This is Historic Times » Editorial Cartoons

Hip to be Square

deephurting — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:41:25 +0000

It’s been a long time since I did a longer, narrative-form cartoon, so I figured it was about time that I drew one. Apparently, I also figured it was about time that I do another piece that would never, ever get published in a traditional print outlet, even if any of them were running me!

The scene depicted in this cartoon is directly lifted from the film version of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel, American Psycho, which stars Christian Bale as a Wall Street businessman named Patrick Bateman who also happens to be a deranged serial killer. Early on in the movie, Bateman has a professional rivalry with an associate named Paul Allen (played by Jared Leto), which comes to a head when Allen manages to get a reservation at an exclusive restaurant where Bateman is snubbed. So, to settle the score, Bateman gets Allen drunk and then chops him to pieces with an axe while delivering a long-winded speech about how much he loves Huey Lewis & The News.

Those who follow my Twitter feed may have noticed me making a comparison between Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney and Patrick Bateman a few weeks ago. I got the idea after seeing this infamous photograph of Romney and his cohorts at Bain Capital, which has made the rounds on the news media for awhile as a graphic underscore for how out-of-touch Romney is with humans who aren’t absurdly rich. I thought it was funny and appropriate that Romney looked so similar to Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman during the era in which American Psycho is set–even down to the sadistic look in his eyes.

Bateman’s murderous rampage is a metaphor for (among other things) the self-serving, amoral greed systemic to the ’80s thanks to the efforts of Ronald Reagan and other contemporary Republicans who were the ideological progenitors of most free-market Conservatives and Neo-liberals infesting the US government today–the movie makes this criticism of Reaganomics clear by featuring a clip of the President speaking on a TV in the background during its final moments. This was the environment in which Mitt Romney’s corporate fortune first germinated, and then flourished; the economic equivalent of a slaughterhouse where money is Soylent Green, and Soylent Green is people.

While I’m surely not the first person to make the connection between Romney and Bateman–it’s just too obvious not to have been discovered already–I expect I’m the only editorial cartoonist to illustrate it. Few others seem to have either the stomach for the film’s graphic level of violence and gore, or the courage to skewer public figures like Romney with such pointed language. Of those that do, most would correctly realize such a cartoon’d be rejected by their employers and publishers, and therefore choose not to waste the time drawing it, but as already mentioned above, that’s not really an issue in my case, so the only practical concern for me is a question of whether or not the commentary has the depth to offset the gratuity of the violence, the obscurity of the reference, and the scale of the drawing effort.

Admittedly, it probably doesn’t, but I still went ahead because I thought it’d be funny, as well as an enjoyable, rewarding drawing exercise. It definitely fulfilled those expectations, even if it does have less intellectual value than I usually try to be certain about including.

Mitt Robbery

deephurting — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 04:49:02 +0000

A report, released earlier this week, revealed that Mitt Romney (as well as the investment firm he ran, Bain Capital) keeps a portion of his vast personal fortune in offshore tax shelters on the Cayman Islands. The Cayman Islands are a bit of a pop-culture cliche when it comes to the subject of tax evasion–frequent viewers of the Simpsons, for example, may recall a humorous telephone conversation between the Springfield police and a man in the Caymans working on behalf of Krusty the Clown, who at one point said, “I’m afraid I can’t divulge any information about that customer’s secret, illegal account.”

It just goes to support my theory that, while modest wealth can perhaps be had and maintained honestly, no one ever got to the ultra-wealthy column and remained there without doing unethical things or outright breaking the law at some point. The above-noted article quotes a tax expert who estimates that havens in places like the Caymans cost the federal government $100 billion dollars annually, so you could say that at least part of Mr. Romney’s fortune is based on (indirectly) reaching into the pockets of every taxpayer in America and stealing their change. In fact, it’s worse than that–this kind of robbery also affects everyone in America too poor to pay taxes, since it deprives the government of money that could otherwise be put towards social services for the unemployed, as well as the elderly, the infirm, and the handicapped, not to mention funding for infrastructure, postal services, fire departments, police…

Anyway, I thought there might be something to the idea of Romney swiping tax dollars, so I sketched a couple of different approaches to the concept before hitting on the image of a getaway car in a bank robbery. I changed the car to a boat, so it’d more easily play into the idea of escaping to the Caymans, and modeled the boat in my final illustration on one belonging to notorious gangster Al Capone, whose own tax fraud ultimately led to his conviction and imprisonment.

The Golden Touch

deephurting — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 04:50:16 +0000

This cartoon combines Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam with Thomas Nast’s classic Boss Tweed caricature with a bag of money for a head. In the place of Adam, I’ve substituted Mitt Romney. I wanted to make a joke about how Romney is the ultimate realization of corporate personhood-a “man” (let’s call him) so out of touch with the rest of humanity, and so immersed in wealth that he has more in common with cold, faceless corporations than he does with other people.

It seemed like an overbroad gag to begin with, but while trying to figure out what to do with the angels in the original painting, I happened upon this list of Romney’s 2008 campaign donors. I felt like including this sort of information in the cartoon would be enough to tie it together and give it some substance beyond the basic joke. What do you think?

Grand Wizardry

deephurting — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 01:23:34 +0000

This was the cartoon I mentioned in the previous post, which I started drawing about a week ago, but set aside so I could end 2011 with something else.

As I expected, Michele Bachmann dropped out of the race for the GOP Presidential nomination following yesterday’s Iowa primary. Rick Perry appears to be limping along, but hasn’t given up yet, in spite of his poor Iowa showing and poor campaign performance in general.

As with the last cartoon I drew including Herman Cain, I did have time to remove Bachmann from the cartoon after I decided she’d probably drop out, but before inking it. However, I just loved how she looked in the picture, and none of the other candidates seemed like a better representative of the crazed, speaking-in-tongues wing of the Republican Party, so I figured I’d give her a last hurrah. Besides, this cartoon’s more about the candidates’ ideas than the candidates themselves, and some of Bachmann’s particular brand of insanity is bound to stick around in the campaign dialogue for at least a little while.

I had a lot of fun with the details in this one. Longtime readers with good eyes may recognize the crystal ball (or palantir, for you Tolkien enthusiasts) from this cartoon in the upper-lefthand corner. The flat Earth globe in the corner opposite was originally included as a relatively meaningless goof, but after awhile, I realized it could be taken to relate to Thomas Friedman’s “World is Flat” economic ideology, for better or for worse. The two “alternate” pointed hats on Ron Paul and Rick Perry were not part of my original idea, but something I came up with on-the-fly.

The book in the background, labeled “Reaganomics,” was originally labeled “Creationism.” I thought it’d be a funny joke relating to all the candidates’ supposed religious backgrounds, while tying into the general theme of pseudo-science, but it didn’t fit the overall theme of economics very well, so I changed it to the more reliable workhorse. I also considered having it read “Voodoo,” but thought that might be too obscure for the average person.

Some of you may have noticed the art in the last cartoon looking a little different, and this one looking more familiar. This was because I got a small Wacom for Christmas, and the last cartoon was the first one I colored with it. I planned to do the same with this one, but I already lost the pen–it’s possible I left it at a friend’s house in Bellingham, WA, where I went for New Year’s Eve, but if not, I’ll have to get another one before I can continue coloring cartoons that way.

Yeah, This Won’t Backfire…

deephurting — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 15:12:26 +0000

I was developing a cartoon criticizing the economic policies of the various GOP Presidential candidates, but then I read this and decided the above might make a more appropriate year-ender. Before developing the economic policy cartoon, I wasted a few days trying to come up with something commenting on the recent US withdrawal from Iraq with which to end the year, but none of my ideas seemed to say much beyond the surface details of “a thing happened.” Besides, I couldn’t possibly outdo this outstanding illustration by Joel Pett, chronicling the whole blunderous enterprise, from its back-alley conception, to its ignominious conclusion, so I’m glad this specific angle was brought to my attention instead.

The very first post-withdrawal articles I read had made note of how Iraq was to be opened up as a prime market for US defense contractors, and I remember rolling my eyes as I read this, commenting to my friend online that arms sales–not “liberty” or “democracy”–were, and always had been, the ultimate purpose of the war.

But for some reason, it took the headline of the more recent article for me to make the connection between the past and the present on display in this cartoon, as well as in the post-occupation policies of the Obama Administration. Despite holding an official policy of neutrality in the Iran/Iraq conflict of the early ’80s, the Reagan Administration provided Saddam Hussien, a Sunni Muslim, with weapons and military funding under-the-table (until they were caught doing this, of course), for the express purpose of acting as a “counter” to Iran. Reagan didn’t really seem to care when Saddam began using the weapons we gave him to oppress and kill Shiites (like Nouri al-Maliki, the current US puppet in Iraq). Nobody in the US seemed to care, really, until Saddam invaded Kuwait.

A famous photograph of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam began circulating on the web shortly before the more recent Iraq invasion, and has become symbolic of the folly of giving strongman dictators guns and an expense account for the Military Industrial Complex all-you-can-eat bonanza, not to mention the irony of having those very weapons turned against the US and its allies shortly afterwards.

It has been suggested to me that this cartoon may be difficult to understand, because people aren’t likely to recognize Nouri al-Maliki on his looks alone. If history is any indicator, he just might become as recognizable to the average person as his predecessor was, in a decade or so.

GOP Bless Us, Everyone

deephurting — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 01:32:16 +0000

I considered a few other ideas for a Christmas-themed cartoon on roughly this topic, and while some of them were probably a little less cliche, they didn’t seem as interesting to me. I hope any shortcomings this cartoon has in the idea department are made up for by the drawing, and the facial expressions, especially.

People have been comparing Newt Gingrich to Ebenezer Scrooge ever since he began calling for the repeal of child labor laws some weeks ago. Indeed, I did a few sketches along those lines, since few (if any) other cartoonists had illustrated this comparison. But, considering how Gingrich’s campaign came back from the dead following Herman Cain’s implosion, I thought there might be something in a comparison to Jacob Marley, instead.

Of course, Marley was aware of and regretted his own past failings, whereas Gingrich seems to revel in his. I’m not quite sure of my choice of specifics to highlight in the cartoon–”ego” and “bigotry” don’t appear to be failings in the eyes of the Republican fringe, after all.

Strings Attached

deephurting — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 21:07:13 +0000

I was playing with the main idea of this cartoon for a few weeks, and decided now might be a good time to use it, because Congress recently passed an Act that would grant the President nigh-unlimited power to imprison anyone without trial, even US citizens, for the duration of the “War on Terror,” which is another way of saying “forever.” The White House quickly responded that Obama would veto the Act, as well he should, but that his reasoning for doing so wasn’t that it’d give the President too much power, but rather that the powers granted were not broad enough.

The veto threat ultimately didn’t amount to much, anyway, because Obama abandoned it and signed the bill today.

This is not the first time Obama’s reneged on his commitment to restoring civil liberties that were weakened, circumvented, or totally obliterated by the Bush Administration, and instead fits a trend of actually expanding attacks on due process and the Bill of Rights. I’ve done a few cartoons on the subject before.

The Obama Administration has already shown a lack of restraint when it comes to assassinating American citizens who align themselves with the enemy (and their families). While the target in that case may indeed have been a dangerous radical, I still found the force expressed to have been excessive–just as I said in the case of Osama Bin Laden, reasonable effort needed to be made to apprehend the terrorist in question and bring him to trial before bullets were fired or missiles were launched. Since no one in the military, the intelligence community, or the White House even tried to argue that such efforts were made, I don’t believe that they were.

That being the case, it’s not just some theoretical future President we need to worry about overzealously exercising these new powers–Obama’s own record proves that he can’t be trusted to wield them with appropriate discretion and respect for the Constitution. Is authorizing missile attacks on Americans who advocate the violent overthrow of the country that far removed from indefinitely jailing members of the press who might expose wrongdoing and corruption in the government, for example, in light of these draconian “war” powers? I think not!

Unfortunately, it’s not like we can look to the opposition party to save us from the incumbent President in the next election, since they’re even worse in every way that he is bad, and offer none of his strengths besides. What can be done to defeat these measures, when someone who spoke out against their like and who represented the public will to put a stop to them has become their most aggressive champion??

Oh, a friend of mine asked if I’d also share the uncolored ink work for this cartoon. Here’s a link to that, for those interested.

Tax Cut & Paste

deephurting — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 15:00:27 +0000

I copied the basic idea and design for this cartoon from a different one I started earlier this year, or perhaps even late last year, but which I never finished. It works better in this case, because the earlier topic fell out of relevance relatively quickly, whereas this one should stay meaningful into the indefinite future.

Like this piece, this cartoon compares the “job creators” argument made by Conservative candidates and pundits to activities commonly associated with organized crime. Initially, I’d included a GOP symbol in the letterhead, but I realized it worked just as well without it, and that way could just as easily apply to the Democrats as well as the Republicans. Or to rich, corporate tools in general, really.

Frontrunners

deephurting — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 14:00:30 +0000

There’s a very good chance Herman Cain will drop out of this race within the next few hours. If that happens, I don’t know if this cartoon will stay completely relevant for very long.

Still, it’s more about Newt Gingrich’s recent and surprising surge to the lead in the Republican nomination for President. It’s surprising because the guy left the House in disgrace in the ’90s, after being the first Speaker reprimanded for ethics violations in the body’s then-208 year history, and recently has made a point of advocating for child labor. It really reminds me of a bit from the early-’90s satirical TV series Dinosaurs, where the evil Vice-President of the WeSaySo Corporation, who routinely ate people he didn’t like, said, “Sure, kids love working! It’s like a game to them! And because they’re so much smaller, you can fit more of them in a tight space!”

Gingrich really owes his sudden popularity mainly to just how inept his competition is. You’ve got Rick Perry, who can’t remember a list three items long. You’ve got the above-mentioned Herman Cain, with his addiction to the number nine and extramarital affairs (whether consensual or not). You’ve got Mitt Romney, who seems to be from another planet and is apparently studying the human concept of “opinions” by holding multiple, contradictory views on just about every topic. You’ve got Michele Bachmann, whom I’m pretty sure is legitimately insane, and Rick Santorum, whose last name is “Santorum.” Jon Huntsman seems to be the most electable of the bunch, but he worked for Obama, so I guess he’s out, and that leaves perennial crazy old codger Ron Paul, who in this group doesn’t seem all that crazy after all.

The shot in this drawing is very similar to an earlier drawing I did on a different topic, and I was a little hesitant to go ahead with it because of that, but I think it looks different enough, now that it’s finished. The perspective on the track came out a little wonky, but other than that, I’m happy with it.

How the Gingrich Stole Christmas!

deephurting — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 04:40:33 +0000

Newt Gingrich, the current flavor-of-the-month in the GOP Presidential Primary, recently called anti-child labor laws “stupid,” and argued that children in poverty find themselves there because of a lack of opportunities to develop a good work ethic. Proving once again that his reputation as an “intellectual” must’ve been earned ironically, he suggested that schools fire their janitors and hire poor students to fill the role instead, as a solution to this imaginary problem.

Gingrich isn’t the first GOPper in recent memory to question anti-child labor laws. At least a couple of Republicans in Congress have argued in the last few years that such laws should be left up to the States, instead of being decided at the Federal level. Others have argued from a “Free Market” perspective, which opposes regulations in general on the basis of the market ultimately sorting out social injustices. But Gingrich is the first one I’ve noticed in awhile who seems to actually be arguing in favor of child labor itself, instead of against the regulations which prevent it.

I suppose it’s in-line with the Republican philosophies that applaud war and torture, but it still surprised me to hear someone actually raise the child labor banner in this way. Worse still is the conspiracy theory that Gingrich said something so cartoonishly amoral in order to distract people from reports of him taking unofficial bribes to lobby for Freddie Mac, even though he’s criticized government involvement with the doomed firm since. I guess the idea there is that the distraction is so unbelievable that it’d be easier to deal with whatever outrage it might generate than something more easily graspable by the public. Still, it seems to me like responding to accusations of shoplifting by saying you just stabbed a puppy to death. Perhaps Newt should’ve stuck with the ‘jerk store’ line instead…

By the way, before anybody points it out, I did realize after coloring this that I made Gingrich’s head look awfully phallic. This was not intentional, but now that I can’t unsee it, I have to admit it seems pretty appropriate, considering the kind of guy he is.