MISC COMICS
When Darkseid, undisputed ruler of Latveria… er, Apokolips!… asked to sit for a portrait, I haggled on the price a bit. But when he offered to pay me in Omega Beams, my response, naturally, was “On the house, sir!”
…
HEY GANG!
Should I create a Lower Decks trailer reaction video starring Dale? I need 10+ people to encourage me to waste my time on this! Comment below!
…
Ruh roh! Did you forget to become a subscriber?
Armed with nothing but her sizzlin’ magnasword™, Vixxen, the future’s nakedest heroine, fights the hideously enlarged Covid-20XX virus in the moist caverns of Lungworld, source of the galaxy’s interplanetary oxygen supply!
…
(FEAR NOT! This week’s Aftershock is on it’s way. But in this time of crisis, I thought it would share a bit of the glory that my subscribers get on a weekly basis!)
My comics for the rest of this month may be a little sporadic. I am working hard on a movie poster and animated short to accompany a showing of Zardoz, the 1974 Sean Connery sci-fi classic, which is running for one night only on April 29th at the North Park Theater in my hometown of Buffalo, NY. I myself am hosting (and roasting) the event!
I’ll be showing off my work as it progresses, but here are a few sketches of the poster in development. And if you live in Buffalo, (or within three hours driving distance) come and see the show later this month!
Bang the cymbals and toot the shofar! All of you who have dwelt in the desert awaiting my return; ye faithful, desperate for the amusements that only I can provide…  you may cease whipping yourselves with knotted cords! Your master has returned, and the cartoon exile is over!
(Well, in a month it will be over! Go pull your knotted cords out of the bonfire. There’s still time for a little more whipping.)
Job opportunities, travel and soul searching have kept me away from my cartoon duties for the past several months, but I am returning to form, fresh and ready to reclaim your love and disposable income!
Here is what you can look forward to, starting in early June:
The Return of Deep Fried
Your favorite trio of misanthropes return in weekly installments beginning next month! Squints dives into his new job, eager to rejoin the rat race, but finds himself tested by his weird new boss. Meanwhile, Beepo struggles with feelings of abandonment caused by Roadkill’s disappearance while fighting with his conscience over his relationship with Asparagus. Things are going to get creepy in the most wonderful ways!
Deep Fried: The Hero’s Journey #1
The most recent Deep Fried storyline, “Out of the Frying Pan”, will be available as a downloadable digital comic complete with covers and everything. I’m also working on a print edition for you Lorax-hating tree killers.
This issue of Deep Fried (the first official Deep Fried comic book since the fourth issue of volume 2 was published several years ago)  marks the beginning of Deep Fried’s new format, focusing on the adventures of Beepo, Roadkill and Squints exclusively (my other humorous nonsense will now go into the pages of PEEK!) The first arc of this new format, which I imagine will run to four issues, will be called Deep Fried: The Hero’s Journey, and will follow the cast as they each embark  on life-altering odysseys of fun, love and perversion.
Project X!
Good news for fans of my action-oriented work, such as Weapon Brown! Starting in September I will be debuting a new thrilling-yet-humorous comic series on this site that I’m sure will scratch your itch for the outrageous.
Here is what I am prepared to say at this time:
- It is not another Weapon Brown comic. Yes, I told several people that a follow-up to Weapon Brown was in the offing. But I also wanted that project to be drawn by several artists other than myself, and that would require money that I don’t have. While I still hope to pull off this project at some point, I have put it on the back burner for now.
- It is not The Garbage Men. I have teased you with this superhero project many times as well. But like the Weapon Brown follow-up, I prefer to write this comic and have someone else draw it. This is for stylistic reasons, but also because I have no wish to publish The Garbage Men myself. I ultimately want a team working on this book so that another publisher can get it out on a regular basis. It’s still a go project, however. Look for it to arrive someday!
- The story is set here:
I have long wanted to tell a story set in outer space. I love sci-fi and all the opportunities for the weird and the wonderful it allows. And, as you already know, I love parody. What could I have in mind…?
You will find out! I will include the first preview of this new project in the downloadable edition of The Hero’s Journey #1, and I will be releasing more and more details as September approaches.
There you go: the agenda that will have me working my fingers to the bone for years to come!
My God, why have you forsaken me?
My Kickstarter prep is almost done, and I will be launching the campaign in the next two weeks. I’m working on the next Deep Fried strip right now, and things should be back to normal once my Kickstarter launches. In the meantime, enjoy this piece of work-in-progress!
Deep Fried and its attendant shenanigans will post on Wednesday. In the meantime, I’ve got something to get off my chest.
So, now that the blood has been wrung out of the mops at the offices of Charlie Hebdo and the ashes of the burned-out churches in Nigeria are cooling, it is safe to assume that the story of the slaughter that took place on January 7th will start to fade from people’s minds until a new massacre is added to the string of pearls in the saga that is The War That No-one Understands.
The political cartoons that were drawn to show solidarite´ with the fallen French cartoonists will mostly, we hope, also be forgotten, committing as so many did the obvious no-no of using the first and most obvious image that anyone would think of. A thousand portrayals of “the pencil being mightier than the gun†is as lazy a tribute to the fallen as those cartoons of the late Rosa Parks sitting in the front seat of a bus to Heaven.
The tribute they deserve, if any nationally published cartoonist in America could get away with it, would be one identical to the cartoon Charlie Hebdo itself delivered: a drawing of the Prophet Mohammed. That’s what they died over, not pencils.
Instead, the legacy of Charb, Wolinksi, Tignus, Cabu and the others who perished is a controversy over whether it was Charlie Hebdo’s dedication to free speech or vulgarity that brought the Reaper to their door.
Certainly the shows of support from the masses which have followed the assassinations, taking the form of candlelit vigils and piles of pencils and hashtags in place of raised fists––collectively, “I Am Charlieâ€â€“–are a bit vulgar. But then, the tone set over the years by Charlie Hebdo’s satire probably makes that un-nuanced response all the more appropriate.
The true vulgarity is the liberal intelligentsia’s contrarian response, which proudly rallies under the banner “I Am Not Charlie.†It has taken two forms: the first being those of apologists for the hurt feelings of Muslims, the other being the decision by most media in the United States to not run any of the Charlie cartoons that featured Mohammed (the absurd exception is London’s Telegraph, which ran art of someone reading Charlie Hebdo and pixeled out the cartoon on the magazine’s cover, as though Mohammed were a character in Minecraft. Twenty people died in one day because Muslims hate patches of white and yellow squares?)
The apologists come from various schools of excuse. Some do not want to join in martyrizing artists whose work they feel is, at bottom, shitty and merely scandalous. Others cite the obvious blowback against minority Muslim communities in Europe. Why should we be cheering the men whose sacrifice is only going to increase those people’s woes? Then there are the accusations of Charlie Hebdo’s racism, bigotry and xenophobia (usually by Americans) whose only justification is exactly two drawings from Charlie Hebdo’s 45-year history that disclose the colonialist cancer to be found at the magazine’s core.
However, anyone who has been Pied Pipered  into thinking that Charlie Hebdo was somehow France’s Tea Party in disguise should visit Understanding Charlie Hebdo, which translates and decrypts the symbolism in some of the cartoons that the apologists are using to tar and feather the victims of the attack. The reality is almost 180º from what the critics (whose cartoon literacy does not extend much beyond Don Martin gags) would have you believe.
The logic that subscribers to I Am Not Charlie use to both praise and damn Charlie Hebdo would put Roger Penrose in a straightjacket. All their commentaries begin with a disclaimer tut-tutting violence before arriving at the conclusion, 1000 words later, that Charlie Hebdo is the natural heir to Volkisher Beobachter. In fact, those critics are trying to thread the same needle as Charlie Hebdo itself: to disparage terrorists who have issued a fatwah against anyone on planet earth who makes fun of their movement’s L. Ron Hubbard, while at the same time trying not to rub raw the nerves of a second-class population that happens to share the terrorists’ religion, if not their ideology.
Politically speaking, to offend and endear at the same time is a move requiring tighter choreography than an OK Go video. But if the apologists think that Charlie Hebdo fucked up that message then they can congratulate themselves for having crafted a rejoinder that is equally incompetent, with the added feature of having been delivered while the bodies were still warm.
Worse, however, is the near unanimous decision by editors and producers of Western media to cover the Charlie Hebdo story without running even the most tepid of the offending cartoons. Their excuses boil down to: We do not deliberately insult our readers’ sensibilities, and we are not going to rise to the bait of terrorists or free-speech anarchists.
Left unspoken is the plain threat of violent retaliation that is the nub of the very story they are covering. If the apologist’s creed is “We are not Charlieâ€, the media’s has been “We are not going to be the next Charlieâ€.
I could give those institutions my grudging respect if they would only be upfront about this obvious fact. But that they bury the truth under a pile of bullshit from Standards and Practices makes me ill. It also begs the question, famously posed by Rabbi Hillel, “If I am not for myself, what am I?†If running a cartoon about Mohammed is not newsworthy now, when the loonies have called off the truce, when the hell will it be?
Fortunately, Charlie Hebdo still exists, despite the despicable acts of scum and the laments of liberals whose agonized editorials reveal that they are the ones who can’t tell the difference between Muslims and terrorists. Charlie has not missed a beat, and is back doing what, apparently, they alone can do: poking fun at His Undepictableness the Prophet, and proving to the world that there really are atheists in foxholes.
Rounding out the two-week cavalcade of cartoons donated by various popular web cartoonists is this offering from Jen Beaven, talented creator of the mirth-saturated Pencognito comic strip. She and she alone responded to my request months ago for fill-in strips for my last vacation, and I have been saving her contribution for just this moment. Enjoy!
Next week: Weapon Brown is back in the second chapter of Blockhead’s War. Do not fail to not miss it!Â
Would “Muffin Bunneez” have been a funnier name for my kyoot kritters? I guess it’s too late to turn back now. But it’s not too late for you to read the entire final installment of my Boogie Bunnez trilogy!
Is boogie really a slippery slope to harder forms of merriment?? Yogurt and Num Numz must intervene to save Sherbert and the world! Read the whole “Twistin Sister” story here.
Want dancing rabbits? Here’s your dancing rabbits! As promised, the first of three Boogie Bunneez short stories (this one being the shortest by about six inches). Read the whole story here.