My own birthday is this week, and, having lately
been in contacct with a young fan of mine who just turned 21, I felt kind
of wistful, for the first time ever, about youth. Not just because I'm creeping
into middle age and miss being young--youth was a wretched and mortifying
time, mostly spent in a lawn chair next to a space heater eating stale yellow
popcorn out of a three-foot-tall bag, plus I'm much better looking now--but
because I miss everything being new. I envy my friend going to art school,
getting to see New York City for the first time. I've had the idea for this
cartoon for years now, this series of escalating legal privileges that would
come at arbitrary birthdays over the years, culminatinig in the right to one
officially sanctioned homicide. People would be nicer to each other, be even
more careful not to make enemies. Certainly parents would warn their kids
not to mess around in their elderly neighbors' lawns. I also think that the
legalization of bigamy in the forties could be a boon to the institution of
The Family; men having midlife crises wouldn't necessarily have to abandon
their aging wives and put their kids through traumatic divorces, just pick
up a hot new young trophy wife. If I were put in charge of the world a lot
of things would improve. Some other things would admittedly get noticably
worse--there'd be bloody pogroms and purges, to be sure, oh yeah, you bet
there would, plus I can see the infrastructure suffering under my regime--but
I'd still like the chance to implement one or two of my little pet social
programs.
The drawing of my friend Michael and the cop is one of my favorite things
I've drawn lately. "Michael Stack" or sometimes "Malachai Stack"
was his standard nom de guerre in all dealings with The Man.
I would never fuck my cat, really. She is much too small.