This is Historic Times » military

Pyramid Scam

deephurting — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 12:00:14 +0000

I stayed up several hours tonight coloring this cartoon, but ultimately decided it looked better in black and white.

This piece addresses the White House’s recently released Federal budget proposal, and how the squeeze is being put on programs that benefit the middle class and the poor in order to satisfy the demands of the defense budget, and the tax cut “compromise” made between the President and the GOP to continue giving tax breaks to the wealthy. The GOP is represented here by Speaker of the House John Boehner, although I admit he’s not very recognizable at this scale.

Warburger, the Infinitely Prolonged

deephurting — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 23:37:00 +0000

I was working on a different cartoon addressing the new House majority’s promise to slash social programs from the Federal budget, while commenting on how the defense budget would probably remain untouched, but before I could finish it, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced his intention to reduce the growth of the defense budget by $78 billion over the next five years.

While this is a paltry amount, considering that the overall budget will still be allowed to grow, I felt my original gag might not seem appropriate to the average person in the context of the announcement, so I set it aside and instead drew this one. I’m very happy with how the illustration came out in it, especially the shading (which didn’t go so well in my last cartoon).

Boo!!

deephurting — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 12:14:27 +0000

Going Up!

deephurting — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 07:32:06 +0000

This cartoon’s development process was very indirect.

Following Obama’s State of the Union address last week, I had several different ideas, one of which was the previous cartoon. I wanted to comment on the spending freeze as well, and since one of the things that’s supposed to cut back on is wasteful spending, AKA “pork,” I thought I could do something showing that a lot of America’s runaway military budget is the porkiest pork that ever porked. To that end, I sketched this.

It wasn’t quite working, though, so I spent a couple days considering different approaches to the same basic joke. Some of them involved the pigs as obnoxious, gluttonous patrons in a restaurant, being served by Obama as a waiter. Some had them gathered around a pie graph of the national budget, with little tanks and arrows, as if planning to invade the slices not currently occupied by the military. I even tried to come up with something referencing George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

But, something seemed to be missing from all the pig-based jokes, so then I started trying to move in a few other directions, and basically came up with a lot of great images that I either didn’t agree with, or with which I had other problems. One sketch had Obama wearing a yarmulke with his logo on it while sitting down to dine on a giant ham labeled “military budget.” Another one had a human military character about to eat a similar ham with a bone in it that looked like Obama’s logo.

Somewhere in the middle of all these, I imagined the above cartoon. I was a little concerned about the potential racial connotations of portraying Obama as a stereotypical elevator operator, but I couldn’t come up with a way around that, and I decided it wasn’t worth tossing out an otherwise great image. If it helps, I was using Droopy’s appearance in Who Framed Roger Rabbit as my main reference for this (and even had a sketch where Obama’s neck stretches out like in the movie).

Sleep on It

deephurting — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:15:03 +0000

IROCKY

deephurting — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 23:05:47 +0000