The Number You Have Dialed Is Not In Service

I was cleaning out my Firefox bookmarks today — getting rid of political blogs, old Ableton Live tutorials, Akai MPC forums, news aggregators and other vestiges of my ADD-riddled college career — and I remembered that this site still exists. It seems like it has served its purpose, since I don’t draw political cartoons anymore.

Since lately the top referring search has still been ‘bill richards berlin wall cartoon,’ you might be interested to view my graphics portfolio, which is here. Check out my Vimeo page while you’re at it. Meanwhile I’ll let you know if I have anything interesting to say about anything.

Until then,

Whereabouts

Just reread this blog’s mission statement. Perhaps I should account for my lack of cartoon output. Not much news on that front lately, as you may have guessed. I quit the gig with 11Alive in August. Did so for a variety of reasons, most of which boiled down to me not being happy with the product I was churning out. I no longer have the stomach to pay close attention to politics. It’s so depressing, all the time. Two jowly retreads run against each other on a destructive, shared platform of immigrant-bashing (who knew Georgia shared a border with Mexico?) and “tax relief” and instead we get coverage of Nathan Deal’s business transactions (bringing business to Georgia!) and hourly Zogby poll numbers. Where is there to turn? It’s not like your average progressive blogger isn’t preoccupied with all that shit, too. It’s fun to laugh at the gallery of freaks, but that rarely gets you far.

Anyway, so I’ve been playing with animation and a more digital approach to telling stories. Here’s my first Flash video. Background: for class, we had to create an ad for a fictional brand. I picked an investment bank, since boring things present more of a challenge.

I’m also in the process of learning MaxMSP, which is a modular audiovisual programming language that you can rig to do some fun things with images and video. Looking to do some VJing or something, I dunno. I just like making weird things.

Reader Mailbag

Slow week, so we’re giving our readers the floor! Got a question? E-mail us at the address in the ‘about’ section, operators are standing by. -Ed

Dear Bill,
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Only if you’ll be handing out free white tees. It’s so hard to clean the Cheeto stains out of these sumbitches.

Dear Bill,
JUS DROPPIN OFF SUM LOVE RETURN DA FAVOR BY CHECKIN OUT MY MUSIC, AND COMMENTING MY PICZ…. THANKS, BE BLESSED-LIL4
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No, you the man!

hey, it’s been a bit since we talked last. I have found this news article that shows how to make up to 700 a day on the internet. ANyways, I think you should read it because i’m already making money from it. Read this rightnow
-superharryo

Your link just gives me a file to download. I opened it and there’s no article. What happened?

Got a question or comment? Drop us a line, and you just might make it into next week’s mailbag! Now get them pencils out and get scribblin’!

Mystic Twenty

Our Friend The Oil Well

I’ve been trying to figure out my fixation on the BP disaster. I’ve finally concluded that it’s not so much the sheer scale of the atrocities, and more what the whole event represents. Here we have incontrovertible evidence of the horrific consequences of tearing up the Earth to extract toxic compounds while merely paying lip service to the idea of sustainability. But Congress still can’t even pass a fucking carbon tax, the moderate half-measure to end all moderate half-measures to give the appearance of dealing with the long-term effects of the fossil fuel economy. The whole spectacle of watching political elites reconcile the horrific scenes on the Gulf with their own unwillingness to do anything about the problem is sickly amusing.

OK, with that out of the way, here is a coloring book I did for a book design class I’m taking right now. I did it in the style of a piece of BP corporate literature. It’s for kids who want to understand what happens when a well blows out.

Spreads after the jump…

Awesome

CNN’s got your freedom of the press right here.

When is one of the major news orgs going to publish a handbook that lays out explicitly which opinions are permissible for journalists to hold ?

Trying To Find A Balance

Yesterday’s Channel 11 Bullpen cartoon is an example of a challenge I face pretty regularly. Allow me to explain.

The chalkboard is a boring, bland object that kills any chance of compositional dynamism. [Its successor, the whiteboard, is even worse, which leaves it out of the question.] So how do you make such an object into something visually interesting? Big black rectangles don’t offer a lot of visual possibilities. I guess the Russian Constructivists tried to make them interesting, but they all got poisoned or sent to the gulag.

Wanting to avoid that fate, I had to switch up my approach from the rough I showed the editor.

The head-on approach would have made for a static image and been no fun to draw. In order to turn the chalkboard into something more interesting I had to play with the perspective. Because I like scientific perspective and don’t get to use it that often, this made for a fun challenge. So I broke out the t-square and triangle and came up with this.

Being pressed for time, I inked the final version in Photoshop. Ordinarily I like to avoid doing that, but sometimes you really want to not have any work to do when you get home. I tried to use dominant lines in the image to bring the viewer’s eye to child Roy Barnes, atoning for his previous gubernatorial sins.

Anyway, just a thought on a persistent visual problem of mine. It’s fun to draw stuff like giant aliens fighting an army of flying robots over Manhattan, but most of the time the situation calls for something way more boring.

Turn My Swag On

Beginning today I am contributing two cartoons per week to Atlanta TV station 11Alive’s political Web site, The Bullpen. So if you like that kind of horseracey politics stuff, click on over. Hint: mine’s the one with the talking elephant and the Mad Hatter.

Haven’t talked to them about enabling comments yet, but that’s the most fun part of the whole thing so I’ll get on that.

Tragedy

Actually, It Sucks

In this light, today’s graduates are not actually so unlucky. They are compelled to be scrappy, to depend on one another, to stick to their own invented definitions of success (what other kinds are there, really?). Like their great grandmothers and grandfathers, they are being made hardy for the long haul, accustomed to tectonic shifts in economy, environment, technology, culture. “There’s only change,” Meryl Streep told the Barnard College Class of 2010, “and then resistance to it, and then more change.”

How right she is. Now that I’ve hit 30, I can proudly say that I haven’t lost my idealism, nor picked up much bitterness, but I have endured the unexpected. My triumphs have tasted pretty damn sweet, but it is the loss and the change that have made me stronger, wiser, more empathic. Cornel West asks, “Yes it’s failure, but how good a failure?”

Even Harvard degrees can’t shelter you from the storms of recession or the erosion of expectations. In those struggles, it is your friendships, your guts and integrity, your humility and patience, that get you through. For new graduates, baptism in real world resilience might be just the thing.

Prospect autoscribe, June 15, 2010

I generally call BS on any author who writes broad-brush profiles of “today’s graduates” or “millennials” or “the YouPorn generation.” But what makes this a particularly grating example is the flippancy with which the author discards the devastating effects of the nation’s ongoing 10% unemployment rate. The writer continues:

It can’t necessarily mean a lucrative job, because there simply aren’t a lot of them to choose from. It can’t be predicated on a cool office environment or hip co-workers — a few new grads might squeeze their way onto the Google campus, but the majority missed out on the heady ping-pong-table-in-the-office days of the dot com boom.

Ping-pong tables and “cool office environments” have nothing to do with it. Most of my friends with journalism degrees aren’t staffing outlets like The American Prospect. They are attending parking lots or doing “social media outreach.” If you and your Ivy League friends are having crazy dance parties in Williamsburg or Columbia Heights or wherever then write about that. But for most, “scrappiness” imposed upon one’s life actually isn’t like Shredded Wheat imposed upon one’s diet, unpleasant and spongy yet healthful. It may keep you regular, but if all you get to eat for the rest of your life are tasteless puddles of mush, what’s the point?