Cartoon Violence Is Just Making Shit Up Now
A hazy, cloudy Friday calls for hazy, cloudy content -- and Today's Cartoons do not disappoint! This week, the Comics Curmudgeon has trained his expert eyes on some of our finest cartoonists' most confounding efforts, and while he doesn't do much to explain them, he does do his damndest to make them funny.
After the jump, Iran, Iraq, CIA, NSA, cannibalism, and armadillos are penciled, inked, and analyzed for your pleasure.
Do you ever go to a movie and it really blows and then you think, "Man, the only way I can make this bearable is to make up my own version of this movie in my head," so you create this sort of parallel universe for the movie in which what's happening on screen has other meanings that are more entertaining to you. Like, last weekend, when I say Lindsey Lohan's new movie, "Just My Luck," and Lindsey and the bland leading man keep exchanging their magical super-lucky power back and forth by kissing, and I thought, "what if instead of 'kissing' they were 'screwing' and instead of 'luck' it was 'herpes'?"
Wait, did I just admit to all of you that I saw "Just My Luck" last weekend? Um. Well, I wasn't on a date with a fifteen-year-old girl, just so you know.
I'm not sure if that makes it better or worse.
Anyhoo, you can do the same thing with political cartoons, especially the ones that make no sense. Just make up your own title and then work out the subtext from there. It's fun! Watch!
New title: "Nuclear-armed Iranian robots threaten us all!"
What it all means: If only these robots would turn over their oversized cue cards and just read what their scriptwriters had written for them, we wouldn't be in this mess, would we? But no, their circuitry is too filled with Jew-hating for a little common sense like that to find its way in there.
New title: "Blowing up armadillos is awesome"
What it all means: This cartoon might be understood as taking the unpatriotic stance that our brave troops are too dumb to change their attitude to fit the mission for which they're deployed, except for one thing: blowing up armadillos is patently awesome, and our heroes richly deserve the armadillo-detonating reward they've earned.
New title: "The CIA and NSA: They exist"
What it all means: Yes, these two spy agencies, they sure dwell in some kind of ... shadowy ... netherworld of ... mysteriousness. And such. Yep.
New title: "Germans love the taste of human flesh"
What it all means: I'd guess that this was an obscure a variation of the old "Democracy is like sausage-making joke", were it not for Germany's well-known status as acannibal paradise . I actually was in a bar in Bavaria where the crowd looked a lot like this, and everyone there was extremely jolly, but now I have to assume that I was in some kind of den of anthrophagy. Thanks, Danziger, thanks a lot.
New title: "Here's a mishmosh of imagery vaguely related to a hot new movie that makes no sense to you or me or anyone else"
What it all means: The Mona Lisa is thankfully in the public domain, but apparently if you put "Da Vinci" and "Code" next to each other you get Sony Pictures' legal department all over your ass, apparently.
New title: "Americans say cryptic but meaningful things to each other in bars."
What it all means: Could go either way: is it a sardonic comment to the effect of, "We're invading countries that we don't even know where they are -- how can that be right?" Or is it a statement of quiet strength: "You don't have to be an egghead with a geography degree to know that sometimes you've got fight for what's right?" More intriguing is the rich and wholly unnecessary detail put into the bar setting, which may give a clue as to where, when, and under what circumstances the cartoon was drawn.