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.

This isn't a very good political cartoon.

1.) The flying saucer is labeled "Speaker Pelosi," which in a political cartoon means that the flying saucer is a symbol for Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi. So—just so we're all clear here—in this particular scenario, involving a flying saucer, flying orange robot heads and two middle-aged white people holding a "No Mosque At Ground Zero" sign being generously referred to as a protest, Nancy Pelosi is a flying saucer.

2.) Based on the few visual clues provided, these protesters are not protesting at ground zero, or in New York City at all, but out in a field somewhere. At night.

3.) The sentient flying saucer that is Nancy Pelosi is sending floating robot heads, which she refers to as "the probes," down toward the two protesters, but at the same time, she/it says, "Find out who's funding this protest." The probes are thus going to simultaneously literally "probe" the protesters in this cartoon as a metaphor for Pelosi's desire to metaphorically probe them in real life and also metaphorically "probe" them within the context of this cartoon to find out who is funding them. I guess...?

4.) In choosing to play off the word probe by imagining an aliens-probing-people visual metaphor in this cartoon, the cartoonist chose to imagine a scenario involving a flying saucer and flying robot heads probing humans. I just finished the final volume of Jerome Clark's three-volume UFO Encyclopedia from Omnigraphics, so I'm sure this is fresher in my head than the majority of people trying to puzzle out this stupid cartoon, but I'm pretty sure that nowhere in the UFO literature is there a single report of a flying saucer sending flying orange robot heads down to earth to probe people. Generally probing—i.e. sticking things in people's butts—occurs when the aliens take their victims aboard their ships.

I'm not faulting the cartoonist for inaccuracy here, I just wanted to point out that the cartoonist apparently decided to make an alien/probe reference in the cartoon, and then decided to bypass the most popular scenario of aliens probing that exists in most people's minds to invent a different one.

Given the fact that Nancy Pelosi looks a bit more like the sort of alien usually described in abduction reports than your average speaker of the house, the cartoonist therefore missed the opportunity to draw Pelosi as a gray alien. I am not a political cartoonist, obviously, but I imagine Nancy Pelosi and/or gray aliens would be fun things to draw.

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I was also a little surprised at the point-of-view of the cartoon, which seems to be sympathetic to the protesters who are, make no mistake, protesting against freedom of religion in the United States of America, which is among the most fucked-up things I've seen in my life. I was curious about how unusual it is for a political cartoonist to address the issue in any direction other than, "Man, these protesters are terrible, evil and/or ignorant people," so I clicked on the "Ground Zero Mosque" gallery at Daryl Cagle's Political Cartoonist Index, and while I did find at least one cartoon expressing my point-of-view on the subject......my God was that ever a depressing gallery. I was almost afraid to click on the galleries "Obama's Mosque Mess" and "Obama Is A Muslim".

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As depressed as the, um, beliefs of so many of my fellow Americans has made me, David Fitzsimmons' style cheers me up. I love the shape of those little people at the ground-breaking ceremony above. If you find yourself feeling blue, I'd highly recommend spending some time flipping through Fitzsimmons' archives. That guy's economic use of shapes and lines, and his bold, chunky figure designs never fail to cheer me up.

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Finally, on the subject of modern political cartooning, if you haven't visited Kate Beaton's site lately, do be sure to check out her latest strip, "Ben Franklin's Editor".

What's wrong with this political cartoon?

Nothing at all, in terms of Salt Lake Tribune cartoonist Pat Bagley's drawing ability.

That is a really nice drawing of Parks and of Breitbart and of Sherrod—Bagley does a great job of making Sherrod look at once like an inanimate object of the sort one might push or roll around, yet she's just animated enough to display a surprised expression. I like the period details invested in each bus, indicating which time period each is from, and I even like the slightly messy, dashed-off look of the colors as seen above (although my hometown paper, where I saw the cartoon earlier today, ran it in black and white).

The connection between "back of the bus" and "under the bus" in terms of racial politics in America seems like a sensible kernel with which to start a political cartoon on the subject, but Bagley seems to have garbled something in the final execution.

The expression "to throw someone under the bus" means to scapegoat or blame an ally, or at least someone who can be seen as an ally or as on the same team as the person doing the throwing (or pushing or tossing). Whether the throw-ee is thrown under the bus with good reason or not, or whether the thrower was justified to be throwing them at all, doesn't really matter in the usage of the phrase. The sole requirement is that both the thrower or throw-ee were on the same bus, moving the same direction. It denotes a betrayal or abandonment of the person thrown under the bus.

So why is the man labeled "Breitbart" in this cartoon at all?

Conservative blogger Andrew Brietbart kicked off the fast-moving media storm that resulted in Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod being fired, yes. He did so by editing a March speech she gave in such a way to suggest, to Breitbart and those who, like him, are concerned that the NAACP, of which Sherrod was a member, may be for the Advancement of Colored People as their name suggests, but only at the expense of the Color-less People. That is, Sherrod, who is black, is racist against white people, and this was proven by a not-terribly-damning-even-out-of-context bit of a speech she once gave.

Long story (that you probably already know) short, the NAACP condemned Sherrod and USDA Tom Vilsack fired her, based on Breitbart's claims, which no one bothered to check out for a good 24 hours or so.

So one could say that the NAACP threw Sherrod under the bus. One could say that Vilsack through her under the bus. Or the USDA. Or the media. Or the Obama administration. Or Obama himself (assigning blame to him personally might not be accurate per se, but it would be accurate enough for a political cartoon, in which a president can symbolize his party or administration).

But Breitbart? He didn't throw Sherrod under the bus. He's just about the only person or institution mentioned in this post who didn't throw Sherrod under the bus. If he has a place in the bush-throwing-under metaphor, perhaps one could say he indirectly suggested she be thrown under the bus, but to suggest that he did the throwing himself suggests a closeness between he and Sherrod.

So despite some wonderful drawings, I think this political cartoon is "wrong"...not in the opinions it expresses (which I don't quite understand anyway), but in its reporting of the situation it uses as its basis.

Of course, that's assuming that the right half of the cartoon is meant to suggest the expression "to throw someone under the bus."

Maybe the message of the cartoon is simply that in in the past, much of white America was institutionally discriminatory against black ladies when it came to public transportation, whereas today we may have gotten past that, but Andrew Breitbart still runs around pushing down middle-aged black ladies, and the Fox News bus then tries to run them over.

If that's the case, then this political cartoon makes perfect sense.



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The above version of Bagley's cartoon was taken from Daryl Cagle's Political Cartoonists Index. Click here to see examples of the various ways various political cartoonists approached the Sherrod/Breitbart fiasco. More than one used bus imagery, and John Darkow even used a back of the bus/under the bus formulation, only he attributed the pushing of Sherrod under the bus to Obama and the NAACP.

I have just ten things to say to you.

1.) I don't have any snide remarks, salient criticisms or political points to make about the above political cartoon by David Fitzsimmons of the Arizona Daily Star at all. I just really like it. I noticed it—in black and white—at the top of an opinion page in an open newspaper on a table in a bakery the other day and was super-excited by design of whoever that woman was (I couldn't tell at an upside-down, walking-past glance).

I'm not so crazy about the elephant, whose face is oddly detailed compared to the other two figures (it's even got liver spots on the side of its human-like head!), but both the Elena Kagan and the President Obama are awesome. I love how few lines are used to make them each up, and the quick, sketchiness of the features (like how the oval of Kagan's nose overlaps with the line of her cheek, for example).

That's also a fine looking Obama...recognizably Obama, but unlike everyone else's version of Obama. I would love to have seen Fitzsimmons drawing his Obama on the page. Did he start with that severe straight line from the neck tie down to the hem of his pant legs, and build from there?

At any rate, it's a great drawing.

While looking it up online after briefly spotting it in the wild, I came across some more Kagan-related cartoons, two of which I thought worth mentioning.

First, here's one by Tom Toles, one of my favorite political cartoonists working today (As point of fact, one of the few who I know by name):
That is one gigantic label he's got Kagan wearing. Considering the context, it doesn't seem necessary at all, either...if you're aware a lady was just nominated to the Supreme Court, and there's only one lady in this cartoon with a building labeled Supreme Court in it, then you've gotta assume the lady is Kagan, right? Her label is so big, it can't even fit in that lion's mouth!

Finally, here's an interesting one from R.J. Matson of The New York Observer:

I'm sure most of you recognize the reference:

How well-known is that first Peanuts strip, do you think? I wonder how many of the folks who see the political cartoon will recognize the homage to Charles Schulz. It works either way, of course, but if the reference isn't apparent, then maybe it doesn't work too well as an homage...?

It was certainly a pleasant surprise to see this one though.

If you'd like to see scads more Kagan cartoons, and compare and contrast the various ways political cartoonists addressed the subject, you should definitely check out Daryl Cagle's Political Cartoonists Index "Nominee Kagan" gallery, which is where two of the above images were swiped from.


2.) New York Times columnist Ross Douthat seems like kind of an odd duck, at least judging from the few pieces of his I've read. Like that one about how Jews don't have their own Middle-Earth or Narnia the way Christians do, or the one about how CNN should be more like CNN already is or...well, best not to even get into the things he's said about gay marriage, birth control and the Catholic Church child rape scandals (It probably didn't help my esteem for Mr. Douthat that the first time I ever heard of him was in this gross story he told about his love life, which made him seem like a real creep. Or, as Wonkette memorably described him, a "Misogynist Neck-Beard.")

I know, I know, deadlines, pressure, you gotta have something to fill that space—I worked in newspapers before too, and I'm well aware of the fact that I still write a ton of dumb shit all the time because I have to have blog fodder to fill the blog. Of course, I'm generally writing about Batman comics and in-development superhero movies for the blog portion of a comics and nerd-culture website (and being compensated accordingly), not writing for The New York Fucking Times (and being compensated accordingly).

But this isn't about me. It's about Ross Douthat. And Iron Man.

Douthat's latest dumb column is headlined "Prisoners of the Superhero Movie," and is a sort-of-but-not-really response to that Matt Zoller Seitz superhero movie takedown on Salon that everyone who writes about comics has felt obligated to talk about this week (I'm working on mine now! I'll finish 'er up as soon as Law & Order:SVU ends!), and a comment from Chris Orr about how Iron Man probably would have been a fine movie without actually having Iron Man in it, due to how awesome Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark is.

Douthat:

[F]rom there, it’s an even shorter leap to questions like, “what kind of movies would a clean-and-sober Robert Downey, Jr. be making if he wasn’t already signed up for ‘The Avengers’ and ‘Iron Man 3’ and the sequel to last’s year ‘Sherlock Holmes’ (which was basically a superhero flick dressed up in Victoriana)”? Or “what kind of films might Jon Favreau/Bryan Singer/Sam Raimi/Christopher Nolan have directed if they hadn’t been sucked into the superhero vortex”? Or “wouldn’t it have been nice to see a Heath Ledger/Christian Bale confrontation in which they weren’t saddled with the grim conventions of the comic-book blockbuster?” Or … well, you get the idea.

Sometimes I try to imagine what the 1970s would have been like if comic-book movies had dominated the cinematic landscape the way they do today.

His basic point is...murky. Either he's just using the idea as a springboard for a round of decade-specific fantasy casting. Or, perhaps, simply that the films of the seventies would have been worse, and, given how influential that decade's films were, then perhaps modern film history as we know it would have been altered for the worse...?

I was intrigued by the launch point of his fantasy casting though, that last sentence in the block quote above.

What would the 1970s have been like if comic-book superhero movies dominated the cinematic landscape the way they do today? Well, there would have been a lot of cheesy movies with a lot of terrible special effects.

As someone who has a Google alert set for the word "superhero," I've read way too many stories about how the 21st century, post-9/11 zeitgeist is responsible for the rise of the superhero in pop culture. I'm sure some psychological /cultural forces in play with the phenomenon, but there are also much more likely explanations. As far as the rise of the superhero movie goes, however, clearly the computer-driven leaps and bounds that special effects technology have gone through since the '90s have been the prime factor.

Can you imagine an Iron Man movie in, say, 1975? Or a Spider-Man? The Hulk? Hell, could you imagine a series of Batman movies a decade or less since the Adam West show was a hit on TV? Running down the list of Douthat's fantasy seventies super-movies, the only one that seems do-able with the special effects technology of the time—somewhere between that which you could see on superhero TV shows like Lou Ferigno's Hulk and the Shazam! show on the low end and Star Wars on the high end—would have maybe have been the X-Men (lasers and lightning bolts could be drawn in during post, magnet and psychic powers would have been easy enough, etc). But then, why would anyone have made an X-Men movie in the seventies, or at any point before their early nineties super-popularity? (Similarly, why would anyone have made a Batman movie prior to the late-eighties, when Frank Miller and a few creators immediately before and immediately after him solidified Batman's new, serious, camp-free Dark Knight persona? The year 1989 was about as early as a Batman live action movie could have been made.

I can't imagine an animatronic or stop-motion Hulk or Iron Man in a big, successful movie, nor can I imagine a live-action Spider-Man swinging on a web line in a 1979 movie that would look like anything different than a guy in a funny costume swinging on a rope, in the same way Johnny Weismuller swung on vines as Tarzan decades earlier) and, of course, without a successful live-action Spider-Man, would any studio even bother with a Hulk or Iron Man movie?

Which is another big factor in the ubiquity of superhero movies—momentum. X-Men and Spider-Man got made, in large part, because Blade got made...and turned a profit. Everything we've seen since was made because X-Men and Spider-Man were huge hits. No matter how many misfires and (financial) disappointments there are, occasional hits like Iron Man and The Dark Knight provide momentum to make Green Lantern and Thor and so on.

If some unlikely visionary had made a superhero movie in the early seventies* to kick off an honest-to-God decade-long superhero movie trend, it would have had to also make a Scrooge McDuckian money bin worth of profit for there to have been a second or third superhero movie, as it takes more than one to be a trend.

Godammit Ross Douthat, you've made me think about this way too long!


3.) Yesterday Johanna Draper Carlson posted a link to this post on Collected Editions, regarding which key DCU trade collections are currently out of print. Of those discussed, I think the number of Geoff Johns-written Flash collections are probably the most head-scratching, as Johns is DC's most popular writer, and both Johns and DC have invested a lot in his work on the Flash (in a lot of ways, Johns' subsequent Green Lantern work used the template he used on Flash).

Final Night, like Zero Hour, is something it seems like DC should obviously have available for readers in some form given the primacy of Hal Jordan in the DCU and the sales charts at the moment—those are the stories where he sacrificed his life to save the galaxy in an attempt to redeem himself for unmaking and trying to remake all of existence while, it's since been retconned, he was possessed by Parallax.

Parallax and the events of those stories played a major role in the just finished Blackest Night, surely someone's going to read those comics and want to see what they were referencing for themselves, right? Why not make it easy?

Likewise, I was surprised to see how much Nightwing is out of print. The Chuck Dixon-written Nightwing, like all Nightwing, wasn't exactly great comics, but they were decent Batman Lite stories, and since the Dick Grayson-as-Batman Batman and Robin is currently one of DC's (and the direct market's) best-selling comics, surely there's more interest in Grayson than usual out there right now, right?

I'm less surprised to hear about Batman: No Man's Land, a story which is more of a branding effort/status quo a la "Dark Reign" than a story-story, and the related Bat crossovers like Legacy and Cataclysm. I read portions of those in singles, and I'd have no idea how you'd collect them into trades, or why you would. Maybe something like a Showcase Presents is the way to go...?

Showcase Presents definitely seem the best way to handle books like Underworld Unleashed and summer annual crossovers like Armageddon 2001, Eclipso: The Darkness Within and so on. Of course, they're of relatively recent vintage and I thought there were royalty issues which made cheap, phone book-format, black-and-white trades of such material undoable for DC, so maybe that will never happen. But since the way many of their big crossover events used to be written and sold—a short miniseries that crossed over into an issue or annual of everything—it seems to be the best way to do it. Particularly since they tend to not be the sort of thing anyone would wanna pay for to get in a fancy schmancy omnibus edition.

Anyway, there are a lot of trades out of print that you would maybe think should be in print. I mean, there are Magog and Red Circle trades being released as we speak.


4.) When I first saw this Joe Jusko cover image for a Boom miniseries, the first thing I thought was that maybe it was for a Marvel comic entitled What If...The Punisher Was Conan?. I want to read that comic. The comic it actually is—Hawks of Outremer, based on a lesser Robert E. Howard property—looks like something I might want to read as well, though.


5.) I have a review of Solomon's Thieves by Jordan Mechner, LeUyen Pham and Alex Puvilland at Blog@ if you're interested. It occurred to me after writing it that, based on my years of working in a public library, Solomon's Thieves is exactly the sort of historical fiction that is pretty popular among prose readers, but which I would never, ever pick up and devote the time to if it were told in prose. Tell a similar story with excellently cartooned images, however, and I'm all over it. Weird.


6.) I updated last Thursday's post about Rick Spears' illustrations for the prose book Tales of the Cryptids with a link to Spears' website. Apparently I'm not the first person to wonder if he's the same Ricks Spears who wrote Teenagers From Mars and Black Metal, since his homepage starts with the words "No, I'm Not the Comic Book Writer..."


7.) Here is an account of an actual conversation I had with a non-comics reader, age 56, earlier today.

"Batman," he says dramatically, picking up a copy of Batman #698 I have in a to-be-returned-to-the-library pile on a table near my front door. He idly flips through it, and starts offering a dramatic reading of a page he lands on at random: "'Someone's killed off three of your old friends. Or roommates, if that's more accurate. I just want to know why.' 'Hell if I know. People make enemies in this town. Anyway, it's none of my business.'"

He glances at the cover, then says, "Hey, I thought that the Joker was dead."

"That's the Riddler," I answer. "But the Joker's not dead. Batman's dead at the moment. That's not the real Batman in there. It's the original Robin. The original Batman was sent back through time, but I think he comes back this week."

"But no one knows this isn't the real Batman?"

"None of the bad guys know."

He flips the page and does another dramatic reading of a panel.


8.) After years of resisting temptation, I finally broke down and borrowed some Cromartie High School from the library (Why was I resisting? Well, I'd heard from so many people that it was so good that I imagined it must be good, and the covers all looked so cool that I assumed I'd buy it one day, so I'd just wait to read it after I bought it). I would just like to report that it is, as you may have heard from others, a really funny series. It took me about a volume to get used to the peculiar pacing and style of character design and joke delivery, but once I did, I've been enjoying each chapter more and more. I'm on volume five at the moment, so perhaps it takes a plunge in quality somewhere down the line, but so far? So good.


9.) Back in...geez, 2007? (I've been doing this that long?!)...I wrote a post about the Batman vs. Etrigan fight in Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle's Detective Comics #603, and mentioned that this was one of my favorite Batman panels:
Recently reader Thiago Fernandes wrote in to share with me a "cover" panel of that panel, from 1996 prestige format one-shot Batman/Demon #1, also written by Alan Grant and drawn by David Roach: And now I've shared it with you.



10.) Quick programming note: I'm going to go out of town to visit my not-so-local comics shop, pick up the last three Wednesdays worth of releases and, upon returning, read the hell out of them. It's therefore quite possible I won't have an update tomorrow, but, if that's the case, there should be a pretty huge one reviewing all those comics on Friday.



*I'm now racking my brain trying to think of a successful filmmaker of the era and superhero property franchise that would have matched up, but the early seventies seem too early for any superhero character I can think of. Star Wars didn't come out until 1977; how early would George Lucas have been able to roll, and what would he roll with? It's hard to imagine a New Gods film in the seventies...or at any time since, really...that wouldn't have sucked. Jim Henson didn't do his Muppet Movie until the end of the decade, but I bet he and his crew could have turned out a pretty sweet, partially animatronic movie, although what superhero properties would work with big, articulated Muppets? The only ones I can think of are minor heroes that wouldn't have been seen as worthy of investment at that point. Superpower-less superheroes like Batman, Daredevil, Wolverine and so on were technically possible as early as 1970, but none of 'em—even Batman—would have had the Q-rating to be worth anyone's trouble..

MLK Day "Special"

Holidays, like any major or potentially historical news events, are usually good times to check in on political cartoonists, as they usually occasion a certain uniformity in subject matter. For example, today was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, so naturally a large swathe of our nation's top political cartoonist drew something on the subject of MLK, giving us the opportunity to see how different cartoonists interpret things differently (and how they differ in style and approach).

A lot of today's cartoons were not very good, although I suppose I could cut the drawing table jockeys some slack: Martin Luther King isn't exactly a side-splitting subject.

Let's turn to Daryl Cagle's invaluable Political Cartoon Index and see if we can't find some depressing and/or horrifying examples of political cartoons (ignoring completely the class of cartoons that simply show portraits of King or uses of his words to serve as simple "Hey, it's Martin Luther King Day!" illustrations instead of providing any additional commentary.)

Did you know that the Martin Luther King's initials are MLK? And that's practically the word milk?
Henry Payne of Detroit's Michigan News does! Here he's appropriated the long-lived "got milk?" ad campaign, misspelled it and attached it to King's massive stomach. (I much prefer the version on Payne's blog, which attaches the slogan to a place one's more likely to see advertising slogans, and I like the way he draws men in profile).

Is there a way to make the "got mlk?" joke, but be a lot grosser? There sure is, and Joe Heller of the Green Bay Press-Gazette has found it!
Martin Luther King believed so strongly in equal rights for all that he meticulously shaved his mustache to read "EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL," thus constantly advocating for just that any time anyone glanced at the lower half of his face.

Or wait, is his EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL-stache supposed to be like the famous milk mustaches of the "got milk?" ads, formed by the drinking of milk in a sloppy, child-like manner? Did King just drink a cup of black milk, which somehow stained his face with...You know what? Let's just move on. I don't really want to look at King's mustache any longer, whether it's his special day or not.

Aaaauuuggghhh! What...what's going on here?! What is Gordon Campbell trying to tell us? That King has now been dead so long that his tombstone has taken on the characteristics of the man buried beneath it? Is that why it's developed King's face and mustache? Can...can it talk...?

Wait, here's some more horror:
This image comes courtesy of Mike Luckovich of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (a cartoonist who has one of my favorite lines). It depicts the tiny, glowing ghost of the still-living President Barack Obama haunting the birthday cake of the long-dead Martin Luther King for...for some reason.

Happy MLK Day, I guess.

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?

Theological questions raised by political cartoons about Michael Jackson's death

When we go to heaven, will we look like we did at the point we died, or will we look like we did at an earlier point in our life?


If Jackson was some sort of pedophile and was guilty of some form of child abuse, then why would heaven roll out the red carpet for him? Do child molesters get to go to heaven?


And, more importantly, WHY IS THEIR CHILD ABUSE IN HEAVEN?!! Surely everything on the other side of the pearly gates has to be a child-rape free zone, right? Right?


Are the "little angels" the souls of human children given wings and halos upon entry into heaven, or are they true angels, members of a sentient race God created to serve and worship him before humanity existed, which would make even the youngest angels millions, if not billions, of years old? (In which case, they're past the age of consent). Or is heaven such an intensely personal experience that it doesn't matter how wrong one's personal desires might have been on earth, they can be safely fulfilled there?


How are our immortal souls judged after death? Is it as arbitrary as a coin toss?


Do famous people go straight to their final judgments, or is there a special VIP cafe they gather in together before going on to their final rewards?


Are heaven and hell the only options, or might our souls ascend to the nearest celestial body to earth, like maybe the moon?


And if so, will we still need to breathe after we die?


Was Michael Jackson such a big celebrity that he's too big to even fit on the moon, but must orbit around it, just as the moon orbits around earth?


What if our souls don't live on in an afterlife or outer space after we die, but our consciousness remains in our bodies, which will slowly rot away to bones? Will we be able to move and talk once we're dead? Will we be able to see even after we've lost our eyes?


Or did Jackson not even leave a body, but ascended bodily into heaven, like the New Testament tells us Jesus Christ himself did?

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.