Weapon Brown 146
Monday — March 8th, 2010

Weapon Brown 146

Savor today’s strip! In an ongoing effort to finally finish the unfinishable Deep Fried #4, I can only offer one update this week. Back to the regular schedule next week!

And Another Thing...

Attention! Book Faces!

As we all know, this Facebook thing is the biggest thing to hit the Interthing since Twister or whatever that other big thing was. So if you are a fan of this site and want to be my buddy in a lurid way that this website alone cannot provide, get your ass to my Facebook page and friend-request me! You’ll be glad you did! Or not. One or the other.

Art Attack!

I’m putting my most recent Weapon Brown page up for sale on Etsy. I’ve only done a little Etsying in the past, but I’d like to do more, especially if I can develop an interest among you fans for owning the original Weapon Brown pages.

As you will see from the the page I am offering this week, it contains panels from this week’s and last week’s strips, which will occasionally be the case. Other times, the strip you read will be the entire page.

I am also thinking about offering prints of the lettered pages, should that prove to be something people want. If you Blockheads (see? I’m using it!) want to weigh in on the kind of original art or art products you would like, the floor is open!  And naturally, if there is an existing Weapon Brown page that you want to get your hands on, please e-mail me.

Hiding in Plain Sight

CBS has brilliantly demonstrated why censorship is not only immoral, it is just plain head-up-your-ass stupid.

CBS: Playing with fire extinguishers!

In covering the recent attack on a Danish cartoonist and his family by an axe-wielding terrorist who apparently couldn’t find any exploding underwear, CBS takes pains to blur out the actual years-old cartoon of Mohammed wearing a turban bomb, lest Jihad Inc. take offense.

Spineless, yes! But wait, there’s more! Apparently CBS is as confused as the rest of us in trying to figure out what makes a muslim time bomb tick. In their segment, they distort one image showing the specific cartoon that artist Kurt Westergaard inked, but later show an undistorted newspaper page with all the offending Mohammed cartoons, including Westergaard’s!

Whether CBS was trying to avoid setting off Islam’s volcanic temper or just trying to protect themselves from being visited by a muslim land shark of their own, they blew it on both counts. Wake up, fucktards! You can bury every copy of that cartoon in a steel drum or you can embroider it on the American flag. Nothing we do is going to keep the next guy from trying to hide a stick of dynamite up his ass while flying JetBlue to Disneyland.

Look, I normally would never force a criminal suspect to watch as his grandmother is eaten alive by fire ants, but I’m warning you terrorists: any one cartoonist is more evil than all of Sunni Islam and the Khmer Rouge combined. Ever read Happiness is a Warm Puppy? There are more coded instructions from Satan in that book than the Necrinomicon. Don’t piss us off.

UPDATE: Speaking of evil cartoonists, how evil am I that it took me this long to note the passing of cartoonist David Levine, a caricaturist who had an influence on me when I was very young. Farewell, David. Your jihad will live on! 

Apocalypse post

Merry post-Navida, humans. I am blogging to you today from New Year’s central, aka my fortified apocalypse shelter.

No mere fallout shelter this! I am the proud owner of a Judgement Day Deluxe, the only doomsday shelter endorsed by Tim LaHaye!  Originally available only to the inner circle of the Trilateral Comission, the JDD is the last word in end times luxury. Nuclear or Mayan, there isn’t an apocalypse yet conceived that this baby can’t ride out!

Right now I’m sitting pretty behind 51 inches of osmium-reinforced concrete and enjoying the nectar of the most expensive urine-to-potable water converter ever to come out of the Netherlands (where they can taste urea at 1 part per trillion). I am fully stocked up on a 12-month supply of  canned beans, rice cakes and armor-piercing bullets, and my entire set-up is safety rated against nine different types of horde, from radioactive cannibal to rage-addled, and three kinds of undead!  New Year’s, do your worst!

My New Year’s preparations may seem a little paranoid, but I’ve been preparing for this since Y2K, our warning apocalypse. And now with the Nigerian “Taint Bomber” reminding us that pointless acts of murder are going to still be the rage in the new decade, and movies like 2012, The Road and The Book of Eli warning us that God’s finger is surely poised to poke us, I’m not rolling the dice on any more above ground New Year’s Eves.

Another Weapon Brown fan I’m not inviting in for coffee.

Oddly, these are the perfect circumstances for putting out a comic, since an interruption-free, cave-like environment is the womb from which great cartoons are birthed. And after the sky falls, I should have lots of awesome reference for drawing Weapon Brown! A few of you may even make it into the story as I sketch you skulking around mass graves looking for rats to eat.

The first order of business for the New Year will be, of course, completing Deep Fried #4. I have tantalized you recently with the promise of a December release, but it looks like I will have to bump this to January, since getting this product done right is going to require that extra few weeks of unanticipated commitment that makes freelance cartooning such a wrist-slitting joy. However, what won’t change is that special fans-only edition that I have promised, with a brand new Weapon Brown story available for a limited time. I know that you are licking your eyeballs for it, so keep the faith!

2010 will bring more than just Deep Fried and skin-melting sleet storms. Blockhead’s War will conclude this year, hopefully before the summer, in a power-packed final arc that will debut CAL-v.1N and HOBS, Chuck’s ultimate enemies. This throw-down was the point of the entire story right from the beginning, so you know that you are going to be getting masturbation-quality work out of me in the months to come. Those who have stuck around this long are not going to regret it!

Once Blockhead’s War wraps there will, of course, be the graphic novel, loaded with more googaws than the birthday booth at a Hard Rock Cafe. I can’t wait to begin designing it. You’d better warn the other books on your shelf that its coming.

Will this spell the end of comic joy on this website? Hell no! Beepo, Roadkill, Squints and some new friends will rise from the grave like so many gamma-irradiated deadlings to renew the joy that is Deep Fried! The comic with no shame will be sailing into some uncharted and hilarious waters as the gang each get some me-time and reveal facets of their personalities that you never wanted to know. Meanwhile, a new trade paperback collecting the second volume of Deep Fried is in the offing, featuring some never before printed material, including a new Clarissa story guaranteed to twist your emotions into pretzels of agony.

I’ve got some other things up my sleeve as well, but patience! You will know these things when I feel the time is right. In the meantime, feed. Feeeeeed…

Last item! For just the longest time I have wanted to have a proper name to refer to you Weapon Brown fans. Rather than try and yoke you with one of my own, I open the floor to suggestions! Who are you people? What is your kind called anyway? Throw some ideas into the comments section and let’s see what sticks!

In the meantime I’ll be checking my scanner for any reports of inbound missiles or Nigerians. Happy New Year, victims!

Look, it’s simple….

For those of you who still have no idea what Weapon Brown is about, if my fathom-deep archive of strips has left you perplexed, perhaps my new YouTube pimpage will set the matter straight.

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Tee for Two

A few people have expressed interest in a new tee based off the stylin’ CAL-v.1n graphic from my recently debuted stickers, meant to compliment the classic Chuck image from the Weapon Brown tee.

So, I wanna know! Do you guys want another tee shirt? And if so, which of these designs makes you happiest? 

Version “A”…

…or version “B”

Make your voices heard! It’s a democracy, dammit! If the response is good enough I’ll do one of my famous pre-order incentive offers for this.

T-Shirt Totalitarianism

The Weapon Brown T-shirt continues to own the Interwebs! Here is its latest appearance, covering the oversized nipples of fellow comic creator Rene Castellano in an interview on Video Outhouse.

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What are YOU doing to spread the fame??

Social Studies

Today, Crooks and Liars brings us some commentary on a television piece done by Phoneix, AZ’s local Fox affiliate on Neo Nazis, but they miss the subtext.

Jabba the Nut: J.T Ready

In an investigative piece, Phoneix’s Fox 10 reports on the shennanigans of J.T. Ready, a blubbery local Nazi and his tribe of disaffected meth addicts and unemployed baby daddies, but the reporter’s lead-in gives the game away:

“The signs, the flags, the pins, the websites. Everywhere you look, Socialist, Nazi, Skinhead… by any name they are here.”

Now, anyone who doesn’t think Fox knows what it  is doing when they incorrectly identify Nazis as socialists just isn’t paying attention. Indeed, though the rest of the segment correctly refers to the uptick in National Socialist hate-mongering, the excessive use of that very term is a bit suspicious in itself, as if Fox prefers it to Nazi, or even neo-Nazi.

Paranoid? Nitpicky? I think not. Propaganda is not a thing which is always represented by its broad strokes. Small moves are needed as well, sort of like poking a fire with a stick to nudge the wood back into the flame. In recent months, “Nazi” and “Socialism” are terms that have dominated the output of the national Fox network. Why then would their affilaites not want to get in on the act?

And really, what percentage of Fox viewers do you think even understand the difference between Socialism and National Socialism, especially after Glenn Beck and the D-Bag movement have worked so hard to marry them?

Slaughterhouse Jive

The massacre last Thursday at Fort Hood has resulted in a more tamped-down xenophobic reaction from the Right than I expected. Oh sure, Fox News and talk radio have all weighed in with bitter grumblings about how political correctness prevented someone or other from sending this guy to Gitmo while we had the chance. Still, the the fact that Michelle Bachman hasn’t intorduced a Constitutional ammendment to have all Americans of Arab descent loaded into a space shuttle and shot into the sun may be the first sign that Obama deserved that peace prize.

Of course, it could also be because another shooting rampage took place the very next day in Orlando.

That shootin’ gallery turned out to be a less sexy story, since the gunman only killed one and wounded five; the piece probably appeared in your paper right below a coupon for Ragu. But it is a reminder to anyone who  thinks that Nidal Malik Hasan is a terrorist because he shouted “Allah Akbar!”*  during his spree instead of “Yippee kai yay, motherfuckers!” that workplace slaughter is as American as apple pie.

Or maybe the reason the Republicans have moderated their tone ever so slightly is the purported reason Hasan snapped: he didn’t want to go to Afghanistan. Who the fuck would?

And speaking of the residue of 9/11, last Monday the Navy unveiled a new assault ship built with steel salvaged from the World Trade Center. And while it is too bad that Ground Zero remains an undeveloped pit after so many years, it is good to know that the building that once stood there has been turned into such a nice weapon of war. Now if only our enemy had a navy…

* still unconfirmed

Cross Purposes

Attention moneychangers: The Body of Christ is open for business!

From Matt Taibbi at True/Slant, on a Goldman Sachs executive’s recent comments…from within a church, no less… that Jesus would endorse wealthcare:

It’s a particular kind of mental disability. This is dumbness that doesn’t know how to connect the information coming in from their other sensory organs, i.e. from the outside world, to whatever flowery kaleidoscope of overwrought horseshit their professors sent hurtling on a permanent lifelong spin-cycle in their empty skulls back when they were eighteen.

Read on…