Click to embiggen:

Jan. 25, 2012
Bedbug Man

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You may have read about the FBI investigation and arrests of four East Haven, Ct. police officers, not to mention the mayor’s subsequent tone-deaf response. This isn’t the first time the East Haven cops have made the news for racial profiling — I did a couple of cartoons about an earlier incident in which a young man lost his life, back in 1997. (Click to enlarge.)

(A recent update on the case here.)

Also: send a taco to the mayor of East Haven.

Bors:

I’m real glad Reddit saved the internet. Now, any chance their users can learn how to credit creators and sources of copyrighted material?

I would have assumed that the rich get certain amenities in hospitals — larger, private rooms, more attentive doctors, etc. But this would never have occurred to me:

The bed linens were by Frette, Italian purveyors of high-thread-count sheets to popes and princes. The bathroom gleamed with polished marble. Huge windows displayed panoramic East River views. And in the hush of her $2,400 suite, a man in a black vest and tie proffered an elaborate menu and told her, “I’ll be your butler.”

The punchline, buried deep in the article, comes after an anecdote about the Saudi King taking up an entire floor at another hospital:

The hospital said in a statement: “NewYork-Presbyterian is dedicated to providing a single standard of high quality care to all of our patients.”

But never mind the absurd disparity between first class hospital accomodations and what the rest of us are likely to experience back in steerage. Here’s the bit that’s likely to go viral in the wingnut zombie-lie media:

But even the rainmakers — doctors who bring in such patients — can sometimes resent the tilt toward luxury.

“The one misgiving is patients with Medicare, which pays physicians almost nothing,” said Dr. Brian Katz, 59, a laparoscopic surgeon in scrubs who took a break in the same library later. “Yet those patients will come up here and pay to enjoy five-star comfort.”

The doctor is complaining that rich patients on Medicare can pay for the accomodations while he himself makes no profit. But watch for that to be distorted by Sean Hannity et al. into a story about welfare patients receiving luxury treatment on your tax dollars.

And speaking of the gilded age, here’s a fascinating little article about our plutocrat overlords, and how they behave when they think no one is watching.

In case you haven’t heard, he’s about to have one.

–Update: did I say “bad day”? Ha ha. Turns out the Republican base has no problem with a hypocritical, moralizing serial adulterer. Worth keeping in mind the next time someone starts yammering on about “family values.”

Still seems like an appropriate moment to repost this cartoon from 1995. Might even be time for a return appearance from Monsieur Newt.

Click to engorge.

Click to embiggen.

Jan. 19, 2012
The Romdroids

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From last week. Been busy.

Jan. 11, 2012
Greetings Earth Penguin

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Somebody sent me a link to this extraordinary creation, which is apparently a mosaic made out of clipped-up credit cards.

Things like this (and this and this) are part of what made the album cover such a fantastic experience. Because people love the music it represents, the art takes on a life of its own, and continues to come back at you in entirely unexpected ways.

You’ve been with us ten years now.

But after the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centers, Americans feared our still-unknown assailants far more than we feared the implications of unchecked executive power. We could not get the lid off that particular petri dish fast enough. Less than a week after 11 September 2001, Congress passed the Authorisation for Use of Military Force, which grants the president unlimited power to use force against anyone in the world – any nation, organisation, person, associated forces and so forth that the president determines was, in any way, involved in 9/11. Military Order #1, passed two months later, authorised the president to direct the capture of any non-citizen anywhere in the world allegedly involved in international terrorism, and detain that person indefinitely without access to the remedy of habeas corpus. (In another example of the deterioration of Americans’ rights post-9/11, that power can now be applied to citizens as well.)

Was catching up with my friend Derf’s blog, and noticed a couple of items of interest to people who are interested in items such as these. If you will.

The Hook in Charlottesville, VA, a plucky little weekly that featured my strip since its start-up ten years ago, decided to devote its shrinking budget to a local cartoon. Can’t argue with that editorial decision, although these things very seldom work out. The local cartoon usually isn’t all that great and, even if it is, the cartoonist soon tires of working for the pittance one lone weekly pays. It’s why those of us who forged careers in the weekly press syndicated in the first place, because these papers all pay shit. But if you multiply shit pay by 50, then it becomes a living wage. The Hook was a refreshingly comix-friendly paper right from the start. It competed with an older, rival weekly and managed to carve out a readership in a nasty newspaper war. The Hook, unlike its rival, ran lots of comix. Its success and that fact are not unrelated. But what’s done is done and I wish them the best.

The DC City Paper also dumped all its comix at the end of 2011, a scant nine months after their much-ballyhoed return to the pages of the paper on a gorgeous comix page anchored by The City. The DC City Paper was once one of the great weeklies. Owned by the Chicago Reader, it often surpassed its revered parent in quality and staff. And it was chock full of comix. In 2007, the aging hippie owners cashed out and sold both papers to the Creative Loafing media company, which quickly went bankrupt, thanks to overpaying for the new papers … In 2009, Creative Loafing’s largest creditor, the Atayala hedge fund, seized all the papers. Things stabilized somewhat after that, but clearly Atayala, worth in excess of $1 billion, is losing interest in a failing, small potatoes industry. So once again the comix are gone from DC City Paper, this time likely for good.

Totally agree with the point about syndication vs. the local cartoonist — I have rarely if ever seen that one work out, though unfortunately the syndicated cartoonist is rarely brought back after the inevitable burnout of the local person. And sorry to hear that the DC paper has already given up on comics once again. I never managed to break into that paper myself, but was glad to see them devoting an entire page to the art form.

Looking forward to Derf’s new graphic novel, the story of his teenage acquaintance Jeffrey Dahmer. Seriously.

… usually don’t repeat things here that I’ve tweeted, but I’ll make an exception for this: dumping comics is the alt-weekly version of “austerity” — killing the cheapest AND most popular part of your paper.