So Obama has given us his bill of particulars for mitigating against the next mass killing spree, and New York governor Andy Cuomo has charged merrily ahead with assault weapons ban for my home state. I’m sure some of the ideas presented between the two of them (and with more certainly to follow from other politicians) will help make a difference, but in the short run they will probably not show results. That is fine, since the problem of gun violence is a behemoth. It is the trajectory of the gun crimes that needs to change, and it would be foolish to hope to reverse course immediately. The difficulty, of course, is our national Attention Deficit Disorder which could easily thwart even these modest improvements. And, as was pointed out by he president, the spree killings we’ve seen of late are not even the main course of our feast of sorrow. It is the routine shootings and maimings that occur in their dozens every week that ought to be our focus. What is interesting is the sop that Obama apparently felt compelled to throw to the NRA in order to stymie their “blame the video games” cannard. I have been watching a lot of C-Span’s Washington Journal call-in program, and the number of yee-haws who have gotten lost in Wayne LaPierre’s smokescreen is staggering. Does anyone doubt that if Wayne had targetted pinball machines during his infamous presser that half the country would now be demanding that Netflix destroy all it’s copies of “Tilt”? And yet, one cannot fault the NRA for its gift at  spinning PR gold from bullshit. Here is a clip of Republican congresswoman Marsha Blackburn, just one of many Republicans who have dutifully toed the line: Diane Franklin, a Missouri legislator, is also playing the “blame the games” game. She has suggested taxing violent video games and putting the proceeds towards mental health treatment. Can you imagine if this twit had the nerve to tax guns for the same reason? I thought I would use Diane Franklin as the final, “most outrageous” example of the GOP response to Newtown, but it actually gets worse! Martha Dean, a lawyer and recent (unsuccessful) GOP candidate for Connecticut Attorney General is–you guessed it–a “Newtown Truther”! Yes, there is a conspiracy movement afoot advancing the notion that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary was staged! A video promoting the theory (and which this cuh…cuhhh…cooooonsenting adult links to from her Facebook) already has over ten million hits!

Ol’ Painless: Sleep tight, kids!

Now, you would think that all these right wingers nose-diving into their own vomit would leave  Obama free to let the video game meme eat itself. Instead, as part of his 500-point plan to prevent every fucknut in our galaxy from acquiring their  own replica of Ol’ Painless, the President seems to have taken the bait and has requested Congress authorize $10,000,000 for a CDC report on guns which will probe the connection between shootings and video games. The joke may be on the NRA, however, since the real intent of the proposal appears to be to get lawmakers to undo a prohibition, in place since 1996, against the CDC investigating the causes of gun violence, a prohibition lobbied for by the NRA who feared it would lead to anti-gun propaganda. It seems unlikely that at the end of the day the CDC will report back that the Super Mario Bros. are more responsible for events like Newtown and Aurora than Bushmaster is, but I look forward to watching the NRA reap what it has sewn. In the meantime, video games are poised to do to the GOP what rape did for them only a few months ago. Update: Sam Harris has some sobering thoughts about the gun issue.

It’s happening again!! I though the Mayan Apocalypse had ended the aeon and that the signs from Hollywood would cease their flow. But behold! They are as abundant as ever! Please, if you value your sanity, stay as far away from the iTunes Movie Trailers website as possible! For there you will find cryptic coincidences of such frequency that they would send Cthulu himself running to his psychotherapist! I wil interpret these prophecies for you as I always have. My mind can handle it, for the star memes have long ago transformed my gray matter into translucent Play-Doh. Strap your egos in tight, and I hope your souls have passenger-side airbags!

Star Trek: Into Darkness		Oblivion
	vs.

Two lonely men stand with their backs to the viewer, gazing upon scenes of devestation. One portends “darkness”, the other “oblivion”. Do I have to spell this out for you? Do you really not know how to spell the sentence “WE ARE WELL AND TRULY FUCKED?!?” Perhaps not, if you were educated in today’s crumbling public schools. AH HA! I have inadvertently cracked the final metaphor!

John Dies At The End		Warm Bodies
	vs.

What kind of mind game is this?? Of course we all die in the end, but who is this “John” whose corpse the world is reheating? Is he Christ returned?? Surely Hollywood would not encourage these hopes, unless they could make a buck off of it. But how can one make money off of God?? The absurdities are compounding upon themselves!

Man of Steel		Pacific Rim		G.I. Joe Retaliation
	vs.		vs.

Now the mad pattern becomes clear! Do not assume it is the coincidence of a man-of-steel alongside a steel man. The final puzzle piece comes courtesy of Dwayne Douglas Johnson. Chests! Broad, mighty chests! Pectorals you could crush diamonds upon! Look for The One to arrive bearing a torso of the gods! All you people who forgot to go gay before December 21st will find your stock in women’s boobies falling fast.  

Buffalo Girls		The Lone Ranger
	vs.

Eyes of truth, staring at you in judgement! Eyes of truth that know what it is you’ve been looking for on /b/! I repent! I REPENT!!!!

…

Some of you… the cynics… may yet not believe what I have revealed to you through Apple’s unmistakeable repeating avatars. But now I break the final seal. Watch the video below. Watch. ‘So what?” you say. “It’s only the trailer for the pessimistic third installment of the Iron Man franchise. Perhaps it is foolishly  trying to channel Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight, but that doesn’t make it a message from the stars.” Don’t you understand? The AUDIO! The audio isn’t from the Iron Man trailer! It’s the audio from the trailer for Star Trek: Into Darkness! They synch up perfectly!! That warm feeling spreading in you lap is delusion leaving you through your urethra. When you are ready to take that final leap into the unknown, find me through the clues I will deposit in the Sunday Times crossword puzzle. And bring with you as many precious gemstones that the sale of your car will get you. You don’t want to know what the Terrorstorm has in store for non-mineral currency in 2013.

Lump of coal for you from Santa, and from me a wish for slow cancer

Okay, the post-Weapon Brown era of Whatisdeepfried.com is coming along nicely. Those who you who failed in your suicide attempts and have Internet access in your psych wards have already enjoyed two installments of Coffee Break, but probably want to know what will come next, and when, and which! So let me finally update you on what is in store in the immediate future from this, your favorite Web destination.

Blockhead’s War #7!

The outrageously oversized final issue of Blockhead’s War will begin its pre-order sale next week. This glorious issue will complete the collecting saga so many of you began a few years ago and will overload any long box ever corrugated! By the way, its time to send me your fan mail! Now is the last opportunity for true Blockhead’s to be commemorated in the pages of the ultimate action parody!

The Pops T-Shirt!

Right alongside the pre-order sale for Blockhead’s War #7 will be the pre-order sale for the long-craved Pops T-shirt! I will also be running a special promotion for those who want to order these two items together, which will certainly include some one-of-a-kind goodies. Remember not to spend all your Christmas money on your friggin’ loved ones! Love yourself this year!

Weapons Grade Deep Fried!

The new Clarissa story, Take Me to Work Day, which Weapon Brown forced me to postpone, is now underway and will occupy the next couple of months of my time. Until it is completed your comic gruel will continue to be Coffee Break (I sure hope your colons can handle that much coffee). But once that story is finished how shall it reach your eyeballs? The answer is the next collection of Deep Fried comics, which I am christening Weapon’s Grade Deep Fried. This paperback edition will collect all four issues of Deep Fried volume 2, and will feature Take Me to Work Day as a bonus. It seems likely that this come to you through a Kickstarter campaign at around the time I am running one for the Weapon Brown omnibus, so you are going to have a lot of reading to do and a lot of kicking to start! Assuming a successful campaign, these books probably will not be printed until the summer. So what about your free goddamn entertainment here?

Deep Fried Rises!

March 4th! A date that will live in infamousness! Deep Fried, the world’s saltiest, most Congressional-inquiry inspiring comic, will rise like Godzilla from the ocean and begin its assault on all that is holy! I have been working on Deep Fried’s new material, as well as its new direction, for a couple of years. Deep Fried began as an anthology, and hatched both Weapon Brown and Clarissa, as well as Beepo, Roadkill, Squints and a host of other characters. Originally an anthology and a catch-all for anything my mind could conjure, Deep Fried will now focus directly on Beepo, Roadkill and Squints and follow them on epic journeys of growth, change and decay, all while expanding the boundaries of what will get you fired from work for reading it. Of course, all of this depends on the Mayan Apocalypse being a false alarm. It is just as likely that our brains will turn to quarks as N’Hgga the Dream Serpent swallows the stars and our souls learn to live inside the scales of Her shed skin. But if we are still three-dimensional beings after December 21st, consider all of these plans a “go”.

I am still recovering from the flu-that-would-not-end, and I would prefer that that, along with the Fiscpocalypse, was all that was on America’s collective mind. Obviously it isn’t. I don’t know what I can say about Connecticut that would be more to the point than what I said a few months back when a similar tragedy broke in Aurora , CO. Apparently I don’t need to, either. For the first time in a long while the NRA and its obsessive need to keep every lunatic in the nation armed for World War Z is under scrutiny. And while one can never predict Washington and her fickle moods, its possible that at least some modification of our gun laws may emerge from this horror. The real takeaway from this obscenity has to be that it will not be the  NRA, Washington or our nation’s fruitcakes that will set the course from this point forward. It is us. If the butchery of all those children, wives, mothers and friends is not enough to change all of our attitudes, to say once and for all that we are on the wrong course civilly when it comes to our permissive attitude towards weapons of war, that the bad obviously outweighs the good, then we simply are a nation of  voluntary inmates in a concentration camp. It does not matter that we still don’t know the “right” answer. I am not going to pretend that I have heard of any sort of magic wand policy that will assure an end to this rolling holocaust of murder, but it is time at last to put the weapon mongers on the defensive. My starting point? “One man, one gun”. If you absolutely must be armed, a single weapon is all you may own. This fits the criterion of the 2nd Amendment, and leaves the vulnerable in possession of everything they could possibly need in the way of self defense. Let the other side argue as best they can against the sensibility of that position in the teeth of the obvious diminishing returns of our over-powered weapons fetishism. The “conversation” has to begin with a position for sane gun laws that is  as immovable as that of the NRA’s, before a sensible midle ground can emerge. One man, one gun. If you need more than one gun, then you are probably on your way to butcher an elementary school.

I am a little under the weather right now, that weather being the Great Red Spot of Jupiter. Yes, I have contracted the So-Called Fiscal Cliff… er, the flu (sorry, everything seems to come back to that goddamn Fiscal Cliff), and with it has come the full panolply of aches, raspy lungs, and a rainbow of mucous. I don’t know if this is connected, but yesterday I also took what must be the most comical shit of my life. I won’t burden you with the details, but suffice to say that it would have been right at home in a stoner/bodily function movie like Ted, which I happened to be watching at the time. In fact, I think even Seth MacFarlane would have considered my crap to be a little too broad. Ted is a bout a little boy’s teddy bear who comes to life after the child makes a Christmas wish, and who then lingers on the in the boy’s life as his friend grows up to be Mark Wahlberg. My verdict on Ted is that it was funnier than I expected, and is somewhat less pandering than Family Guy (the animated cartoon that the film’s creator Seth McFarlane is best known for). Still, some of the gags ran on too long and even for a movie with a by-the-numbers plot the ending could have been riskier and still worked well with the overall theme. On the other hand, and I hope I don’t get any weird looks for this, but Ted himself seemed… really cuddly. Even if you don’t like the film you’ll still probably want to spoon that bear. On the other end of the spectrum (though not unrelated to rivers of shit) is this weeks revelation that HSBC will pay a whopping five-week’s profits as a penalty for laundering billions of dollars for Mexican drug cartels, as well as working all sorts of other money magic for America’s enemies, including Iran and Sudan. That HSBC, already embroiled in the LIBOR scandal, should once again be revealed as the kind of bank that Lex Luthor would run is one thing, but the there is an additional scandal, more poisionous, and that is the tacit admission that the reason Manhattan’s AAG for the  Justice Department Lanny Breuer is not pusuing criminal charges against an institution that they have dead-to-rights as aiding and abbetting criminals as high profile as any al-Qaeda affiliate is because HSBC is too powerful to be held accountable. For a snapshot of what I’m sure is the reasoning Breuer uses to get back to sleep at night when he wakes up in a cold sweat, here is Felix Salmon, a blogger for Reuters:

The US is the most powerful sovereign nation on the planet. With a flick of its Justice Department finger, it could wipe a globe-spanning bank off the face of the financial system… The question isn’t whether to use that power, it’s why. To do so would be bullying, and capricious, and would punish thousands of innocent individuals, and would destroy hundreds of billions of dollars of value, all for the purpose of nothing much in particular. Just because the US can prosecute HSBC doesn’t mean that it should prosecute HSBC. And sometimes, forbearance isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of maturity.

“Maturity”… is that the reason that neither this bank nor any of it’s corpse-fucking executives are to be made to suffer more than the deduction of a little couch-cushion money? We are living through an extended depression where every day brings new revelations that the masters of high finance are the ebola virus of the world economy, and Felix Salmon thinks those of us who think it’s time for the handcuffs to come out need to grow up. Matt Taibbi, on the other hand, puts all this in the proper perspective, though who we really need right now is a Tyler Durden.

God… My first week without a looming Weapon Brown deadline for me to ignore. I am feeling this intense sensation of euphoria and paranoia over it…! Oh, wait… that’s from smoking my bong. Here–let me just put that away for the next fifteen five minutes. What’s happening to me? I’ve never been a wake-and-baker! I mean, I should at least try it for a month (might give me some insights into Squints’ character), but I can’t be doing that now! Not with so many new responsibilities to take the place of the old! Those of you who have actually returned this week (I would suppose my post-Blockhead’s War fan base can now be measured in the low teens) deserve a cartoonist who is on the ball and ready to jump right into the next stage of Internet amusement. I hope I can be that cartoonist! But we must let the slow-moving masses who haven’t read the final Weapon Brown strip arrive and be heartbroken, as you have been, so I will let this strip linger a bit longer. Coffee Break will begin on Wednesday, and I will have the schedule for the final issue of Blockhead’s War to give you then. Yay! I feel organized! Better celebrate with another hit… By the way, thank you to all my new mailing list subscribers. If I’d have known that all it takes to harvest your valuable e-mails was to not publish Weapon Brown, I’d have cancelled it years ago!  

Tongues sure were a-waggin’ over the Obama/Romney kiss-and-make-up-lunch yesterday. The event was shrouded in Illuminati-like mystery, and the physical evidence that Romney even attended the meeting wouldn’t satisfy your average Bigfoot hunter. Many in the press lamented that they weren’t “flies on the wall” at the lunch, which apparently featured white turkey chili (no doubt made from the Thanksgiving turkey Obama “pardoned”. Just a little warning to Mitt). However, not possessing six legs and a taste for dog shit, the press was left to speculate as to what the two discussed. Suggestions ranged from Obama getting pointers on how to steer the government through the current budget crisis (I’m sure) to a possible cabinet position for Mittens (pull the other one). I noticed, however, that the least-mentioned possibility to justify the unusual White House powwow (other than good sportsmanship) might be that Obama wants the Prince of the Plutocrats to help walk the Republicans back from the fiscal cliff. Fiscal cliff!! Fiscal cliff! Fiscal cliff! If you repeat it ten million times in front of a mirror they say that Herbert Hoover will appear!  Boy, am I ever tired of hearing that term! But despite daily protestations from both political parties that they will never honor their mutual suicide pact, it seems to be a real possibility in the minds of even sober pundits that Washington will let that axe fall. It does not help that our leaders continue to operate in Hollywood thriller mode, where no matter of consequence can be resolved before the timer reaches 00:00:01. It is also a testament to the die hard personality of the GOP’s fiscal Cold Warriors that we still don’t have a deal, when the outlines of a resolution cannot have changed much in the past year. We should not forget that holding the line on taxes is pretty much the only thing now keeping the conservative movement together. The electorate just delivered stinging rebukes to Republicans on gay marriage, color, immigration, Obamacare, and they even broke the Carter/Bush-41 curse on electoral fortunes in down economies. Despite 2010′s Tea Party putsch, the Republicans’ reason for being has never been murkier. And this has not been lost on Obama, who after four wishy-washy years has finally found a frozen flag pole that the Republicans are afraid to lick. The President may talk modestly about resisting second term overreach, but just listening to Jay Carney swear that The rich will pay their fair share, by Crom! tells a different story. Obama’s sexy and he knows it. If the Republicans yield before the clock strikes midnight on the eve of the Cliffpocalypse then Obama will have done what no Democrat was thought capable of doing, that being breaking the back of Grover Norquist. But if the Republicans do allow doomsday to arrive, then their reckless disregard for America’s fiscal health (a record that includes the Bush deficits, the  Crisis of ’08 and the more recent credit downgrade), will literally be all they are known for in living memory. Meanwhile, Obama will gather fresh laurels as he stumps for reinstating those Middle Class tax cuts, and will probably go down in history as the Black Reagan. So Obama may have offered a job to Romney after all, to deliver the following message to those Republicans still fighting the last war: It’s over. But if Romney can’t get the point across, perhaps Heisenberg can:  

Happy Cyber Black Monday, my strong brothers and sisters. I hope you are all taking power from whitey through one cutting blog post after another. Don’t be afraid to troll Amazon, neither! The revolution will not be retweeted! But this Monday is blacker still for lack of a Weapon Brown update. And that agony will grow sharper still throughout this entire comic-less week; building and building, the pain like flaming razorblades being pulled through your arteries, until the pressure finally releases next week in the orgasmic gush of blood that will be the final installment of Blockhead’s War!!! Phew. I need a cigarette. Will tears be jerked? Will heartstrings be pulled? Is it personal this time? You will know soon! But I must say, the anticipation is killing me, too. This project, originally intended as a two-issue series, has grown into a four year-long monster, and it is only now that I realize how easy it would have been to form a suicide cult from my fan base. Sadly, that decision needed to have been made around issue four. There are a lot of logistics involved in acquiring arsenic and matching mauve jumpsuits that simply cannot be organized at the last minute. And so my dreams of burning my name into history will have to be extended into my upcoming projects. I will give you all a nuanced update about the Whatisdeepfried.com of tomorrow when the last Weapon Brown strip hits, but let me extend this pre-conclusion “thank you” to you all for hanging around this long, and I think the conclusion will make you happy you did.

Sheesh! This “wrapping up Weapon Brown” thing is more agonizing than I thought! Still, I will keep to my damn schedule, even if I bend my rules a bit. Even if I have to make rule origami out of them. With few pages left to go, the very last installment may come with a week’s delay, as I will probably make it a multi-page spectacular, so prepare for that and save your snark for the newspapers which, by my reckoning, haven’t run a new Charlie Brown strip in years. Hey Schulz! Your vacation’s over! Get back to work!! Now, can we PLEASE stop talking about the thing that brings you to my website and talk politics for a change? You probably all noticed that a certain someone-someone was elected president again, after the longest and most bruising campaign in our nation’s history. Let’s reflect on that for a moment. Without falling for the “there’s no dif’rinse ‘tween ‘em!” cynicism of the dejected independent, I proudly cast my vote for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. Were I a resident of the Swing States of America, I may have voted differently, but I am not. I am a citizen of Blutopia, the land that the candidates forgot. And though the admonition not to “throw my vote away” rang in my ears, I understood that to vote for the candidate who already had my state in the bag would be the true waste of my vote. I’ll be honest and admit that I did not even take the time to research Stein’s positions, so perhaps my vote was tinged with cynicism after all. One should vote for the candidate one would like to see in the Oval Office. Obama, be-warted liberal that he is, did fulfill the only pledge I would raise a pitchfork over, that being healthcare reform. Tepid, unambitious healthcare reform that, despite it’s overall modest character, Obama endured dragonfire to achieve. Had I been asked to vote against Romney to cinch that accomplishment, I probably would have. But in New York State, my approval was simply assumed.

Yes, this is what I wore to vote. Vermin Supreme 2016, bitches!!

However, this was the first election where I divorced myself from the horse race in one significant way: I refused to watch the debates. I had always given those glorified press conferences the benefit of the doubt as significant battles in the war of ideas. Not so this year. This year I finally cut the cord and stopped pretending that the debates aren’t staged spectacles, founded on plain collusion between the Democrats and Republicans to lock out all third party candidates, and the selection of safe, predictable moderators bound by blood oaths to lob softballs at the candidates. This year I chose to let the scales fall from my eyes, and sure enough, the conversation in the press that followed each debate betrayed a cynical consensus that elections are simply quadrennial Super Bowls, jazzed-up campaigns to sell Dorritos. Ads! Another thing I was mostly exempted from, owing to my lack of cable and my citizenship in Blutopia (unlike Swing Staters who were, by all account, subjected to a level of  brainwashing akin to what Alex endured in A Clockwork Orange). Nevertheless, with the 1% sensing a tax hike on the horizon (despite the heroic efforts of lobbyist cockroaches like Grover Norquist) America’s “makers”, “job creators” and other pious Scrooge McDuck’s poured out so much uninvested, non job-creating cash into the campaign that by the end they were turning themselves into YouTube celebrities (as my Thomas Peterffy cartoon illustrated). Substantively, one thing was crystal clear: the campaign, though it focused on the economy, was all about austerity, the “Fiscal Cliff”. Having been put on the ropes by the conservatives in 2010, Sugar Ray Obama’s gambit was to push off the coming holocaust over debt and taxes until the start of the next term, and to let the people decide which party should set America’s pain threshold as the depression slogs on. To protect their assets, America’s pharaohs absorbed and branded a grass roots movement, then ran a candidate who was the exact opposite of  what their grouchy vassals were screaming for: Mitt Romney. Never has a near-unanimous second choice advanced so far in American politics. And in the end, we will always have Karl Rove’s election night exasperation to make us feel good about the good guys winning. But it will quickly fade as our satisfaction over Obama’s re-election settles back into the anxiety that has been the national mood since his first win. Never, too, will we again see so clearly the way populism can be pumped up and shrugged off by the Two Party State. The Tea Party and Occupy, the twin insurgencies that raised the flag of Revolution as they came to recognize the scope of the choices facing the country, were broomed off the stage to make way for a resplendent campaign by the Powers-That-Be. The Tea Party, which in 2010 made the first true dent against politics-as-usual in a generation, could not have been further from the core of Mitt Romney, the great white hope of the resurgent establishment whose agenda (gutting the New Deal, keeping the wealthy dressed in fine silks and only sorta worrying about the Debt) was a light year away from the actual gripes of the elderly who are the true believers of that movement. Meanwhile, Occupy, a dream that lives in the hearts and minds of newspaper columnists more than the masses, found no favor whatsoever amongst the Democrats who, after all, are its legitimate targets. That Elizabeth Warren eked out a win against former Tea Party star Scott Brown in Massachusetts to become that state’s newest senator may be considered a win for the “99%”, but her victory owes more to the stirrings of liberals than to the deeds of those more radical rascals of the Left. So what is  my takeaway? First, the Republicans, and conservatism, are at long last in marked decline. The Bush years have been rebuffed twice, and the party’s message is now so scrambled with propagandistic noise that it is impossible to separate the intelligentsia from the fucktards. In trying to defeat Obama the GOP had to scrap half of their normal program, that being championing our wars abroad, and focus exclusively on the hardest subject for anyone to pretend they understand: macroeconomics. Unable to describe at all how they would grow jobs, the Republicans reduced their argument to one (ironically) bite-sized issue: the national debt. Unable to explain how to tackle that without serious bloodletting (except for putting Big Bird on a rotisserie), they placed all their chips on a racist smoke-and-mirrors campaign that would have made Goebbels clutch his heart. The people, however, voted their interests, and proved that the Third Rail of American politics still has electricity crackling through it. The Democrats were the tortoises in this race, and my hot-blooded sympathy for radicalism aside, Aesop was proven right again. The country is not, after all, peopled by fools, and this election turned on the public realizing, however subliminally, that the 99% question was more than just a meme. Occupy can take some satisfaction for having stirred those coals. However, those who are waiting for Obama to transform from Mace Windu into Shaft in his second term will be sadly disappointed. Had the Republicans recognized Obama as the pragmatist he is they would have had a lot better shot of beating him with one of their own. Now it is time for the Democratic voters to swallow their medicine as the man who coddled Wall Street takes on the Fiscal Cliff, agrees to postpone the day of reckoning for six months or so, and ultimately delivers what he is best at: a less than stellar bargain for the working classes.