Welcome to this month’s edition of the newsletter. We have had a lot of new sign ups after Substack deployed the new Notes feature, which seems to have some promise. Just to get new people up to speed, this newsletter does not regularly feature full comics and is not about the news. It is about whatever I’m working on, drawing, what’s on my mind, and what I’m reading. Low stakes. Cool and chill.
Not getting around to a newsletter last month is part of my new media mindset: Slow Newslettering. Maybe you’ll hear from me one month, maybe not. It won’t be about whatever everyone is chattering about online that week. It’ll come at just the speed we should be hearing from strangers whose work we are interested in: every once in a while.
With that said, I do have some news coming up I will want to write about in another installment, so I wanted to get this draft polished off and sent!
Bog Being
Let’s start off light. This is a character I’ve drawn exactly one comic about and have been itching to do more of ever since. Recently I started drawing him again, trying to refine the character design a bit. I don’t know where this is headed, but I’d expect to at least see some one-pagers or a short story some day. He’s too fun not too.
Iraq War Cartoons
I intended to write something for the twentieth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq on March 20, but my draft just sat there for weeks as I struggled with it. What’s to say? Well, it was politically formative for me and launched my career as a political cartoonist, so potentially a lot. As I thought about writing something though, I came up blank. It was a disaster, killed hundreds of thousands of people for no good reason, and left millions of others refugees, injured, or with drastically worse lives. The US has moved onto other things and barely cares!
Let’s take a minute, two months after the 20th anniversary, for me to show you the comics I drew at the time. The following is my first political cartoon, drawn in February 2003, that ran in the student newspaper (copy machine pamphlet, really) at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh.
The silent one panel comic is rare for me and even then wasn't the direction I wanted to head in, but the visual came to me and I had to draw it. The paper needed a comic the following week—would I draw one? Of course. I had the bug and wouldn’t stop for 18 years. It was two and then three comics a week in those early years and I only downshifted to one a week after I started with The Nib in 2013.
I believe this was the second editorial cartoon I drew. For those who weren’t reading my work in the mid-2000s, my strip was titled Idiot Box for a few years and heavily featured televisions as panels and pundit-driven narration. I was very much a “I don’t own a television” person in my very young days and Idiot Box is a bad title I would eventually drop. In my defense, liberal media barely existed at the time, the news felt like propaganda, and the other big programming of the era was reality television. Awful.
Some of the early work is rough though. Can you believe this zinger failed to end the war?
The strip featured a lot of nameless characters like the one below. We have two brainless anchors who were regulars along with a conservative idiot and a self-righteous liberal guy based on (only visually) my good friend Chris who took the photo below. I had some regular bits, like The Time-Traveling Forefathers and Bitter Pundit Man, but my big regret with my time in political cartooning was not focusing on creating recurring characters until my wasteland comics of the last few years. I was, for reasons I can’t recall, allergic to the entire concept for the longest time and will blame my youth and stubbornness.
Digging through some old work I found this Beetle Bailey parody I had completely forgotten about, but feel like it holds up.
Here is a rare picture of me from 20 years ago—19 years old and protesting the Iraq War with millions of others around the world. Today my beautiful hair is gone and the Bush regime remains at large. A truly unjust world.
Official Bors Endorsement
For something actually substantive and reflective on the Iraq War, I turn you to Friend-of-the-Newsletter Spencer Ackerman in Rolling Stone. His piece is about the war as “a giant con that heralded a thousand more.” I wanted to bring up Spencer because he also has his first comic book work out now through DC in Waller vs. Wildstorm. It’s a political thriller featuring early versions of Lois Lane, Amanda Waller, Deathstroke, and Battalion in all his 90s bubble-headed glory—all informed by Spencer’s years as a national security reporter. Co-written by Evan Narcisse with art by Jesús Merino. Pick it up!
Podcast Mania
I’ve been going on a lot of podcasts lately with Ben Clarkson as part of a Justice Warriors promotion bonanza. Now, many of these are hidden behind the paywalls of the Patreon accounts. I am not in charge of those decisions, nor am I asking you to subscribe to multiple podcasts to hear me talk about comics and bullshit with people. But for your consideration:
Trashfuture (paywalled) - We discuss brain-wormed UK cartoonist Bob Moran’s work, woke banks, and other online phenomenon deleterious to mental health.
Welcome To My Ted Talk (paywalled) - Maybe the strangest podcast format I’ve been on—this one analyzes the 2012 movie Ted in 30 minute chunks and I started watching it at the 1 hour and 30 minute mark with zero context.
Pod Damn America (paywalled?) - Casual session on Justice Warriors, AI art, Scott Adams, and the Garfield Dog Cum Comic.
Bungacast (free) - A global politics podcast for leftist sophisticates has us on to talk about our weird ass fictional world and attempt to insert materialism into genre comics.
Current Affairs (paywalled) - Podcast of the lefty magazine discusses Justice Warriors and satire in the age of, well, the age we’re in.
Cold Cuts (free) - Chatting with some web cartoonist boys—on video!
Comic Book Couples Counseling (free) - I’m running out to things to say but I really enjoyed this podcast.
You can also check me out on the YouTube show Comic Book Club and the upcoming episodes of Graphic Policy Radio, with host Elana Levin, and Struggle Session, where we discussed dystopian cop movies.
I’m recording with QAnon Anonymous today. Phew.
Spring Books Sale
Over at The Nib bookstore we are having a Spring sale: 20% off orders over $100. We have more than 40 graphic novels in stock including Kate Beaton’s Ducks, Noah Van Sciver’s biography of Joseph Smith, Nib magazine back issues, and the stellar anthology American Cult.
And of course, Justice Warriors is available there as well, so if you haven’t picked it up yet, now is the time!