Oy Vey

When I drew this cartoon to tie the fall of the Berlin Wall to the contemporary situation in the West Bank, I expected a certain amount of negative feedback. The UGA campus represents a sort of nexus between your flat-earth right-wing Christian types and your metro Atlanta Jewish types, and as such has several rather sizable Likudnik student organizations. What I didn’t expect was the stack of angry letters fixating on the way I implied that the Israelis bought the Berlin Wall secondhand from the Germans — “on clearance.”

Well, turns out certain people have certain stereotypes about Jews and money. And the “Jews and money” routine itself has a bit of historical baggage.

Anyway, I got e-mails, I got phone calls, I got angry letters from university presidents written about me. Some understood that I was acting in good faith and focused on the substance of my argument. Most got caught up in the IDF soldier’s comment. And to the extent that my message was obscured by sloppy self-editing, I do think there was a bit of merit to those complaints. Folks who publish things have a certain obligation to anticipate reader reactions and get rid of possible confounding variables in order to direct readers toward the intended message. I should have been more direct with the IDF guy’s comment re: getting the wall used. But that’s the only thing I would have done differently.

Side note: it is certainly interesting that the pro-Israel crowd has managed to make a cottage industry out of shouting “anti-Semitism!” whenever Israeli policy is criticized in America. It has always seemed odd that at the same time Likud supporters keep reminding us that the Holocaust was an incomparable atrocity, they devalue the anti-Semite label by comparing every little perceived slight against them to what the Nazis did. And this sort of thing has happened to a Georgia cartoonist before, too. Check out Dylan Woodliff’s brutal, pointed Emory Wheel cartoon from 13 months ago, the hysterical reaction from faculty and ultimate mea culpa from the artist.

So the moral of the story is that your humble webmaster is now your humble, anti-Semitic webmaster.

As Smoove B would say, “Damn.”

P.S. Though I disagree with some of his particulars The Chiego Blog had a pretty good summary of the problems with throwing around such loaded labels.

They Try To Advance, I’m Bio-Enhanced

I just got my grubby paws on one of these “smartphone” thingies. The novelty has not worn off yet, but, eternal optimist that I am, I must bolster my defenses in anticipation of the inevitable crash.

Cartoon for July 2, 2009

This one took a while to come up with. I wanted to do one about death, using the Grim Reaper, but I didn’t want to get into Far Side territory (other approaches I was considering included “Death’s Roommate,” “Death’s Intern,” “Death attempts to figure out directions from Southern California to Tampa using his GPS handheld,” etc.). I think I succeeded. We’ll see.

Now let me take a trip down memory lane

Recent events have reminded your host of two old favorites.

On yet another push for the U.S. to meddle in Iranian politics:

January 23, 2006

On yet another push to deny Americans access to affordable health care:

June 14, 2007

This shit writes itself, mainly because it’s the same shit written over and over and over again.

lab notes

Spent Spring Break doing a series of posters for a local pool supply company. The management wanted 16 color posters that would give customers something entertaining to look at while standing in line during the peak season. Each depicts a particular product distributed under the BioGuard brand.

Images below the fold…

cartoon 9-5-08

Back at the Red & Black. Here’s my first entry:

A single-minded obsession with abortion makes for some interesting instances of cognitive dissonance among the GOP faithful. See Palin, Sarah.

grab bag o fun

-It would be remiss of me not to recall the name of my own blog. This is supposed to be a cartoon blog, and I haven’t posted a cartoon (or any other thing I’ve drawn) in months! The horror! Since returning from DC in April, much of my time has been spent transitioning into “art student” mode. I have just finished the first semester of the UGA art school’s foundations classes, i.e. drawing, composition and art history. At the outset I was worried that all the time I spent in cartoon mode had somehow robbed me of any latent ability to represent things as they actually, well, look. Judging from the meager, two-month sample size, this doesn’t appear to be the case. I will post a select few examples of what I’ve produced in these classes once I get the photos up (most are too big to scan).

-The semester has, in certain ways for me, been a months-long rationalization of what could be interpreted as a decision on my part to delay “real life.” I have come to the conclusion that the most useful thing a 22-year-old in my position could do in a recession would be to improve skills for a future potential economic upswing while at the same time becoming relatively self-sufficient. I’m using that as my narrative from now on.

- I’m currently working on a character that I haven’t spent much time on until now. You’ll see the results of that soon, too, hopefully.

- My image-hosting site has decided to change names, once again rendering all the embedded images in this blog dead. I will dig through my memory banks and correct everything in the next few days. Fixed.

- I have added to the “Luminaries” category the Web site of Joshua Bienko. Wish him well at Texas A&M.

about the way i talk / about the way i dress / about how my gold teeth look so fresh

Omaha-based freelance cartoonist Neal Obermeyer has posted on his blog a lengthy interview with me about college editorial cartooning. Check it out if you can’t get enough MEMEMEMEMEMEMEMEMEME!!!!!!!

sharing the wealth

we should stop drawing more often

We win more awards that way.

We may be announcing something interesting soon. Be advised.