Posted with the kind permission of Kevin Moore. Click on the cartoon to see it bigger, and to see Kevin’s commentary and links.

In addition to Kevin’s comments, I’d point out this post by Ezra, pointing out that (by the weird definition of “subsidize” conservatives are suddenly using), Stupak “did not block the federal government from subsidizing abortion. All it did was block it from subsidizing abortion for poorer women.”

And read as well this piece, pointing out that by the Bishop’s definition of federal funding, the enormous support the Federal government pays to Catholic hospitals and charities must be a subsidization of religion, and is presumably unconstitutional.

[Visual description:
Panel one: Dude wearing "Uncle Sam" hat and a Hawaiian shirt is walking alongside a cliff, with John Keynes, who has a big mustache.
HAT DUDE: Keynes, you are old-fashioned and useless. Modern economics has transcended you.
Panel 2: Hat Dude teeters on the edge of falling off the cliff.
HAT DUDE: Oh Dear! I am plummeting over a cliff! SAVE ME KEYNES!
Panel 3: Keynes has caught hat dude by the wrist and is pulling him to safety.
KEYNES: It's okay... I've got you!
HAT DUDE: Thank you, Keynes!
Panel 4: The duo resumes their walk.
HAT DUDE: As I was saying, Keynes, you're of no use at all! ]

A cartoon that was inspired by Paul Krugman’s article “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?” Click on the cartoon to see a bigger version.

I’m thrilled to announce that Friends of Lulu has nominated Hereville for two awards! “The Lulu Awards recognizes the the people and projects that helped to open eyes and minds to the amazing comic and cartooning work by and/or about women.”

Hereville was nominated for the Leah Adezio Award For Best Kid-Friendly Work, and Mirka was nominated for Best Female Character.

To vote for Hereville (or for the other nominees — swell folks, all of them!), go to Friends of Lulu and follow the directions there.

* * *

Hey, speaking of Hereville, whatever happened to it? I’m still working on it, believe it or not. Comics are slow!

The graphic novel will be coming out from Abrams in late 2010 (in time for Hanukkah!). I’m just finishing up the second draft of the pencils now, and I’ll begin work on the final art in a bit over a week.

Meanwhile, just to whet people’s appetites, here’s a penciled page from chapter one:

Click on the cartoon to see it bigger.

Click on the cartoon to see it bigger. Happy Labor Day!

Click on the image to biggify it.

Click on the cartoon to see a larger version.

You can listen to Reagan’s speech here, and see I’m not exaggerating (he begins talking about loss of freedoms for doctors at about six minutes, and predicts total fascism at around seven minutes). Listening to it, it’s interesting how little the debate has changed between 1961 and today.

If it’s true, as Reagan claims, that the idea behind Medicare was to take a first step that would inevitably lead to socialized medicine for all citizens, then boy did that plan backfire.

I love this cartoon by my friend Mikhaela Reid.

If you’ve ever been to TVTropes.org, you know that Randall Munroe is absolutely right about this. I once inadvertently spent seven hours surfing there. Indeed, I defy anyone to go there and get out without reading, at minimum, ten articles. It can’t be done.

Consider this an open thread. 

Click on the cartoon to see a larger version.

I have two things currently being auctioned off to help a couple of people out.

The first, a copy of the dead tree edition of Hereville with a sketch in it, is currently going for $40. That auction closes at midnight tonight.

The second, the original art to a Muppet Star Wars health care political cartoon, has a current high bid of $200. There are two days left to bid on that one.

I’m pretty pleased with how both these auctions are going — I was afraid they’d both sell for, like, $10, which would have been dead embarrassing.

No, not that kind of underground comic!

Steve Lieber’s and Jeff Parker’s new adventure comic Underground looks neat. And I say that because apparently much of it will take place deep in caves (the heroine is a park ranger), which is a setting I think is cool times 1000. You can read a free preview of the first issue here. Steve¹ just got robbed, which is putting a crimp in his publicity plans, so he’s asking people to link the Underground website so that folks know the comic exists.

Plus: Female protagonist who doesn’t wear ridiculous clothing! Is that even legal in a comic coming from Image?

The free preview is mostly setup (it’s the first issue of five), but the last adventure-comic-by-Steve-with-a-female-protagonist I read, Whiteout (which is about to be a movie), completely rocked.

1. Full disclosure: Steve is someone I know and like. (back)

Yesterday I posted one of my recent cartoons, which suggested that a health care system like ours would be run by the evil Empire, from Star Wars.

Today, Ezra Klein reports about a Senate health care hearing:

Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) says that he’s not sure who wrote the Affordable Health Choices Act but that if you put “Rube Goldberg, Karl Marx, and Ira Magaziner in a room,” you’d have ended up with something pretty close. A classy, gracious line from the man who was nearly Obama’s secretary of commerce.

Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) shoots back, “Our current system is a combination of Adam Smith, Darth Vader, and the Bodysnatchers. So I like our plan better!”

Here’s my cartoon from this past April’s issue of Dollars and Sense. (Click on the cartoon to see a larger version.)

To tell you the truth, I can’t draw Darth’s helmet to save my life. So I turned to the awesome Bill Mudron, who could easily draw Darth’s helmet with a crayon clenched between his butt cheeks, although in this case I’m pretty sure Bill used his hands. I wrote and penciled the cartoon, and Bill inked it, drawing Darth and the backgrounds pretty much from scratch.

Since this is a health care cartoon, I thought it would make sense to auction it off to help someone pay for health care. Somewhere on the internet I ran into Connie Parrott’s case; Connie is a type 1 diabetic who is trying to raise funds for needed medical equipment through the internet. Although I still haven’t met Connie, she and I have emailed, and she was willing to let me do the auction thing. Connie’s friend Ed Brayton, who blogs at Dispatches From the Culture Wars — a blog that, coincidentally, I’ve been reading for years (sometimes the internet is a very small place) — volunteered to help organize it.

So, anyway: The original art is being auctioned here on Ebay. You can find details (paper stock, image size, etc) over there.

The other day, I quoted from Bruce Bartlett’s editorial about libertarians. It’s worth quoting more:

Libertarians’ views on social policy and national defense make them sympathetic to the Democrats, while their views on economic policy tend to align them with the Republicans. If one views social, defense and economic policy as having roughly equal weight, it would seem, therefore, that most libertarians should be Democrats. In fact, almost none are. Those that don’t belong to the dysfunctional Libertarian Party are, by and large, Republicans.

The reason for this is that most self-described libertarians are primarily motivated by economics. In particular, they don’t like paying taxes. They also tend to have an obsession with gold and a distrust of paper money. As a philosophy, their libertarianism doesn’t extent much beyond not wanting to pay taxes, being paid in gold and being able to keep all the guns they want. Many are survivalists at heart and would be perfectly content to live in complete isolation on a mountain somewhere, neither taking anything from society nor giving anything.

An example of this type of libertarian thinking can be found on the Web site of a group called the Campaign for Liberty. It pays lip service to the libertarian philosophy on foreign and social policy, but says little about them. The discussion of economic policy, however, is much greater. But its only major proposal is abolition of the income tax. No ideas on how government spending would be cut to make this possible are put forward except to eliminate the congressional pay raise. Perhaps this group really believes that will be enough to abolish the income tax, but I suspect not.

Naturally, this reminds me of one of my cartoons:

Bartlett points out that the libertarians you meet in Washington, D.C., aren’t goldbugs or survivalists, but they still seem focused on economics above all else. Ezra argues that it comes down to who pays the bills:

But if the country’s libertarianism is a reaction to taxes, D.C.’s libertarianism is a response to subsidies. And it turns out there are rather a lot of folks interested in subsidizing libertarian arguments against regulation and progressive taxation and not a lot of folks interested in subsidizing libertarian arguments against abortion restrictions. And that’s because libertarianism in D.C. is more of a tool than a movement. It can’t command votes and so can’t wield broad power. But it can summon funds to apply direct pressure to discrete issues of interest to, well, funders.

Rad Geek and Roderick Long both argue that Bartlett unfairly ignores those libertarians who do, in fact, argue quite a lot about foreign policy and civil liberties — although Long concedes that the Libertarian Party has pretty much the focus Bartlett describes. I also think that Bartlett’s case about CATO is fair. Since CATO and the Libertarian Party are hardly small and irrelevant parts of American libertarianism, I don’t think it’s true that Bartlett’s argument is, as Rad Geek says, a “ridiculous strawman.” But it’s true that there are some kick-ass libertarians (like Rad Geek and Long) who aren’t all about how paying taxes is just! like! being! mugged!, and those folks deserve more notice and acknowledgment.

That’s an old cartoon, but I like it, and so I’ll take any excuse to post it. Such as this email I received from “Mark”:

Just caught your “If Housepets were Libertarians” cartoon

Boy are you confused about what Libertarians are. It’s not about selfishness, it’s about not being FORCED into charity. What’s more damaging however is the impression you form in the minds of those who take your little drawing at face value. Read a book would you; how about “Atlas Shrugged” or “Wealth and Poverty” or “ Freedom to Choose”. If you are going to dabble in political thought don’t let yourself be pigeonholed as a complete neophyte.

I’m really tickled by the idea that if you haven’t read a book by obscure 1970s anti-feminist George Gilder, then you’re a complete neophyte.

I don’t interpret “If Libertarians Were Housepets” as saying that libertarians are selfish (that’s more the theme of this cartoon). Rather, it’s saying that Libertarians have dangerously little understanding of how society actually works. As Mark Thoma writes:

Where I part with many libertarians - perhaps due to my background - is in the idea that government is almost always at odds with liberty. In my case, government played a key role in providing me with opportunity - education is one example, without tuition of $100 per semester at a state school, I probably would not have gone to college - but the opportunities government provided me go beyond education (and also see the examples given in the article for women and minorities).

Bruce Bartlett argues:¹

Many government interventions expand freedom. A good example would be the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It was opposed by libertarians like Barry Goldwater as an unconstitutional infringement on states’ rights. Yet it was obvious that African Americans were suffering tremendously at the hands of state and local governments. If the federal government didn’t step in to redress these crimes, who else would? [...]

One could also argue that the women’s movement led to a tremendous increase in freedom. Libertarians may concede the point, but conservatives almost universally view the women’s movement with deep hostility. They think women are freest when fulfilling their roles as wife and mother. Anything that conflicts with those responsibilities is bad as far as most conservatives are concerned.

But although Libertarians may concede the point, Bartlett points out, in the end they still vote Republican, because they’re entirely focused on economics, and on government as the enemy of liberty. This is problematic because libertarians tend to have an extremely narrow conception of what liberty is: not paying taxes.

The Cato Institute publishes an annual survey of economic freedom throughout the world, but produces no surveys of what countries have the most political or social freedom or those that have the most libertarian foreign policy.

Furthermore, economic freedom tends to be determined primarily by those measures for which quantifiable data are available. Since it is very easy to look up the top marginal income tax rate or taxes as a share of GDP, these measures tend to have overwhelming influence on the ratings. As a result, countries like Denmark, which are very free every way except in terms of taxes, end up being penalized. Conversely, authoritarian states like Singapore don’t suffer for it because they have low taxes.

Although not all libertarians are well-off white men, nearly every libertarian I’ve met had at least two of those three traits. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I think that if you’re economically comfortable, white, and male, it’s much easier to imagine that government is the biggest threat to liberty in the world, and to minimize or dismiss how other factors — such as racism, sexism, and the concentration of wealth and poverty — also constrain liberty. For George Gilder — a white man with more money than he could ever spend — perhaps the biggest threat to his freedom is taxation. But most of us aren’t George Gilder.

1. I’ve cut out a sentence in which Bartlett says that blacks no longer have less freedom than whites, generally. One look at who goes to prison in the US is enough to refute that claim. (back)

Okay, so let’s say that National Review decided to do a racist caricature of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, but they decided to do a racist caricature that changed her race? Would that be better?

That may seem like an insane question to ask, but you haven’t met insane until you’ve met the National Review:

You see, it’s funny because…um…all those brown people look alike? Yeah, maybe that’s it.

On occasion I’ve said, sardonically, “Gee, and the GOP wonders why they have trouble attracting non-white voters.” But they don’t wonder that, really. They’ve embraced racism in a big bear hug, and they’re not going to let go of it, even as it pulls them into the electoral abyss.

See also Cara, Ann, and Jesse.

(Click on the cartoon to see a larger version.)

Thanks to Mandolin for suggesting the inset panel at the end.

Lately I’ve been very into reading about comics, and reading comics, and I’ve just spent hours reading about comics when I really should be drawing Hereville. Here are my current open tabs, and feel free to add more any comics-related links or discussion in the comments:

1. This online comic book short by Rebbecca Sugar, about a couple of Simpsons fans, “Don’t Cry For Me, I’m Already Dead,” will strike some readers as maudlin and cheesy, and if that’s what you think it is, I won’t argue with you. But I found it touching and sad and really well done.
2. The collection of “supplemental material for Josiah Leighton’s ‘Storytelling with Art’ class,” and especially the action category. Lots of interesting observations about storytelling here, not all of which I agreed with, but all of which I thought was interesting. (Note that unlike most blogs, this is intended to be read from top to bottom.)
3. Study shows McCloud was right: People really do relate more to cartooney images. Although I’m predisposed to agree with the finding, from the example of art shown, I have doubts about the validity of the study; the “realistic” art is ugly and off-putting, which might have been distancing. Better-drawn “realistic” art might have drawn readers in better, and “cartooney” art can be distancing if it’s drawn in unwelcoming ways.
4. The Coverly cartoon reproduced here cracked me up.
5. The Hooded Utilitarian compares two images clearly intended as “awe-inspiring,” one from an American comic, one from a Korean comic, and discusses why he thinks the Korean image is so much more effective. I’m linking this as much for the discussion in the comments as for the post itself. (One of the comment writers is, alas, a fool, but he’s kind of a useful fool in that he provokes the other folks into writing good comments attempting to explain things to him.)

   I think, in the end, what is awe-inspiring comes as much from the writing than from the art. I’ve found some bits of OOTS pretty damn awesome; on the other hand, some of the most impressive renderings in comics can leave me relatively cold. I mean, Alex Ross is impressive at what he does, and I even like some of his stuff (in particular, I like the meaty, 1940s faces he uses to render Superman and Captain Marvel), but can he make me care about the events he’s drawing? He really can’t.

6. You can read the first hundred or so pages of Scott McCloud’s 500+ page Zot! paperback for free online. I don’t think there’s ever been a better superhero comic than the black-and-white Zot!.
7. This Pogo fan is posting the “Pogo in Pandemonia” sequence — the whole thing. It’ll take him a while to post it all, I imagine, but there’s plenty there to read, plus some interesting commentaries. (Update: link is now fixed!)

   I adore Pogo, but I prefer the Sunday comics printed in black and white (as they are in some reprint collections); the color, to my eye, just muddies up Kelly’s matchlessly lush brushwork, especially when combined with lousy newsprint printing. And Kelly (or his assistants?) seems to have been a mediocre colorist at best. That said, it’s still Pogo, and Pogo is great, and lengthy plotlines in Pogo are particularly great.

8. Remember a short-lived comic book called Thriller, with art by Trevor Van Eeden? No? Well, I do — I remember being a kid and having my mind absolutely blown by the things Eeden did with layout. His layouts seem less world-shaking to me now (I’ve seen a lot more comics since then), but I still loved reading this appreciation.
9. The comic strip Sinfest is extremely sexist nearly all of the time, in an loads-of-t&a-smarm sort of way. But despite the sexism, I enjoyed this little romance plotline, helpfully linked to by Webcomic Rumble.
10. Of course, T&A is nearly unavoidable in genre comics. When Maia started reading the Buffy comic, she found the way women’s bodies were drawn to be extreme — which it is, unless you’re used to how mainstream comics usually depicts female bodies, in which case Buffy ’s art is if anything very mild.

    Which brings me, sort of, to the online comic FreakAngels, which I thought was a pretty fun post-end-of-the-world superpower adventure story. I especially envy how good the artist is with architecture (which is pretty important for the story).

    I really like sci-fi stories about rebuilding civilization from scratch. But why do we need the superpowers to make it interesting? It’s a way, I think, of removing politics from the equation. In the real world, societies are built by the people who have the best political skills. But Warren Ellis doesn’t want to write a comic about politicians, he wants to write a comic about a bunch of hot gothy 23-year-olds who just happen to be in charge. And with superhero powers added to the mix, he can do that. Thanks to The Other Maria at The Hathor Legacy, whose review led me to this comic.