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When the extremely homo-phobic and generally insane self-described Christians led by Fred Phelps and the Westboro Church decided to protest the “idolotry” and “skimpily clad whores” of San Diego Comic Con, there was bound to be an interesting response.  You have to wonder why a few brain dead “true believers” (read: provocateurs) go up against the teaming throng of tens of thousands of comic book nerds…when you know the reaction is going to be an absolute trash fest.   But, thank heavens, the comic fans didn’t fail!

Bender, of Futurama fame, had his moment in the sun, holding a KILL ALL HUMANS sign and shouting: “Westboro Church, bite my shiny metal ass!”   Wish I had been there for that one!

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Happy New Year, and welcome to the same old story…   At least in the comic pages sixty years ago, the standards of line art were fantastic, such as the panel above in Alex Raymond’s Rip Kirby.    Nowadays, not only do we have to put up with degrading and meaningless searches, but the comics that are “fit to print” look about as sophisticated as Cathy Guisewite.  Yuck!

Anyway, let’s enjoy this incredible profile from Alex Raymond’s incomparable brush, and aspire to something better!

At first, the survey of political systems in Mack Reynolds‘ interstellar spy novel, Planetary Agent X, seems quite whimisical and superficial.  There are planets full of anarchists, and planets crawling with feudalism, nihilism, socialism, and what have you.   There are some playful jabs at democracy, individualism, and even the tyranny of the uninformed voters (a la John Stuart Mill).  The tone is not as playful as Ron Goulart, but definitely not very serious either.   So it came as a pleasant surprise when the protagonist, Ronny Bronston, is given a sarcastic lecture by his handler, the mysterious Tog Lee Chang Chu, on the disasters brought about by “industrial feudalism.”   How strangely familiar!

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Watching the Republicans flail around in psychotic convulsions at the CPAC finally seemed to have convinced some Americans of what I have observed for most of my life, namely that the GOP is the party of the criminally insane.  The recent bile-spewings of Rush Limbaugh and Alan Keyes, are nothing new.  It is rather sick to watch, though, as if we are viewing the inside workings of a really lunatic fringe cult, played out live on national t.v.

There are more than a few sociological parallels to the cult that figures in the book I just finished, Imaginary Friends (1967), by Alison Lurie.

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Went to the opening of an exhibit called Arts of Subversion, Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union, which is a very nicely curated show that explores the lives of artists under the opressive fist of totalitarianism.   The most shocking aspect of the exhibit, which of course is deliberately unstated, is the feeling of creeping familiarity that we have when looking at the works — don’t we also live in the same space?  What makes the brutality and insanity of a regime that espouses torture any different from the KGB under Stalin, after all?   As the attendees munched cheese and sipped Hungarian red wine, did they not feel a twinge of empathy for the character of Sergei Kotov in the brilliant (and terrifying) film, Burnt by the Sun?  Or was that just me?

Still, it is always instructive to try to feel and understand what the artists were envisioning, and to appreciate the subtle (or unsubtle) ironies of how they depicted life under tyranny.   Yuri Rybchinsky’s photos of prisons and slavering guard dogs are taken as if they were totally impersonal snapshots from a Kodak Brownie, and yet are riveting for their subject matter and splendid foreshortening which electrify the images with sudden energy.

The untitled portrait (perhaps self-portrait) by the art student, Boris Sveshnikov, while living in exile at the gulag is executed with almost casual mastery.  But the expression of the subject is riven with the poignance of a man beaten but never defeated.

Back in the realm of obviousness,  the large canvas by Alexei Sundakov that appeared over the opening descriptive summary of the exhibit, showed a crowd of people with their backs turned to the viewer, all hovering toward an invisible object that may have existed — though probably did not — under a sign reading meat.    Is this enough to convey the sense of malaise and dissatisfaction that it proposes?  Only through the flawless sterility of the scene, painted with smooth mastery reminiscent of George Tooker.

The exhibit featured a number of excellent pieces, including those of Peeter Ulas, Vello Vin, Ernst Neisvestny, and Oskar Rabin, to name a few.   The substance of the commentaries seemed to be derived partly from the book, Beyond Memory: Soviet Nonconformist Photography, which looks quite good, especially the section on Subversive Photography by Ernest Larsen.

The show-stealing image, which appeared on the cover of the program, and which was reproduced on a gigantic 4 meter wide banner hanging from the atrium wall, was Boris Mikhailov’s hand-tinted photo of some Soviet apparatchiks marching along, draped with their honorary sashes.   These are ordinary politicos in a local affair, which is evident by the disorganized band of smiling young pioneers marching behind them.  Etched into these faces are the agonizing realities of being tools in the state machine, the machine that fattens them with luxuries while others go hungry, the machine that hustles them to and from meetings while others stand wearily in lines for non-existent meat.  The farcical splash of super-rich primary colors across the black and white print, gives an obscene, Walt Disney edge to the parody!   How this image provokes us to think of our own times, when party-line weasels enacted policies promulgated by the likes of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the unseen octopus of geo-politicial black artists who stood them up before us!  What sarcasm and gallows humor have we all had with their evil ways, all gaudily pumped up on their own false-flagged patriotism…don’t these bastards all look alike?

After a terrible ordeal of being stuck in some sort of collective nightmare, Americans have somehow managed to bring themselves to back to planet Earth:  we have elected Barack Obama to be President of the United States!  It’s been a long haul, but somehow the momentum did not fade away.   While Republicans managed to drag themselves down into the gutter, then the sewer, only to spend their final hours screaming to themselves inside of a septic tank, the rest of us kept striding forward into the future.  Let’s face it, when you are forced to choose between Jim Crow and Barack Obama, only a knuckle-dragging troglodyte could still vote a straight GOP ticket…    Thank goodness we have busted through that atavistic nightmare!   It is time for generational change!   It is time for Camelot!

We need a Camelot, and the world needs a Camelot, so let us celebrate and dream for a glorious moment!  Then let us get our feet back on the ground and realize that even Camelot is built on the torture dungeons of evil madmen.   We need to inject some realism into our progress, and ultimately to reject the notion of castles, of kings, and of peons.   If this election teaches us anything, it is that only a union of free individuals can defeat tyranny.  So let us stop thinking about top down solutions, and let us start to NETWORK!

Only by chance did I notice that Lloyd Dangle, cartoonist and creator of Troubletown, is currently tramping across America on a 20th Anniversary Book Tour, celebrating two decades of ceaseless trouble! How can it be that most people know Dangle only because of his Airborne packages, and not for his amazing comics?

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Now where have I heard a similar story before? Where was it again? Give me a minute! It’ll come to me, if I think about it. Hmmm… something to do with crime. Something to do with politics. Yes, yes… Something to do with the President of the United States. But what was that example that I was thinking of? Hmmm… Okay, think about evil, think about some perverted rotters who would turn the Presidency into a criminal operation. Think of traitors. They would stoop to nothing. They would tear up the Constitution itself, even torture random people off the street in order to pillage and steal from the U.S. treasury. They would not even hesitate to kill and destroy their own people, for what?! To get their hands on stinking money, covered in blood… That’s it! I remember now! This is exactly the story called “Woody Woodpecker, the Evil Genius,” by John Stanley, which appeared in Four Color Comics #169 (1947). Whew! For a minute there, I though I was losing my memory.

If you haven’t yet seen the film, Dark Knight, please do that first before reading this post, because you will definitely spoil the “tension” of the plot, assuming there is any. For some reason this film is a runaway hit, with critics pissing all over themselves to outpraise each other. From my perspective, despite some excellent cinematography and a stellar performance by Heath Ledger as the Joker, it is really just another Batman movie, but with a troubling dichotomy at its core that is getting scant attention. There are clearly two very conflicted subtexts in the film, one centered on Batman and the other on the Joker. Batman’s supposed internal conflict we are all familiar with — having to take the law into his own hands in order to fight evil — dating back to his first appearance in Detective Comics #37; on the other hand, unlike the ridiculous slapstick Joker that Burton and Nicholson gave us, Ledger pushes his exploration of the Joker’s mercurial psychology into whole new realms of uncharted territory.

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After speaking to a sea of 75,000 people in Portland, Oregon, it seems as if the wind is lifting Obama’s wings. But it’s a long road to November, and he may turn out to be the same old cog in the machine, forcing us to back the Bigfoot-Nessie ticket.

In any case, we hope that the monster-swine who are currently looting the U.S. Treasury for their phony global black-ops don’t get all autistic and 9-11 repeat on us. Of course they will try.

Thus we turn to this image floating around the web, which reminds us that the hell-bats are ALWAYS going to fly at dusk, the lizard-goons will ALWAYS gather in Las Vegas… So we have to get a firm grip on the vial of psilocibin, steer a course out onto the open road towards freedom, and see how fast this baby can move!

Mahalo!