2 Ways of Looking at Socialism

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Little known fact: Uncle Sam is a champion fencer, and can take down an unarmed banker with an epee blade in under 2 minutes. Well known fact: babies contribute nothing. 

I almost didn’t draw this comic today. I almost didn’t draw any comic today. For one thing, this is an illustration where my lack of advanced cartooning skills kills me, because this would be 10 times as powerful with better drawings. For another, it has been made clear to me that my views on democratic socialism, while widely shared among those with whom I went to school and my current friends, are pretty far from the mainstream, and downright offensive to some.

It’s confusing to me how people can own 3 mansions and 12 cars and not think about the less fortunate at any point in their lives. I personally earned about $300 last year, and I gave pretty much all of it to charity (I am a special case, obviously, living on The Man’s largesse, some of which I also gave to charity) in addition to having a regular volunteer job, which I’ve been doing for over 11 years. But apparently, there are some people who think it’s totally fine to stockpile vast resources they could never hope to use in 50 lifetimes and give nothing to the community while there are homeless, hungry kids on the other side of the tracks whose lives would be immeasurably improved with 1% of what the rich people don’t use.

If the American presidential election were held today from among the current candidates, but only the people I know on Facebook were voting, the tally would stand at something like 80% Sanders, 15% Clinton, 1% Trump, and 4% whoever else remained in the Republican clown car. But America is diverse, and apparently some people somewhere do not think Donald Trump is the most selfish, least responsible, sorriest excuse for a leader ever to take to the campaign trail. We’re talking about a guy who hates women, hates minorities, hates the poor (so already, this guy hates probably 85% of America), has bankrupted 4 of his own companies, spit on the media, and clearly has no understanding of what a person might be expected to do should that person be elected president. (Hint: the president has to answer questions about what he’s going to do with meaningful and honest statements; the president doesn’t get to skip important meetings because he doesn’t like the person moderating them.) We’re talking about a guy who claims he built an empire from nothing, a guy who considers a million dollar loan from his dad “nothing.” (I also read that, if he had just put that million in some kind of standard money market account, he would be 10 times as rich as he is now. This really isn’t a person you want making budget decisions. This isn’t a leader. It’s a taker.)

So, that’s my story. I just drew something that’s going to make me unpopular, but I’m standing behind it. Sharing is caring. Unchecked selfishness is sick. Regardless of who is elected president of America, I still believe in socialized medicine, fully funded public schools, the post office, the highway system, and having firefighters available to people of every income level, including no income at all. Anyway, as an artist, I’m compelled to tell the truth. Anyway, this is my blog, and if you don’t like it, you can go start your own blog and post original art and writing 5 days a week and send it out into the world for strangers to judge and see how that feels. (Hint: something like this.)

In panel 1, I made the worthless lowlife receiving the handout an artist, obviously. The arts are always the first thing to go. But when I was telling the Girl about FDR and the WPA the other day, the first thing that came to my mind was that there was funding for artists in the WPA. There are still great works of art, which you can see today, that were commissioned by the government. There was a time when the government paid lots of artists to create art, and that art elevated the country. That art inspired people who were beaten down and wanted to give up. And that was democratic socialism. If you visit national parks, many of the roads and improvements you use will have been forged by young workers hired by the WPA. You might think we don’t need art and parks, but I promise you, we do. Without art and parks, there isn’t much point to anything else.

In panel 2, I chose the communal table because this type of dining is very powerful. My mother was a big believer in large dinner parties, and I take it ever further. If you know how to cook, you can make a lot of food for a lot of people without having a lot of money. If there are people, I cook. It is always joyful to share food, no matter how little I have. This guy I know from Benin, who owns a local restaurant, once told me, “In my country, we say that if you share with your friends, you always have more food.” Maybe that sounds paradoxical, but in my experience, it’s 100% true. I feed people, and it inspires them to feed people, and everyone gets to eat. We don’t begrudge those who can’t contribute today. We know that if we give them something now, it will boost them up enough that they’ll contribute tomorrow.

And if they don’t, you know what? It’s still the right thing to do.

Fruit Salad Mandala

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Grapefruits and cherries. They’re grapefruit and cherries. Get your mind out of the gutter.

I have this dilemma regarding how political I want to go; in the last week, I’ve been involved in a few really interesting conversations about democratic socialism starting with randomly telling the Girl about FDR and the WPA. Then I made a throwaway comment–a joke, really–on someone’s Facebook page, and a mutual friend who I think is actually a poly sci prof or something like that challenged me to define socialism.

Man, I was actually afraid. Who wants to get spanked online by a guy who’s probably 10 years their junior but way further ahead in his career? I almost just copied the entry from the giant OED in my desk. (Aw, hell, who I am kidding? I just love pulling that thing out of my desk. It weighs about 50 pounds and comes with this crazy hemisphere magnifying glass.) But then I thought about what the word meant to me and wrote something kind of thoughtful and intelligent that wasn’t exactly about what “socialism” means, but about what it means to individuals, what it could mean under certain circumstances. And more-successful-than me professor guy gave it a like.

Anyway, it could also be a comic. It would have been super cool to have it ready now, just in time to kick off caucus season (ug) but those serious comics take the most time to lay out and I was getting punched in the guy by my monthly dudebro and also The Man had to play a klezmer concert for a mock Jewish wedding at a Hebrew school north of here, and that sounded more interesting than not attending a klezmer concert for a mock Jewish wedding. Maybe I can do it tomorrow. Although I might have a tattoo consultation tomorrow.

So many comics to read and write!

Amusing anecdote about people who don’t understand socialism:

In 2002 or 2003 I was standing in this interminable line at the Walgreen’s pharmacy counter. I don’t even think I was getting my own medication; it seems to me that I was picking something up for a friend, and this line was WAY past the toothpaste and didn’t seem to be moving at all. And there was a guy in front of–old white guy wispy white hair and a fierce voice–and he had opinions. Lots and lots of opinions.

Well, complaints, really. His medications were so expensive. His doctors were so expensive. He was getting ripped off on all his pills. Everyone was profiting off his misery. It was just terrible, terrible, everything cost so much, medical care cost so much money. This dude was telling me (well, everyone in the vicinity, but I was the person behind him so I was the most trapped) about how much his healthcare cost for like 10 minutes.

Finally he took a breath for air and looked at me expectantly.

“That’s why we need socialized medicine,” I said.

“Well, YOU’RE a COMMUNIST,” he replied, disgusted, and mercifully turned his back on me and shut up.

People are unclear on the concept.

Koala-T!

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I don’t see why we wouldn’t win. We meet all the koalifications.

The Man works for an aerospace manufacturing firm, in quality assurance. It’s a job, you know? Every year, the company holds a big picnic in the park, with a bouncing castle and water guns and games for the little kids. Hot dogs and hamburgers provided by the company, potluck for everything else, water balloons, temporary tattoos, that sort of thing. Very America. Much wholesome. In advance of the picnic, they print a commemorative shirt, designed by an employee. Whoever wins the design contest gets a little bonus, maybe $100.

So The Man had this idea, putting the koala in quality. The words are his, and the idea for the picture is his, but he doesn’t have the patience for drawing. He mentioned this concept about 6 months ago, and I said I could probably do it (I’m much better at Photoshop and the Wacom tablet than I was last year!) but we didn’t follow through. Yesterday, he mentioned that the design was due next week, so I did a little sketch. Today he mentioned that it was actually due tomorrow. That was fine, since I had the sketch and no comic anyway.

This is what I did today. I started by looking at how other cartoonists would depict the body of a koala giving a thumbs up. The Man was very clear that the koala must be giving a thumbs up. I was surprised to find that this is, apparently, a common theme, and there were many thumbs up koalas from which to choose. Then I looked at photographs of actual koalas, because most people who draw cartoon animals don’t seem to have ever seen that actual animal, and I like some degree of verisimilitude in my comics. Once I got the eyes, nose, and mouth satisfactorily blocked out and positioned, I just started grabbing colors from actual koala photos, and drawing tiny dots and lines to represent fur. Then I used the blur tool to floofify QA Koala. Somewhere along the line I noted that koalas do not, in fact, have tails and deleted the vestigial one that had appeared in my original reference image. You can’t trust cartoonists. Not about animal anatomy.

The Man was happy with the design but wanted it a bit darker, so I added a layer, grabbed a dark gray, set the opacity to 20%, covered the koala with this shade, and then cleaned up the edges. The Man came in again as I was finishing up the outline and said he could see that I was doing something, but he couldn’t tell what. “I’m making him floofier,” says I. The blur tool is great for cartoon fur.

I used fonts for the lettering instead of doing it by hand. The original version has the company name and “2016 company picnic” written at the top, but I took that out for this blog.

Whether or not we win (“When we win,” The Man said, assuming that no one else was going to top this) I’ll fix this design up a bit more and offer it on my website. Someone, somewhere, wants a Koala-T.

Check, Please

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I can also validate your parking if you like. But I can’t validate you as a human being. 

I predict that this comic will perform well across all platforms except for the ones where people celebrate their own lack of diversity and feel threatened when anyone questions their dominant paradigm. You know who you are. But amongst my friend, 99% of whom are academically trained lefties and front line civil rights activists, I expect a warm reception.

Or not. Who knows what people like? Not me.

I went to this bar last night. We were coming back from the Girl’s musical performance and I got a text from Misses Kitty that read, “queer munch now, 3 mins from your place.” There were no follow-up texts. Fortunately, I could read the secret bestie code and guessed that she wanted us to meet, and where, so we did, and found her sitting with about 20 people, maybe half of whom I recognized.

One woman called me over and said, “I can’t even tell you how I got there, but I was reading your blog.” But, as it eventuated, she hadn’t been reading my blog. She had been reading my old homepage, from about 10 years ago, so I’m actually really curious how she, or anyone else for that matter, could have ended up there, and also awed and amazed. She didn’t look familiar to me, but mentioned that we had met at a party about 3 years earlier. That’s pretty typical; The Man takes me to a lot of parties and I’m terrible at recognizing faces. Certainly, she hadn’t been searching for me when she stumbled upon my work, but rather clicked through and recognized me afterward.

She went on. “I’m Israeli, and I was reading your essay about Israel.”

The essay about Israel is 20 pages long, and I wrote it over 15 years ago, when I was a lot more sarcastic. “Oh, man, I hope you weren’t offended!” I said.

“No, I loved it!”

It’s nice to be recognized, and to know that people are actually reading. With pleasure. Even 15 years later. When I told the Rabbit this story, she told me about a friend of hers who write an essay 8 years ago that was suddenly picked up by a major media market this week. She was like, “Uh, OK.” But writing on the Internet is enduring. If it’s relevant, it doesn’t matter how old it is.

Which reminds me: I need to rehost some essays that I wrote for an old project that the Rabbit and the Bear and I did about 10 years ago, on a site that vanished because we stopped paying for it even though it was still getting 70+ hits a day when it hadn’t been updated in 3 years. You never know when someone’s going to need my extremely tongue-in-cheek but also technically accurate guide to pleading the insanity defense for murder, or my rant about Internet trolls.

 

The Evolution of Gaming

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Well, at least it keeps those pesky kids off my lawn.

In case you do not hang out with adolescent people, you might not be aware that this is a thing. Kids with perfectly good video game systems–multiple systems with a nearly limitless number of games available across a variety of platforms and devices–will spend hours watching strangers on the Internet playing games they could be playing themselves. This would be a hard thing to understand in the ’80s, but I guess now there are so many video games available that you get tired and worn out of playing video games? So you watch other kids playing video games to take a break from playing video games?

Maybe it’s just a testament to how amazing video game graphics and story lines have become, but it also strikes me as really passive and sort of disturbing.

Kids today have to have other kids do their playing for them.

::shakes fist relentlessly at sky and hobbles back to the nursing home to resume being old::

My Hero

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If you’re wondering why past Mallory has curly hair and future Mallory’s hair is straight, that’s because it’s 1989, so past Mallory is sporting a bad perm.

Just some standard silliness. If I could travel back in time and give 3rd grade me some advice, I’m not sure what I’d say. It’s tempting to joke about stock tips and the outcomes of sporting events, but in fact I don’t really have a great sense of what that would be, and 8-year-old me probably wouldn’t have cared anyway.

If picking a past me to meet and offer advice, I’d probably pick 7th grade me, because she could really use some assurance that she’d show them, she’d show them all. And it would have been nice if future me had clued hormonal adolescent me in about pointless relationships and the fact that I wasn’t actually going to get married until I was 38.

I learned my times table eventually. But, like, not until high school. It wasn’t a huge priority. I was never going to become a physicist. Unlike Mallory Morimoto, who, most likely has further heroic time traveling adventures to pursue. There are wrongs to be put right.

Green Machine Mandala

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I love it when a mandala comes together.

This is pretty sharp mandala, good symmetry, complexity, and layers. It’s based on a principle of 12, which gives it a powerful foundation. There’s so much repetition and less variation. It’s easier to not make a mistake in proportions, especially when you’re mostly dealing with triangles all going the right way. It looks complicated, but it’s actually a little easier than some mandalas with fewer layers.

If I am a green machine, I am a worn down one that requires recharging. Friday and Saturday night were each strenuous in their own ways, and it catches up, even though today all I did was write an article about Lost Girls and cook and clean. There is a bit of a comic in my head but it would be funnier if the joke were expanded, although it could still work in a simple form.

Someone else told me how much they loved the Rapunzel comic from last week. Everyone I know personally who read it thought it was hilarious, but strangers on the Internet didn’t seem impressed. However, my David Bowie tribute was randomly trending somewhere for almost 24 hours Saturday and Sunday so traffic was up all weekend.

No more art news. Only sleepytime news.

 

Immature Behavior

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You can’t take Molly and suck on a pacifier! You’re 68. But I guess if you haven’t grown up by now, it’s never going to happen.

Everyone over the age of 27 has realized the great secret of adulthood, which is that growing up doesn’t exist. You just get increasing amounts of responsibility piled on your head until you no longer have the time or energy or connections necessary for enjoying opportunities to have fun. That doesn’t mean you stop wanting fun. You just start to believe that fun is too difficult to obtain, and then you stop noticing opportunities for fun because you can’t get your head up above the responsibility. Plus, if you do manage to have fun, people tell you to grow up. The older you get, the more taboo it becomes to let on that you’re still having fun. Other grown-up people who have succumbed to the pressure disapprove of your happiness.

But truthfully, you can have more fun as an adult. And, let’s admit it, we’re all immature on the inside.

 

 

1000 Times More Fair

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So the good news is that she’s not really dead. The bad news is that she has to spend the rest of her life with a pedophile necrophiliac. 

Given the continuing unpopularity of these fairy tale comics, it was definitely imperative to write a third. Basically, I could go on for a while, because when you look at this kind of story through a modern, scrutinizing lens, ignoring the magic, they’re all subject to ridicule, and there are 250 of them in Jack Zipes’s Grimm translation alone.

According to Zipes, when the prince sees the beautiful dead girl he said, “Let me have the coffin, and I’ll pay you whatever you want.” The dwarves reply, “We won’t give it up for all the gold in the world,” and the prince answers, “Then give it to me as a gift.”

Of course, the dwarves are already complicity in the objectification of the dead girl, having interred her “in a transparent glass coffin so that she could be seen from all sides.” All the better to transform you into the object of the male gaze, my dear.

The illustration in the Zipes edition goes one better, omitting the glass entirely, showing the dwarves laying flowers on her midriff and kissing her hand, while forest animals weep.

Creepy. But it all works out for her in the end. I guess. Except for the part where the prince likes to play that game where she lies very, very still and doesn’t respond to anything. Happily ever after. The End.

A Stock Photo Is Worth 1000 Inexplicable Words

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In the real world, birthday parties and boxing gloves mean something. In stock photo world, they mean something else. 

Feeling a bit out of sorts and unable to finish the 3rd fairy tale comic, I went for another ridiculous stock photo caption comic. These images all happened to come from a BuzzFeed article entitled “60 Completely Unusable Stock Photos,” and I chose them primarily to prove the headline wrong. They’re totally usable. You just have to stretch your imagination a bit.

Curated collections are always nice.

People rag on BuzzFeed, but I like it. You don’t have to sift through as much crap to get to the lols like you do on Reddit, and they actually produce some pretty credible journalism. You have to read their news section; there are good longform investigative articles on interesting topics, and you can also get the latest current events, often with original material if they have a reporter on the ground.

It’s just a coincidence that 2 photos have birthday themes and 2 have boxing gloves. In face, I reshuffled the panels to make it clearer that guy waiting to punch the little girl in panel 1 is not the same guy punching the professional in panel 4.

Even though yesterday’s comic was the funniest thing I’ve written in a while, it didn’t seem to impress any strangers on the Internet. Come on! The Man laughed out loud, and so did the Fox. I think it’s brilliant.

Even if this comic wasn’t my masterpiece, I guess I still made a decent mark on the world today. I went to read to kindergarteners and got about 27 hugs afterward. Then I made The Man some leek and potato soup and a strawberry pie that were apparently so good he had thirds of each. Cream soups are a bit rich for me, but he grew up on a dairy farm, so he’s got 34% butterfat running through his veins.

Tomorrow I will be super creative.