Below is the latest The Pain -- When Will It End?
Updated 11/24/04

Artist's Statement

I relish singling out anti-gay Americans for particular loathing. The frustrating thing about so much modern institutional evil is that it is so diffuse; the responsibility for most immoral and destructive policies lies with faceless shareholders or technocrats, and the only guy you ever get to vent your rage at is some hapless minimum-wage flack behind a counter. So it is gratifying, in a way, to have the anti-gay folks to despise, because whatever they may think their motives are, they are just ignorant, superstitious, mean-spirited bigots who want to deny their fellow Americans a basic human right. They’re the same type of people who opposed integration forty years ago, and opposed abolition a hundred years before that. They’re assholes who hate freedom and don’t deserve to call themselves Americans. They are the very kind of people our ancestors fled their home countries to escape.

Hard Questions for Tim Kreider

Q: Do you really not care about the plight of Palestinean women?
A: Not much, I’m afraid, no. I know I should.
Q: Do you feel guilty about this?
A: Not really.
Q: Do you at least feel guilty about not feeling guilty about it?
A: Yes, slightly.
Q: Would you really sleep with a woman whose art was pretentious and boring just because she looked really good naked?
A: No! Certainly not. Of course not. Do not be silly. I do have my integrity.
Q: Are you and your friends really alcoholics?
A: Hey you know what? Like, fuck you.

New Enemy Added to List

Soft Skull Press has established a reputation for courage in refusing to back down from a fight, having published J.H. Hatfield’s Fortunate Son after St. Martin’s Press, its original publisher, cravenly agreed to burn it under pressure from Bush’s lawyers. Unfortunately this courage seems to apply in confrontations with distant, abstract enemies like the Bush administration, and not so much in conflicts with more immediate, concrete antagonists, like incompetent printers. Regular readers of this website will know the name Megan Kelso, and they should know her comics (Queen of the Black Black, Artichoke Tales). Megan spent much of the last year of her life editing an anthology of comics by women called Scheherazade, which was published by Soft Skull. (I myself did a little scanning and Photoshop work on the book when Megan’s hand was injured.) In an author’s nightmare come true, the book came back from the printer’s with an error that caused delicate ink washes to go solid black and certain fine lines that delineated faces and word balloons to disappear completely. As Megan put it, “they look like bad faxes.” It was, in short, not a niggling little imperfection that only a prima donna would notice or whine about but an absolutely unacceptable printing error that rendered the book unsaleable. Megan’s publisher, Richard Nash, was suspiciously squirrelly about promising to demand a re-print, and, when the printer stonewalled him (as printers invariably do) and refused to concede error or reprint the book, he failed to stand by his author and backed down completely without making a fuss. He just fucking caved. Clearly in his head he saw a scale with vague, wispy, “artistic concerns” on one side and a big fat pile of cash on the other. So now he’s going to try to foist off on the paying reader a sadly maculated version of the book that does a disservice to the artists (mis-)represented in it, over the protests of its editor. It’s a decision that demonstrates contempt for Megan, who devoted a year of her life to the book, for the artists who contributed their work and talents to it, and for readers who are expected to fork over their cash for a shoddy product and not know any better. I know you don’t care about any of this. The point is, this guy has made Megan Kelso, one of my best friends, cry. You can read Megan’s version of the story on her website.