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Artist's Statement This is the last cartoon I'll send in to the Baltimore City Paper, where I have appeared weekly since 1997. Endings always make one melancholy, even if they're timely and natural, or even long overdue. I just watched the series finale of Battlestar Galactica with some friends, a show I’d lost interest in about a season ago, when the allegory to contemporary America fell away and it got wrapped up in its own internal mythology and they stopped ever having space battles, but watching it end still made me sort of maudlin and wistful, since we’ve lived with those characters for years now and we’ll never see them again. A TV show creates an artificial family group, it's serial and ritualistic, and it lasts over a sizable fraction of your lifespan, so it’s much better at evoking this feeling of time and finality than even long movies or books--even if that series is as silly and trivial as Cheers. (I still get all nostalgic for a certain era of my life and circle of friends whenever I see an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.) It makes you mournful for a whole phase of your life, even if it's only just ending and you didn't even notice it was a phase while you were in it--a sort of nostalgia for the ever-vanishing present. Also I had a big crush on Laura Roslyn. When The Pain started running in the City Paper I was thirty, living in a row house in Fell’s Point with my friends Jim and Sarah, writing letters to Bill Clinton to invite him out for the Giant Fish Sandwich ($3.00!) at a now long-defunct seafood place in Broadway Market. The intervening twelve years encompassed the entire Era of Darkness—9/11, the Bush doctrine of preëmptive war, the gung-ho idiocy of Freedom Fries and “Have You Forgotten?”, the useless mass protests and marches and rallies in Washington and New York, the invasion of Iraq as unstoppable as stupidity itself, the deepening hopelessness and disbelief, the sense that maybe truth really was irrelevant and "the reality-based community" obsolete, the wretched shame of Abu Ghraib and ugly tragedy of Katrina, the endless impotent guttering out of the Bush administration and slow-motion implosion of the global economy, and the brief, moon-landing euphoria of the Obama election. Now I'm forty-two, and trying to get used to an America in which I don't have to feel like a fugitive alien anymore. I feel a little untethered now. It was nice, when I made the preposterous claim to be a cartoonist and people tentatively asked me where they might see my work in print—in kind of the same tone that grownups used to ask you if they could see your talking dragon friend--I could say, “The Baltimore City Paper.” (I generally allowed them to assume that this meant something respectable like the Baltimore Sun rather than the alternative weekly with all the phone sex ads.) Now when those people ask me the same question, what do I say?--“My work appears on the Internet.” I’m of an age where print still seems legitimate to me and the internet somewhere on the prestige scale between vanity presses and men's-room graffiti, since there is some vetting process for publication but any moron can (and does) post his bad art, political rants, or photos of his kids online. I can start to understand why Charles Schulz kept drawing Peanuts until he could physically no longer hold a pen. I quit the weekly strip for a combination of reasons: the end of the Bush administration obviated my raison d’etre as a political cartoonist, and now that money is an increasing worry for all of us $20 a week just wasn’t enough incentive to put in two full days of drawing each week. But freak not, internet readers! The Pain will continue on a weekly basis, more or less uninterrupted. Once a month or so I might be too hung over or too busy entertaining ladies to draw a cartoon, but I intend to entice myself with little rewards to keep up the weekly deadline. Unfortunately these rewards will most likely take the form of drinks or ladies, so you can see the potential for a problematic loop. I also intend to pursue more serious writing and longer cartoon essays like "The Stabbing Story." (Look for my op-ed on drinking and age in the New York Times' "Proof" series soon.) Not because this is some grand farewell but just because it is fun and good for the soul to express gratitude, I’m going to take this opportunity to thank various people who have been helpful in my cartooning career, such as it’s been:
And, before you ask, yes: "Ass Swami" T-shirts will be made available shortly.
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