Fresh Pain

News from the World of The Pain

 

July 23, 2003

Issues #10 and 11 will be released simultaneously next week. They're $3 each. Let's call it $5 for both if you order them directly from me.

June 12, 2003

The trade paperback compilation of the best of my cartoons, to be titled The Pain--When Will It End, will be published by Fantagraphics books in March of 2004, unless, as seems possible, they go belly-up before then.

My essay "That's Not Funny: Rage, Laughter, and Political Cartooning After 9/11," which has apparently earned me the bitter enmity of Tom Tomorrow, appeared in issue #250 of The Comics Journal.

November 25, 2002

The first collection of my cartoons, to be titled The Pain--When Will It End?, will be published by Fantagraphics Books next year. So far this announcement is based on one terse e-mail from Gary Groth, publisher of Fantagraphics, but the process has been set inexorably in motion. That distant rumble you hear, growing ever closer, is the sound of the long-awaited Money Truck trundling down my lane. The slight lurch my long-time supporters feel beneath their feet is the cottails, for so long motionless, at last starting to move. There will be places of high honor for all of you in the New Order. At last the bloody day of reckoning is at hand, when not only those named on my Enemies List but all the jealous little people who have tried to keep me down over the years will be made to pay. O yes, my friends--they will rue the fucking day.

Needless to say the release date, ordering information, and news of the destruction of my enemies will be announced on this site.

July 21, 2002

My essay on B. Kliban, the funniest cartoonist who has ever lived and the single most obvious influence on my own work, is featured in the current volume of the Comics Journal Summer Special, on the shelves at fine bookstores near you.

I have finally finished Photoshoppping all of the God damned cartoons for my God damned book and have gotten a manuscript version printed up. It is now in the hands of an agent, and as soon as she rejects it I will send it to Gary Groth at Fantagraphics. In the meantime I am polishing up little nitpicky problems I noticed in the printouts and working on the cover design. One way or another this book will be out--sooner if I have to publish it myself, later if someone else actually wants to do it.

Most importantly, I have received word that a female artist of my acquaintance has had one of my cartoons--the little stuffed panda holding the heart-shaped mylar balloon inscribed with the sentiment "God Have Mercy on My Soul"--tattooed on her breast. Although this suggests troubling things about her psyche it is flattering to me personally and some sort of tribute to the power of my work. I have requested photographic documentation.

June 22, 2002

The new issue of The Pain, issue #9, is out. This is a special all-9/11 issue, collecting all the cartoons I've drawn since September 11th about the Attack on America and our subsequent War on Terror. In impotent symbolic protest against the profiteering from images of September 11th in the publishing industry (notice how most of those books of glossy color photos of the tragedy say "a portion of the proceeds will go toward the September 11th relief fund"--how large a portion, and where's the rest going?), I am not charging any money for this issue. So all you have to do is write me a little letter or note asking politely for your copy of issue #9 and I will send it to you. Sorry, ordering one by e-mail isn't good enough. It's just too easy. You must physically send a piece of paper with words on it via the United States postal service to my P.O. Box in order to demonstrate your sincerity.

In other news, the Catholic League has included The Pain in their 2001 Report on Anti-Catholicism in the media. I quote:

January 24, 2001
Baltimore, MD - The City Paper ran a cartoon titled "Blowing One's Cool in the Clutch." The cartoon, by Tim Kreider, depicted the Crucifixion with Jesus yelling obscenities at the crowd.

My name is now officially included on the list of those who have joined in the persecution of that most tolerant and longest-suffering of victims, the Catholic Church. I will admit I am delighted to be counted among their enemies, and I'm certainly in good company. (Also indicted in this year's report are the Go-Gos.) I know everybody from white males to Christians to capitalists likes to think of themselves as the embattled underdog these days, but it seems to me a little ludicrous for the Catholic League to take on this sort of self-righteous, wounded tone. It's hard to think of any greater bastion of ignorance, bigotry, hypocrisy, cruelty and fear in the last thousand years than the Catholic Church, and now they're acting all aggrieved over a little bad P.R.? It's not like anybody's driving spikes slowly through their knees or burning out their eyes with hot pokers or lime, as some organizations I could mention have been known to do. And doesn't it seem sort of petty and weird that they're keeping such grim, meticulous score of every little offense against them? [See Enemies of The Pain.] Let me gently suggest that they might do a little more good in the world, and hey maybe even improve their much-maligned public image, if they worried less about their own victimization and a little more about other people's. And no I'm not talking about all the children they've been raping over the years. What about people who are sick, or poor, or starving, or suffering in wars--you know, the Wretched? Catholic Relief Services, for example, an excellent charity to which I've donated money, does useful relief work around the world (though unfortunately they're forced to parrot the church's doddering party line on birth control and abortion), which is the sort of thing I suspect Jesus would be doing if he were around today rather than obsessively scanning the newspaper and jotting down the names of people who said mean things about Him.

What a bunch of fucking crybabies. They're still sore about the printing press and the Enlightmenment. Let's just call this a little payback for Galileo.