Fucking SHRUG already.

The suspense is killing us.

We, the Ninety Nine Percent of all American citizens, who are now in OPEN REVOLT against what is no longer a democratic government answerable to the People, have been waiting for the so-called Productive Citizens, alleged Producers, much ballyhooed Wealth Creators and all around Engines of America to keep their word to pull up stakes and abandon ship like some captain off a luxury liner that he just ran ashore onto some oil-stained beach.

Isn’t that the dream of Ayn Rand, The Martin Luther King of Selfishness? That those Americans who have triumphed, who have stradled Industry like Collosus, will find the lower classes no longer in awe of them, and will evacuate the world to live lives of splendor in some mountain fortress, or more likely some fucking Caribbean island within a jet ski’s ride of the Caymans?

Book your tickets.

We’ve seen how you greeted the end of the Cold War, your smug, head-shaking disappointment that the triumph of capitalism also meant surrendering to the aeon of the One World Sweatshop, where dignity means working in a tarpaper shack in Indonesia for pennies an hour so we can have rubber pigs to squeeze while we wait for our YouTube to load.

And soon the Cult of Rand will release an ass-humping documentary to honor their founder’s vision, and to toast the production of the immaculately panned big-screen adaptation of Atlas Shrugged, a work based on

The Shittiest

Novel

Ever

Written.

A tale of how the most beneficent Americans, her industrial titans, find they have fallen from favor in the eyes of the common squeezemop. They then flee and hide behind a holographic forcefield (Jesus wept) as the world that would not kiss their all-white asses collapses under the unsucked fat of its own indolence.

(“Impossible! ” you cry.  “Surely the Industrialists had made every effort to keep the middle class healthy, excercised great sobriety in their adventures in high finance, and held to an ethos of not intruding in the People’s government?” Yes, but such was the Dystopia they found themselves in.)

The documentary is Ayn Rand and the Prophecy of Atlas Shrugged, a title worthy of J.K. Rowling. (Coincidentally, Rowling DID achieve excellence in the field of novels and became richer than the Queen, and yet somehow she doesn’t make us want to cut her throat for it.) It is the latest call for American’s to worship the gilded hem of the robes of Those who think they were carved from God’s own foreskin: The One Percent, they who would threaten to Shrug.

So Shrug. Swing those shoulder blades up, up, UP!

Go hide in the land of Star Trek like you promised. Because the Moochers, the Looters, the Users, the Takers, the Unproductive Citizens–The Ninety-Nine Percent of us who aren’t raking in the green in Everest-sized heaps, the ones who didn’t become a Rowling–that’s exactly what we’re asking you to do. Take a hike.

We’ve heard enough about the rich and their sacred juices, about a paradise where Americans are entitled to all that the Corporations leave for us before they head for the stars, which judging by the size of their stomachs will be a few crystals of sodium.

Wait! I think I hear Wealth’s patent-pending response! “You own a cell phone /iPod /iPad/ Kindle/ wristwatch, so what the hell are you so angry about?”

Yes, thank you for selling us our toys. And how exactly does that entitle you to use copious fraud and racketeering to nosedive the economy into a mountainside, then mushroom the public debt to pay for the catastrophe while you keep pulling down salaries the size of Powerball payouts?

By all means, strike. I mean, you aren’t still pretending that we haven’t seen behind the curtain, are you Oz old buddy?

The Wizard of Oz? Why, that’s another book with a message about the Great and Powerful. I’m surprised you haven’t read it.

SOPA /PIPA is our benighted government’s effort to put the Internet genie back in its bottle. It is basically an electronic PATRIOT Act. Any surprise that the Democrats are once again showing themselves to be just like their “opponents” when it comes to your liberties? Call or e-mail your congressman today and tell them to FUCK OFF.

Like all men I do my best thinking on the can. This is why our desert enemies will never defeat us. Although they have a blood lust that is nearly Klingon in its intensity and bear us an inexhaustible grudge that comes from living all year round in an oven, nevertheless they squat over holes to take their dumps. Science has shown that unclenching the sphincter loosens the brain as well, but only with the proper buttock support. This is why the symbol of Western intellectual superiority is Rodin’s The Thinker; a man lost in thought while pinching a loaf. Al Qaeda will never understand this.

(Wait… are we still at war with al Qaeda? I know we are still spending billions every nanosecond on some fucking conflict… but where? Osama is dead, Saddam is dead, Qad… Khad… Ghadaffaqi is dead, we’ve yanked our boys from Iraq, we’ve all but signed our surrender with the Taliban… where the hell is the money going? But I digress…)

So, this is a roundabout way of saying that I am typing this from the comfort of my loo. And since I don’t have a fancy iNook, I have had to drag my desktop computer in here with me. Not comfortable, but I couldn’t brainstorm my ambitions for the coming year any other way.

So, 2012. There’s a lot to do before the Mayans return in their flying saucers and bestow free will on the Internet, but what will it mean for you, the consumer of Deep Fried/Weapon Brown products? Great things are coming, new beginnings, new endings, and so much to buy that you will beg your manager for extra graveyard shifts at the Wendy’s drive-thru just to purchase them! Here is what is on the agenda:

Weapon Brown

Chuck’s brain-shattering  epic will wrap this year, paving the way for the long promised graphic novel that will be stuffed to bursting with extra goodness. The arrival of the GN will be presaged by a pre-order sale which will include some awesomely neato prizes for a few lucky customers. You can shove your Dark Knight Rises up Promethus’s poo maker, because the epic conclusion to Weapon Brown: Blockhead’s War will be the event of the season.

Before that bomb drops, however, there are still some comic books you will need to stock your fallout shelters with. Coming darn soon is a pre-order sale for issues #5 and #6 of Blockhead’s War, complete with some cool incentives. Also, you wanted it, now fuckin’ shell out for it: a crunchy Pops T-shirt will soon be on sale as well.

Deep Fried

The end of Weapon Brown will by no means be the end of Whatisdeepfried.com’s bad ass entertainment. Long promised and now streaking towards earth is the extinction-level event that is the return of Deep Fried! Beepo, Roadkill, Squints and yes, Clarissa will all return in 2012 with new stories on this, your favorite website, that will make you laugh, cry and quickly click over to Amazon when you hear your co-workers approaching. Beepo will go looking for love in all the wrong places, Squints will go looking for work in all the wrong places, and Roadkill… oh God. Let’s just say that Roadkill has been letting a lot of things build up, and now someone has to pay the price.

2012 will also see the arrival of Weapons Grade Deep Fried,  the bound edition of volume 2 of Deep Fried, which will contain new, unpublished material, including the way overdue Clarissa story Take Me to Work Day.

Who are…The Garbagemen?

For those of you who dig the action of Weapon Brown and are sad to see it depart, you can stop hoarding sleeping pills and razorblades. I’ve been cooking up my next unconventional adventure for some time now, and Weapon Brown fans who enjoy my mix of comedy, violence and irreverence will soon have something new to shoot in their veins.

The Garbagemen is an absurdist superhero thriller that will do for the world of comic books what Weapon Brown has done for comic strips. Set against the backdrop of Garbage Day, a 9/11-style tragedy, the Garbagemen are a team of exaggerated 90s-era superheroes looking to reclaim their honor after failing to prevent the world’s most absurd terrorist attack. However, their new job as the government’s professional patsies soon leads them into a spiral of retcons and reboots that threatens to tear the world to shreds, unless someone can make sense of it all!

The Garbagemen is a work in progress, so I can’t give a hard date on its debut. But if you love Chuck, you will want to let your anticipation build for this, my next experiment in cockamamie satire.

…

What else can I squeeze into one year? Another Easter Egg hunt if you are good, and I think I’ve teased you with the promise of my nifty Weapon Brown animated trailer long enough. Also, if the Republicans choose the wrong candidate, I can’t promise I won’t run for president. We’ll see.

(I wonder if I can do all this and still sleep in until noon every day? Fukkit. I can do anything I want. I’m a cartoonist!)

I thought the trailer to Ridley Scott’s upcoming Summer bone crusher Prometheus looked familiar…

I have been meaning to remark on the string of anticipatory comments attached to Weapon Brown 279 about what will become of Chuck when this (final???) story arc wraps. But first, let me acknowledge the passing of an important figure in American politics and letters.

Christopher Hitchens, the hard-drinking, hard-charging polemicist, author and bon vivant whose career gained added illumination in the past few years for his pungent attacks on religion, died today of esophageal cancer (sadly, he was also hard-smoking).

It is for his bruising critique of religion and the religious that I became a fan of Hitchens, but I quickly gained respect for the wit and education he brought to all his topics of interest, and for being a true scrapper for the Left while being willing to give them a rap on the chin when they deserved it as well.

Hitchens was a transplant from England who became a US citizen some years back, often citing Thomas Jefferson’s wall of separation between Church and State as America’s seminal contribution to the world. In debates (of which he participated in scores after the publication of his book God is Not Great) his unrelenting, Oxford-educated wit dominated the stage, never sounding better than when up against reedy twerps like Dinesh D’Souza. Love him or hate him, the guy crushed.

Hitchens planted coffee in Castro’s Cuba and supported the war in Iraq. He prepared a jail cell in Hell for Henry Kissenger and another in the same block for Mother Teresa. He was a contrarian for all seasons. (I’m worried that he might not have liked that last line, but he wouldn’t give a fuck about what someone like Christopher Hitchens thought of his writing, so neither will I.)

From Hitchens I gained an appreciation for George Orwell that extended beyond his well known fiction, an aggressive and mellifluous role model for political apolagetics (in fantasy debates I conduct in my head I often assume his voice), and a reminder that brains go better with balls.

We need him still. I’ll miss him.

In this age of economic apocalypse, social unrest and the genetically engineered plague I released in the produce section of an area Whole Foods yesterday afternoon, it can be hard to know where to spend your Christmas dollars. Rejoice! For I have made the decision for you.

Read this!

Looking for a good-natured web strip about a modern American family? Stay 500 meters from Odori Park at all times. Chris Watkins’ dark, troubling serial about a mixed race couple (a normal-colored woman and a pasty white man) and their child–who walks the razor’s edge between two worlds while belonging to neither– would make David Lynch squirm.

Okay, maybe I am reading a little into this strip. On second glance, it  is kinda cute and well drawn, and  If you are into that kind of stuff I suppose you will want to buy the book as well. But if you know how to read subtext, you’ll realize that the kid might go Dexter at any moment.

Put this in your ears!

I recently discovered Rochester-area musician Benjamin Jameson Morey and now demand 10% of all his future profits. I am not good at dissecting musical styles, so I guess if I describe his sound as The Moldy Peaches spliced with Cake it means no more or less than if I described it as the Rolling Stones covering the Bugaloos. He describes himself as “anti-folk rock”, but I think he is keeping a little piece of folk ass in a studio apartment downtown. Just listen.

Find his music here and at his personal website. I definitely recommend.

The last of my probing and personal Occupied! cartoons for the City Newspaper. Ah, it felt good to shake the pillars of society once again.

As I continue to juggle the responsibilities of being a cartoonist for free and a cartoonist for money, please forgive my continued Weapon Brown tardiness and instead enjoy my latest Occupied! cartoon!

The oddly named and hopelessly English “Henry Higgins Is My Homeboy” has posted an interview he conducted with me on Ain’t It Cool News. I tried to stay focused on a small chapbook of lesbian poetry I published in 1998 under the name Elaine Pinkmitten, but somehow the conversation got steered onto Weapon Brown. Sigh.