Below is the latest The Pain -- When Will It End?
Updated 7/24/02

Artist's Statement

Okay I know I made a solemn vow three weeks ago to put aside my Klibanesque non-sequiturs and focus with relentless laserlike intensity on political cartoons. And in fact I was well into a drawing of Dick Cheney sneering out of the side of his mouth in his trademark manner with a ventriloquist's dummy of G.W. Bush on his knee, but I kept thinking about "I Fucked My Buddy." This was the title of an imaginary pulp war novel that my friend Boyd and I came up with sometime during the productive second hour of one of our late-night phone conversations, when we've both become tired and punchy enough that all sorts of genius burbles up from our collective unconscious. I've drawn a few of these inspirations as cartoons--"The Death of Gandhi" is perhaps the most celebrated example--while others remain legendary unfinished works: "The Alcoholic Iron Man," the adult version of  The Cat in the Hat, "The Dog-Nappers," Nancy Screw and the Adventure of the Mysterious Weed, and the infamous "Negropolis." We came up with this idea a month or two ago, but it came up again one night at the 4th of July Party, and cracked everyone up. People could not stop saying the words over and over again: "I fucked my buddy!" And I found that I could not stop saying them as I drew this cartoon, growling them out and biting off each word as if I had a cigar clenched between my teeth. You should try it. It's incredibly fun.

Viewers of this website get to see a special modified version of this cartoon: in the newspaper version the guy in the foreground is just imagining a pin-up girl, but I realized this morning, too late for publication, that she should have his buddy's face.

I solemnly vow that next week I will return to my hard-hitting, controversial, uncompromising political agenda.