Monday, November 24, 2003 :::
 
JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. (AP) - A bullet fired in the air during a Ku Klux Klan initiation ceremony came down and struck a participant in the head, critically injuring him, authorities said.

Gregory Allen Freeman, 45, was charged with aggravated assault and reckless endangerment in the Saturday night incident that wounded Jeffery S. Murr, 24.

About 10 people, including two children, had gathered for the ceremony. The man who was being initiated was blindfolded, tied with a noose to a tree and shot with paintball guns as Freeman fired a pistol in the air to provide the sound of real gunfire, Sheriff Fred Phillips said.

A bullet struck Murr on the top of the head and exited at the bottom of his skull, authorities said.

Freeman fled the ceremony but was arrested near his home, authorities said. He was released on $7,500 bail.

::: posted by Comic Tools at 6:31 PM



Thursday, November 20, 2003 :::
 
I have a little treat for you all. As you may know, Berkeley Breathed, one of the greatest comic artists of my lifetime, nay, the century, is returning to the comics page. The strip will run on sundays only, and he has demanded that anyone publishing his work use a half a page to do so, forbidding anyone to run it if they use any less. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, one of the giants is returning.

And here for you now, copied and pasted illegally from Salon premium, is the entire interview with Berkeley Breathed about his upcoming strip:

From: Berkeley Breathed
Date: Fri, Oct 10, 2003, 1:51 AM
Subject: Fwd: salon interview

> Last we heard from you, via the Onion interview a few years back,
> the odds of you ever doing a strip again seemed pretty slim
> (to put it mildly). What changed?

The world went and got silly again. I left in 1995 with things properly, safely dull, and couldn't imagine why anyone would feel it necessary again to start behaving ridiculously. It would have been at least courteous of the Republicans to warn a few of us inclined to retire our ink-swords that they had King George waiting in his zoom-zoom jetsuit aching to start the Crusades again.

> What are the advantages of a Sunday-only strip?

In my case, having a life. Ever see a seven-day-a-week cartoonist?

They all look like Keith Richards at 5 a.m. I've said that cartooning, like education and sex, is wasted on the young ... but I understand why it's that way. It's wearing, corrosive, killing work. Consider Charles Schulz. Look where he is today.

> Again, in the Onion interview, you claimed that it was no longer possible to
> satirize American politics. In the past two years, the (visible) political landscape
> has changed considerably. Do you still believe it's impossible to satirize?

I think there's both a saturation point and a failure point in events being beyond satire. I started stripping in 1981, the same month that MTV started. Daily satirical comment was either "Doonesbury" or "The Tonight Show." The horizon was clear. We had the whole playing field. You young punks just try to imagine that there wasn't even a World Wide Web. Michael Jackson jokes passed as edgy comedy in "Bloom County."

Now. Lord, now. The din of public snarkiness is stupefying. We're awash in a vomitous sea of caustic humorous comment. I hope to occasionally wade near the black hole of pop references only obliquely without getting sucked in with everyone else. Full disclosure: I'll admit that I had a momentary lapse and recently inked a strip where Opus' mom sees a picture of Michael Jackson in 1983, proclaims Jacko's old nose irresistible and voices an urgent wish to nibble it off down to the nub.

It took every thoughtful middle-aged fiber in my being for the courage to toss the finished strip. I did, but I wept.

Now the flip side of this is when events get untouchable. It becomes like the occasional lampoons of supermarket tabloids: unfunny because they're mocking something that's funnier than the satire. You can't effectively satirize Bill Clinton getting waxed by an office vixen in the office of Abraham Lincoln. It's done. Over. Go home. Know when you're beat. It almost was physically painful to watch the great Garry Trudeau have to try to get a handle on it.

> What was your comic reading experience like as a child?

None. I'm sorry, I don't know how else to put this. I watched "Wild Wild West" and collected snakes.

> Would you let your daughter anywhere near a modern comics page?

Not without those magnifying glasses you buy at the counter of Thrifty-Mart.

Your question brought me briefly back to the old days. There was a time in that hazy, sunny morning time in a bygone innocent America when a slightly off-color "Bloom County" or "Doonesbury" would hit the comic pages and the nation's ministers would proclaim the funnies as ground zero on the cultural battleground for the morals of our youth.

Now it's the sale rack of thongs for preschoolers at J.C. Penney. Even with "Boondocks," the comics don't even cause a ripple on the moral Zeitgeist anymore. This speaks poorly of where the comic page is today, by the way ... which speaks volumes about why we're bringing Opus back and why we're demanding a half-page. Things have simply gotten far too bleak.

> Opus has existed in several mediums now -- two comic strips, as well as
> children's books, and an animated cartoon. Did transferring him to other
> mediums require you to reimagine the character at all?

Yes, regrettably. His personality often served at the mercy of the joke or story that needed telling. This makes for funny gags sometimes ... but not good writing. After 15 years, I honestly didn't think I had a handle on my marquee character: He was a cipher. Suddenly I've found myself curious as to what really makes him tick. I plan to explore. Or at least after we're done transforming him into "To Kill a Mockingbird" for some real money.

> Was having more space to play with a condition of your return?
> Do you think you deserve more space than other strips? Or is this
> an attempt to encourage other strippers to demand the same?

Strips are in the tiny size and proportion that you see now to allow editors flexibility to cut the boxes apart and rearrange in psychedelic patterns all over their kitchen ceilings if they want, I guess. Bill Watterson halted this graphic slide toward nothingness several years into his strip ... and the editors screamed, but went along for the most part. They thought it was safely behind them until we offered them "Opus" in only one size.

Would I like to see other strips run similarly? Good God, yes ... if anyone bothers to put the work into the drawings. My drawings are going to be fun to look at or I'm going to get bored. And if readers want to see what bored cartoonists produce, take a look at much of the page. Actually, some are so bored, they're actually dead. That's another issue.

> It's upsetting editors, but has it caused any major setbacks? Are enough
> papers picking up the strip?

We'll be in all the major markets. But the size issue will initially keep us out of the majority of the nation's newspapers unless the readers make a fuss. Boy, I'd hate to see that happen. I'd hate to see readers force editors to eliminate the comic strips marketed by corporations, widows and distant relatives long after their deceased creators pass on. What would happen to all the hacks hired by Jim Davis to write and draw "Garfield" if we were to put it out of business? Remember what they did to Mel Gibson at the end of "Braveheart"? There's an idea.

> That said, would it be your wish to cause ripples?

As an end, controversy is a dead end. It's why TV shows tried to throw in nudity some years ago. I notice now that the ripples de jour are lesbian kisses. It's a sign of desperation, not good writing. Not to say that if I could figure out a way to throw in some hot lesbian action into "Opus," I wouldn't.

> Do you have a sense of mission with your return? Do you feel you have
> something to prove or accomplish?

There ain't no going home again. That truth burns with a vengeance on the comic page as in does in other popular entertainment. "Bloom County" had its perfect, temporary moment during the '80s ... the only moment it would have ever flourished. My goal now is to simply have some fun -- and I never really did before, oddly. If I can encourage other artists to have some fun too ... then that's about as big a mission as I'd want to claim. Actually being alive and aboveground is also an asset I'd like to encourage in more of today's strip cartoonists.

> You haven't read the daily comics page in a while, but I was curious if you
> followed those comics that attempt to bridge the gap between the daily paper
> and the Op-Ed section (and usually end up running in alt-weeklies), such as
> Tom Tomorrow's "This Modern World," David Rees' "Get Your War On," etc.?

I'd hate to see the funnies become a de facto editorial page, frankly. But you see more raw energy and passion in the strips that you mentioned than you would in the next 200 years of "Garfield" strips, which -- by the way -- have already been written by Jim Davis' staff.

> Is it possible for the comics page to ever regain the sweeping popularity it
> enjoyed at its peak?

Well, we won't know it if the page is forever filled with "Peanuts" reruns from 1957 and those undying vixens from "Apartment 3G," will we? Housecleaning time, girls!


> What do you hope to achieve with a strip? A laugh? Or something more?


Something much more. A laugh from me.


> A lot of old syndicated comics used teams of artists, writers and inkers to
> produce their work. Are your strips a one-man show, or do you have help?

If you need all that help, well, you're -- Jim Davis, actually. Rich and slothful. The comic strip works best as deeply personal art and writing produced by near-insane, passionate creators. Like music and filmmaking, actually. The more hands-off it becomes, inevitably, the more boring it becomes, if not actually killable (a unique aspect to our business).

 
> With "Outland," you took a whole lot of chances visually, which didn't
> always go over too well with readers. Now, eight years later, do you
> have any game plan to balance experimentation with accessibility?

Balancing creative growth and experimentation with accessibility is the issue of the day for any artist. All I can say is that there's nothing more populist that a comic strip. The comic page is not the place for the whacked-out Jackson Pollocks out there to ram their nutso visions down the readers' throats ... not that I haven't tried that myself. The counterpoint to overexperimentation is being offered "Blondie" 73 years after it started. But we also have to stay interested ourselves. There's the balance. And balance is the operative word.

> You've spent the better part of the last decade working on children's
> books, where you have an extremely fine control over color and detail.
> Is it safe to assume that this is one of the reasons why that medium
> has been so attractive? If this is the case, having worked in that form, have you
> gained a different perspective on how to use the cruder boundaries of newsprint?

Painting picture books necessitated me actually learning something about art. And like a baby armed with a new box of colorful crayons and a newly painted living room wall ... I'm anxious to wreak some havoc.

> What kinds of things keep you visually interested in a strip?

Emotion. Raw visible emotion. It's virtually absent from most comics today. It flared warmly with "Calvin and Hobbes" and has mostly disappeared again. That and nudity.

> How frequently does an idea for a strip begin with a gag or punch line,
> vs. beginning with a visual idea, or even a conceptual/structural idea
> (a different arrangement of the frames, for example)?

The reality of a cartoon strip or character is vapor-thin. I doggedly decline to test that gossamer construction by discussing the characteristics of the smoke it is made of. I will go to my grave in a state of abject endless fascination that we all have the capacity to become emotionally involved with a personality that doesn't exist.

Especially a smudgy one a half-inch high on newsprint. The power we find in our hands if we're one of the lucky few that find that we have invented such a thing fills me with the awe that I normally reserve for watching my children sleep or contemplating the age of starlight or watching George Bush Jr. try to actually pronounce the word "to" without leaving the "o" off.

> Can a strip be socially relevant without resorting to pop-culture references?

Ya know, just reading those words "socially relevant" made me physically wince just now. Our job is to make people smile. If my cartoons stray into -- I'm sorry, I can't type them again ... those words you used above -- it's an accidental byproduct in the effort to make ME smile.

> What is it you most love about the medium of the comic strip?

If the "Opus" comic strip were instead a movie, for instance, I'd have to send a memo to Bob Weinstein (when I knew he was having a good morning and enjoying his eggs) and ask if he wouldn't mind me drawing a panel where his ass falls off while flossing too vigorously. Opus' ass, not Bob's. Later, I'd have to follow up with a budget adjustment requesting the funds for drawing the ass falling off. Later we'd have to cut the scene after two 14-year-old boys in Dubuque wearing pants well below their own ass wrote on their test-screening response card that the butt scene sucked.

I love comic strips because I can skip the above.

But then, coincidentally, I actually am making "Opus" into a movie right now. And I should add here that I hope Bob Weinstein understands that I'm just having a little fun and that I honestly think of him like a father.
---------------------------------------------
You're quite welcome.
-Matt


::: posted by Comic Tools at 2:14 PM



Monday, November 10, 2003 :::
 
My comment to Christy's post was too long for the comment window, so I'm posting it here:

First off, Greg is quite right about Ms. Here's what dictionary.com has to say about it:

As a courtesy title Ms. serves exactly the same function that Mr. does for men, and like Mr. it may be used with a last name alone or with a full name. Furthermore, Ms. is correct regardless of a woman's marital status, thus relegating that information to the realm of private life, where many feel it belongs anyway.

In some professions, I find it convienient to have gender seperated names. It doesn't matter whether a doctor is a woman or not. Your ability to take my temperature or administer injections is not affected by your having a pussy. However, for, say, actresses and actors, I think it's useful, and, in fact, invaluable to have a distinction. If I'm casting a film, the roles are probably gender-specific. If I cast a civil-war abttle film, I don't want women showing up for the parts.

In fact, there are some prefessions for which I think we need seperate titles but don't. Like with exotic dancers. Last thing I want at my hypothetical bachelor party is stripping rambo up in my face with his meat gun, when what I wanted was lovely lolita and her lactating orbs of love.

Gay and lesbian are stupid because "Gay" is, linguistically, the sexual orientation, and non-sexual specific, but lesbian is sex specific and also describes orientation. Oddly, people are fine with Bisexual remaining a bisexual term, rather than making up a seperate word for female bi's. And furthermore, why oh why is the clinical term, "homosexuality" (Homo meaning "same", and not "man", by the way) never applied to woman? It's a clinical term. It should be a bisexual term. But it isn't. There's gays/homos/fags/queers, and then there's lesbos/dykes.

I actually like how "guy" is becoming, especially in showbiz circles, a bisexual term. I also like how Bitch has gone bisexual, because so many men are Bitchy.

I agree with you on how, especially in adolescence, positive boys names focus on how cool or masculine the man is, whereas all female names refer to the woman as being small and fuckable.

What disurbs me more, however, is that almost all sexual pet names for women are pedophillic, incestuous, or beastial, or some combination. (baby, chick, hot mamma, kitten) The rest involve food, which, at my best guess, represents a phycological connection between the desires of hunger and sex. (tomato, hotcakes, honey, sweety-pie, love muffin, sugar, etc.)

As a side-note, names of attraction in the american venacular tend to focus on big T and A. The terms "Hot cakes" or "sugar muffins" (both bodily-referential) don't really work for petite women with perky but modest busts and butts more suitable for paris fashion than spelunking. And that's not even referring to non-attractive body types that don't fit the mold. (Imagine if in the future triangular, flap-like breasts were the fashion, what sort of names people might concoct. "Heeeyy there, pocket flaps.")

That's all for now.




::: posted by Comic Tools at 7:38 PM


 
But today's military doesn't even use the words "body bags" — a term in common usage during the Vietnam War, when 58,000 Americans died.
During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the Pentagon began calling them "human remains pouches" and it now refers to them as "transfer tubes."

Transfer tubes.

Some of you might know what I'm referring to- Christy will, because I watched the show with her-, but George Carlin once did a very good bit about the millitary's sterlilization of language over the years, to cover up the pain and the suffering, to make wars more glorious and desireable for the population, to make parents more and more willing to allow junior to be shipped off, emotionally abused, broken of his individual will, turned into a killer, and then fed, head first, into whatever meat-grinder of a country we're currently invading, to be returned to them as a broken body in a flag-draped box.

He specifically talked about how the term "shell shock" changed over time. In the next war, it was called "battle fatigue. The connotations of a violent, traumatizing mental injury were gone, the phrase now suggested that the soldier was merely tired from too much kraut-killin', as opposed to, say, on the verge of completely losing their minds. Then the term was changed to "Post-traumatic stress disorder." A clinical, cold, meaningless term in terms of the synesthetics of it's language. It sounds like something some coffee-drinking forty-something Californian workaholic might be diagnosed as having by the personal psycologist they see every week. Say the terms out loud, you'll see how the life, the humanity, has been sucked from the language.

But at least "post-traumatic stress disorder" has the word "traumatic" in it. "Transfer tubes" doesn't even indicate that a human being is involved in any way. When I hear "transfer tube", I think of a cardboard thing used for mailing large posters. I do not think of someone's dead son or daughter being put into a glorified garbage bag, to contain the smell of the putrefying body and keep the blood and guts off of the handler.

And that's the point. The military has once again sucked vivid, lively language dry, leaving a meaningless husk, so far removed from the thing it represents that if you didn't know the connection, you wouldn't guess at it.

I'm waiting for a millitary recruitment flyer that looks like this:

Enjoy pay and adventure while travelling the world in the Millitary! After a brief orientation and goal-oriented behavioral modification period, you'll be on your way to warm and sunny forign lands! You'll spend your time in "team to team" action scenarios, or possibly even "urban multi-interpersonal interaction scenarios", sometimes even involving real "multi-player conflict-resolution action." There is a slight chance that "multi-player conflict resolution actions" could result in minor personal "corporeal alterations", or possibly even the need for the removal of the player from the "area of play" in a plastic transfer tube for relocation to a the family's choice of a "permanent personnel storage facility." But why let that spoil the fun? Come join the army now!

::: posted by Comic Tools at 6:29 PM



Sunday, November 09, 2003 :::
 
Rumsfeld either has Alsheimer's disease, or he's just stopped fucking caring:

For example, on Feb. 20, a month before the invasion, Rumsfeld fielded a question about whether Americans would be greeted as liberators if they invaded Iraq.
"Do you expect the invasion, if it comes, to be welcomed by the majority of the civilian population of Iraq?" Jim Lehrer asked the defense secretary on PBS' "The News Hour."
"There is no question but that they would be welcomed," Rumsfeld replied, referring to American forces. "Go back to Afghanistan, the people were in the streets playing music, cheering, flying kites, and doing all the things that the Taliban and the al-Qaeda would not let them do."
The Americans-as-liberators theme was repeated by other senior administration officials in the weeks preceding the war, including Rumsfeld's No. 2 - Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz - and Vice President Cheney.
But on Sept. 25, - a particularly bloody day in which one U.S. soldier was killed in an ambush, eight Iraqi civilians died in a mortar strike and a member of the U.S-appointed governing council died after an assassination attempt five days earlier - Rumsfeld was asked about the surging resistance.
"Before the war in Iraq, you stated the case very eloquently and you said . . . they would welcome us with open arms," Sinclair Broadcasting anchor Morris Jones said to Rumsfeld as the prelude to a question.
The defense chief quickly cut him off.
"Never said that," he said. "Never did. You may remember it well, but you're thinking of somebody else. You can't find, anywhere, me saying anything like either of those two things you just said I said."

When testifying about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction before the House Armed Services Committee Sept. 18, 2002, Rumsfeld said Saddam "has amassed large clandestine stocks of biological weapons." including anthrax and botulism toxin and possibly smallpox. His regime has amassed large clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons, including VX and sarin and mustard gas."
Saddam
Saddam "has at this moment stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons," he later added, repeating the charges the next day before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
He repeated that theme in the weeks preceding the war.
Last month, after U.S. weapons hunters reported to the administration and Congress that they have yet to find a single weapon of mass destruction in Iraq, Rumsfeld was asked about his earlier statements.
A reporter at a Pentagon news conference asked: "In retrospect, were you a little too far-leaning in your statement that Iraq categorically had caches of weapons, of chemical and biological weapons, given what's been found to date? You painted a picture of extensive stocks" of Iraqi mass-killing weapons.
"Wait," Rumsfeld interjected. "You go back and give me something that talks about extensive stocks. The U.N. reported extensive stocks. That is where that came from. I said what I believed to be the case, and I don't - I'd be surprised if you found the word 'extensive."'

While it's true he didn't use the word extensive, allow me to point something out:

ex·ten·sive    ( P )  Pronunciation Key  (ek-stensiv)
adj.

1. Large in extent, range, or amount.

Large. Extensive. Same goddamned thing.


(amusing cartoon, which, sadly, does not exaggerate his behavior in any way: http://www.workingforchange.com/comic.cfm?itemid=15717 )



::: posted by Comic Tools at 12:35 PM



Saturday, November 08, 2003 :::
 

Vibrator causes bomb scare:

A sex aid has caused a bomb scare at a South African rubbish dump, the Cape Times says.

A group of women searching for items for recycling heard a ticking sound coming from a rubbish bag.

Thinking it could be a bomb, they informed the manager of the Hermanus dump in Cape Town, Adolf Hansen.

"I thought I would just tear the bag open a bit, and then there I saw what it was - a vibrator, the batteries still working," he told the newspaper.


Mr Hansen said he told the women recyclers there was no danger of an explosion, and attempted to explain what the item was to the mystified group.

He recognised what it was immediately, he said, because he had seen vibrators "more than once" before. This one, he said, was "middle-sized".

::: posted by Comic Tools at 1:38 PM



Friday, November 07, 2003 :::
 
First, I have to credit Ben with letting us all know the details of this story. He really covered it thoroghly at Whocares.

And now, proving everything ben said to be !00% correct, here's Jessica Lynch herself:

Asked by the ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer if the military's portrayal of the rescue bothered her, Ms. Lynch said: "Yeah, it does. It does that they used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff. Yeah, it's wrong," according to a partial transcript of the interview to be broadcast on Tuesday.

...
Asked how she felt about the reports of her heroism, Ms. Lynch told Ms. Sawyer, "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about. Only I would have been able to know that, because the other four people on my vehicle aren't here to tell the story. So I would have been the only one able to say, yeah, I went down shooting. But I didn't."
...
Ms. Lynch also disputed statements by Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief, the Iraqi lawyer, that he saw her captors slap her.
"From the time I woke up in that hospital, no one beat me, no one slapped me, no one, nothing," Ms. Lynch told Diane Sawyer, adding, "I'm so thankful for those people, because that's why I'm alive today."

Once again, the media was totally (say it with me, you all know the words by now) MAKING SHIT UP.

::: posted by Comic Tools at 11:24 AM


 
By the way, this is actually a musical in London now, and I imagine it will turn up in New York soon.

::: posted by Jeff at 10:01 AM


 
I am incapable of posting anything more than two sentences! See?

::: posted by Jeff at 9:49 AM



Thursday, November 06, 2003 :::
 
Originally from Time Magazine, copied from This modern world:

For several seconds after the rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) drilled through the back of their armored M113 "battle taxi," the soldiers inside, mainlining adrenaline, continued firing. Then they started screaming. "It blew my leg clean off," says Private First Class Tristan Wyatt, who was standing at the rear of the armored personnel carrier (APC), unloading an M-240 machine gun at a dozen or more Iraqis who had ambushed them minutes before. He was the first to be hit. The RPG then passed through Sergeant Erick Castro's hip, spinning him violently to the floor. His left leg was still attached — but barely. "I picked up my leg and put it on the bench," he says, "and lay down next to it." Finally, the RPG shredded Sergeant Mike Meinen's right leg. "It was pretty much torn off," he says. "There was just some meat and tendons holding it on."

--snip--

The medic, the wounded soldiers and their comrades began a frantic race against the clock. Buddies pressed their hands into Castro's hip wound to keep him from bleeding to death. The wound was so massive that his tourniquet was useless. He handed it to Wyatt, who needed two to stanch the blood flowing from his femoral artery. Amid the mayhem, Meinen, who had been manning a 50-cal. machine gun, noticed that he didn't have any feeling in his right foot. "It felt like it had gone to sleep on me, so I picked my foot up and was trying to massage it, trying to get the feeling back," he says. "But then it dawned on me: it wasn't even connected. So I put it on the floor."

They tried to raise their wounded legs to slow the bleeding. "There was nothing to elevate my leg except for the piece of my leg that had been blown off from the knee down," Wyatt says. "So I took my leg and jammed it under the stump to keep it pointing up. It was kind of messy."



To my mind, the most poignant and heartbreaking part of the story comes near the end:

The three wounded soldiers are united not only in their good humor but also their unequivocal support for the war. Wyatt doesn't much care for those who think Bush fudged the intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. "That makes you feel like you fought for nothing or you fought for a liar," he says. "They're telling me I went out there and I got my leg blown off for a liar, and I know that's just not true."

I defy you to read that last sentence and not feel like, if not in fact actually start, crying.

Now go follow Jeff's link below to pick your spirits back up.


::: posted by Comic Tools at 5:41 PM


 
Link of the day:

Mothers Against Peeing Standing Up

::: posted by Jeff at 11:35 AM



Wednesday, November 05, 2003 :::
 
Thanks very much to Carter for once again filling in the little holes in my news posts, as wel as bringing up a great point of his own.

You mean countries have sane voting laws? We should bomb them for it. (Do I mean bomb them to get it, or bomb them for having it? You decide.)

But to continue on the Reagan thing, CBS has pulled the series totally, according to what I've read. Buck buck buck, yellow! Yellow! Yellow!

In reference to the inaccuracy of the line, in that it was never actually heard being said by Reagan, I supported it on the basis that it represented his exact feelings and policies in na concise, dramatic way appropriate to a telkevision series. Even if he never said it, his aides said worse publicly, his policy and personal feelings reflected exactly what the line said, and he very probably said much, much worse about Gays when the press wasn't listening. Furthermore, I think the media gives very little attention to Reagan's bad qualities. Despite Reagan being one of the worst presidents of this century, the media fawn over him and treat him like royalty. That CBS backed down on thie series because it might represent him unflatteringly by representing him accurately (in policy, if not in words) pisses me off.

But, rather unusually, I have good news for everyone:

CBLDF joins Media Coalition
(Censorship) The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund has been laying kind of low lately, which in many ways is a good thing -- it means that their services haven't been needed by busted retailers lately, a state about which one can hardly complain. For the past couple of years, however, the organization has moved to take a more proactive approach, working to smother censorship in the cradle before it ever becomes a problem in the first place. To assist them in this endeavor, the CBLDF has just joined The Media Coalition, an organization that looks out for the legal interests of books, magazines, recordings, videotapes, videogames -- and now, as the press release points out, comic books:

"Membership in Media Coalition affords the Fund the ability to track the activities of Congress, state legislatures, and the courts on new laws and legal developments related to the First Amendment. Media Coalition will also permit the Fund to participate in legal challenges to unconstitutional laws and prepare amicus curiae, or Friend of the Court briefs, in cases involving the First Amendment rights of producers and distributors of constitutionally protected works. The Media Coalition also communicates with federal, state, and local government officials on a regular basis in an effort to advise them on proposed legislation affecting material that is protected by the First Amendment, giving Fund members a voice in how the law will affect their interests.

" 'In joining this prestigious organization, the CBLDF now stands as an equal among this country's most important First Amendment advocates,' says CBLDF Legal Counsel Burton Joseph. 'This is very good news for the Fund's members who depend on the organization to provide them with the most up to date information on how the law is changing and to fight for their rights in that legal climate.'

This really adds meat to my membership card, as well as affording me and cartoonists like me with an ever greater base of support should we ever require the efforts of the fund. This is a very, very GOOD THING.

Also, thge fund just filed an amicus brief (I don't know what that is, exactly, but wouldn't know what else to call it) in support of the ACLU oppstition to section 215 of the patriot act.

And on a funny note (only because I don't think anything will come of it), Darby Connley, the cartoonist for Get Fuzzy, has reccieved death threats for callinbg Pittsburg smelly. I shit you not.

"What began as an 'inside joke,' Conley conceded in e-mail, 'has gone pretty horribly wrong.' The 33-year-old artist said he unwittingly 'touched a major nerve.'

" 'I've never gotten death threats before, and I've done some pretty controversial cartoons.'

"In the four years since Conley's comic went national, the Boston-based artist does not remember a more visceral or vitriolic reaction to a single daily strip. Nor does he remember getting this many e-mails (he usually receives 50 to 80).

I guess the Pittsburg stink makes the locals cranky.


::: posted by Comic Tools at 1:16 PM


 
I'm going to talk about a lot of things. At least I think I am.

First of all, Matt, I will answer your questions as best I can. The RNC decided to make a fuss over the Reagans after someone leaked a script to the NYT and they expressed concern. Take it up with the times. The RNC is complaining (amongst other things) that the mini has Reagan saying, in reference to homosexual people who have contracted AIDS, that "they that live in sin shall die in sin". Now, Reagan may very well have thought this, he may have acted as if he felt that way, he may in fact have actually said that, but there is no record of him ever having done so. Because of this, the mini winds up putting CBS in the awkward position of putting some VERY unflattering dialogue into the mouth of the former president. Ed Gillespie of the RNC requested that CBS attach a disclaimer to the mini that it was partly fictional and not historically accurate.

Well, whatever. There's also a lot of flack flying around in general for the negative protrayal of the man, but really that's to be expected, and very little is coming (directly) from the RNC. They have a legitimate grievance, also. I'm no fan of Reagan, but I am a fan of accuracy.

Subnote: There is a record of Reagan saying, in reference to AIDS, "Maybe the Lord brought down this plague [because] illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments". This doesn't come up, as far as I know, in the mini, but i wanted to mention it because it's just a damned odd thing to say. Evidently Ronnie was of the opinion that HIV had somehow gotten linked with marital infidelity, because otherwise there's just no way that makes sense.

Weird.

Next, I want to tell you the story of instant runoff voting. In some bastions of civilization (Australa, much of Europe) democracy work like this:

When voting, voters rank candidates in order of preference. 1st, 2nd 3rd...etc. In the beginning, only your first choice gets counted. However, if at the end of the day, no one candidate has a majority (over 50%) of the first choice votes, then the candidate in last place gets taken out of the running and his constituency gets their second choice votes counted. If there's still no majority, then the new last place candidate gets removed, and so on.

This way, no one gets elected without at least some level of support from the majority of the voters. Plus, people can vote for a third party candidate without fear of getting massively screwed. As I was standing outside the Rock the Vote debate tonight, in the bitter cold, with a clipboard, trying to educate people about IRV, it suddenly occured to me that this was a pretty good idea. So...

WHY THE FUCK DO WE NOT DO THIS?!?! I DO NOT UNDERSTAND!!

Thank you and goodnight.

::: posted by Carter at 1:10 AM



Tuesday, November 04, 2003 :::
 
Two items of news today. I'll start with the lighter one as first course, to get your cynicism running and your liberal glands fired up:

Apparrently the Republican National Commitee somehow feels it has the power to veto the upcoming CBS miniseries about Reagan if they disagree in any way ith it's account of him. Of course, the republicans feel that anything less than obsequious worship of Reagod should be punnishable by death. One sticking point for them seems to be that the series depicts Reagan saying that AIDS should basically be ignored because it only affects sinners, effectively punnishing them for their sins. Of course, he did have this opinion, but unflattering details are something the republican national committe just won't tolerate in a historical miniseries. And the question I'm asking, and that alot of people are asking, and which I'm hoping you're asking, is justr when the fuck did the Republican national committe get the fucking right to review television programs for content? And why the fuck is CBS letting them?

Well, anyway, here's a few more unflattering details which might or might not make it to air in the series, depending on how many facts those chamnpions of free expression and fair media, the republicans, allow CBS to include:

"As someone who served with President Reagan, and in the interest of historical accuracy, please allow me to share with you some of my recollections of the Reagan years that I hope will make it into the final cut of the mini-series: $640 Pentagon toilets seats; ketchup as a vegetable; union busting; firing striking air traffic controllers; Iran-Contra; selling arms to terrorist nations; trading arms for hostages; retreating from terrorists in Beirut; lying to Congress; financing an illegal war in Nicaragua; visiting Bitburg cemetery; a cozy relationship with Saddam Hussein; shredding documents; Ed Meese; Fawn Hall; Oliver North; James Watt; apartheid apologia; the savings and loan scandal; voodoo economics; record budget deficits; double digit unemployment; farm bankruptcies; trade deficits; astrologers in the White House; Star Wars; and influence peddling."

Right-o. Now that I've whet your tongues for outrage, and put you in the mind for thinking about Russia, indirectly, here's an article I am requiring you all to read:

http://www.nypress.com/16/45/news&columns/cage.cfm

Long story short: The media is saying Putin arrested this guy because he represented the virtue of "free market." The fact is, the man is the worst of all professional Russian gangsters, and the reason Putin arrested him is that Khodorkovsky stopped paying off Putin for the right to commit crimes without government intervention, and even went so far as to challenge Putin's power, so Putin had him arrested to make an example of him to the other crooks running Russian sociaty. They're BOTH goddamned thugs, a point which the american media seems to convienently be missing. If Khodorkovsky is really people's idea of free market ideals, then the Italian Mafia represents the purest form of free market capitalism in U.S. history.

And as you read this, I want you to remember Bush saying that he "looked into Putin's eyes" and saw that he was a "good man."

Bearshit.

::: posted by Comic Tools at 7:10 PM



Monday, November 03, 2003 :::
 
Thanks!

::: posted by Jeff at 8:10 PM


 
Happy becoming a member of the blog day to you, happy becoming a member of the blog day to you, happy becoming a member of the blog day dear Jeff, Happy becoming a member of the blog day to you.

::: posted by Comic Tools at 9:53 AM



Sunday, November 02, 2003 :::
 
Today we (I) celebrate one year of being a part of this exciting blog.

Hooray for pointless commemorations.

How are you today?

::: posted by Jeff at 8:58 PM



Saturday, November 01, 2003 :::
 
In case you missed it, here is the impressive Doonesbury strip from 10/19. And here are the impressive responses.

::: posted by Jeff at 10:49 AM

ARCHIVES :::

Ben, Nick, Molly, Matt, Carter, Maria, Christy, Jason, Greg, Eric, and UNCLE JEFF!! We are truly honored to have someone among us who is over 20 and claims to have some sort of responsibility. It won't last long.