, none of that really means anything, as Palin has repeatedly demonstrated that she won't be forced to follow the rules of politics, either because she doesn't know/understand them, or because she doesn't agree/believe in them, or she just likes doing so to cultivate an outsider image.

So the Friday afternoon before a holiday announcement may not have actually been some sort of preemptive damage control, it may have just been the latest Weird Sarah Palin Action in a long line of them. It certainly didn't really do a whole lot to diminish coverage, as the way she went about it—i.e. not giving a real reason—simply invited more speculation then a "So yeah you guys, I think I'm going to just start going on a speaking tour because it's tons more lucrative and I've got mouths to feed" would have.

You know who the true victim's of Palin's announcement are? No, not the people of Alaska who voted for her, or the English language, or political rhetoric, although those are all some good guesses. No, it's America's political cartoonists, who had to attempt to make some sort of statement accompanied by a funny drawing about Sarah Palin resigning, despite having no idea why she did so.

What did the poor wretches come up with on such short notice? Let's take a look, shall we?


These similar images are both by Taylor Jones. Both seem to play off of her phrase regarding dead fish in her remarks, which I'll quote here in context...for whatever the context is worth:

Life is too short to compromise time and resources... it may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: "Sit down and shut up", but that's the worthless, easy path; that's a quitter's way out. And a problem in our country today is apathy. It would be apathetic to just hunker down and "go with the flow".

Nah, only dead fish "go with the flow".

Jones' first image plays up the incoherence of Palin's announcement, while also managing to imbue his caricature with the animalistic characteristics so often associated with Palin, on account of her outdoorsy reputation and her state's wilderness environment. What it's actual message is, well, that's a little more cryptic, but who can blame Jones for being cryptic about a cryptic statement? Maybe this is just a funny drawing to go alongside someone else's opinion piece.

I'm not sure I get the point of the second one either; it's basically another variation of the first, only with one of her strange metaphors quoted.


Monte Wolverton's was one of the first cartoons I saw after the announcement, and he did certainly capture my own immediate reaction, of, "Okay, why is this lady doing this and why is she doing it now?" Unfortunately, it's not much of a cartoon is it? It's simply an illustrated metaphor, with everything labeled, including "The Other Shoe," with those words, despite the fact that we can tell it's another shoe, on account of it being the, um, other shoe in the cartoon.

Was there really no more clever way to convey "Oh ho, I bet there's more to this! When will the other shoe drop?" than to draw this?

But maybe Wolverton had to turn it around in ten minutes to have it ready for the following morning's paper, I don't know.


Lisa Benson ties her cartoon into the timing of the Palin's resignation in this multi-panel piece, and effectively demonstrates the Republican Party's fascination with Palin, as well as their confusion at her latest move.

It also works well as a metaphor for someone who burns brightly only to be more quickly extinguished, which works well if this is the end of Palin's political career. In that case, this is a particularly good metaphor. I don't know that it is of course; Palin did say she at least planned to campaign on behalf of other politicians in her July 3 speech.

Too bad about the "Palin" label there, though. I think Benson could have probably communicated that the rocket was Palin without having to write the word "Palin" on its side. But otherwise, not bad at all!


Jim Morin of the Miami Herald also ties his cartoon into the timing, but his implies the opposite of Benson's—not only is Palin not done with politics, but this is actually the start of her run for the presidency in 2012.

I personally doubt that is the case, for the simple fact that being the governor of a large state for at least a term looks much better on a resume than quitting being governor of a large state because it was too hard or there wasn't enough money to be made in it or one felt ineffectual in the job.



Tony Auth sees Palin's move as the death of her political career. Is that the case? I don't know, but I really like this cartoon. Again, the labeling seems superfluous (obviously that's a fortune teller, obviously that's Palin), but I think trying-to-read-a-skeleton-hand is a pretty funny gag. Has that been done before, in a different context? If not, then this is definitely one of those jokes that falls under the so-obvious-in-retrospect category.


Wait, she didn't say this in her speech at all. What is the point of this nonsense? There's no need to paraphrase or put goofy rationales in her mouth; her mouth was full of readymades last Friday!


I actually like this one, by R.J. Matson, even less. The tangled cord is kinda clever I guess, but how old is the ipod advertising campaign it's riffing on? Old enough that I can't remember seeing one recently, which means ancient by today's accounting for time. Keep up, newspapers!


Here are a couple of straightforward "Hey, this crazy lady is being crazy" entries...




And, finally, here's one by Jeff "Mister" Darcy, of my favorite newspaper, The Cleveland Plain Dealer: He gives a pretty good reason, one I could definitely buy. If you're getting paid so-so to do an extremely hard job when you could be getting paid insanely well for doing an easy-ass job, why not cash-in while the cashing-in's good? Especially if you have no intention of running for president in three years. And whether Palin has any intention of running for president in three years, I don't think she has a chance in hell of winning that race, and, if she feels the same, then why bother running at all?

Politics aside, this isn't a very good cartoon (The politics are pretty dumb though).

I apologize in advance for how dated this discussion probably is. I'm not exactly sure when the above cartoon by Glenn McCoy ran, but from the date in the corner of the above image, it looks like it's from June 15, almost two weeks ago. Certainly based on the subject matter, it's a good half-dozen or so news cycles ago. But I didn't see it until it popped up in Josh Fruhlinger's "Cartoon Violence" column Wonkette today.

So, does McCoy's cartoon up there look familiar to you at all? If so, you've probably seen the classic Charles Addams cartoon it's riffing on, from a 1946 issue of The New Yorker: I don't begrudge McCoy's use of the Addams cartoon as inspiration, even if McCoy is clearly no Addams (A statement I doubt McCoy himself would argue with). I'm sure it was a fun piece for McCoy to work on, to break out a collection of Addams cartoons he no doubt has on his shelf and spend a few hours studying it and replicating the characters in his own style. I can appreciate that, just as I appreciate seeing McCoy's "cover" of an Addams cartoon. I really dig those rare opportunities where you get to see one cartoonist with a very distinct, specific style covering the character or subjects of another cartoonist with a very distinct, specific style.

I have no idea why McCoy might have thought it would be the best choice for illustrating Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's fake outrage over David Letterman's flubbed, dumb joke about one of her daughters though. In fact, I only know that is what the cartoon is about because McCoy included a caption that says "David Letterman makes a vulgar joke about Sarah Palin's teenage daughter."

First, how common is the reference? Addams is undoubtedly a famous cartoonist, but he's far more famous among cartoonists and cartoon art enthusiasts than among the general population of newspaper readers today, who know him primarily as the creator of The Addams Family. Are his individual cartoons so well known? I don't think so, and this isn't even one of his more famous ones, like the Christmas carolers piece (see below) or the one with the skier and the tree.

I suppose it's labeled "thanks to Chas Addams" in the lower right corner (everything's always labeled with these people!), below McCoy's name and a couple other words (The name of his home paper, I think?) But I don't think the specifics of that single Addams cartoon are terribly common. Certainly they're not as instantly recognizable as, say, a riff on Snoopy laying atop his doghouse or a fat cat with a blase expression and half-closed eyes or the blank-faced Keane cherubs might have been (Not that any of those would work better in this particular cartoon; I'm just thinking of more popular cartoon imagery among modern newspaper readers).

Second, applying McCoy's topic to the cartoon is a rather awkward stretch.

The joke in Addams'—and it's just a joke cartoon, devoid of politics—is the disconnect between the ghoulish Addams character (who we now recognize as a pre-Uncle Fester Uncle Fester) and the rest of the movie-going audience. They are all pretty upset by whatever the sad event in the sad movie they're watching is, whereas he thinks it's hilarious. It's just the sort of gentle, quite, observational humor that The New Yorker is known for.

Okay, so let's try to reconstruct the parallel lines McCoy is suggesting. Here, the weird character is "The Left," clearly labeled as such. Is "The Left," defined I suppose as people who think Sarah Palin is a funny joke, really marginalized as the Uncle Fester character?

Is the live studio audience of some dumb late night television show for old people the equivalent of the audience in a movie theater? I...guess...? Because they're both groups of people? Sitting down? In an enclosed space? Expecting to be entertained?

Are Dave Letterman's dumb joke monologues the equivalent of a very sad movie? Um...I don't know?

I wonder how well this cartoon went over with its intended audience. Did people get it? Did they think it funny? Did they think it perfectly summed up the conflict between Sarah Palin and David Letterman?

To be fair, I can't imagine this is an easy subject to ridicule with a political cartoon, but then, picking a target and understanding it is a pretty important part of political cartooning, isn't it? McCoy seems to be implying that Letterman meant to tell a joke about Palin's underaged teenage daughter with a funny name being raped by a baseball player, rather than mistakenly referring to her adult teenage daughter with funny name being impregnated by a baseball player.

Granted, the joke wouldn't have been funny even if he had said "Bristol" instead of "Willow," but it was clearly just a lousy telling of a lousy joke, not an endorsement of child-rape, and as ignorant as Palin may strive to appear in public, she's not actually so stupid as to have thought that Letterman meant to refer to Willow being raped either.

In this cartoon, McCoy does seem to think that—or is at least pretending to think that, and whether he's being ignorant or faking outrage like Palin herself, it's pretty sad.

In addition to implying that Letterman meant to make that particular joke, he's also implying that a) everyone in America is rightly appalled by it, save for b) The Left, who also thought Letterman meant to tell that joke about Willow being raped and also thought it was hilarious.

Man, nobody thinks he meant that joke, not even Palin. And, as a member of "The Left," I can assure you that we didn't think Letterman's accidental joke was funny, or that if it was told correctly it would have been funny, or that David Letterman is ever funny, or that David Letterman is even worth watching.

Besides, The Left is watching The Colbert Report when Letterman is doing his monologue.

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If you would like to read another member of "The Left" respond to the whole dumb Palin/Letterman episode, then check out Jim Newell of Wonkette's analysis. I second his comments. Which will save me form having to write anymore about how fucked up the cynical politics of accusing TV comedians of telling jokes about your daughter getting raped actually are. (Hint: Pretty fucked up)

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While looking for scans of that Addams cartoon (and failing, ultimately having to scan it from a copy of The World of Charles Addams [Knopf; 1993] myself), I came across another, older example of a modern political cartoonist using an homage to an Addams cartoon, and not necessarily doing a very good job of connecting the source strip into the new context:

McCoy was a lot more meticulous in his homage; this one seems like it may have been done from the memory of the Addams cartoon, rather than from looking closely at it while drawing this new cartoon of the press walking up the public's right to know (?) to get to the emails-haunted governor's mansion (?), where some man is apparently dumping a steaming green, viscous liquid called "Ed Martin" on the porch while the slime in the slime cauldron boils.