This is Historic Times » war

Cornered

deephurting — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 04:17:24 +0000

This is not a terribly original gag (in fact, shortly after I started working on it, I noticed another cartoonist had already done something similar). However, I thought some specifics about my approach to it, such as the severed arm Gaddafi’s using to paint, might set it apart. The way the blood reads as both blood and paint is also unlike anything I’ve seen anywhere else, except maybe my own stuff from a few months ago. Hopefully this doesn’t mean I’m beginning to repeat myself–blood and violence do seem to be increasingly common themes in my cartoons, but heck, that’s the reality of war, right?

I feel my caricature of Gaddafi’s not as good as the last time I drew him, although my choice of color for his skintone seems a bit more accurate. I would’ve rather drawn something that put emphasis on the revolutionaries’ victory than Gaddafi’s defeat, but I didn’t have any good ideas to that end, and besides, “positive” cartoons (as opposed to cynical ones) aren’t usually my strong suit.

Weiner of Mass Distraction

deephurting — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 14:00:22 +0000

I avoided doing anything on the recent Anthony Weiner Twitter scandal basically for its entirety. There was enough nonmentary throughout the media that I didn’t figure there was any sense in me adding to it unless I happened to come up with a perspective that was unique, or at least not being explored very much.

In my opinion, the important thing here isn’t what Weiner was accused of in the first place–it’s that he lied about it. That’s the part of this story that’s bigger than one man. It’s the latest incident illustrating how some members of Congress and other governmental institutions think they can be flagrantly dishonest to their constituents and suffer no consequences for it.

What baffles me is that people who can howl for blood and run a person out of office over lies about his or her inconsequential fetishes and affairs couldn’t get so worked up about having the nation plunged into economic disaster and hundreds of thousands of lives pointlessly extinguished by a war based on fabricated threats. I’m sure many of those who called for Anthony Weiner’s resignation (or demanded such from President Clinton when he was embroiled in his own scandal) are the same ones who defended the lies and treason of the Bush Administration, and probably do so to this day without any awareness of the irony.

When I mentioned this to a friend on Thursday, shortly after hearing about the Congressman’s resignation, he said, “Well, it’s too late to impeach Bush and his cronies now.” That may be so, but as long as they live it won’t be too late to punish big liars like them, both for the purpose of justice, and to send a message to other big liars, and smaller liars like Anthony Weiner: When you speak to the public, speak the truth, especially when you’re working at the public’s behest.

War Ink

deephurting — Fri, 20 May 2011 15:00:14 +0000

I first sketched the above idea several months ago, but for some reason it never got beyond my sketchbook. Since the US hit its debt ceiling on Monday, I thought now might be a good time to haul out the gag.

There’s a lot of finger-pointing going on in Congress and around the country as to the blame for the budget mess, which has been going on since well before the 2010 midterm election. I feel the recent explosion in the deficit has a lot to do with cutting taxes, especially on corporations, while waging an incredibly wasteful, multi-front war for the purpose of funneling money to ~~war profiteers~~ defense contractors.

Speaking of the devil, the cartoon’s title is a reference to the movie War, Inc., a John Cusack satire of the military-industrial complex from 2008 which is sort of a spiritual sequel to an earlier movie of his, Grosse Pointe Blank. While it was critically panned for heavy-handedness and having a much more predictable plot than its predecessor, I’d recommend it to anyone who hasn’t seen it for Dan Akroyd’s spot-on impression of Dick Cheney, if nothing else. It also has one of the best names I’ve ever heard for a character in a movie, “Yonica Babyyeah.”

I have a couple of other things I’m trying to develop, including a cartoon on Congress deciding not to repeal $2 billion in tax breaks for oil companies, but since my sister’s getting married on Saturday, I don’t know if I’ll be able to finish anything new before Sunday. Keep an eye on your RSS feed or my Twitter.

Fuzzy Aim

deephurting — Fri, 06 May 2011 15:00:59 +0000

I actually had this idea right away after hearing about the death of Osama Bin Laden, but because it was very similar to a cartoon I did on Saddam Hussein’s execution in 2007, I wasted a few days trying to see if I could come up with anything better, and consequently I’m a bit late to the party.

As most of you are no doubt aware, “party” isn’t merely being used as a figure of speech, here. I’m not going to mourn the loss of an evil, mass-murdering psychopath, of course, but I do find the bloodlust reflected in many of my countrymens’ jubilant celebrations disappointing and dangerously short-sighted, though not all that surprising.

Other than ridding the world of a very bad person, I don’t see what practical ends killing him has accomplished. He didn’t really seem to constitute a clear and present danger to national security any more–guy wasn’t even armed when Navy SEALS busted in on him. Surely it would have been a better idea to capture him and publicly eviscerate his ideology, instead of martyring him immediately? I feel the path that was chosen will only result in the germination of a bigger crop of new terrorists, more determined to continue Bin Laden’s war than ever.

And look, we’re still mired in Iraq and Afghanistan. Killing Bin Laden didn’t save anybody’s lives there. If anything, it puts them in greater jeopardy.

I also think a longer, drawn-out public spectacle of some sort would have been more likely to force Americans to reflect on how our government’s foreign and economic policies, as well as our greedy consumption of the world’s resources, aid the persistence of terrorism. I saw part of a program on HGTV today about the most expensive homes in the world. This fat woman was talking about her $5 million closet, and how she thought she needed to buy more stuff to put in it since it isn’t full. As she bragged about the garish opulence of her overwrought home, I thought, “This is why the terrorists want to kill us.”

As David Cross once said in reference to seeing a commercial for battery-operated scissors: “The terrorists hate our freedom? I hate our freedom, if this is what we’re gonna do with it!”

This is a very broad topic, and the above cartoon doesn’t even come close to saying everything I’d like to say about it, so I may have at least one more on it in the next update. Stay tuned!

Learning from Past Mistakes

deephurting — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 16:30:39 +0000

Sam’s Club

deephurting — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 16:00:54 +0000

I should be doing more lately on the Libyan revolution, but it’s a difficult subject to comment on, especially in light of the US’s current occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.

I do feel we have a legitimate humanitarian mission in Libya, but it’s hard to trust our government to treat it as anything other than yet another opportunity to put down an anti-US tinpot and distribute his country’s resources to extra-national corporations, instead of the people who live there.

While I was playing with a few ideas involving the US stretching its military too thin by adding another front to its war in the Middle East, a friend of mine pointed out that this isn’t really an accurate characterization until we send ground forces to Libya.

I nearly drew a cartoon that showed Uncle Sam as a knight unable to properly rescue a damsel in distress as she falls from a tower because he’s already carrying two others, but I’ve had problems drawing people falling from a great height before, and the gag implied more virtue than I felt Sam deserved, so I tried to come up with something that would cast him as both a rescuer, and a potential aggressor, and ended up spinning the above image off from the concept of damsels in distress.

I wish I’d drawn the woman representing Libya fighting back a bit, perhaps wielding a club of her own. She’s too passive, as it is here. It really would’ve been the final piece of the narrative, which is noticeably missing from the finished illustration.

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).

Shock & Awe

deephurting — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 10:34:52 +0000

You Are Forgotten

deephurting — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 04:10:05 +0000

Animal Mother

deephurting — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 10:23:00 +0000

This cartoon addresses a topic from last week, but hardly anybody else did anything on it, and my approach here has broader applications than the initial topic that sparked it.

I actually had the original idea for this during the 2008 election, but didn’t use it at the time. Since Sarah Palin’s once again using her children as PR cannon fodder, I thought now would be a good time to haul this out of the vault.

The imagery, of course, makes reference to one of my favorite movies, Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. The shot is very similar to a scene shortly before the climax, and there are some symbolic Easter Eggs here for anyone who can identify the characters based on what’s written on their helmets.