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