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.