This is Historic Times » Economy

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.

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.

Rescue 9-9-9

deephurting — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 01:12:34 +0000

The title of this cartoon references Herman Cain’s rich-friendly tax “plan,” and Rescue 9-1-1, a popular reality show from the ’80s and ’90s which was about actual emergency response telephone calls, and was hosted by William Shatner.

I started developing a cartoon months ago which compared record corporate profits and windfalls for the wealthy at the expense of everyone else to the common cliche of a sinking ship. Even though the overall metaphor wasn’t especially original, it hinged on a gag which was pretty unique, but it didn’t quite seem to describe the present situation accurately, so I set it aside and finally drew this, instead.

God-Man: Year Two Thousand Eleven

deephurting — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 04:45:41 +0000

It was kind of a slow week in terms of news, so I hope you readers can forgive the delay in updates. At the beginning, the big news was Michele Bachmann’s victory in the Ames Straw Poll, but that was immediately overtaken in the news cycle by discussion of an apparently impressive write-in performance by Texas Governor/gun nut Rick Perry, or as I like to call him for his history of executing the innocent and the mentally-impaired, “The Texacutioner.”

Besides the Texas Governorship, another thing Perry seems to share with our last President is being a total idiot. Unfortunately, eight years of George W. Bush (well, four if you don’t count the time he spent on vacation) kind of tapped the keg dry when it comes to new ways to say “he dumb,” so I wanted to draw a cartoon that did something other than comment on his deep, caveman-like brow.

Instead, I decided to focus on his plans for America: how to solve problems like economic chaos, unwinnable wars, social divisions and bizarre weather patterns which surely have nothing to do with Global Warming? Why, hold a prayer summit organized by a designated hate group where you ask God to fix it! If that doesn’t work, well, y’know… He works in mysterious ways; throw another tire on the fire and hand me a shank of Poor Person.

The Governor appears to be far more devoted to his religion than W. (except for the positive parts, of course), but I didn’t want to just slam Christianity in general, so after considering a gag that had Perry leaving tons of messages on God’s answering machine, I finally went ahead with a reference to Batman.

The skyline depicted in the second panel is Austin, Texas, and the spotlight for the “God Signal” is coming from the general location of the capitol building.

Neo Cons

deephurting — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 04:50:02 +0000

It’s become increasingly common for Republican Congresspersons lately to refer to the obscenely wealthy as “job creators” in their quest to deflect the burden for government spending onto the poor and the middle class instead of those who can actually afford it without giving up a meal. Since recent history shows that cutting taxes for the rich didn’t prevent the high unemployment and other economic problems the US is currently experiencing, the relationship they’re trying to draw is pretty unreasonable–if there’s a correlation at all, it seems more likely to me that the tax cuts, as well as other giveaways to corporations (such as various deregulations), probably caused the recession, and continuing that trend is bound not to help.

This cartoon compares this blatant economic trickery to the “shell game” or cup-and-ball routine, both of which being sleight-of-hand used for centuries to con desperate or unsuspecting dupes out of money by presenting them with what appears to be a simple gambling game which is in fact impossible to win. The crowds surrounding a victim in this con are usually composed of shills or “muscle” whose job it is to either make the game appear to be winnable, keep the victim from leaving, or watch out for police (although the cop in this cartoon doesn’t really seem to be all that effective at protecting the public from these crooks, eh?). Another well-known form of the same basic trick is the Three-card Monte.

Powder Keg

deephurting — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 14:00:06 +0000

I wasn’t planning on doing a 4th of July cartoon, but I had this idea on the 2nd and thought it was clever, so I executed it at the last minute.

Mitt Zombie

deephurting — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 14:00:20 +0000

On Saturday, I started kicking around a few ideas for a cartoon addressing GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney. His history as a “corporate turnaround specialist” is the centerpiece of his candidacy, and he claims a knack for dealing with the tough economic problems burying the federal government and average Americans today.

Of course, he usually glosses over how his strategy in dealing with those affairs often involved mass layoffs and liquidating companies’ assets, allowing him to build a great personal fortune in the process.

There was a theme of parasitism or cannibalism common to many of my ideas, but I also thought it’d be funny to play up how Romney looks sort of like Lurch from the Addams Family (maybe crossed with Gordon Gekko and Dr. Jonas Carson’s android doppelganger from the movie Still Not Quite Human). Zombies were a natural meeting point for those two ideas, and appropriate for me considering earlier stuff I’ve drawn. By the time the Romney Campaign released an ad where people seem to rise from the grave, not so much in support of Mitt, but at least against Obama, my cartoon was already pencilled and ready to be inked.

As many readers are no doubt aware, there was a Republican debate in New Hampshire on Monday–the above-mentioned ad was rolled out mere hours before it, obviously in anticipation. To be fair, I don’t spend a lot of time watching debates, but this one seemed especially terrible in its terribleness. Nearly all of the questions were softballs, and barely any of the candidates gave a straight answer to anything, a special alchemy which resulted in honest-to-God not-fictional moments such as Rick Santorum stumbling over himself to choose between “Leno or Conan?” and Michele Bachmann failing to say whether she preferred “Elvis or Johnny Cash?” It wouldn’t have been the least bit surprising if one of the candidates eventually announced their ultimate preference for LIVE FROM NEW YORK IT’S SATURDAY NIGHT!!!

The most noteworthy thing to come out of it, for me at least, was Newt Gingrich’s declaration that the Red Scare was actually a good thing, and that the Federal government should apply the same standards of judgement when it comes to hiring Muslims. Really?? I thought this guy was supposed to be an historian or something. Ah I don’t know, who cares? He’s having trouble even getting his own campaign staff to care anymore.

When the dust settled, very little had changed: Mitt Romney was still the front-runner, Tim Pawlenty was still the little dog nipping at the big dog’s heels, Gingrich was hastening his meteoric fall to the ground, and Rick Santorum still apparently had a stick up his ass. Michelle Bachmann did manage to come off as less of an escaped mental patient than usual, but only by virtue of muffling many of her responses with gauze made from some variation or other of the phrase “my 23 foster children.”

Ron Paul was as crazy as ever, at one point launching into a bizarre rant about the Catholic Church in response to a question on whether the children of illegal immigrants should be denied emergency room care. But he still managed to make the most sense overall. That’s how bad the Republican crop is at this time! The crazy gold prospector in the dirigible is the sensible one.

Oh, I guess I almost left out Herman Cain. He’s with Newt on Muslims being terrorists until proven innocent. Also, we learned that he likes DEEP DISH pizza. Thanks for the utterly worthless debate experience, CNN.

To Serve Man

deephurting — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 04:48:23 +0000

I usually prefer not to do more than one cartoon in a row on the same subject, but the topic has certainly evolved since last week, and this seemed like a good idea.

Dead Weight

deephurting — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 09:39:05 +0000

I was born 27 years ago today (September 23rd). I couldn’t really afford to do anything for my birthday this year, so I packed up and paid a surprise visit to my parents.

Readers of the New York Times may have caught this earlier cartoon in Sunday’s Week in Review section. This is the first time I’ve appeared in a paper with so large an audience, although they mixed up attribution of my work with a cartoon by Jim Morin, and they misspelled my name. I haven’t gotten to communicate with them since then, but any readers who care should contact the Times and request that they reprint both cartoons with proper attribution, or at least run a correction.

The meaning of the last cartoon seems to have proven troublesome for quite a few people. Hopefully this one is better (though I feel my drawing got a bit sloppy in the last panel there).

That’s None of Your Business

deephurting — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 21:53:16 +0000