I wrote this cartoon after the Gabby Giffords shooting in January of 2011. It remains tragically relevant.
New toon
A note about the first panel: this of course refers to the famous moment in the Reagan/Mondale debates, when Reagan sought to dispel doubts about his age and alertness (after a poor showing in the first debate) with, well, a clever one-liner some speechwriter had come up with. And it worked! Everyone agreed the clever one-liner certainly put those doubts to rest. It’s particularly terrifying, given what we now know — the man was a few short years away from being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and more to the point, his own son has speculated that he might have been in the early stages of the disease at that moment, and into his second term as President of the United States. I thought a long time about that panel, and thanks to Sparky’s List had the opportunity to discuss it with a reader whose parent has Alzheimer’s. At any rate, it’s a comment on a specific and disturbing moment in American politics; it’s not meant as a joke at the expense of anyone suffering from that disease, and should not be taken as such.
Entropy requires no maintenance
Well, as it turns out I’m down another paper — sorry to say that due to (what else) budgetary constraints, long-time client paper NUVO in Indianapolis is dropping the strip.
Sucks to lose the readers, but there’s not much to be done about that.* However, adding a mere couple dozen more members to SPARKY’S LIST would make up for the income hit, at least for a few months.
And that’s what I’m hoping to do with the list and its model of direct audience support — to shield myself from the vagaries of the market, which are mostly trending downward these days, as you may have noticed.
So consider this a small NPR-style pledge drive. Without tote bags.
The basic rundown about the list is here. I would add that as I’ve been doing it for a couple months now, it’s begun to develop into its own creature. You get to see the cartoon a couple days early, but you also get a moderate-to-lengthy post deconstructing the week’s work, discussing what I was thinking about certain panels, or other directions I might have gone. One week, subscribers got a peek at a first draft which normally no one would ever have seen.
And more to the point, if I get enough people signed on to this crazy scheme, then it’s going to be a lot easier to shrug off these losses and stay focused on the work.
*Though of course if you live in the Indianapolis area and This Modern World is one of the reasons you pick up NUVO, it certainly can’t hurt to let them know.
End of the line?
An article in the Austin Chronicle about Jen Sorensen (who recently moved to Austin), and the future of alt-weekly cartooning, with some commentary from me. My only quibble is, I wish they’d included my comments about papers (such as the Austin Chronicle) which DO still support our little art form, for which we cartoonists are all immensely grateful.
Related: a huge shoutout to OC Weekly editor Gustavo Arellano, for bringing Red Meat back to the paper. Maybe the cartoon freeze at most New Times papers (with the happy exception of the Village Voice) is starting to thaw. (There’s a comments box at the bottom of that post–send the man some cartoon-fan love for doing the right thing.)