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August 28, 2010

Teabaggerama-doo-da

If it isn't clear by now, we've entered the Decade of the Teabagger. Get used to bug-eyed, ranting white people.

I always knew the Democrats would blow it, although they managed to accomplish this quicker than even I predicted. So the question, as we hurtle toward November, isn't if the Teabaggers will be victorious, it's how victorious? The hope is they grab enough power to prove themselves utter disasters, without inflicting much lasting damage on the nation. Pray for a Rand Paul victory! That douche will single-handedly derail the whole movement. The best "rational America" can hope for, in the aftermath of the election, is maybe one house falling to the Right, resulting in utter deadlock in Washington, not just with Dems and Republicans squaring off, but with GOP leadership and Tea Party fanatics lobbing bombs at each other, too. This, in turn, may just save the Democrats from themselves and, two years from now, prevent a total Teabagger power grab across the board. We all remember what happened when the Neocons swept to victory in all branches of government in 2004. We still haven't recovered from that.

From my cartoonist perspective, Teabaggers are far more amusing than their Biblethumper ancestors. Maybe too amusing. I mean, how do you make these people look more absurdly hilarious than they are? This is a real problem, as the photo below amply demonstrates. No way I could come up with a cartoon this funny!

Short term, it looks like Teabaggerama will be a far bigger headache for the GOP than for the Democrats, especially with Sarah Palin and her new fake bazooms whipping the faithful into an even bigger froth. Will the Tea Party hijack the Republican Party, as the Moral Majority did way back in the Reagan Era? That would probably be the best-case scenario, since The Republican elite gave the biblethumpers little other than lip service and the occasional half-assed attempt to pass some key legislation that the Jesus Squad longed for, legislation GOP leaders knew damn well would fail. But the Tea Party, which has already taken over FoxNews, is obviously dragging the GOP to the far, far right. I'm curious how the "new" Republican Party will combine its traditional subservience to corporate interests with the Main Street, common man libertarianism the Teabaggers espouse. I guess such inconsistencies won't matter. They seldom do with the Tea Party.

Here in Ohio, the Teabagger favorite is one Tom Ganley, a sleazy used car dealer running for Congress against incumbent Democrat Betty Sutton. Ganley owns the "largest automotive empire in the state of Ohio," in the candidate's own words, and has logged a long list of buyer complaints, stretching back years, over his shady sales tactics. He was moved to tackle Sutton to stop the growth of the federal government into the private sector. Teabaggerism 101, right?

One problem. Sutton is one of the architects of the Cash For Clunkers program that bailed out the auto industry. Ganley sold over 800 vehicles through that program!

Ganley is one of FOUR car dealers running as Republican candidates for Congress, all passing themselves off as "outsiders," a label which sends Teabaggers into fits of ecstasy.

Used car dealers? Really? The Tea Party is relying on people who make their fortunes ripping off grannies to save the country?

L-L-L- Lifetime achievement?

Turns out, much to my surprise, I am receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award, along with fellow comix creator the late Harvey Pekar, at this year's award ceremony of The Lit- Poets & Writers League. I guess it's the year of the graphic novel.

Makes me feel kinda old.

Here's a vid the Lit posted.

Aug. 23, 2010

Argh. Spoke too soon!

In my post of the 13th I announced the MY FRIEND DAHMER graphic novel was "essentially done." Which it was. And now it isn't. Why? Because I coaxed an unexpected interview out of one of my high school friends.

There were four of us, who were pals with Dahmer in high school, the guys who formed what was called the "Dahmer Fan Club" and encouraged him to pull all the weird spaz antics in school and around town that are now part of the Dahmer legend. I got into this a little in the original stories. I examine it in depth in the graphic novel. The three friends, besides me, were Kent, Mike and Neil.

Mike has been an incredible resource. We've spent endless hours recounting things and sharing stories. His memories are razor sharp and he's a natural storyteller.

Kent has been, by and large, useless. His memory is horrible and he has no interest in talking about Dahmer, or high school at all, for that matter. What I've been able to gently extract from him has taken a lot of work and hasn't been worth the effort.

Above: the chilling fishing hole episode, this from the original short story
from 1996, comes from Neil.

Neil is the one who has been tough to nail down. I'm still good friends with Mike and Kent, but Neil I only run into every couple years, even though he's the only one of the three still in the area, very close to where my parents still live, in fact. Neil was a neighbor of Dahmer and was closer to him and spent more time with him than any of us. I've gotten Neil to talk a couple times in the past and what he gave me then was pure gold. But he's never spoken publicly or to the media. But he did, I recently found out, talk at length with Dahmer's lawyer! This was the trial for Dahmer's first murder, committed in our home town a mere two weeks after we graduated. The lawyer was hoping for an insanity defense, and wanted Neil to supply insights into what Jeff was like as a teenager. Jeff told the lawyer that he "trusted" Neil more than any of us. Yike!

A month ago, Neil and I had an email exchange and I sent him a copy of the book. He called me shortly after and we talked until almost 2 a.m.! He gave me reams of new material, stuff I'd never heard before. I'm sifting through it now and trying to figure out how to work it in without a major re-work of the whole damn book.

It'll be worth the wait. Trust me.

Aug. 20, 2010

Cartoonists in Afghanistan

Colleagues Ted Rall and Matt Bors, the two best political cartoonists working in the field, in my opinion, are in Afghanistan, getting a first hand look at the war and hopefully not getting beheaded by the Taliban. My admiration for these two is tremendous, even if I think they're both friggin loons.

The LA Times is posting Rall's cartoon diary.

Bors is posting sketches on his blog.

Aug. 18, 2010

And in the "who cares?" department

The big news in the mainstream comics world is that Cathy is being retired. Creator Cathy Guisewite announced she will end it in October. The strip has run in a bajillion papers for 34 years, or roughly 30 years too long.

Topless Robot honored Cathy as #5 on its list of Ten Comic Strips That Need to F-ing End. There's plenty of other moldy strips on the daily comics page to take her spot.

Aug. 13, 2010

Writing, writing, writing, drawing, drawing, drawing

I hit the 60 episode mark with TRASHED:THE WEBCOMIC last week, for those of you not keeping count. Since each episode I post here is equal to 2/3s a standard comic page (which is how I draw them), that only amounts to 40 true pages. So it will take awhile before I have enough to publish it in book form, if indeed I chose to do that. We'll see. I've never done a project like this, where I write it in little weekly chunks. Oh, I have a basic idea where each episode is going and the end point is always known, but other than that I just crank it out as it comes to me. It's been interesting, from a creative standpoint, but not I'm sure if it's really how I want to operate.

The new MY FRIEND DAHMER, on the other hand, was meticulously planned and constructed, more so than any other book I've done to date. It's essentially done and awaiting editing and proofreading and pre-press tinkering. This book clocks in at 200 pages! PUNK ROCK & TRAILER PARKS was 152 pages, so MY FRIEND DAHMER is 25 percent larger, the longest book I've ever done!

However, it's a quicker read. PR&TP had 7-9 panels per page. MFD is spaced out more, typically with 4-5 panels per page. I was aiming for a slower pace than the frenetic PR&TP, which also gave me plenty of room for some pretty fancy drawing. I think it's the best artwork I've done to date. We'll see what the critics say.

I had a recent spike in orders of the original comic, so I suspect the Brit tv show BORN TO KILL which featured excerpts of the book, as well as an interview with yours truly, must have re-broadcast on cable here in the states. The whole thing is now on Youtube. It's not a bad documentary, as these things go. I agreed to do it because the original comic book had just been released. These tv biopics are usually rife with mistakes, but this one is fairly accurate.

 

The funny thing was, and this demonstrates just how small my hometown was and is, while we were filming this interview in front of the old high school, my Mom drove by!

I also get a kick out of the comments posted beneath the video by Dahmer "fans" who criticize me for not being more sympathetic to their hero. This part of the Dahmer legend continues to perplex me, that there are so many people out there who relate to this guy, I guess, because he was an ostracized loner as a teenager just as they were. As if being picked on in high school justifies butchering 17 people, especially since those victims, for the most part gay, black men, were themselves shunned and bullied as teens.

My premise in MY FRIEND DAHMER is that the Dahmer I knew, that ostracized teen, was a tragic figure. But that ends when he kills his first victim. After that, the only tragedy is that he didn't have the courage to put a gun to his head.

The original comic will be pulled off the market once the new graphic novel is ready to go. I've issued that warning before, so if you want a copy, don't hesitate. Order one from my store.

Another Comix Issue

Apparently this is now a trend in the weekly press (see below). Don't run comics on a regular basis, but publish an annual "comics issue" to attract comics loving readers. City Pages in Minneapolis unveiled it's annual "Comics Issue," timed to coincide with the Minneapolis Indie Xpo, a new indy comix con that shows great promise.

This is all well and good. It's great that City Pages is backing the con and Minneapolis is one of those towns that's thick with cartoonists, but the irony here is that City Pages, owned by the powerful Village Voice Media Inc., dumped all its comics nearly two years ago under orders from the head office, which decided comics were no longer part of their editorial plan. VVM owns 14 of the largest weekly papers in the country, all of which are now virtually bereft of comics, except for a few papers that have a local scribbler that pens local cartoons.

City Pages still has a comics pulldown on its website. Here's what that page looks like.

 

August 5, 2010

The Comix Issue Makes a Comeback

Style Weekly, the altie rag in Richmond, VA, just published a comix issue.

This is nothing new, of course. The East Village Other, the LA Free Press, The Berkeley Barb and other hippie papers of the 1960s regularly had popular comix issues, featuring the work of underground pioneers like Robert Crumb, Spain Rodriguez and Kim Deitch. I have a number of these in my collection. In the 1990s, many of the altweeklies continued this tradition. I regularly contributed to some– the Chicago Reader had the best offering– and talked the (now-defunct) local rag here in Cleveland into doing a comix ish back in 1999, an issue I edited and art directed. Here's the cover, by my pal Max Cannon of Red Meat fame.

But times have changed. As I've frequently written here, weekly papers have tossed most of us cartoonists off the back of the bus. A paper that ran a dozen strips ten years ago today runs a single strip, if that. I don't know how many strips Style Weekly has in the paper, since I haven't seen a copy in quite a few years. Can't find any strips at all on their website. Maybe they run one or two. Or maybe none at all. I'll try to find out and add that info later.

They wanted comix about Richmond, apparently got a boatload of submissions, and selected the best 14. These vary from "high school amateurish" to "interesting but needs some more work." That's the new trend in weeklies, you see, to be, as they call it, "hyper local." All well and good, but what do these rags pay? Fifty bucks for a cartoon that takes a couple days to create? $25? $10? Or, more likely, nothing at all, just the "honor" of being published. That shit gets old fast.

Note 8/6/10: The best cartoon received a $100 gift certificate for art supplies. The other 13 received no compensation.

"The reader reaction.... was overwhelmingly favorable," said Style Weekly arts & culture editor Don Harrison in an email to AAN.com, an industry blog. "Our online numbers showed that the comic section was the most viewed content in Style that week.

And what do we conclude from that? If a collection of amateur comix generates that kind of interest, imagine what a grouping of high-end, professional comix would do? It's something painfully obvious that altogether alludes the editors and publishers who run today's papers:

READERS.... LOVE.... COMIX... GODAMMIT!!!!!!

This isn't meant to be a putdown, because I applaud Style Weekly for putting out this issue, but I don't know whether to give Mr. Harrison here a pat on the back or a slap upside the head!

 

The cassette is now hipster cool

Cassette tapes are also making a "comeback?" Really? According to the LA Times they are.

 

This is the kind of story some mainstream, square reporter gets conned into writing. A few hipsters make a couple cassettes, sell a dozen or so at gigs (or, more likely, give them away) and suddenly it's a "trend."

I'm old enough that I've experienced every format in recording history. Vinyl LPs, 45 singles, mono, stereo, quadraphonic, 8-track tapes, cassettes, cds and now digital. Hell, my grandparents even had a collection of old 78s I used to play at their house! I can state from experience, the only thing worse than cassette was 8-track. Cassettes were a total drag. They broke, they warped when left to cook on the car dashboard, they came unspooled and, of course, the sound, especially for the record industry issued ones, was atrocious.

The only thing I miss about cassettes are mix tapes, like the one Rob is making in High Fidelity, above. Before the digital revolution, it was the only way to compile favorite songs. They were fun to make and took more thought and effort than just dumping a pile of MP3s into a playlist. And I liked how cassettes so totally freaked out the recording industry! At first it tried to get them banned altogether, arguing that some music dork making a mixtape in his basement was "stealing" music. When that didn't fly, the industry got a fee tacked onto every blank tape sold. Ha. It seems so naive now. Those weasels had NO idea what the future held.

I know, I know, all retro technology isn't inferior and there are audiophiles out there who swear by vinyl. To you I say: YOU'RE NUTS! Vinyl was a total pain in the ass. The cleaning pads, handling every record by the edges only, the turntable stylus that cost more than the rest of your stereo combined.... and in the end, no matter how delicately you handled your LPS, your favorite cut on every album invariably developed a skip. Always. And most vinyl lovers have never tried to move a collection of 1,000 or so LPs, weighing collectively more than a Hummer, probably because they all still live at home with Mom. Sorry. I'll take an iPod any day, "substandard" sound quality and all.

Cassettes were a godsend in the 1980s, specifically for the hardcore and postpunk scenes. Vinyl was expensive to make, and the indie labels that were popping up couldn't afford to press many 45 singles, but cassettes were dirt cheap. Bands like Black Flag and Fear released their early material solely on cassette, which were then passed around the underground like contraband. Here in the lively Cleveland Postpunk Underground, circa 1983-1993, there were upwards of 50 bands at any given time. Only a handful ever put out vinyl. It was all cassette.

Still got a box of them stashed away. Right next to a box of 8-track tapes!