My new cartoon collection, Why Must They Shove It In My Face?, is out! It’s about 200 pages of cartoony goodness, featuring 100 cartoons, plus text pieces and oodles of behind-the-scenes sketches. You can download the PDF if you join my Patreon at the $3 level. In fact, you get to download four different book collections if you join at the $3 level — about 700 pages of material.
(700 hundred pages! See that, brain? I’m not entirely unproductive.)
Check out the timelapse video of me drawing this comic strip. (If you have pot handy, consider getting stoned for it, that might enhance the experience.)
This strip was inspired by a kerfuffle in the comics community. A white cartoonist, who had gotten a lot of attention for her award-winning first graphic novel (published by a prestige publisher), posted a comic strip on her Instagram about how comics fans, due to white guilt, felt forced to pretend excitement about the work of presumably undeserving nonwhite cartoonists.
A pseudonymous cartoonist commented on Reddit:
I was a fan of her (mostly her paintings— I’ve never felt very compelled to read her comics to be honest) and it just really sucked to read that comic. I’m in the industry and it felt so extremely pointed at some of my peers. It was so stressful as a POC cartoonist reading all of the positive comments rolling in right after it was posted because I just felt like “wow, is this how people feel about me?” It really, really sucked.
I’ve always found the right-wing theory that people don’t really like what they like, but are only saying so to appease the “woke,” hilarious. (“You Only Think You Liked It!” might make a good title for the eventual reprint collection). In the last couple of months I’ve been hearing people say this about James Gunn’s allegedly “woke” Superman movie. (“Woke” because of its radical message that empathy and immigration are good things). But there have been many previous examples – I’ve seen similar claims made about Black Panther, The Barbie Movie and HBO’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
There’s also a catch-22 – when “woke” or “diverse” media does well, the anti-woke scolds crawl out of their internet forums to declare that people are just pretending to like it. But when a piece of “woke” media does poorly, the same people crow “go woke, get broke.”
(I ought to define what “woke” means, since I’ve typed “woke” seven times in two paragraphs. Alas, I can’t – at least, not with any specificality – because what’s meant by “woke” is an ever-moving and opportunistic target. But, generally speaking, “woke” means anything to the speaker sees as being too friendly to the interests of women or minority groups.)
The specific dust-up that inspired this comic is obviously a flash in the pan, but the attitude is common enough to be worth drawing a comic about it. Naturally, I considered switching the specifics from comics to a more popular and thus generic feeling art form – novels, say, or movies.
But I’d already thought of panel three, and I was very excited about drawing a comic-within-my-comic. So comics it remained. I tried to write it so that people unaware of the specific case I was responding to (a group which comprises approximately 99.99999999999% of humanity) would still be able to enjoy the strip.
I also thought for a long time about whether criticizing another cartoonist (even without naming her or drawing a caricature of her) was something I even wanted to do. At some level, is this unprofessional of me? And shouldn’t I be aiming my critiques at genuinely famous people, not a relatively unknown cartoonist?
In the end, I decided it was okay (I mean, obviously, since you’re reading this). If political stances people go out of their way to take in public aren’t fair game, what is? And Graham is probably more successful as a cartoonist than me (admittedly a low bar), so it’s not punching down.
TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON
This cartoon has four panels, plus a tiny “kicker” panel under the bottom of the strip. Each panel features two women talking on a suburban sidewalk. One woman has glasses and a red t-shirt; the other has short dark hair and torn jeans. I’ll call them “RED” and “TORN.”
PANEL 1
Red, angry, is holding out a comic book towards Torn. Torn crouches to examine the comic.
RED: Look! A “diverse” artist’s comic book won an award, but their work is garbage!
TORN: I liked that comic.
PANEL 2
Red tosses the comic away over her shoulder, while producing another comic and handing it to Torn.
RED: You only think you liked it!
RED: No one actually liked it. They just said they did because they’re afraid. Here, read my award-winning comic, it’s actually good.
TORN: Um… Okay.
PANEL 3
In the foreground, we see Torn is reading the comic. In the background, Red continues to rant.
RED: You know why they give awards to middling “diverse” artists? White guilt! It’s pathetic!
PANEL 4
Torn, amused, hands the comic back to Red. Red looks suspicious.
TORN: Have you noticed that when middling white artists win awards, no one thinks that needs an explanation?
RED: Sure, but– Wait, what are you implying?
TINY KICKER PANEL
Torn talks to Barry the cartoonist.
TORN: You’d know all about middling white cartoonists winning awards, right Barry?
CHICKEN FAT WATCH
“Chicken fat” is obsolete cartoonists’ terminology for unimportant (but hopefully fun) details in the artwork.
PANEL 1 – The comic book’s title is “Minor Detail Comix,” and has a sedate dog on the cover. One of the spies from “Spy vs. Spy” is in a hole in a tree in the background. An open can on the ground is labeled “Ant Food” and has a trail of ants leading to it.
PANEL 2 – The dog on the cover of the comic being tossed away now has a panicked expression. The new comic she’s holding out is entitled “Changing Details Comix,” with a skeleton in a suit on the cover.
PANEL 3 – We see some of the panels of the comic Torn is reading. “Hey, wanna have some ill-advised sex? But in an artsy and highbrow way.” “No, I’d rather do it with Mr. Stephen Sondheim.” “I understand. He is the greatest songwriter ever. Maybe I could have sex with Andrew Lloyd Webber instead?”
Also, the Evil Bunny – a character I frequently draw into backgrounds – can be seen in panel 1 of the comic-in-a-comic.
PANEL 4 – The comic now shows the famous painting “The Scream,” and is entitled “Still Changing Comix.”
TATTOO – The tattoo on Torn’s left arm forms a three panel comic strip. In panel one, a moon and a sun, both with smiling faces, face each other across the arm. In panel two, they’re dancing with each other, holding hands, with little hearts floating in the air. In panel four, they’ve floated apart and look heartbroken.
It also reminds me of when the right-wing media freaked out because a trans teenager was voted Prom Queen by her classmates, and conservatives said the teenagers only voted for her to “virtue-signal” or “appease woke.”
The whole Far-Right of the SF community has been insisting for over a decade now that we can’t really like the books we like. How could we really like amazing, innovative science fiction written by people like Ann Leckie and NK Jemisin? All virtue-signaling, obviously.
Meanwhile, they keep publishing the same book with the same characters and the same plot, just new covers and new names for the characters. That’s real science fiction!
Beth: Same energy!
Delagar: The Sad Puppies pissed me off so much! Not because they like very boring SF, but because they were so mean and bitter about the idea that not everyone shared their tastes – and were so comfortable partnering with Nazis. There was a less-successful group in comics, “Comicsgate,” that was pretty similar to the Sad Pups.
The flipside is that the right believes its racist and sexist humour is objectively universally funny, and the only possible reason any human being could find it unfunny is ideological reasons.
Wasn’t The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu?
Watcher, good observation.
Megalodon, no, it was an HBO (stops and googles) – oh, whoops. Good catch, thanks.
At my church our congregation is small enough that homilies end up as a group discussion on that Sunday’s lectionary readings. Last Sunday due to their content the subject of empathy came up. We are told that we should visit prisoners, after all. One of my fellow parishioners was having a hard time with the concept of having empathy for people who are in prison for heinous crimes. How does one feel empathy for a murderer?
The concept we settled on is that you can feel sympathy for someone in a given situation (i.e., in jail with all the suffering that can result in) while also understanding that at least in some circumstances their suffering is the result of their own actions; that their suffering is not unjustified and that empathy for their suffering doesn’t mean that you are supposed to bring it to a stop.
Immigration is also a good thing, but only to a certain extent. In the case of the U.S. in particular, that extent was written into our immigration laws through the agency of a democratically elected Congress and President. The latter’s job, which they swear to uphold when they take it, is to enforce the laws to the fullest practical extent. With respect to the immigration laws that doesn’t seem to have been Biden’s priority, but it sure is Trump’s.
Speaking of comics – how long do you think it takes Abbadon to draw something like this?
Even if they’re very, very fast, I would think it would take days. For a slow drawer, it would take much longer.
“Immigration is also a good thing, but only to a certain extent.”
Thanks for sharing your (unprompted, unasked for) views on immigration (for the umpteenth time), Ron!
Trump is now, after months of ramping up, just barely deporting more than Biden did (and Obama deported more than either of them). Biden deported FAR more in his term than Trump did in Trump’s first term.
The extremely right-wing Cato Institute summed it up:
Ron, can you point me to where – during Trump’s first term – you implied Trump was failing to enforce immigration laws?
Many Republicans believe that we actually had open borders under Biden; it’s actually the mainstream view among Republicans, stated by GOP congressmen. No one who isn’t pathetically ignorant could possibly believe that tripe, but for Republicans the number one rule is “we have always been at war with Eastasia.”
Also, Ron, the oath the President takes is this:
President Trump, devoted servant to the impartial rule of law…
No, something about that isn’t ringing quite true. Maybe it’s the blatantly selective enforcement against his political opponents. Maybe it’s the way his administration keeps blithely ignoring inconvenient court rulings. Maybe it’s the fact that he himself was convicted of crimes and used the power of his office to evade punishment.
And to cut off any what-abouts: I’m not happy about Biden’s pardon of his son either, or his misuse of military power. But the scale and sheer brazenness of the current administration’s lopsided application of the law is breathtaking.
I agree, but I remember that “false consciousness” is also a familiar move on the left: Kids didn’t really like rock’n’roll, they’d been brainwashed by commercial so-called entertainment and peer pressure. Or: “stereotypical” gay people don’t really want to act like that, they’ve been brainwashed by the patriarchy. And there may well be some validity to the idea, but no one ever seems to think they like what they like because of it. It’s only the brainwashed mindless sheeple who’ve been duped.
@Duncan: I don’t want to be seen as soft on the right but this is I think actually an apolitical problem – or rather, a generalise political problem, since it certainly has political implications, but nonetheless manifests pretty much everywhere on the political compass – not just left to right, but authoritarian to libertarian, and also on other axes (e.g. feminist vs antifeminist, third world vs western, etc etc). We all believe societal behaviour is shaped by larger forces, but we all give ourselves and probably our close personal friends and/or intellectual allies a pass – we all believe that we are individual independent thinkers whose ideas are shaped by nothing but pragmatism and logic, but we condemn our opponents to be nothing but creations of society-level forces (whether we think those society-level forces are capitalism, sexism, the so-called “woke mind virus” or sexual depravity, or whatever).
I don’t think there’s really much to be done about it. It’s just seemingly a generalised trait of human thinking that exists independent of any political orientation – even though it’s very political in the way it acts out.