Deep Fried: The comic that leaves a STAIN!

7/18
Don't delay and miss your chance to bid on some original artwork that has been burning a hole in my portfolio! I am currently auctioning three 14x17 pen and ink drawings on E-Bay that would look wonderful in almost any den! Here they are, with their links

Superman being super friendly and giving Wonder Woman a horseyback ride...

...Wolverine looking wolverpissed...
...and my favorite, the marvelous Marv, from Sin City.

You can see bigger pictures on their auction pages. By the way, I have a whole lot of original Deep Fried comic book and comic strip pages for sale. If there is any page or strip that you have a fancy for, drop me a line and inquire about it.

Pretty soon I will have a proper page for purchaseable artwork, but it's never too soon to buy! Halloween will be here before you know it, then that thing where the family eats dinner together and no one says grace anymore because Gramma died....THEN CHRISTMAS!! Don't waste time shopping for a nut log for that sister-in-law you can't stand. Give her a Deep Fried "illustrated present" and then see the chilly look you get!

7/12
"The White House is not engaging in a cover-up here" said Rush Limbaugh today, pressing the face of his Jack Nicklaus Signature Series eight iron into the soft wax of today's White House press briefing. His imprimatur officially seals the Plame/Rove Affair as a bona fide scandal.

If only that drug-deafened fuck could have heard himself today as he belched an utterly Nixonian tirade against all the President's enemies, from the Democrats to the Republican faithless to to the very atmosphere of Washington itself, so hopelessly liberal that any attempt to make the capital safe for oligarchy can't help but dissolve like a salted slug.

Maybe Marlee Matlin can sign the transcript to him later.

If the gelatinous obfuscations of Scott McClellan are any indication, Karl Rove is almost positively the source of the leak that revealed the covert CIA status of Bush denouncer Joe Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame (first reported by flying insect connoisseur Robert Novak). You should avail yourself of the video, if only to savor the hypocritical vim that the press corp is now exercising in trying to get a straight answer from McClellan, a level of enthusiasm that, had it been applied to the President before March of 2003, would probably have kept us out of war.

Rush, sucking hard on a Macanudo cock, went on to suggest that the real scandal is whoever New York Times reporter Judith Miller is trying to protect as she serves time for not divulging her own source in the Plame affair. The vulgarity of Rush's efforts to suggest that the source might be Plame's own husband was forgivable given the pitiful exasperation he frothed with as he bitched about being the only person in the country "carrying the water for this administration."

As to why Miller is not coming clean when Time magazine's Matt Cooper has already revealed the same source's name to the grand jury is not entirely clear. You can take Miller's word that it is based on principle, in that her source was "coerced" to offer the "general release" from the confidentiality agreement that tied hers and Cooper's tongues. Or you can buy into the right wing's spin that the source, once revelaed, will actually embarrass the President's enemies more than the bitch himself.

My own theory is that Miller is holding out for principle's sake, but only insofar as it will further damn Rove when he is finally forced to accept culpability. She is carrying a cross for the maligned New York Times, and indeed the entire mass media, which has had it's colon bruised by this White House far too often. (Though who can resist an ass that offers itself so willingly and so frequently?)

Miller is playing the anti-Rove, one who refuses to reveal secret identities no matter what the cost. The longer Karl's reticence keeps Miller imprisoned the harsher the spotlight glare on the White House when he finally fesses up.

We can see the President's pit stains over this in his courteous deference to the Democrats' call for bipartisanship in picking Sandra Day O'Connor's replacement to the Supreme Court. If you listen to Bush speak lately you will hear that a note of Dana Carvey's impression of his father has begun to creep into the President's voice.

Just don't be surprised if, when Rehnquist resigns, Bush's pick for Chief Justice is the most fanatical Texan ever to play with snakes during a Sunday sermon. He'll need as sympathetic a judge as he can find for the impeachment.

Throw some gas on the bonfire! Put this gif on your website! Just right click and save!

7/9
I hope the following observation will not be misconstrued as implying that the London bombings were in any way sauce for the gander, but every time I hear someone say of London that "it was only a matter of time", I must ask, only a matter of time until what? Until someone whose citizens we actually care about got a dose of what Baghdad endures 7-21 times a week?

Intellectually and emotionally we know why London rates extended coverage. Morally, however, it is perverse that one country should earn more tears after a single day of horror than another country which has sustained years of this shit, due in some small part to the half-assed military planning of country A.

Neither England nor Iraq asked for or deserved to be victimized by terrorists. It is not England's fault that they have been made a target of Islamic extremists, but they, and we, are the reason that Iraq has been made one. Everyone, left, right and center, had better remember that. They should also recognize that at this point it doesn't matter whether or not you voted for Bush or supported the war. A nation makes a commitment by its actions, a commitment which is binding on all its people. Cold feet is not an escape clause.

If we have to bleed with Iraq, so be it. We can't ask the rest of the world to suffer because we collectively chose to forget that wars cost lives.

.....

You know what, though? Fuck the world's misery! Deep Fried just got reviewed on Ain't It Cool News! Exposure, baby! Cures the headline blues!

7/7

Wow. I guess France really wanted those Olympics.

I awoke this morning from a dream— in which terrorists were attacking an amalgamation of New York City and Helm's Deep with a shoulder launched nuke— to the news that London had just enjoyed their own 3/11 (Madrid's lo-carb 9/11). It was like waking up to find yourself clutching Freddy's hat.

Nice to see that the war in Iraq is still reaping dividends.

The fundamental flaw of Bush's War could use some reiteration here. Although theories abound regarding the genuine what and why of Iraq, and surely the truth must be made up of several of these overlapping, the primary sell to the public was this: Iraq and Al Qaeda were natural, if not actual, allies. Knocking over the one was going to be an inevitable blow to the other.

In the post-Afghanistan afterglow, the ephemeral nature of this claim did not seem as nonsensical as it does today. Hadn't that war gone so smashingly, what with the burqas flying off and the poppy fields once more in bloom? Kick out the Taliban, let the warlords divvy up the country into fiefdoms, put a handsome guy with a fez in Kabul's city hall. That's regime change! And if it worked once...

Oops.

At this point, to keep fighting in Iraq only makes sense in the broad, heroic terms of a clash of civilizations. From a WMD standpoint we have achieved all we intended to do to (the air of the Middle East, at least, will be anthrax free). But in the terms of the War on Terror, it has been an unredeemable failure. Islamic fundamentalism has been handed an opportunity for mischief it could never have earned on its own. Meanwhile, the dream of a free Iraq has been reduced to the hope that Babylon will serve as a giant roach motel, sucking in all evil and leaving the Shirelings free to while away their days eating pies.

Once again this has proven to be a scheme only a Christian would hatch. Bush denounces any time table for withdrawl that would give our enemies hope, but refuses to increase troop levels in any way that would give them pause. Simultaneously he sooths a worried public with promises that not a single additional sacrifice will be required of them to secure victory. In fact, all ice cream cones will now come with an extra scoop!

So this is what it's like to lose. No wonder we miss the Nazis.

England now has a chance to prove that it is more than just our water boy in this war. If they are really in it to win it they will pony up some more troops, although this might have the undesirable effect at home of making it seem that our own commitment could use some more meat on its bones.

But of course, this is nonsense. England wishes it had never got involved with in this cock up. That's why a single drop of evidence that Iraq was a con job goes over better there than a video of George Bush and Ernst Blofeld hatching 9/11 while sipping blood from Caligula's skull and shown simultaneously in every IMAX theater in the nation would ever play here.

No, they will continue to drown politely with us, not quite understanding why they keep trusting these cowboys, but determined never to let the French see that.

6/24
If any of you thought that my last bloggin was off the mark, and that "stranger danger" deserves at least as much of a federal eradication crusade as polio, this week's "babe in the woods"drama, the missing Utah Boy Scout, has a lesson in it.

After the errant 11-year-old was found unharmed, his mother revealed this:

Brennan's mother, Jody Hawkins, suggested her son may have been avoiding searchers because of his father's advice.

"He had two thoughts going through his head all the time," she said. "Toby's always told him that 'if you get lost, stay on the trail.' So he stayed on the trail. "We've also told him don't talk to strangers... When an ATV [all-terrain vehicle] or horse came by, he got off the trail. ... When they left, he got back on the trail."

"His biggest fear, he told me, was someone would steal him," she said.

Ironically, the dangers of exposure, starvation and large, flesh-eating mammals were scheduled to be covered in a series of workshops planned that weekend at Boy Scout camp, although sources tell Whatisdeepfried.com that the boy had only signed up for archery and wallet making.

6/14
The air was a swamp of warm oatmeal, hugging me like a long lost brother. Mosquitoes bred in the standing pool of sweat on my upper lip while I sipped my vodka and cranberry. Toothpicks of ice bobbed in the glass that had been D-cell sized rocks only half a minute before. Through the ozone haze I could see a valiant newsboy coming up the street, plowing his Schwinn Rollfast through the wet woolen atmosphere and pitching rolled copies of the Democrat & Chronicle at his customers' houses. They landed spluk on the doorsteps, nothing but papier mache'.

Summer had arrived in Rochester like a fat aunt, with sloppy 85º kisses for everyone.

The weather in my neck of the woods this week must have been intended by God for some Louisiana bayou. The term "muggy" is too Sesame Street to do the last five days justice, so the above prose must stand in until meteorology comes up with an appropriate descriptor for the current phenomenon. My own suggestion is "gewurrllghhnthllg", which I only arrived at after gargling a mason jar of earth worms. Probably won't catch on.

So, you may have noticed my site lurching towards entropy lately. Without the weekly comic strip to anchor it, Whatisdeepfried.com has become as missionless as our effort in Iraq. I assure you it is all part of a plan.

Yessir. Well conceived plan.

More of a plot, really. A scheme, if you want to pick nits.

Okay, my entire business plan is actually written down on the back of a Bazooka Joe wrapper which I haven't seen in eight weeks. But I've got a good idea where it might be, and once I find it, look out Internet!

It's true, this web site became somewhat formless after I completed the last issue of Deep Fried. There were a few employment objectives I needed to tackle and I wanted to backlog some content before returning to a weekly schedule of regular goodies. And then my usual mental clutter kicked in and both of those objectives also wound up needing a tow from AAA.

But after a longer delay than I would have liked, things are now back on track. I just had a computer exorcist cast out the spyware and viruses from my "previously loved" new computer, which means I can get back to work on the animations.

There's the rub though, since getting that process streamlined is part of the effort. The cartoons have thus far proven to be a real time sucker, and I see no point in doing this if I can't produce a timely product. So, there are still several months of work ahead before I'll have this enterprise whipped back into shape. When that happens, however, I think you will dig the results.

I've also had several people send me earnest pleas for the return of the strip, which I would eagerly do if not for the need to be steadfast and give the animation the effort it requires. I have wanted to take this new direction for a while, and if it works as I think you will be in for a very unusual new type of entertainment here. So bear with me if you can!

And do not think I have forgotten the value of comedically reaming our politicians either. My Great Leap Forward will renew my anarchic efforts to destroy our nation with fresh Weapons of Mass Corruption that Hans Blix never dreamed of!

More info as events warrant.

Meanwhile, I would like you to consider the following unpublishable opinion, which I call

Megan's Claw

There is always a witch hunt taking place in this country. It changes the name of its target from time to time, but the eternal witch hunt has an inertia of its own. In the realm of threats to civilization there may be many culprits at once. Communists, homosexuals, pot smokers, black nationalists...the fiends fade in and out of style.

The child molester, however, is an evergreen threat, as he bespeaks the horror that is violation of innocence. As such, he (sometimes she) is the gold standard in any politician's campaign for law and order, and beware ever becoming the dissenting voice against any action piously taken on behalf of "our children".

Moreover, representing as he does the perceived outer edge of sexual tolerability, the child molester is crucial in any moral crusade, which is to say, any campaign that seeks to reign in society's pursuit of pleasure. Decency demands that in our changing, permissive times, some form of sexual expression be put forth as a common bogeyman fit to evoke reflexive horror in the citizenry. After all, are we not perversely supposed to take pride in the abject violence that is war? There must be a balance in even the most corrupt equations.

And the fact that child molesters are A-1 scumbags is, of course, the grease that lubricates these gears.

Recently though, there has been an increased demand in both the media and government that more drastic steps be taken to "safeguard" children. The fact that that these steps represent diminished safety for voting adults is easily glossed over for the reasons I cite above. We should be paying close attention to these efforts, however, for they are the latest push to further what many are calling the "surveillance society", or less generously, Big You Know Who.

In our present political and economic climate, the idea of privacy is considered as quaint as the Geneva Convention. How can you expect privacy when at any moment the government may need to subject you (well, not you. Your neighbor, of course. The one who owns the superette) to extraordinary rendition? At the same time, having your identity stolen or your Social Security number snatched with a million others from a company you have never done business with is surely a small price to pay for all those credit cards you carry, right?

And you are one of the good ones! So if privacy in our society does not exist for you, how can it be expected to exist for society's criminals?

So goes the unspoken logic behind the idea of GPS monitoring for sex offenders.

Under Megan's Law, the states are now required to keep a registry of sex offenders and their addresses. Offenders are generally placed into one of three levels, each representing their likelihood to repeat their crimes, which to some degree is represented by the level of violence their crimes involved. Less violent or predatory action (incest, statutory rape) may get you a level one, while pathological types typically get a level three. These levels determine what information local police can release to the public through websites and pamphleteering about sex offenders living in their area.

Starting with recent legislation in Florida, a movement has begun to place GPS tracking bracelets on all released level three sex offenders, even those not on parole. The mandate is for lifetime monitoring. When the offender enters a "hotzone" (such as school area), police are signaled. Theoretically, if you exclude the problem of the police having to fire up the chopper every time a released felon drives past a Chuck E. Cheese, the monitors will supposedly deter the wearer from repeating his villainy, and can rule him out as a suspect in certain investigations.

Naturally, ideas like this meet almost no resistance when they are offered to the public. Who the hell wouldn't want a child rapist under 24 hour surveillance? But it is here, at the soft underbelly of the public's resistance to government intrusion, that the knife enters. And from there we have the start of a conundrum for our civil liberties.

Because no free society can stand the creation of a class of people who, having served their time in jail, are still under lock and key. The idea of monitoring released inmates--for our children's sake!!--has a specious appeal that will not start to show its fangs until that monitoring is requested for lower level sex offenders and, simultaneously, for those persons who you also would not want living next door to you, such as drug dealers, manslaughterers, and a host of other criminals who could also revert to form and who are only marginally more savory than kiddy diddlers.

Ah! The old slippery slope, you say. But it is a slope that we have already clearly begun to descend. The new hope of monsters tagged and numbered by judicial game wardens comes on top of existing law that already gives the public an exclusive right to monitor the whereabouts of a class of criminal Untouchables (in the Calcutta and not the Treasury sense of the word) that they are not entitled to under any other circumstances, not even for murderers. The realm of sex offense seems to be the proving ground for all sorts of efforts to extend the bounds of the prison yard to include the community as a whole.

But only for the worst of the worst, correct? Only for those whose intent to rape, murder and sodomize the corpse of little girls is all but a certainty? To listen to the news you would think that such events were a daily occurrence, instead of tragic aberrations. For the moment the proponents of GPS legislation can make the argument that they are only seeking new ways to control those who will not control themselves, because the move in Florida, New York and other states to bell the cat by and large only targets level three's, those deemed most predatory.

However, that standard is legally very thin, since we have already declared that the price for crimes is to be paid in the form of jail time, and the threat of further time taken away is the only way to reasonably manage criminals of all types in a free society. People must not be punished for crimes they only might commit, otherwise who isn't a criminal? The "chilling effect" of an electronic bracelet could naturally be applied to all sorts of felons with similar effect. Wouldn't we be better off knowing that a convicted drunk driver could never sit behind the wheel again without the police knowing it? Should armed robbers not know that the State will be able to record every 7-11 they enter for the rest of their lives?

And in the meantime, the noose is also being tightened around those sex offenders deemed least likely to reoffend (which includes a wide range of types who do not fall into the playground lurker category), restricting where they can live and work and in general eroding the very principle of a person paying their debt to society.

This may seem like an impassioned defense of people who prey on the most vulnerable, but it is not. It is a warning that it is possible for a society not to know that it has already done all that can be done to punish or prevent a type of crime, and the rest is simply judicial excess and an experiment in political pandering. In the case of sexual assault, new and novel means of punishment are an easy sell, whether or not they actually improve our safety, and little consideration seems to be given to the harm that could come from giving an additional license of authority to the government. If GPS monitoring is good for some, why not for all?

When does a scarlet letter become a yellow star?

6/2
In the movie "Adaptation" there is a scene where an Everglades orchid hunter describes the bee orchid, a flower that resembles a queen bee so closely that male bees are compelled to give it the Ron Jeremy treatment and thus spread the flower's pollen.

In the movie they used prop flowers which so resembled a bee that seeing them I nearly had to contact the Kansas State Board of Education. If ever they needed airtight proof of God's existence, such that they could send their "intelligent design" quacks back to their former careers of debunking the moon landing on the Art Bell show, this was it.

As you can see, the real flower would only fool some dumb as fuck redneck bee who'd been huffing Raid with a cockroach named Chico in a Texaco men's room.

Still, that's not a bad likeness for a brainless flower that is relying on a one in ten trillion roll of the genetic dice that it will resemble a flower-loving insect in order to survive a single Spring on planet earth.

However, I have an eerier coincidence to report.

Yesterday afternoon I was listening to Fresh Air. The guest, Martin Scorcese's film editor Thelma Schoonmaker, mentioned the work of her husband Michael Powell, who directed a movie called "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp." I paid special attention to that title. Colonel Blimp. Funny name, n'est pas?

So thens I come across this music video just last night. Note the name of the production company at the beginning. Colonel fucking Blimp!

"Colonel Blimp" is not a name like "Colonel Sanders" that one could reasonably expect to hear eighteen times a night during TV time. I have not heard that name once in my entire life, and now I have encountered it twice in a single day. On top of that the video rocks, so that I have watched it four times already, thus multiplying my Colonel Blimp exposures to way, wayyyy more than my previous tally of none.

Plainly I have cracked some secret code of the Illuminati. I will report more after I go hump this remarkably sexy flower I have just now spied on my lawn.

5/30
When life hands you a sparkling sunny day and a tank sitting in a residential neighborhood of Scranton, PA, capital of Redtopia, you know that destiny is calling! So on this fine Memorial Day I say...

GOD BLESS AMERICA AND ALL OF HER WARS!

5/26
Here's a link to a lecture given by Michael Medved that dovetails nicely with what I was talking about yesterday. By now it should be plain that seizing Hollywood is more than just a pipe dream for the right; it's next on their agenda. You heard it here first.

As with Lileks, Medved (would you like a pair of assless chaps to go with that mustache, Mike?) is confounded by Hollywood's unwillingness to roll out the red carpet for a new generatipn of Chuck Norris/Sly Stallone movie commandos to keep America's blood percolating. He doesn't make any bones about it: he wants propaganda and he wants it now.

Can anyone think of a movie that has celebrated America's victory in the Cold War? Probably most of us will think of Miracle. Apparently Hollywood can face the fact that we beat the Soviet Union in a hockey game, but not the fact that we overcame the Soviet Union politically—through attention to moral principles and through the maintenance of military superiority—because the entertainment elite is terribly invested in the idea that no war ever meant anything.

Let's see: open with a crowd of East Berliners sledgehammering away at the wall...pan over to a trenchcoated CIA spook dropping his cyanide pill onto the concrete and grinding it under his heel...and then what? 90 minutes of Jeane Kirkpatrick and William F. Buckley making out in the basement of the American Enterprise Institute? It's not like they surrendered, asshole!

5/25/05
Eyes left! Wizard World Philly will soon play host to the unique blend of carnival showmanship and used car salsesman desperation that is always the hallmark of one of my convention appearances.

If you haven't set aside the weekend of June 3rd for a cracklin' good time hanging out at my Artist Alley table, call the stereo shop and tell them you're gonna need off for a few days (switch schedules with Craig if you have to). I'm gonna have chips, wine-in-a-box, umm...Coldplay is gonna stop by and do a few sets...they said so...

Trust me, it's gonna be all you talk about for the next month at least, so fuckin' BE!

BITCH BITCH BITCH

I have been vascilating on whether or not to pick apart a recent Jim Lileks bloggin. Having given up my fixation on the AM radio fascisti I have come to realize that all such obsessions with enemy politics is, quite frankly, masturbatory. The subject of such critiques holds the natural high ground by never reading the criticism and not giving a rat's pucker either way, thus leaving the (consults thesaurus for a synonym for critic) slanderer with a deluded sense of his own authority.

However, if I didn't forsake my better judgement at least once a day I wouldn't be able to face myself in the mirror. And anyway, after caving in and laying down $10 of my labor power to see Revenge of the Sith, a film that I now admit I saw out of pure obligation to the franchise (in other words brand loyalty, the surest sign of capitalist slavery), I am forced to abandon all pretense of actually possessing principles.

(And, since Jim mentions that he is also planning to see that movie though he holds the same reservations I did, the high ground, whether or not he knew he held it, is now in play.)

Anyway, the piece provides a useful footnote to several blogginz I have written about Hollywood and the war effort. On 5/23 Jim writes:

Believe it or not, I finally saw "The Incredibles." I rarely see movies in the theater, so I missed the big-screen run. I bought the DVD the day it came out, but saved it for some Special Night when I could enjoy it without distraction. Well, I had plenty of time this weekend. I was almost afraid to watch it, frankly. You don't know what it's like to get a billion emails from people telling me I'm going to love a movie so completely I will want to be buried with the DVD, and dug up and reburied if it ever comes out on High-Def Blu-Ray discs. So along comes Friday. Perfect time. Perfect mood.

Unfortunately, I'd already rented "Team America."

(snippage)

I have to admit, though, it's a brilliant satire of all those US-forces vs. the terrorists movies we've suffered through in the last few years. You know, the ones with the Arab militants as the bad guys. The ones full of jingoistic drivel about Special Forces. The ones that feature all sorts of slam-bang action designed to make you feel good about our side and hate the other.

You know, those movies.

It was called Tears of the Sun, and it aborted the genre. Tough break, babe.

I have reported before on Lileks' complaints about the dearth of Kelly's Heroes/Operation Pacific/Destination Tokyo-style movies coming out of Hollywood these days. His frustration seems to be rooted in the theory that the War on Terror is an actual war and not a slogan, and that television is not doing a sufficient job of keeping the public consciousness preoccupied with threats of terror families nesting in our planned communities, selling peanut butter bars at the juvenile diabetes bake sale and plotting nuclear mischief when the shades are drawn (one of the themes of this season's 24).

"Team America," in other words, may be the first movie that satirizes a genre that doesn't actually exist. I know, I know, it's a satire of the Bruckheimer junk. It's a satire of a movie Bruckheimer might as well have made. But still. It felt a bit like having "Casino Royale" as the first Bond movie. the part about Team America ruining all the monuments in foreign lands was funny, because - well, because we're America and we don't aim, right? It never ceases to amaze me that the country with the biggest weapons - nukes - bothered to invent a bomb that could fly through a window and blow up everything on the right side of the room that started with the letter "K." But hey, it's all a joke. We're trigger happy cowboys with bad aim who don't care what we hit, and Kim Il Jong is a megalomaniac who wants to sell bad weapons to terrorists and runs a police state. Hell, everyone takes a hit! Relax.

Lileks, like many Republicans who thought that the Bush Doctrine would result in some of those conclusive, score-settling fireworks they longed for in a war with the Reds, is plainly frustrated by the fact that most people are not onboard the Millennial War bandwagon. A police raid in Karachi, a violent demonstration in Jalalabad and a suicide car bomb outside of a police recruitment station in Kirkuk just do not a World War make.

I'm sure there will eventually be a few spy thrillers based on America's adventures in Pakistan and Sudan, especially as the pluralists lose their xenophobia-phobia and snuggle into the idea of full-time hostility with every mooslim nation on earth from now until eternity. But it's hard to make a tanks n' foxholes epic about an enemy with no army, no territory, and no front. How do you tap into that ra-ra spirit when the nation knows that the "war" is as won as it is ever going to be?

As for America's hawk-eyed aim when it comes to urban missile strikes, I don't think they've invented a bomb yet that asks for three forms of ID before blowing only it's target to Paradise, nor one that apologizes when it wanders a few meters off course and hits a home instead of the big Darth Vader helmet that the Legion of Doom held their meetings in.

And I did. Sort of. Mostly. Pretty much. You have to have a sphincter of infinitessimal tightness not to laugh at a bawdy puppet movie because you detect the faint harmonic overtones of (gasp) moral relativism. If you can't laugh at the "Freedom Ain't Free" song, you have clenched your buttocks so tightly your flatulence cannot be released without making a high keening sound only dogs can hear.

Then again, the "America (F*ck Yeah!)" song has a different version in the end credits: Wal-Mart (F*ck Yeah!) Gap (F*ck Yeah!) Baseball (F*ck Yeah!) NFL (F*ck Yeah!) Rock and Roll (F*ck Yeah!) The Internet (F*ck Yeah!) Slavery (F*ck Yeah!)

Because, you know, Americans are so into slavery these days, which we like totally invented anyway.

(snip)

Nah. We just kept slavery in style long after the rest of the civilized world had abandoned it. Because...well, because we thought Africans made good pack animals. Nothing wrong with pointing out that sometimes our country isn't the one setting the trends, is there?

Of course, in those early days France had not yet premiered the Terror.

I never got the impression that the South Park creators stood for anything except making something funny, which is preferable to a team devoted to making grim bleak movies about the lives of meth-addict dishwashers in Omaha and other such uplifting archetypes, I suppose. But it's not enough to be opposed to hypocrisy and cant; that's a rather adolescent stance, and it was old the day "Catcher in the Rye" entered its 3 millionth printing. You have to stand for something. I gather that Parker and Stone stand for making fun of Jerry Bruckheimer movies, actors, and bad country music. Not enough for a coherent political philosophy, but enough for a funny puppet movie.

The thing that Jim doesn't get about Trey Parker and Matt Stone is that their politics are fully coherent, because they DO stand for something: the truth. In Team America's most brilliant moment, the hero speaks the American Gospel that neither side can stand to hear: we're dicks. We do what we want because we can, and sometimes it's for the right reason.

The line goes, "Pussies hate dicks because dicks fuck pussies. But dicks also fuck assholes! And if you don't fuck the assholes they'll just shit all over everything!" It isn't Emerson, but there you have it. Europe may have topless beaches, but bare tits weren't going to hold back the Russians. Still, if our playmates now see that a little bit of the neighborhood bully has rubbed off on us, maybe that's what the folks in the double wides need to get hip to.

Heaven help someone who chooses a side that isn't recognized by Fox or NPR. How many people will actually take a stand against hypocrisy these days? Claiming that America's shit stinks but is a buttermilk biscuit compared to North Korea's may not be Manichaean enough for most. But the guy who up-armors his Honda Element with an inch thick layer of ribbon magnets, what is he saying? (besides "my other car is a refrigerator.")

Those magnets are the sum total of his contribution to the world-changing events going on around him. He purchases his place in the conflict as an afterthought while checking out at Target. "Will that be all, sir?" "No, I'll also take this disposable affirmation of my country's greatness. And a pack of Dentyne."

Give me some puerile toilet humor by two men who see people for what they really are over that level of "conviction" any day.

Jim isn't a complete crumb bum on the topic of cinema, though. He did find an antidote for the morally vague Team America.

"The Incredibles" was made by 30 year olds who remembered what it was like to be 16, but didn't particularly care to revisit those days, because it's so much better to be 30, with a spouse and a kid and a house and a sense that you're tied to something. Not an attitude; not some animist mumbo jumbo, but something large enough to behold and small enough to do.

I enjoyed The Incredibles, even though it was a cutesy poo version of a far superior concept tackled by Alan Moore in The Watchmen decades ago. Still, great action, warm, endearing story, good comedy. I'm not going to call Jim on that.

However, let's step back and reflect on the subtext of Pixar's latest nuanced hit. A freewheeling jock has life by the tail UNTIL HE GETS MARRIED, after which he is eaten by the domestic cancer of a job in a cube farm, mopey adolescents and having to take orders from pipsqueaks.

The resolution? Take on a hobby and bond with the wife and kids through some wholesome family activities (in the movie: fighting robots. In reality: Saturdays at Putt Putt).

In otherwords, we all have to grow up, settle down and kiss ass, but don't forget that pizza once in a while will beat the leftover blues. A life of fulfillment still boils down to PTA, mortgage and 401K.

Disney's getting bold, dawg!

5/20/05
Like the geek I swore never to be again, I attended a midnight showing of Revenge of the Sith last night.

Suffice to say that it was horrible in all the same ways the last two films were horrible, and all the more so because of the the momentus gravitas of this long awaited chapter of the epic. The long anticipated fall of the Republic and the rise of Vader, the very sperm and egg collision that precedes the original Star War, should have rated better treatment.

SFX-wise, Sith is outstanding. But at this point who cares? I don't say this casually, since I remember the days when a sci-fi movie with a single good special effect or Doug Trumbull-worthy spacecraft was the event of the season. Lucas built the special effects industry as we know it today, and his vision is on parade in every spectacularly overwrought scene of this film.

And Lucas has acknowledged fans' complaints about the abysmal stories and characters of the two previous chapters. Unfortunately, his only concession to the orthodox faithful's pleas for redemption was to reduce Jar Jar's screen time to a tiny, speechless cameo at the end of the film. This is actually more insulting than respectful, since it implies that that Jamaican fish alone was the cause of Star Wars fall from grace. Jar Jar actually served a useful purpose as a surrogate towards which the audience could direct all their hatred for these films' indigestable acting and dialog. Instead, Hayden Christensen, with his unbearable portrayal of the man who would be Darth, stands in for Jar Jar as the epitome of all of Star Wars' sins.

Hmm. Poetic! Maybe Lucas knew what he was doing after all!

I won't bore you with further details. If you are familiar with the last two films than you are already versed in the trilogy's suckage. They are, in short, exactly what the first three films would have been without Harrison Ford. So here's the good news: Ian McDiarmid plays Palpatine with great relish, which only gets better when he is revealed at last as the grotesque Darth Sidious. And the Nosferatu-like General Grievous is kind of interesting for a few minutes.

But to be honest, it's high time for a rebellion against this empire.

...

The Red Cross is confirming charges of Koran molestation at Gitmo of the likes which put Newsweek in hot water recently. Unfortunately their sources are the prisoners themselves, and we know they don't have a sense of humor about anything! Gosh, stick one chemical light up a guys ass...

And now we have word from the Pentagon (with a little coaxing by the ACLU) that when our military isn't defiling holy books they are getting their rocks off playing "Sophie's Choice" with Iraqi civilians.

Just remember: someday our country will deny that any of this ever happened. Probably after some big mouth Iraq vet brings it up during his presidential run.

5/17/05
Newsweek has now retracted it's story about interrogators at Guantanamo flushing the Koran down a toilet. Questions of whether or not they have been slipping severed fingers into the prisoners' chili remain unresolved.

Naturally the administration, eager for any news story about a Middle East hornet's nest that they didn't actually stir, has demanded an apology (but only because Karl Rove is supposed to be cc'd on all fake news he has not expressly greenlit).

Bear in mind that it appears that the source for the Newsweek story misled the writers regarding his certainty, as opposed to explicit negligence on the magazine's part. Neither has the Pentagon expressly stated that the charge is untrue (nor this one). In other words, it probably actually happened. But personally...

...I just can't believe it.

5/13/05
If you blinked you might have missed the war taking place in Iraq, but I assure you, it is still happening.

That "never say die" insurgency just continues to defy expectations, don't it? Over 400 pieces of collateral damaged in just two weeks! Of course, it helps when the enemy column you are attacking is only a horde of Tikriti Kinko employees who have queued up for an advance screening of Revenge of the Sith.

The insurgents, we are reminded, fall into two camps: the former Ba'athist "dead enders", those with the fancy Nokia remote detonators for their car bombs, and the D.I.Y. jihadis or "foreign fighters" who prefer to blow themselves up in crowds just so they can catch the priceless look on their victims' faces.

Do not confuse these Sunnis with the likes of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, the now downplayed Shiite face of the insurgency which is cooling its heels while the new government goes through the motions of establishing just enough democracy to get America out of their hair. After that the Shiite/Kurd alliance will have carte blanche to smash the resistance in ways that will make Saddam's tactics look like a Care Bear marshmallow fight by comparison.

Meanwhile, our own soldiers are keeping their death stats down to a respectable 2.11 corpses a day, a marked improvement over their casualty rate of 2.19 stiffs at this time last year. Who says we aren't winning this war? And if the excitement of Operation Matador has got you hopeful that our army is finally taking back the night in Iraq, here's more good news! We may finally have found a way to undermine the insurgency for good! Here's the hopeful word from the Asian Times:

Jeremy Binnie, Middle East editor of the London-based Jane's Sentinel Security Assessments, says it is still too early to know whether the insurgency is maintaining its strength or gradually waning. He says both sides can point to successes and setbacks. "Whilst clearly the situation isn't great for the Iraqi [government] and the US military in that country, it's not going all that well for the insurgents either," he said.

But Binnie says there are signs that new political initiatives in Baghdad could divide and weaken the insurgency in ways that military pressure alone has yet to do. "There are rumors that some of the Ba'athist factions [in the insurgency] are talking to the government and there might be some possibility of an amnesty, especially now that a Sunni tribal defense minister has been appointed," he said. "He might be able to bring some people in from the insurgency. And the insurgents, in some of their rhetoric and statements they publish on the Internet, seem to be concerned over the possibility of some of these factions going over."

Anbar province represent! Who's gonna want to blow themselves up for the insurgency once Saadoun al-Duleimi starts dolling out that enlistment bonus bling??

If you haven't been keeping score, here is the current list of turning points in the war that were supposed to have made Iraq all quiet-like by now:

Fall of Baghdad
Deaths of Qasay and Uday
Capture of Saddam
Sovereignty
Seige of Fallujah
January elections

We can now add "token Sunni ministers" to that collection of frail reeds. But hey, if two months from now the resistance is in full retreat and unexploded crowds of Iraqi families are safely gathering at a dozen new open air ice cream parlors outside the Green Zone, I'll eat my words. In the meantime, remember that the official terms of victory in Iraq have been expressly spelled out as handing the war over to the new government and bugging the fuck out.

And the time table for withdrawl? Approximately 3000 soldiers from now.

5/05/05
For those of you who care, or even for those of you who just like reading words on screens that have no relevance to your lives, Saturday May 6th is FREE COMIC BOOK DAY! Shops around the country will be giving out free comic books to inspire readership of the same. Visit your local comic shop and bring the papooses!

I will be appearing at Comics Etc. at the Village Gate Square in Rochester, NY (274 Goodman St.) from noon until 4 PM. Turn up, drop in and chill out! I'll sign virtually any body part offered.

5/04/05
If you are reading this I have returned safely from the Pittsburgh Comicon. If you are not reading this then I am dead, and Control probably already has you under satellite surveillance. Run! RUUUNNN!!

Great con that Pittsburgh. I made some quality loot, most especially thanks to patron of the Deep Fried arts John Dubel who bought five pages of my original artwork, though only after haggling me down on the price (this despite the fact that my artwork is so affordable that a Hasidic Scotsman would have been embarassed to pay less).

I drove to Pittsburgh and back in my new car, a '97 Taurus that comes to me courtesy of my late grandmother by way of my aunt Sharon. But what began as a joyous reunion with the freedom of automobile ownership (which I have not enjoyed for three years) has transformed my life into the final reel of Needful Things. In less than a week this free car has mutated into an uninspected, fluid dripping canker sore that, through a series of misunderstandings and hurt feelings that could have been authored by Euripides, has soured my relations with my aunt and is sure to queer Thanksgiving.

Call me Clarissa, I guess. Unfortunately, the real losers are the people of Nepal, since King Gyanendra always takes my aunt's side in these matters and will likely use this as a jutification to brutalize his country's political cartoonists more so.
...

Hey look! New comic strip this week! I prepared this one for the Kansas City Star which ran a handful of my strips over the last two months, and am only now legally free to share it with you non-Kansasians.

Several fans of my site approached me at the con to let me know they missed the strip. To be honest, I miss doing it. I enjoy the animations but they are much more time consuming than the comic, as well as being a little less gratifying to execute from an artistic point of view. Too much time staring at a screen, not enough time scratching away with my pen.

I have been scheming as to how to strike the proper balance and give you nice visitors what you want the most of. As you know, a regular Deep Fried animation is part of the plan, but the "regular" bit is what I am struggling with. As I have made clear, I need to keep an eye on my bottom line and spend my time developing only those products that are most desired by my public.

So, feel free to offer your imput as to what you would like to see more of. Strips? Black Jellybeans? News Beat? What is your pleasure?

But before you begin pondering that question, behold! The 2005 Pittsburgh Comicon Freak Show!

Let's hear it for the Ghost Busters Volunteer Auxilliary! I got all these guys to buy Deep Fried, which almost makes up for the sales they cost me by crowding around my table for an hour.

If you see these two on the street please contact me with their whereabouts. I bought a dime bag of red pills off of them which didn't do shit. "Whoa" my ass!

You call this cosplay? That's the worst Sailor Moon I've ever seen! As for the rabbit, unless you have a scepter that shoots hearts and stars hidden in that purse I wouldn't go strutting my stuff in Shinjuku, Miss Thang!

This twinkly old lady reminded me so much of Nana that I nearly had to drop her in a shark tank. She let her grandkids buy my comic however, so I only tied her up and threw her down a flight of stairs.

I realize that our world is threatened by the Overbrains of Regulon and that tough choices must be made. But an alliance between Wario and Lobster Johnson?? I don't know, man. I just don't know...

I drew a picture of Clarissa on this young lady's arm just before being sucked into the singularity above the bridge of her nose.

I'm not sure, but I think this is the Tick.

There is nothing particularly special about these girls, except that I have been having dream three-ways with them for about a week now.

This girl didn't like it when I slapped her against my palm and blew on her contact points, but it was the only way to get her to work.

Ladies and gentlemen, Kathy Griffin IS Phoenix!

Enjoy these pix while you can. Next week my site gets fumigated.

4/21/05
Although I have prepared a topic to expound upon today, why I thought a critique of the work of author Ayn Rand would be worth your time or mine suddenly eludes me. Rand is already recognized as a terrible author, so a pitiless dissection of The Fountainhead (which I completed) or Atlas Shrugged (which after a promisingly laughable start has now become a plate of literary brussel sprouts, and nearly a thousand pages left to go) would not only be redundant, but hopelessly irrelevant. Although people like Maggie Thatcher and Alan Greenspan are said to be followers of Rand's philosophy of Objectivism (succinctly, the veneration of capitalism and social Darwinism), we do not have to wait for half a century of intellectually bankrupt Third World revolutions in Rand's name to invalidate her theories, and not merely because she has none.

What makes her books such car wrecks is that Rand's immovable core, her faith in the virtue of personal excellence is plainly an alien concept to her when it comes to writing. Although her pages are laboriously jammed with rich, descriptive text, her characters and their torments are the height of fluff. The fact that Rand believes that it is in one's trade that one's mettle is revealed only makes her effort that much more benighted.

Rand's protagonists are so charged with their own magnificence that they must resemble some sort of atomic superhero with macroscopic electrons in orbit around them. They are the mouthpieces of Rand's philosophy, that socialism in all its forms is foul, so foul that she never concerns herself with pondering the soil of misfortune from whence such ideas sprout. But her creations are megaphones only. Depthless, nearly sociopathic men and women of sheer will, in single-minded pursuit of the ultimate steel alloy or New York skyscraper.

They are meant to represent the embodiment of America's entrepreneurial spirit, but what issues from their mouths is the sort of comedy that could only come from an author pursuing her own craft with equal earnestness, anticipating great walls which must be crashed through and armoring her sentiments thusly. Her demigods are prone to lines such as "I'll always bow to a coat of arms. I'll always worship the symbols of nobility...The coats of arms of our day are to be found on billboards and in the ads of popular magazines...Industrial trademarks," or "I like cigarettes, Miss Taggart. I like to think of fire held in a man's hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips."

And then there is my favorite:

"The code of competence is the only system of morality that's on a gold standard. When you grow up you'll know what I mean."

"I know it now. But...Francisco, why are you and I the only ones who seem to know it?"

Such grossness is to be found on every third page of Rand's books.

Anyway, I could turn this into a treatise like last week's Battlestar Galactica essay, but I will stop here. If I have pulled anything from Ayn Rand's work is that anyone stuffed full of their own ego may yet make a name for themselves. With that optimistic thought I am off to Pittsburgh!

...

Newsflash: Ann Coulter is a cunt! Contrast her thoughts on Timothy McVeigh with Ward Churchill's "Little Eichmann's" quote. Were that there was a news network willing to spend the next two weeks eating her liver the way Fox does whenever something similar falls from a liberal's lips.

4/14/05

Drawn Out!

Have you been wondering when the next time I would whore my talents on E-bay would arrive? Answer: NOW!

Time again for another of my commissioned art auctions! Have you got an idea for a cartoon, pin-up or record album cover you could never afford on the private market? Your prayers have been answered! Go to my auction and bid on the chance to have damn near anything drawn for you by the hardest working man in comix! Bid today! Ten days from now the lucky winner could be you!

Speaking of hard work, I recently got a slew of e-mails, one after the other, from a girl named Sara who was eager to see more Flash of the likes of my breakout hit "4:20." After quite a bit of pestering, I thought it was time to bring something to my eager fan's attention.

4/14/05
Sorry crew, but a massive up-tic in file sharing between soon-to-be-indicted college kids clogged the information superhighway and prevented this update until today. I hope none of you shot up your Indian reservations over it.

So, with Paul Wolfenstein doling out the shekels at the World Bank, John Negroponte in charge of death squad oversight and John Bolton on deck as our next U.N. ambassador (hope you like Indian burns, Kofi), I'd say we're probably about ten months away from Raytheon decanting it's first battalions of clone troopers. For the Republic, of course.

Congress seems to be wielding the shakiest rubber stamp in the West these days, but wield it they do. With reservations—oh, the reservations!— they have approved, one by one, a torture sympathizer for top cop, an architect of Third World conquest as loan officer for Third World development, a Dirty War veteran for intelligence czar, and soon, Nelson Muntz as our lead negotiator.

Or will they? Lincoln Chafee, the last Republican who still remembers the Bushido code, is playing it coy! You think you know which way he'll jump when he tells John Bolton "You said all the right things in your opening statement." but he's made it quite clear that the Democrats may yet be able to steal his heart!

But with what? Roses? Minks? Public housing block grants? What gets Link wet? E-mail the senator and ask him yourself!

...

I recall a conservative columnist some months ago bemoaning the fact that liberal Hollywood, ignoring the World War quality of our invasion of Iraq, was not doing it's part generating patriotic pap for the cinema.

I didn't quite understand the basis fo his grievance. Firstly, the nature of the Iraq War, affront as it is to our national mythology of "we don't start the fights but we will damn well finish them", makes it hard to package. Imperialism tends to shine through any conflict where the enemy never struck a blow and is outgunned a thousand to one. The last war movie that tried making an Iwo Jima out of a Wounded Knee was 1986's Heartbreak Ridge, a fittingly Reaganesque movie in which Clint Eastwood dispelled America's Vietnam Syndrome (which by then was also our Beirut Syndrome) by halting the grave and gathering threat that was...Grenada.

Furthermore, every spy thriller, shoot em' up, toga epic and alien invader movie is itself a subliminal advertisement for the xenophobia that makes our military economy chug. And if that's not enough, there are ample amounts of television programs like Alias, 24 and The West Wing (and by extension, the sundry Law and Orders and C.S.I.s) which expound upon America's inherent justness, military supremacy and, directly or indirectly, the terrorist threat every week. And to this list we can now add...

Battlestar Galactica.

That's right! The Sci-Fi Channel's slick retooling of the hokey 70's space opera about a wagon train of star Mormons looking for Earth has been co-opted by the neo-con agenda, and no one is gonna tell me different!

I will grant that every tale of interstellar conflict will necessarily resemble whichever crisis is making the headlines that day, and the bad guys can usually stand in for any real foreign agency that is tweaking the State Department or Big Oil. The Borg, for example, might represent communists at one moment or, with their hive mind and meticulous precision, substitute for the overindustrious Japanese of the late 80s.

However, on Battlestar Galactica (B-Star-G to the initiated, yo yo) the recurring motifs of a constant state of Orange Alert crisis, a president with religious delusions, and hostiles that keep quacking about God and who wear suicide vests make the similarities to our current national pastime a little hard to miss.

The story of Battlestar: The Next Generation is superficially the same as its predecessor. Humanity's cousins from another solar system have just been obliterated by the stinking toasters of the Cylon Empire, sending a convoy of survivors on an aimless journey for planet earth, rumored in sacred texts to be the origin of their civilization. At the head of the pack is the Battlestar Galactica, the last piece of military hardware left in space and the convoy's only protection against Cylon attack.

This new sci-fi enterprise (pun? what is this "pun?") does indeed honor and outshine it's forebear in most ways. Aside from a deliberate design sensibility which downplays the techno geekiness of the futuristic society, the show features first rate special effects, grueling tension, political intrigue and not a few fine performances and worthwhile scripts.

The new twist is that the Cylons are now no longer clunky chrome robots but sexy, slithery saboteurs. The aliens have adopted human form (usually a curvacious female one) and the fleet is riddled with interlopers that from time to time plant bombs or simply blow themselves up, keeping what's left of humanity in a state of panic over attacks from without and within. Show trials, the righteousness of revolution, brutal interrogation and tension between military and civilian government are the typical hot issues.

The Cylons are portrayed as more pious than vicious. They seek simultaneously the annihilation and conversion of the good guys, and walk among them unnoticed until they detonate themselves, blissful smiles upon their faces. They are of course Al Qeda. I suppose that it is a mercy that the Cylons are not portrayed as throat slitting heathens, but the villains are nonetheless steeped in an inexplicable fanaticism which they use to mesmerize their enemy (a Cylon even lives in the head of the mercurial coward Baltar).

The human Colonials, America, are the underdog. All their technological might was worthless against the below the radar sneak attack of the Cylons, and exile is the price they have paid. In a nod perhaps to our Cold War exploitation of the Third World, the Cylons are portrayed as vengeful former slaves.

My eyes become slitty, however, whenever God is brought into the show, which is often. It is hard for me not to notice agendas in the frequency of that subject in entertainment these days. It has become so dominant in politics of late that even prominent Christian Republicans are sounding a warning klaxon.

This would not be a problem if ever God was explored with some finesse, and taken outside of the religious chicken coop It is caged in. That is asking a bit much of television, and certainly of the moneyed interests that own it. The result is that on Battlestar Galactica we are treated to a rather wishy washy tête-a tête between the Cylons, the Billy Grahams of space, and the humans, who worship a Greek Pantheon. Typically the show only touches on the merits or excesses of devotion itself, never the substance or irrationality of what one has faith in. Either way, no new ground is broken on the subject and typical cliches are constantly reinforced.

Now before I come off as a bitchy Micheael Medved, rendering every element of a teleplay down to its subversive tallow, I will grant that there are only so many ways to boil an egg, and much of Battlestar Galactica is quite smart. But it is unusual for a science fiction program to so tightly identify with authority and the status quo. Usually rebellion and progressive values are the order of the day, as sci-fi is mainly targeted at those picked last for sandlot baseball, not the handsome kid with the expensive glove.

Not so this show. Galactica is, if anything, an apologist for paranoia and authoritarianism, unique among even other military styled science fiction in its generous flattery of the powers that be.

Take Commander Adama. The original Galactica captain was portrayed as an endearing father figure by Loren Green, a wise village elder if ever there was one. The current Adama is a grizzled war vet played by Edward James Olmos (whose weathered face is badly in need of some spackle). He's tough and gravel-voiced, though not without warmth. But he is a departure from the Buckaroo Kennedy heroism of someone like Captain Kirk, whose take on the future was upbeat and gung-ho, as well as from the crisp, erudite Captain Picard who reflected the multiculturalism of the 90s. Adama is all steely resolve and grim determination, a post 9/11 Commander-In-Chief.

Second in command is Mary McDonnell as President Laura Roslin. If Adama is the flight-suited George Bush, she represents the feminine aspect that is his faith. Roslin is the keeper of the flame of democracy, demanding that the Colonial Constitution be honored, while at the same time believing that she is carrying out a role foretold in scripture. And by virtue of being appointed president, not elected, she also reflects Bush's lingering illegitimacy.

Rounding out the authoritarian troika and helping to implement the Adama Doctrine is Adama's executive officer Colonel Tigh (Michael Hogan), a grumbly dead ringer for Cheney. In the original series Colonel Tigh was black, but the recasting makes sense lest anyone confuse him for Colin Powell and thus believe he would ever flinch from flexing a little muscular diplomacy.

Far from shedding light into the dark corners of the human experience, Battlestar Galactica reinforces one brutish stereotype after another. Putting aside the fawning admiration for soldiers and guns which is typical of our entertainment in any era, the torn-from-the-headlines topicality of specific episodes is more forgiving of military excess than any show of its kind I've seen before.

In one installment, a sadistic interrogation of a captured Cylon, which includes drowning, is written off as a day's work. The interrogator is only chastised for not extracting useful information before the captive is shoved out of an airlock (by the gentle President Roslin no less). As this is an obvious statement on Abu Ghraib/Gitmo, the show's attitude can be read easily by the reaction of the superiors to both torturer and victim. Message? "Terrorists get what they deserve."

Pointing out that the two of the three "ethnic" looking members of Galactica's crew are in league with the Cylons might seem nitpicky, put imagine the situation reversed and you might scratch your chin a little. But even when the villains aren't Cylon their threat to our the status quo is manifest.

Take Tom Zarek (played by Richard Hatch, the original series' Captain Apollo). An imprisoned revolutionary, he is set free and begins his political career anew by preaching collectivism to a drooling mob of reporters. Both Adama and Roslin, usually at odds, are united against the very idea of Zerek's influence and conspire to reduce it. In television, of course, we can suppose that he is actually plotting foul play which will later justify their actions and validate our suspicion of his populism. In the short term, however, the program's attitude is one of reflexive hostility not to the character of the man but to the politics of the character. And while someone who attacks money must be an enemy of our culture in any universe, real or imagined, it's hard not to recognize this as a shot against the likes of Michael Moore and the "liberal" media" (or "elite" media in Fox News parlance).

So here again Battlestar Galactica has taken an affirmative stance against an alternative to our conventional view of power. What is more regrettable is where else could you find a better forum for discussing alien ideas than in science fiction? Would it not be superlative to see the relative merits and deficiencies of capitalism and socialism put on trial in the fictional debates of the outer space government?

Alright, but maybe just ONCE, between laser fights?

We can expect many exciting space wars and clever subterfuges in the seasons of Galactica to come (the show is doing well), but what we will also get is an unusual amount of deference to the specific authorities of our age, and one more dose of derision against society's detractors.

...

I promised a rebuke of Ayn Rand in today's blog, not that one is needed or even desired by anyone, but I will let that wait until next week. Rather, check out this fan shizzle!

Benjamin Hayden creator of the Canadian AT-AT and Weapon Brown action figure below has gone and pimped Beepo's ride. How many clowns do you think could fit into that car? And as if that weren't enough...

Jared Hindman sent me this Tim Burtony take on Weapon Brown he painted. Thanks to both of them!

...

After some serious waffling I have decided to attend this year's Pittsburgh Comicon. If you are anywhere near Pittsburgh April 22-24, don't forget to stop by and pay me some love!

By the way, regarding this week's link, I don't believe for a yoctosecond, the smallest unit of time yet measured, that this guy is doing anything but pulling the country's collective leg and having a screaming good time doing it.

4/10/05
Done! At last! Is the second Nanathon cartoon! Eyes right! See it? There it is! Done! DOOOOONE!

You would never guess from it's relative brevity that this cartoon took nearly three "Are you kidding? Doesn't this guy have a job?" weeks to complete. Never again, people! (well, not without good cause.)

This cartoon is running on NewGrounds, and voting on it will help increase its exposure and allow me to pull in a few sales. So, if you would be so kind, click here and vote me a "5"!

I'll have a chunkier bloggin for you on Wednesday, about Ayn Rand and Battlestar Galactica no less. Right now I am justly pooped! I'ma treat myself to a limited edition peanut-butter-on-the-outside Reese's cup!

Meanwhile, behold yet another of my frequent liquidation specials on Deep Fried! This week's absolutely bottom-scraping bargain is a combo deal: The Great Taste of Deep Fried and both of the new regular issues for only $10.00!

Let me repeat that: $10.00!!! I need some cash to justify a trip to the Pittsburgh Comicon, and a mere handful of sales will cover my expenses. Think of it: 170 pages of comedy bile, a $21.00 value. Yeah, you know you want it. This week only!

Wednesday y'all.

3/29/05
The Terry Schiavo circus seems to be spooling down, and for once the Right Wing is feeling the unpleasant sensation of a tail between its legs.

It's been hard for me to resist my usual shadenfreude towards the losing team in this case, especially Tom DeLay, whose duel attributes of pig and vulture could make the career of any cryptozoologist. But to gloat over an innocent person's impending death, no matter how many times its justness has been affirmed, would be indecent. Unless it's Jerry Falwell.

I refuse to confuse the sincere, if fantastical, hopes for Terry's recovery on the part of Mary and Bob Schindler with the parasitical abuses of the Republicans. It is not surprising that parents should feel absolute devotion towards their child, nor that the religious should hold out for miracles.

But that this non-story should have been allowed to become the country's central preoccupation for nearly two weeks reflects a grotesque lack of priorities on the part of government, to say nothing of the abject molestation of the emotions of both Terry's parents and her husband.

The latter is the most unrecognized victim here. Michael Schiavo has had to endure outrageous slanders against his character from Operation Rescue's perennial spotlight hog Randall Terry. the usual assortment of radio leg breakers and de-facto from the entire Republican party, whose hypocrisies regarding states' rights and "family values" in this instance are so glaring that, Lord help us, they may even be remembered at the next election.

As for Jeb Bush— who between Terry Schaivo and Elian Gonzalez has transformed his governorship into the Jerry Springer show—I think strapping him down, ramming a garden hose down his throat and force-feeding him a tureen of Wendy's finger chili is just what the doctor ordered.

Of course, we'll have to see what Congress says first.

...

Robert Novak has followed up on a speculation he made in September (which I commented on here) that Bush is planning a cut and run in Iraq. In his column Monday, Novak continued to toss fish to conservative dolphins wondering just when we can call a stalemate a stalemate. Looks like there's good news on the horizon, and all thanks to lithe, spankable Condi!

"The most obvious change is the improved situation on the ground in Iraq, where it is no longer preposterous to imagine local security forces in control. Subtler is the advent of Secretary of State Rice. This willowy, vulnerable-looking woman wields measurably more power than Colin Powell, the robust general who preceded her. Officials who know her well believe she favors the escape from Iraq."

"Control" is word that, like democracy, can have so many interpretations. And just as Iraq's style of democracy may not eventually resemble our own (as the President has encouragingly conceded), so too might the Iraqi brand of control be more reminiscent of El Salvador's in the 80's than even the pseudo-stability of Afghanistan. And speaking of control...

"' She is not controlled by the neo-cons insisting on achieving a perfect democracy before we go,' a colleague told me. That reflects not only the national consensus but also the preponderance of Republican opinion. Without debating the wisdom of military intervention in Iraq two years ago, President Bush's supporters believe it now is time to go and leave the task of subduing the insurgents to Iraqis."

Who are these die hard neo-cons that are supposedly stumping for a protracted presence in Iraq? Because if Condi, who is very nearly their Borg Queen, is crying "uncle", then it's a sure bet that Rusmfeld and Cheney aren't sweating over battle plans that will turn the tide and prove her wrong.

On the other hand, does anyone suspect that Condi's role as the Republican's Tiger Woods is being overplayed to distract from the fact that Cheney remains the big enchilada in the White House? Let's face face it, it sure looks a lot worse if Cheney is the one with sweaty palms than cool and competent Condi.

Cheney and Rummy built this war when Condi was still only Bush's national security advisor. As long as she is the public face of defeat (which, given the lofty ambitions of this administration above and beyond kicking over Saddam's sand castle, is exactly what we are talking about here) it reduces the sting while taking the heat of the men who planned this war before Bush was even elected.

In fact, making it look like Condi has taken power away from Snarlin' Dick makes the President look smart. The buzz on Condi is great, while the neo-con aroma is more and more fetid by the day. Painting Rice as an outsider, a new broom in the White House, however spurious that may be, fits the pattern of typical Karl Rove spin control.

Furthermore, it at last vindicates Colin Powell, who would doubtless be making the same call right now. It also marks two Secretaries of State in a row who don't think this White House knows how to win a fucking war.

...

For those who missed it the first time, "Zogg" is now on my revamped Extras page. The next cartoon is also progressing nice and slow. I'm about half done with "Nanathon Reloaded", but it will be worth the wait, I guarantee (gurantee void outside the continental United States).

3/21/05
Many honorable thanks to all those who jumped onboard the purchasing bandwagon and pre-ordered the second issue of Deep Fried. I am now pleased to announce that the lucky winner of the cover art to the new issue is:

(drum roll)

Tom Ragatz!

Tom spends most of his day explaining to people that no, his name is not made up, despite the fact that you can journey out of our solar system, beyond our galaxy and all the way to the Thnooperphon Empire and never encounter a name as goofy as "Tom Ragatz". Congratulations Tommy!

In addition, A lucky member of my exclusive mailing list also wins a Nana T-shirt for participating in my quest for lira. That person is:

(dinner roll)

Charles Jones!

Congratulations Charles. By the way, what do you think of Tom's name? S'that funny or what??

The new issue is being printed as we speak, and with that off my plate I can at last return to my long, long, quite long overdue second Nanathon cartoon. After that, there is the little matter of the Deep Fried regular animated featurettes that I sacrificed the weekly strip for, so do not think I have abandoned ye.

I am, however, abandoning any political bitchings for this week, except to say that if Terry Schiavo is entitled to free chow at the taxpayer's expense then Washington better pass a bill to put a tube down my throat too!

With that said, check out the paleo-Deep Fried artwork that I have just recently come across!

3/10/05
Before you jump to conclusions in the Michael Jackson completely celibate sleepover misunderstanding trial now underway, look at the photos below and ask yourself: have you really considered all the possible theories?

....

"Yes your honor, I suppose it could have been a chocolate factory I was taken to and molested at. Whoever did it sure seemed interested in packing fudge."

...

Dum Dum gave another one of Karl Rove's speeches this week, this one at the National Defense University (this semester's most popular elective: "Four limbs good, two limbs better"). Turns out that Lebanon is our surprise democratic success story of the week! Nevermind that Lebanon is already a democracy in the most American sense of the term (they are a sovereign republic with an elected government and thousands of foreign occupiers lending a "stabilizing" hand), or that half a million Hezbollah supporters turned out on Tuesday to rally in support of Syria over the West.

The speech was chock full of classic Bush chest-puffing and sis-boom-bah, all of it a veneer for his increasingly thermonuclear rhetoric about the stampede of "freedom". Stop me if you've heard this one before:

"As one Marine sergeant put it, ''I never want my children to experience what we saw in New York, at the Pentagon, and in Pennsylvania.'' He said, ``If we can eliminate whatever threat we can on foreign soil, I would rather do it there than have it come home to us.''

To which the Marine added "And if you could ask your bodyguard to stop pointing his gun at my daughter's guinea pig, that would be swell."

More stirring words:

"Pervasive fear is the foundation of every dictatorial regime -- the prop that holds up all power not based on consent. And when the regime of fear is broken, and the people find their courage and find their voice, democracy is their goal, and tyrants, themselves, have reason to fear."

Insert ironic sneer here. He continues:

"In our time, America has been attacked. America has been challenged. Yet the uncertainty, and sorrow, and sacrifice of these years have not been in vain. Millions have gained their liberty; and millions more have gained the hope of liberty that will not be denied. The trumpet of freedom has been sounded, and that trumpet never calls retreat."

One should always be concerned when evangelists mention trumpets, since Gabriel's is their favorite.

Freedom, as in all Bush addresses from his victory speech in November until the end of time, was the word of the day, rating 22 mentions. I no longer chafe at the president's mesmeric repetitions of the words "freedom", "democracy" and "liberty." What else can he say? What nuance about our system of government could possibly find purchase in that hymn-stuffed head of his?

In a January interview with C-Span, Bush could offer no reflections at all about political thinkers that have shaped his theory of democracy, save Reagan. It's clear that he hopes patriotically loaded words like "freedom," repeated ad nauseum, will articulate what his own gummy vocabulary cannot express of the feelings contained in his plaque-lined heart.

And so for the remainder of George Bush's term expect freedom to ring; ring until the entire country has tinnitus.

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