Below is the latest The Pain -- When Will It End?
Updated 6/12/02

Artist's Statement

I thought this one up last winter when I was living in New York City and Osama was still on everyone's mind. (Lately it seems like we're supposed to forget about him and just be content with attacking Iraq for no clear reason instead.) I was deterred from actually drawing it by the facts that 1.) it didn't seem to have any real political point and 2.) it would be hard. Once I had enough incentive to overcome the first objection, however, the second was as easy to dismiss as always. The incentive was that I am almost finished with the next issue of The Pain, a special issue composed exclusively of cartoons about 9/11 and the "War on Terror." I needed one more cartoon to complete the issue and decided to go ahead and finish this one. I still had a couple of prelimiary doodles lying around and was able to fill in the rest in a couple of long, late-night sessions.  It still doesn't seem to have any particular message or point, but there is something if not subversive or "empowering" at least exhilerating and fun about refusing to take the whole War on Terror seriously. And, for me anyway, that moment where they realize Osama's heading for the Empire State Building because it reminds him of a minaret is worth any number of incisive political statements. The final punchline seemed too clever for me to have made up, and of course it turns out I didn't; Dave Israel, the rocket scientist who runs this website for me and is, like most of my friends, much funnier than me, wrote it as a lyric in a song of that same title years ago, and he is here grudgingly credited.


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