Below is the latest The Pain -- When Will It End?
Updated 10/22/03

Artist's Statement

I drew half of this cartoon while being filmed by a documentary crew. They even interviewed me while my attention was bifuracated, half my brain focused on drawing or photoshop. They'd ask a question and ninety seconds later I'd give an answer like, "Yyyeahhh... that... does happen... some... times...". I''d actually begun the drawing early for once, using the creative momentum I'd gained drawing a two-page story for the Comics Journal's winter special, but then foun d myself in the ridiculous situation of having to delay finishing it so that the documentarians could capture my traditional frenzy of desperate last-minute drawing before deadlnie Friday afternoon. No doubt the contrivances will only becomes more and more absurd as filming continues. Yesterday, on camera, I confessed not only my terrible sympathy for Nixon but my love for George Bush (see last week's artist's statement and the one for "Plausible Deniability," August 6th of this year, for clarification). My life is over.

Grateful acknowledgement is hereby made to one Matt Taibbi, who wrote an insightful article on Howard Dean for The Nation in which he concluded that he personally would vote for Count Dracula over George W. Bush, inspiring panel 4 of this cartoon.

Joe Lieberman is the punchline of this week's cartoon and I would like to take this opportunity to further malign his character. He is drawn here crawling with flies to suggest that he is rotten inside, putrefying, moribund. First of all, any Democrats who voted for the war in Iraq either believed the administration's arguments, in which case they're fools (because several hundred thousand other people and I, who had way less information than they did, marched through the streets trying to tell them that exactly what's happened since was going to happen), or else th ey didn't but voted for it anyway out of political cowardice, in which case they're something more like traitors. I was just at the Vietnam Memorial wall this weekend, and the thought that our government had once again sent American soldiers into a lethal quagmire for no reason made me feel like going up to the U.S. Capitol and start strangling people bare-handed, one by one. I certainly don't feel the same gut-lever hatred for Lieberman that I do for former Governor Bush, but he's definitely far more contemptible. To the extent that George W. Bush actually "believes" anything, rather than just thinking whatever he's told to by his owners or Billy Graham, he's probably the only guy in the entire Bush administration who actually believes the contemptuous lies they're telling us. But Lieberman's just sticking with the pragmatic strategy that worked for Bill Clinton for the last decade--agreeing with the Republicans on every issue where they're strong, disagreeing where they're weak, making his principles by opinion polls. The only flaw in this plan being that Bill Clinton, whatever else you wanted to say about him, was brilliant and charismatic, whereas Lieberman's a wheezing, useless old windbag. He's a gutless hypocrite who ought to be marooned on a desert island with a bag of pork cracklin's, a copy of Black Tail magazine, and a pistol, and left to figure it out for himself.

I'd still vote for him over George W. Bush, though.


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