Yearly Archives: 2023

State Department Synonyms

This entry was posted in comics and tagged foreign policy Gaza Israel Palestine State Department United Nations on by
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Our government’s support for Israel’s month of indiscriminate retaliation against Gaza continues as the numbers of dead and injured continue to mount. Hospitals are being razed, refugee camps wiped out to get one guy; the IDF is doing a speedrun of our debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan. And hardly any politician, especially ones in positions of power, are able to even say the word “ceasefire” to this carnage.

I couldn’t bring myself to draw a wacky caricature cartoon of these ghouls. The goofiness of my drawing style doesn’t seem right for the subject matter.

I was still doing a comic for the New York Times during the 2014 bombings of Gaza by Israel, and I am sure they wouldn’t let me run this without adding a heavy coat of “both sides” polish.

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Meet Mike Johnson

This entry was posted in comics and tagged Congress coup fascism HouseGOP Mike Johnson Speaker of the House on by
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After three weeks of chaos, the House Republicans finally settled on their generic right-wing freak. Like everyone else, I never heard of Mike Johnson until this week. He’s a full-blown coup-thusiast, white supremacist, and evangelical anti-abortion authoritarian.

Who knows how long Johnson will keep the job, but his successor will be even more fascist if the Republicans get to pick it. This all could’ve been avoided if the insurrectionist members of Congress were expelled as the Constitution explicitly calls for. Now we’re stuck with them and if the House majority isn’t flipped by a sizable margin in 2024, they’re going to install themselves permanently.

Having fascist goons as your opponent may help increase voter turnout, but that only works if the fascists honor election results; which they’ve already shown they won’t.

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9/11 Brain

This entry was posted in comics and tagged Gaza Hamas Israel Palestine terrorism on by
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It’s been another week of Israel bombing and starving the people of Gaza into oblivion as collective punishment for Hamas’s brutal attacks. Not only is the warfare asymmetrical, so are the death tolls and empathy from the Western world. A ceasefire is the only way to stop what is effectively the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, but the US government is letting its client state run buck wild with revenge.

Biden gave a tepid suggestion that Israel avoid our post 9-11 mistakes, but that message gets lost when you hand over enough military equipment to make Raytheon execs’ boners visible from space.

Jokes return next week. (Hopefully.)

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D.I.Y. Halloween Costumes

This entry was posted in comics and tagged border wall Federalist Society gerrymandering Halloween immigration Leonard Leo refugees SCOTUS transit vulture capital on by
(Title on a Spirit Halloween generic costume bag.) D.I.Y. Halloween Costumes
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I’m firmly against topical Halloween costumes in real life, but it’s a decent premise for a cartoon where you don’t have to spend an entire evening stuck inside your one-note joke that only news nerds might get.

While the final panel is about Biden deciding to build more border walls, it applies to everywhere refugees are being denied their right to seek asylum. A wall refusing desperate people entry is the opposite side of one locking them into a miserable fate.

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Speaker of the House Auditions

This entry was posted in comics and tagged Congress HouseGOP Jim Jordan Kevin McCarthy Lauren Boebert Matt Gaetz Republicans Speaker of the House Steve Scalise on by
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Nine months after he barely squeaked into the speakership, Kevin McCarthy was ousted by the Ding-Dong Caucus. I was pleasantly surprised the Democrats didn’t bail him out for the sake of “norms, bipartisanship” or some other bullshit. McCarthy refused to make any concessions to earn that kind of unprecedented act and deserves to be the historical footnote he is.

More shutdowns and parliamentary brinkmanship are sure to ensue, but they were already going to under McCarthy. Best to make the Republicans flail around and demonstrate just how unfit for office they’ve always been.

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Sucky the A.I. Vacuum

This entry was posted in comics and tagged AI art art artificial intelligence plagiarism technology on by
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Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, or whatever you want to call it has practical applications. From sorting the Pentagon’s bloated budget to doing whatever it is middle managers do, it has its place. Creating original art is never going to be one. The whole enterprise involves lifting from the work of others and mushing them all together. And until there’s a chip that creates sentient inspiration, the results will always be derivative.

This won’t stop executives from using it to cut costs. The WGA knew this, and that’s why they held firm and guaranteed that AI works won’t ice out the writers. Most of pop culture is already a boring mix of stuff that already exists, and A.I. would only make it worse, much more quickly.

Anthropomorphizing terrible tech is now a recurring bit that started with this A.I comic and Cruisey the self-aware car. Let’s see if I’m the John Henry of ripping myself off and can beat the machines to running it into the ground.

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CEO’s Scab Shows

This entry was posted in comics and tagged Amazon Apple Bob Iger David Zaslav Disney HBO Jeff Bezos Netflix Reed Hastings Scabby the Rat strikes television Tim Cook TV unions on by
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I was originally going to mock Drew Barrymore and Bill Maher for scabbing when they announced they were putting their shows back into production while the WGA/SAG-AFTRA strikes are still going on. Unlike CEOs, some celebrities are capable of shame, and both changed their minds after a week of ridicule. I still had to put a Maher jab in here ’cause he sucks.

If the strike continues much longer, the studios’ pipeline of new stuff will dry up. They may think they can wait the unions out, but audiences are less patient and won’t keep their subscriptions autorenewing if the only new stuff they’re getting are reality TV and game shows.

If these CEOs can’t get their shit together, they deserve to be bought out by UPS, a company that realized averting strike for a few million in benefits is better business than losing billions to stick it to the unions.

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Kevin McCarthy’s Inquiries

This entry was posted in comics and tagged Congress HouseGOP impeachment Kevin McCarthy Matt Gaetz Speaker of the House on by
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This week McCarthy announced the House’s Biden impeachment inquiry that the Ding Dong Caucus demanded to get their support for his speakership. It’s going to be real dumb and full of garbage that the media will dutifully cover as straight news to appear to be objective observers of the two parties.

In good news, no actual legislation except some stopgap thing to avert a shutdown will get through Congress this session, then nothing is going to happen legislatively until after the 2024 election. So hopefully I won’t have to draw this guy again for a while.

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