Posts Tagged ‘politics’


Crazy Bastard

March 12th, 2008

pearce
Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce is the latest Arizona politician/xenophobe to weigh in on the immigration debate. His position? He hates Mexicans and wishes we were a nation of white folks, just like the good old days.

From NPR: “I will not back off until we solve the problem of this illegal invasion,” he says, from an office decorated with awards, keepsakes and photos of fellow fighters Ronald Reagan and John Wayne. “Invaders, that’s what they are. Invaders on the American sovereignty and it can’t be tolerated.”

The United States has never been a nation that welcomes people of color (even the Irish were considered a little too low-class for America’s high standards for a while). We have no problem mucking about in other countries’ business, but when refugees from misbegotten wars come flooding into our borders, well, that’s cause for alarm.

It’s hard for me to take someone like Russell Pearce seriously. Maybe he’s so afraid of immigrants because their children will grow up and vote against him in upcoming elections. I hope they do.

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really?

January 13th, 2009

I’m shooting myself in the foot by trash-talking a blog – especially one written by the very editors whose attention I’ve been trying to get for the past eight years – but some statements cannot go by unremarked.

Make ’em Laugh


Humor is all about surprise (a strikingly similar formula to Horror, strangely enough). But it is also about relatability, and demographics, and whatever a syndicate thinks makes a newspaper editor chuckle.

Bill Watterson snuck his weirder tendencies in the back door by making Calvin’s imagination so vivid. Had he sent in Spaceman Spiff as a submission, I have a feeling it wouldn’t have made it to the editor’s Inbox, let alone any newspapers. It seems the safest bet with a comic strip is one that features human characters doing everyday things.

I’m certainly not putting down any of strip that does feature human characters doing everyday things. Like I said, Calvin and Hobbes was, in part, a boy and his parents. Cul de Sac is a “family strip.” Heck, even Charles Addams’ comics featuring the Addams Family could be classified as people doing everyday things (though…weird…things).

Saying “be funny and we’ll syndicate you” is a gross understatement. It should be something more like “be funny in a particular way, with particular characters and particular art, and we might syndicate you. ” But that doesn’t make for a good blog post, does it?

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