Alas, a Blog | Feminist, anti-racist, pro-fat, plus whatever else we feel like talking about.

Issue 43 of Uncanny Magazine

Posted on November 29, 2021 by Mandolin

Picture of rose in hand with text: White Rose, Red Rose "They say the dead see the world as a nightmare. Love and shock and pain are one merged, hungry thing." a short story by Rachel Swirsky, Uncanny Magazine

How cool is it to be back in Uncanny Magazine for the second time this year?

Earlier this year, they published my (very) short story, “Thirteen of the Secrets in My Purse.” (I’ve been thrilled to see that folks are enjoying it. I think it’s a good year to read something funny and a little exciting.)

My newest short story, “White Rose, Red Rose,” is a shivery–perhaps even uncanny?–fantasy about a seamstress in a war-torn city.

That morning, there was a white rose on my windowsill, and my heart cracked.

I took it inside. I knew well the only things that mattered were that it was a rose and it was white, but I examined it anyway. It had been in full flower recently, but was quickly withering. Several petals were gone; another came off in my hand. The petals wore traces of dirt that browned them, and I wondered if that had been purposeful. A missive of death: white for the bone, earth for the grave. I was probably thinking overmuch.

I plucked the petals into a bowl and washed them, then put them to boil to make a sweet tea. As far as we knew, the armsmen didn’t know our resistance codes, but I didn’t like to leave evidence.

How? I wondered, and chastised myself for wondering. There couldn’t be another message until tomorrow; our communication process came in slow trickles, frustrating but necessary, according to the resistance leaders. I wondered anyway. Throughout the day, as I patched uniforms for the occupying armsmen, and baked bread to bring my neighbor with the broken leg, and scrubbed every floorboard in the house, I wondered: how?

Quick? Painful? Bloody? Horrible? Unlucky? Slow?

How had my brother died?

Uncanny Magazine Issue 43 Cover The full story will be freely available online on December seventh (I’ll post a link!), but Issue 43 is already available for purchase now.

The first part of the issue is already online. There are some great writers for you to peruse now:

“That Story Isn’t the Story” by John Wiswell

“For Want of Milk” by Grace P. Fong

“The Stop After the Last Station” by A. T. Greenblatt

I hope you enjoy the issue, and I look forward to being able to share my story online, too!

Posted in fantasy, Fiction, short story, Uncanny Magazine | Comments Off

Cartoon: A Concise History of Body Positivity

Posted on November 29, 2021 by Ampersand

If you like these cartoons, help us make more! Each $2 pledge really matters.

This cartoon is another collaboration with Becky Hawkins.

Most cartoonists hate drawing crowd scenes; Becky, given several scripts to choose from, picked this one out immediately. I’m glad she did; this comic really shows off Becky’s ability to draw different sorts of bodies and fashions.

Of course, doing that well usually requires diving into internet image search engines; imagination is fed by research. Here are some of the photos Becky used as inspiration for this cartoon.

I think – or, anyway, I hope – that this cartoon explains itself well enough so that even people who aren’t familiar with fat politics will get it.

Tigress Osborn, writing for the BBC, sums the issue up:

Unfortunately, as more people started using hashtags like #loveyourbody and #allbodiesarebeautiful, the most marginalized bodies in society have become marginalized again within the very movement they started.

Some Body Positive believers say that weight loss talk should be included in Body Positivity messaging, as losing weight makes people feel better about themselves. Even major diet companies describe themselves as Body Positive. Some activists still embrace Body Positivity as a gateway to more radical body liberation movements. To others, the phrase has become so meaningless that they’ve either adopted variations or simply won’t use it at all.

Body Positivity is nothing without its Fat Activist grandparents of all genders. It’s also nothing without the Black women and femmes who amplified the message at the beginning of the trend.

I just paused in writing this post to go refill my water glass. When I opened the freezer to get ice, a box of corn flakes on top of the fridge came tumbling down, and I said “AAAHH!” and then caught it one-handed, without a single flake being spilled. It’s a matter of no importance, but it’s probably the greatest moment of physical competence I’ve had all month, so I wanted to tell someone about it. :-p

TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON

This cartoon has four panels. All the panels show people standing in a blank cartoon space and talking directly to the readers.

PANEL 1

Three women, all unambiguously fat, are smiling warmly and talking to the readers. The one on the left, who is white, is wearing cool boots, and an open red plaid shirt over a black dress. She’s wearing squarish glasses. The other two women are black. The middle woman is wearing a crop top shirt with a brightly colored blue and pink pattern, and bright blue shorts. The woman on the right is wearing a plain white tee, blue shorts, and red-and-blue sneakers.

BOOTS: Body positivity means that no one should apologize or be made to feel bad for their body.

SNEAKERS: Love the body you’re in!

PANEL 2

A white woman, thin and with carefully styled blond hair, has walked out in from of the three fat women. She’s carrying a big sign that says “Love the body you’re in” in cheerful large lettering that’s a bit nostalgic for the 1960s. Below the lettering is a picture of a tube of lotion.

Behind the new woman, Boots looks startled and distressed. Sneakers is holding up a finger like she’s trying to object. And we can’t see what Crop Top is doing, because she’s almost completely blocked from view by the woman’s sign.

THIN WOMAN: “Body positivity” sounds great! You know what this would be amazing for? Selling skin care products!

SNEAKERS: Um…

PANEL 3

Two more thin white people have entered. One is a young woman with a pony tail, wearing yoga pants and a crop top; she’s sitting on the floor, legs curled under, and is holding her smartphone high to take a selfie. The other is a salesman-looking man, wearing a blazer over a v-neck shirt, who is holding up a book for us to see. The book’s title is “Love Your THIN Self.” Both of the newbies are talking very cheerfully.

Between these two newbies, and the blonde woman with the sign, Boots and Crop Top are almost completely blocked. (We can see Crop Top’s eyes, which look annoyed). Sneakers can be seen better, and is open-mouthed with how appalled she is.

PONYTAIL: If I bend just the right way, there’s a fat roll! Helping women like me is what body positivity is all about!

BLAZER: Diet companies are also part of the body positivity movement! Losing weight will help people love their bodies!

PANEL 4

There’s now a lot of smiling people, nearly all white, crowded into the panel. Most are thin, a couple are a bit chubby, but there’s no one here you’d describe as “obese.” Everyone is grinning and talking to the readers.

Boots and Crop Top cannot be seen at all. We can see just a bit of Sneakers, as a smiling woman in a pretty pink blouse with an open back, with string forming a spiderweb pattern over the open part, violently shoves Sneakers out of the panel.

EVERYONE IN UNISON: Remember, body positivity is for everybody!

PINK BLOUSE: Except for really fat people. We can’t glorify obesity.

CAPTION AT BOTTOM OF STRIP

A large caption under the strip says “A CONCISE HISTORY OF BODY POSITIVITY.”

This cartoon on Patreon

Posted in Cartooning & comics, Fat, fat and more fat | 12 Comments

More on MileHiCon: Speech and Panel Reflections

Posted on November 23, 2021 by Mandolin

Last month, I posted a bit about my experience as a guest of honor at MileHiCon in Denver this year, including an excerpt from the “speech” I gave at the opening ceremonies and some thoughts about my panels.

On my Patreon this month, I’m sharing more of my MileHiCon materials, starting with the complete, unexcerpted text of my “speech.” Since the version I read at the convention was shortened, this is never-before-seen material for everyone except my husband (who served as my captive audience in our hotel room).

I’ve also included my extensive panel notes with thoughts about things like third-sex roles in non-Western cultures and weird creatures from the Cambrian explosion with five eyes and vacuum mouths. (And this very creepy video about the hypothesis that vertebrate heads are on sideways! ) Plus, recommendations for awesome material like Beyond the Binary, an anthology about non-binary characters edited by Lee (then Brit) Mandelo, and Alien Sex, an anthology of short stories about alien… well, sex, edited by Ellen Datlow.

All of my Patreon content–including a substantial offering once a month of something like an original essay, poem or short story–is available to all my patrons, no matter how much or little they contribute. Every contribution is greatly appreciated and makes a big difference to supporting my writing career!

I hope everyone’s had a lovely November. For folks celebrating this weekend, have a great holiday! (And for those who aren’t, but get a few extra days off, have a great weekend!)

Posted in MileHiCon, Patreon | Comments Off

Cartoon: Racist Bones

Posted on November 22, 2021 by Ampersand

If you enjoy my cartoons, you could help me make more by supporting my Patreon! Lots of people making $1 and $2 pledges is how I make my living.

I admit it: This cartoon is basically a dad joke. I was just mulling over the idea of racist bones and this cartoon idea came up and made me chuckle.

But there is a real issue this strip nods at. If I say “I think that joke is kind of racist,” and someone angrily responds “I don’t have a racist bone in my body,” the conversation has been diverted.

Instead of discussing what makes a joke racist, we end up discussing the moral character of someone I may not even know. Is he evil? Does he hate Blacks? Is he rotten inside? In short, does he have racist bones?

It’s an impossible conversation. We usually have no way of knowing what someone’s hidden character is. It’s much better to discuss if things are racist – actions, institutions, rules, and even jokes. But that’s a conversation that many white people seem desperate to avoid.

“There’s not a racist bone in my body!” is an expression that goes back to at least 1967, a variation of 19th century expressions like “not a lazy bone in his body.” But, according to Christopher Petrella and Justin Gomer, the person who turned that relatively obscure expression into a cliché was Ronald Reagan.

This tactic emerged in a climate in which explicit racism was no longer openly tolerated in U.S. politics, but white Americans remained uncomfortable with and opposed to the policies necessary to ameliorate decades of racial discrimination.

As this rhetoric crept into the political arena, the “racist bone” defense rose alongside it as the default retort against allegations that opposing civil rights policies revealed a racist character. This pairing was no coincidence. While Reagan and his Justice Department brought colorblindness to the Oval Office, they also fundamentally reframed the federal government’s conception of racial discrimination from a group issue that could be addressed with policy to an individual one that required personal change.

This framing was essential to Reagan’s assault on civil rights. It raised the bar for proving invidious behavior and for justifying public policies intended to right past wrongs. And when one changed the metric from the marginalization of African Americans at a group level to individual misdeeds, the “racist bone” defense made much sense. After all, racism was a matter of body and soul, not public policy. What mattered was an individual’s personal conduct toward others.

So I guess that’s something else we can thank Ronald Reagan for.

(I initially began to draw the man in my strip with Reagan’s distinctive haircut, but decided that if he looked like Reagan that would just be confusing to readers old enough to recognize Reagan.)

In my first sketch, the bones were just… bones. Realistically drawn bones floating in space with no faces or hands, just word balloons pointing at them. It would have been neat, visually, but I just didn’t want to draw something so… lifeless. Also, the idea of bones with eyes and mouths and even teeth really amuses me.

For such a simple idea, the script took a surprising amount of work. The first version was pretty much a listicle of racist things “Sam” said. But then I realized that nothing indicated the bones, themselves, were racists, and without that what makes them racist bones? So I rewrote, with less issues touched on, and the extra space being used to make it clear that the bones agree with the racist things Sam says.

TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON

This cartoon has four panels. The first three panels show three bones talking in a blank space. The three bones – a rib bone, a thigh bone, and a hip bone – are anthropomorphized, with cartoon faces, arms and legs. They’re wearing white gloves with rolls at the wrist, like Mickey Mouse.

The fourth panel shows two human beings talking in a park.

PANEL 1

Rib Bone is talking to Thigh Bone and Hip Bone. Hip Bone, in particular, looks concerned.

RIB BONE: Thigh bone and hip bone! How’s it going?

THIGH BONE: Not good, Rib.

HIP BONE: We’ve been trying everything to get into this guy named Sam…

PANEL 2

In a closer shot, Thigh Bone leans back, laughing, and Hip Bone, still looking concerned, shrugs.

THIGH BONE: First Sam did a hilarious fake Asian accent! I love funny Asian accents, so I thought, “I’m in!”

HIP BONE: But then Sam said he was just joking, and as we all know, saying it’s a joke means it can’t be racist.

PANEL 3

A shot of the three bones. Rib Bone listens with a neutral expression and gosh darn it I just now realized, looking at the cartoon as I type the transcript, that I drew a mustache on Rib Bone in panel 1, but forgot the mustache in panel 3. Hold on, I’ll be back in a few minutes.

I’m back. Rib Bone, sporting a thick, luscious mustache, has a neutral expression as oh geez I just noticed I forgot to draw Rib Bone’s arm. Wait here, I’ll be right back.

Okay! Rib Bone, a character with both a mustache and arms, listens with a neutral expression. Thigh Bone steeples their fingers and is smiling in anticipation, and Hip Bone is grinning hugely.

THIGH BONE: Then Sam talked about how bad white men have it and how much easier it is for Blacks to find jobs.

HIP BONE: Exactly what I think! I thought for sure I was in! But then he said…

PANEL 4

Two men stand talking in a park. The first man — Sam — is white, blonde, wearing a button-up tan shirt, brown slacks, and a nice-looking pair of sneakers. He is yelling and waving his arms, obviously angry. The other man has brown skin, black hair, and a van dyke beard. He’s wearing an orange tee with a “!” design, and is rolling his eyes.

SAM: I DON’T HAVE A RACIST BONE IN MY BODY!

This cartoon on Patreon

Posted in Cartooning & comics, Race, racism and related issues, Racism | 4 Comments

Cartoon: Oil and Gas are So Cheap!

Posted on November 21, 2021 by Ampersand

Help us make more cartoons by supporting my Patreon!

This cartoon was inspired by one of AOC’s tweets.

I read that and thought of the cartoon idea. And then pretty much immediately started work drawing it.

The Union of Concerned Scientists writes:

We’ve all paid a utility bill or purchased gasoline. Those represent the direct costs of fossil fuels; money paid out of pocket for energy from coal, natural gas, and oil.

But those expenses don’t reflect the total cost of fossil fuels to each of us individually or to society as a whole. Known as externalities, the hidden costs of fossil fuels aren’t represented in their market price, despite serious impacts to our health and environment.

And from NPR:

Fossil fuel producers should avoid extracting at least 90% of coal reserves and 60% of oil and gas reserves by 2050, according to a study published in Nature, to limit global temperature rise to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. Even then, that gives the planet only a 50% chance of avoiding a climate hotter than that.

Global temperatures have already warmed about 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the late 1800s, due in large part to the burning of fossil fuels, which releases gases that trap heat in the atmosphere. As a result of the warming, droughts, storms and heat waves are becoming more extreme, causing a cascade of disasters.

(Research for any cartoon about global warming is seriously depressing!)

I became excited about drawing this cartoon when I realized I could draw the first three panels as a single continuous image – something I’ve been wanting to incorporate into my political cartoons for months. This technique is more common in comic books than in comic strips like this one – although the earliest use of the technique I know of was in a few Sunday pages of the innovative comic strip Gasoline Alley back in the 1930s.

Working on the reprint collection over the last few weeks had reminded me that I used to do non-naturalistic, limited color palettes more often, and I really like the way they look. So I decided to go that route for this cartoon. I was trying for a muddy, grim feel for the first three panels, to contrast with bright and almost antiseptic colors for panel four.

This one took a lot of time to draw. Both the post-hurricane wreckage environment, and the private jet plane environment, took research and a bunch of time to draw. For the jet plane interior, I based my drawing very closely on some photo I found online, but for some reason recreated the perspective grid so I could draw it from scratch, rather than purely tracing. The wreckage environment isn’t based on any one picture; instead, I looked at a lot of pictures, until I felt able to draw something from imagination that would at least get the feeling across.

Then, literally as I was writing the above paragraphs, I thought “wait, what if we could see the jet plane from panel 4, in the sky in panel 1? That would link the two environments together, at least for readers who notice.” Fortunately, drawing things on computer makes changes like that pretty easy to manage, and a half-hour later a jet plane was in panel 1’s sky.

TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON

This cartoon has four panels.

The first three panels show a continuous scene of post-hurricane wreckage; house roofs lie on the ground at odd angles, all sorts of lumber and shards of unidentifiable broken objects are sticking up in the air, or litter the ground. A power line pole and a couple of streetlamps are leaning at odd angles. There are occasional identifiable objects mixed with all the litter on the ground; a hairbrush, a child’s ball, a desktop computer. All three panels are colored in greens, browns, and dim oranges that (I hope) will remind people of mud. The sky is a dull orange. A distant jet plane – incongruously colored in shades of blue – can be seen in the sky.

There are dazed-looking people standing in or looking through the wreckage.

PANEL 1

A man with dark hair, rectangular glasses and a neat van dyke beard is clutching a little pile of framed photos to his chest. A woman sits on the ground near him, her face in her hands. Nearby, a person wearing a long coat, and lifting what might be a round table top, looks back at the man with the van dyke beard.

BEARD: I rescued some family photos… everything else is gone.

LONG COAT: Me too… My business, my house…

PANEL 2

A woman wearing a hoodie, and with her hair mostly wrapped in a scarf, is talking to a child and petting her on the head.

HOODIE: Mommy’s in the hospital, so you’ll stay with me until we find Daddy.

HOODIE (thought): If we do.

PANEL 3

A man in a striped sweater stands, looking sad and dazed. Further in the foreground, an older man, bald and with glasses and wearing a vest, and a woman with a baseball cap and her hair tied in a pony tail, are looking around and talking. The woman is looking at a smart phone.

GLASSES: How much will it cost to rebuild all this?

BASEBALL CAP: Billions. Weather disasters cost us $99 billion last year.

PANEL 4

A new setting. We are aboard a private jet plane. On one side of the aisle is a long sofa; on the other side, a single airplane-style seat, with a full table (not just a fold-out tray) in front of it. There’s a vase with flowers, and an open laptop, on the table. Sitting in the seat, a man wearing a collared shirt with a striped necktie is talking on his cell phone. Nearby, a flight attendant is holding a tray, offering the man a glass of wine. This panel is colored mostly in antiseptic blues, although the people are colored in a light, bright orange.

NECKTIE: So I told the senator, “forget wind and solar! Oil and gas are so much cheaper!”

This cartoon on Patreon.

Posted in Cartooning & comics, Environmental issues | Comments Off

Cat Drawing! Zephyr Petted by Mike

Posted on November 19, 2021 by Mandolin

drawing of cat being petter

photo cat being petted Zephyr being petted by my husband, Mike. Zephyr likes to grab petting hands so you can’t stop petting.

Posted in artwork, Cats, Drawing, zephyr | 1 Comment

Link Farm and Open Thread, Hand Eye Coordination Edition

Posted on November 18, 2021 by Ampersand

“This is it” is the consensus among some COVID experts. So how should you assess risk for the long term?
““Eradication, meaning complete elimination of this virus from the world, is not going to happen,” said Dr. John Swartzberg, a UC Berkeley infectious disease expert. “We’re going to be living with COVID.””
Crypto Investors Are Bidding to Touch a 1,784-Pound Tungsten Cube Once a Year
The cube is 14 inches on each side, and weighs 9/10ths of a ton. Bidding starts at a little over $200,000.
We actually shouldn’t care about local college students | by Katelyn Burns | Oct, 2021 | Medium
“Dozens of mainstream writers and pundits have carved out a career obsessing over the activity of kids at tiny liberal arts schools. It’s a joke.”
The Firearms Policy Coalition Offers a Simple Way to Resolve the Texas SB 8 Case – Reason.com
Interesting (although it makes sense) to see a gun rights group coming out against Texas’ anti-abortion law – or, rather, against the mechanism.
Before the Final Frame: When Police Missteps Create Danger – The New York Times
How officers can put themselves in danger, making shootings by police more likely. (Here’s an alternate link, but some of the features of the story – like the videos – won’t work on the alternate link.)
No, America is Not Experiencing a Version of China’s Cultural Revolution – Nicholas Grossman
An extremely good article. I don’t agree with 100% of anything, but I probably agree with 97% of this.
How hospitals inflate bills for healthy births by labeling them “emergencies” : NPR
As the story makes clear, this isn’t just one hospital; it’s an increasingly common practice.
Is “casual sex” unhealthy? – by Cathy Reisenwitz – Sex and the State
Simple answer: No. More nuanced answer: It depends on each person’s values and why they’re having casual sex.
Stop Calling “Wokeness” a Religion – Heterodox Academy | Heterodox Academy
“The Liberty Way”: How Liberty University Discourages and Dismisses Students’ Reports of Sexual Assaults — ProPublica
“But two former students did recall being punished after they reported being sexually assaulted. One said that after she reported being raped to school authorities, she was fined $500 for drinking alcohol and told she had to attend counseling.”
Why Many Police Traffic Stops Turn Deadly – The New York Times (And an alternate link).
“In fact, because the police pull over so many cars and trucks — tens of millions each year — an officer’s chances of being killed at any vehicle stop are less than 1 in 3.6 million… ‘The risk is statistically negligible, but nonetheless it is existentially amplified.’”
Justice Dept. Sues Penguin Random House Over Proposed Simon & Schuster Acquisition- The New York Times. (And an alternate link.)
Interestingly, the case against the merger is based a lot on potential harms to authors of blockbusters (who would be less likely to benefit from bidding wars if two of the largest publishers merge).
The Ohio AG says stings rescue trafficking victims. Often that means they’re arrested. | WYSO
“I wasn’t being human trafficked. I was basically soliciting for money to support myself because of my criminal background. I’m not able to get a decent job. Now they’ve added to my criminal record. I didn’t feel rescued.”
What does COVID-19 transmission have in common with sexism and harassment? As it turns out, quite a bit. | The Clayman Institute for Gender Research
“Of course, this does not necessarily mean that sexism or sexual harassment causes someone to engage in risky behaviors related to COVID-19. However, it does suggest that similar overarching attitudes or beliefs may underly both types of “boundary-crossing” behaviors.” Thanks to Grace for the link.
Menace Enters the Republican Mainstream – The New York Times (And an alternate link.)
“…historians and those who study democracy say what has changed has been the embrace of violent speech by a sizable portion of one party, including some of its loudest voices inside government and most influential voices outside.”
Kyle Rittenhouse’s Defense Is a Threat to the Rule of Law
“Once Rittenhouse fired his first shots, he and his attackers plausibly entered a context in which neither could be held legally liable for killing the other.”
The Many Trials of Keith Davis Jr.
He’s entering his sixth criminal trial. As far as I can tell, the Baltimore police are claiming that they initially shot him multiple times for one crime, but when that couldn’t be proved, they discovered that luckily he had committed a completely different crime so shooting him was all right. He was the first person shot by Baltimore police after Freddie Gray’s death, which is maybe why the prosecutor (a so-called progressive) is so determined to find some way to find him guilty of something. Meanwhile, he got shot nearly to death and has spent years in prison without ever being convicted, despite five going on six attempts. Police and prosecutors have essentially no accountability, and it’s infuriating.
Photos by Yahor Urbanovich and Chandler Hilken on Unsplash.

Posted in Link farms | 5 Comments

Haiku for November 18th

Posted on November 18, 2021 by Mandolin

Cold drives off the bugs.

We shiver, but no bug bites

afflict our bonfire.

Comments Off

Cat Drawing! Pete is a Cupcake

Posted on November 12, 2021 by Mandolin

cat in bowl

This is one of the images I used in Scragamuffin, the chapbook I released as October’s exclusive Patreon reward. I thought it might be fun to release the pictures with the photos that inspired them.

cat in bowl Pete was a pretty large cat. This is a substantial-sized mixing bowl which explains how he got into it, but the way his fur spills over the edges makes it look like the bowl is much too small. I think he looks like a cupcake.

Drawing this image was interesting because the photograph is relatively low quality so I had to do some guessing. I also wasn’t sure whether the technique of using empty pencil lines to sketch in background elements would work when the bowl is such a pivotal part of the image, but I think the empty space works in contrast to the density of fur, and helps emphasize Pete’s expression.

Posted in artwork, Cats, Drawing | Comments Off

Cartoon: The Five Kinds of Republican

Posted on November 11, 2021 by Ampersand

If you enjoy these cartoons, why not help me make more by supporting my Patreon? A $2 pledge makes a real difference! (Well, to the making of these cartoons. But in the long run, we’ll hit the heat death of the universe and nothing matters anyway.) (In which case, why not support my Patreon?)

A central fact of American political life today is that the Republican base will believe anything, anything at all, so long as all their trusted news sources (NewsMax, FoxNews, etc) are saying it in unison. Or maybe just if the people on their Facebook feed say it.

Although the lies in this comic strip are sometimes exaggerations, none of them were made up out of whole cloth. There really are millions of Republicans who believe these things. The Big Lie has become The Big Spreadsheet of Lies.

This is something I think about a lot lately. There must be some way to talk to Republicans about reality that they can hear. I hope.

(This cartoon isn’t such a way, obviously.)

As my longtime readers have probably noticed, over the years I’ve done many comic strips which are basically panel after panel of different, often wacky-looking people talking straight to the reader.

One reason is that I like doing cartoons about patterns – cartoons that try to look at problems as spread across society, rather than being just one problematic individual. This “survey” approach to a comic strip is one way of getting at that.

But another reason is, cartoons like are ridiculously fun to draw.

The throw-off gag in panel one is there because the word “Republican” is so long, which limited how big the font could be while still fitting the word more-or-less in the panel. That meant that – unless I made the “5” even bigger – I had a dead space at the bottom of panel one.

So I threw in a quick little gag with a little self-portrait of me. It was the last thing I wrote or drew, and it took much less time and effort than any of the other panels. Naturally, when I showed my housemate the cartoon-in-progress, that’s the bit he laughed the longest at. As Billy Pilgrim might say, “so it goes.”

Usually I gender-balance my cartoons much better than this one, which shows four men and one woman. (I think the man in panel 4 was a woman in my original conception, but while I was drawing it I thought a big mustache would be fun).

How bad a mistake do folks think this is? Should I redraw a panel? I’ll do better next time I do a cartoon in this format.

TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON

This cartoon has six panels. Each of the panels shows a white person speaking, usually to the reader. Every other panel has either a tan or a blue dominant background color, forming a sort of checkboard pattern.

All panels, except for panel 1, have a caption at the top of the panel.

PANEL 1

Most of this panel is taken up by large, friendly lettering for the title of this strip: “THE FIVE KINDS OF REPUBLICAN.”

At the bottom of the panel is a small self-portrait of me, Barry, with my arms crossed and looking at the reader with what I hope is sort of a “sheesh!” expression. Barry is fat, has dark hair in a ponytail, and is wearing a solid black tee.

BARRY: White, white, white, white and white.

PANEL 2

A blonde woman yells at her laptop screen, appalled and panicked. She’s wearing a dark red tee and has a coffee cup next to her on the table.

CAPTION: 1. Tools who believe ridiculous lies.

WOMAN: A million Americans have been killed by chips in vaccinations! The lamestream media’s covering it up!

PANEL 3

A man with his brown hair parted in the middle is walking a dog on a leash through a hilly area, with a tree in the background. He’s wearing a collared yellow button-up shirt and blue jeans. He’s smiling big and pointing to something on his smartphone. The dog is looking up at him with a “oh not this again” expression.

CAPTION: 2. Tools who believe ridiculous lies.

MAN: It says here that Portland is a burned out shell of a city!

PANEL 4

A redheaded man, with a large mustache and large glasses, is leaning out of a window and holding up a smartphone. He has an elaborate sleeve tattoo covering his entire left arm, which was super fun for me to draw and which probably no one is able to see because the drawing is small. (Things on the tattoo include a smiling sun, a bird, a big eye, flowers, a compass, and woman’s face in profile, and a big diamond.) He looks angry.

CAPTION: 3. Tools who believe ridiculous lies.

MAN: The Dumbocrats are bussing in ten thousand Mexicans to illegally vote!

PANEL 5

An older man, wearing a thick vest over a yellow sweater, looks out at the reader with a concerned expression. He’s holding a tablet to his chest. He’s standing behind a fence; a bunch of tall, dark red flowers are in front of the fence.

CAPTION: 4. Tools who believe ridiculous lies.

MAN: Liberals made up “global warming” because George Soros secretly owns the solar panel companies!

PANEL 6

A hand (which looks like it belongs to someone Black) is holding a smartphone. On the smartphone, a slick-looking blonde man with carefully styled hair and a huge grin is staring out at his viewers. He’s wearing a suit and tie, and holding up a big orange bottle, like the kind some pharmacies put pills in.

CAPTION: 5. Liars.

MAN: …and that’s why Trump is secretly still president!

MAN: And have you tried my cancer-blasting vitamins? Only $34.99 a bottle for the next five minutes!

This cartoon on Patreon.

Posted in Cartooning & comics, Conservative zaniness, right-wingers, etc., Rank Stupidity | 27 Comments