Below is the latest The Pain -- When Will It End?
Updated 12/22/04

Artist's Statement

Ah--The Kid is back in the game.

I spent most of this week working on a T-shirt design that was due Wednesday, and by Thursday morning I had no good ideas for a cartoon, plus it was the day of the NASA Christmas party, to which I was invited. So while my friends played music in a conference room I sat desperately doodling in my folder, trying to come up with something funny. Thank God for the presence of The Big Log, Boyd White. He eventually got bored playing music and came over and sat next to me and drank beer after beer and tossed ideas at me. This cartoon emerged out of one of our legendary brainstorming sessions; I was working on one called "This Is the Worst," in which, among other things, I would have been slumped in front of a TV showing Geroge Bush's smirking face, saying, "This is the worst." Boyd said, "No--wait! I've got it! It should be a beheading!" "They should be beheading a snowman," I corrected him. He was unconvinced of the genius of this until I showed him the drawing. "You have to use that," he said. "You are a fucking pussy if you do not. You know it's true." This is why Boyd is an indispensable collaborator--not just because of the depraved brilliance of his ideas but because where other friends might caution me that perhaps I had exceeded the bounds of civilized discourse he eggs me on to ever greater heights of evil genius. We hashed out the rest of the cartoon over the course of the afternoon, and the collaboration was so effortless and fun that I can honestly no longer remember which idea was whose. I do know that the title was Boyd's. I have no idea whether this cartoon has any political message at all. It's just fucking crazy.

I tried to look up the Arabic word for "lightning" online ("Blitzen" means lightning in German) but all the translation programs used the Arabic alphabet. If anyone knows or can find a phonetic translation in the Roman alphabet please let me know.