Won’t be monitoring the worldwide information networks very closely today. Digital messages sent through your computing machines may not be promptly acknowledged.

There’s been a huge outpouring of support over the, ah, late unpleasantness. I’m doing my best to keep up with the email but if I’ve missed anyone please accept my profuse apologies. And again, thank you, it means the world.

a politician speaks Truth to Morons. Freshman Democrat Alan Grayson from Orlando:

“Rush Limbaugh is a has-been hypocrite loser, who craves attention. His right-wing lunacy sounds like Mikhail Gorbachev, extolling the virtues of communism. Limbaugh actually was more lucid when he was a drug addict. If America ever did 1% of what he wanted us to do, then we’d all need pain killers.”

… and–a 2010 candidate quoted at Down With Tyranny:

“I think the newly elected junior senator from Minnesota said it best: Rush Limbaugh is a big, fat idiot. It speaks volumes that Rush continues as the mouthpiece of the Republican Party, even as the party implodes into electoral insignificance in most parts of the country. It also reveals the true values of the GOP in that this convicted drug addict, serial racist, gay-bashing closet case, and insulter of our troops, continues to have such a messianic hold on the party rank-and-file. Screw Rush Limbaugh and the dittoheads he continues to ride in on.”

It’s about time Democratic politicans adopt this tone, rather than the inoffensive “Oh ha ha ha that Rush is quite the entertainer” crap that you heard so much during the mid-nineties. Occasionally someone will ask why I pay any attention to the right wing hate talkers, as if they will simply disappear if we ignore them. The answer is simple: they will not disappear if we ignore them. They spread hate and ignorance every day, and to whatever small extent I can counter that, I will.

As I often do on this blog, I’ve been sorting out my thoughts in public about this whole VVM fiasco in real time, in a fairly sloppy manner. Max Cannon, by contrast, has taken the time to write up a cogent summary of the situation and what it means for alternative comics fans. It really is up to you.

… and let me just add: if your local paper still runs the cartoons, please shoot them a quick email and let them know how much you appreciate it.

…also: if you got here by a link from another site (thanks Atrios!), you can visit the main page for much more on the topic.

… and let me reiterate for the newcomers: in theory, this is a temporary suspension, to be repealed in three to six months, when things get a little better. What worries us, I think, is what Lloyd Dangle pointed out: I don’t know anyone who believes things are really going to get better, certainly not that soon, and certainly not for the newspaper industry. And — I said this before but it’s especially important — this isn’t an “us vs. them” situation. These are in many cases people who have supported my work and given me an audience for ten or fifteen years; some are personal friends. This is just an unfortunate decision made at the corporate level in response to a very difficult time. If and when you write them, keep that in mind, and be polite. There aren’t any villains here, except maybe the Wall Street morons who got us into this mess.

An article about cartoonists and the Obama Administration from the New Haven Advocate, featuring some quotes from yours truly, as foul mouthed as ever. Conducted last week, prior to what we shall henceforth refer to as the Monday Morning Massacre.

My friend Lloyd Dangle has lost a few papers lately as well.

The line that sums this whole mess up for all of us: “The Stranger and Metro said that they might bring Troubletown back when things get better, but for newspapers, I don’t know anybody who thinks it’s going to get better.”

Media matters:

In another house-of-cards example of purported media infatuation with President Obama offered by Bernard Goldberg in his new book, Goldberg echoes Rush Limbaugh by printing badly doctored “snippets” of an interview between Charlie Rose and Tom Brokaw. Goldberg’s doctored transcript of the interview falsely suggests, among other things, that Brokaw expressed the view that “there’s a lot about [Obama] we don’t know,” when, in fact, Brokaw attributed that assertion to “conservative commentators” and that comments Brokaw and Rose made about their lack of familiarity with the candidates applied only to Obama when, in fact, they were referring to Sen. John McCain as well.

As some of you have no doubt intuited, I have the right wing radio on in the background a lot of the time, and I heard those clips over and over again, followed by the usual rants about the purported biases of the media, and if Tom Brokaw doesn’t know anything about Obama, whhhhyyyyyyyy didn’t he say anything ssssoooooonnner, hmmmmmmm? Yada yada yada, rinse and repeat, endlessly.

I assumed at the time it was some sort of dishonest bullshit, but never really got around to tracking it down. And of course I was right, because when you assume that pretty much everything you hear on right wing talk radio is dishonest bullshit, you will rarely be proven wrong.

See also: this, this, and this.

The only way cartoonists could get even less respect would be if we presented our work in the form of handmade knit doilies thrust upon random strangers on the street.

Some weeks just make you tired.

(edited this one slightly … but I am taken aback at how little coverage has been generated so far by the nation’s largest altweekly chain deep-sixing all cartoons across their entire chain … it’s quite unprecedented in our little industry…)

… adding also: The more I think about this, the more it feels like a pivotal moment, beyond the immediate concerns of my own career. If the takeaway lesson here is that altweekly cartoons can be wiped off the slate without consequence, it may really be the beginning of the end for this particular genre.

Then again, the papers could realize how integral cartoons are to their success, reinstate the ones they dropped, add many new ones, give everyone a raise, and find caring homes for the monkeys that subsequently fly out of my butt. You never know!

The special fine art paper I ordered finally arrived and I just did a test print … and it’s shockingly gorgeous. I’m really blown away but how much difference the paper can make. Those of you who ordered these will be very pleased.

… this is how good these look: I almost never put any of my own work on display around the house — it’s work, I stare at it all day — but I am going to hang one of these up. They’re really just stunning.

This is a relatively new printer that I’ve been underutilizing. Now that I see what it can do — any thoughts on what the next limited edition print should be? I was thinking about the shoe tossing cartoon — or are we all just too sick of the Bushies at this point? Input welcome.

… one more update b/c I just stepped back into my studio to shut down the computer and took another look at the prints: those of you who ordered these, your expectations will be blown out of the water. Clearly many things in life do not work out as well as we might hope — it’s lovely when some small thing does. Always worthwhile to embrace that.

Several people have written to inquire about the possibility of reader subscriptions or sponsorships, and I appreciate the thought and will look into it. But this isn’t only about the lost income — I can survive that hit, at least until things get even worse. It’s also about losing the readership, everybody who’s used to picking up these papers to see the cartoon each week. I mean, christ, look at that list — Dallas, Ft. Lauderdale, Houston, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Nashville, Orange County, Kansas City, Denver, Seattle, New York. (On top of which I lost the VVM paper in St. Louis earlier in the year, again due to budgetary cutbacks.) That’s a lot of cities!

The irony is, I deliberately set out at the beginning of my career to make sure my eggs were in a lot of different baskets, so no one person could do me this kind of damage. What I didn’t count on was the baskets themselves deciding to merge — i.e., the consolidation of the paper chains. And isn’t that working out well for all concerned.