CSotD: From the amusingly ridiculous to the not so much
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Couple of quickies before we get to the hard core issue of the day:
Two minds with but a single thought:
This pairing ranks as one of the more odd coincidences I've seen on the comics page lately, since I haven't seen anything about bananas in the news or rocketing around social media.
I'm kind of reminded of the classic Darwin's Ape sculpture, only with Jef Mallett of Frazz and Tony Carillo of F Minus, miles apart, sitting at their respective breakfast tables and similarly contemplating their fruit bowls.
No, wait, it's more like Lavoisier and Priestly, independently coming up with the discovery of oxygen, one in England, one in France.
No, never mind. It's the monkeys. Bananas, monkeys. It's monkeys.
And, hey, I like monkeys.
Classic cartooning, and an addition to the blog:
I have always loved Willard Mullin's work and am delighted that Fantagraphics has published this collection.
Illustrations were all newspapers really had before the 20th century and, even well into it, the slow process of getting film back to the paper, developing the photos and then processing them for print kept this kind of cartoon feature part of newspapers.
Another case of throwing something out that you should have kept: Just because you can run photos easily doesn't mean you should stop running good work that people like.
Tom Spurgeon has an excellent review of the book that is a must-read if you care about old-time cartoon illustrations or old-time sports.
This also spurred me to add a small blogroll to the rail. I have been, and remain, reluctant to list the blogs of individual cartoonists, because it seems a conflict of interest or a sign of favoritism, and I have enough problems with fretting over whether I'm giving someone too much ink (phosphors, whatever).
But I've decided there's no harm in steering readers to some of the aggregating-and-or-reporting sources I use, beyond the individual strips I read every day on my own. Several of these are much more oriented towards comic books than comic strips, but they each offer quite a bit of variety and are solid resources.
I've tried to be honest with my hat tips anyway, but now you'll really be able to tell how I manage to keep up with stuff, and, besides, there will very likely be things there that fascinate you but don't fascinate me.
And now, let's go off to war
Drew Sheneman, with one of the very few partisan commentaries I've thought was worthy.
Several cartoonists have suggested that consulting Congress was a matter of passing the buck, but I can't help but think the same pens would be attacking Obama for not consulting Congress had he invoked the usual executive power to intervene.
And, honestly, I'm really having a problem getting my head around the mostly right-wing commentary attacking him for pointing out that use of chemical weapons is something the international community has formally condemned and not something he came up with on his own.
Or those on the left who can't draw a coherent line between chemical warfare and use of chemicals (of which gunpowder, I would note, is one) in war.
Amid all that, Sheneman simply points out that the consultation has really put the Party of NO in a funny and uncomfortable position. Pretty indisputable, that.
Meanwhile, amid all the foaming-at-the-mouth coming from other quarters, Ruben Bolling rather quietly sums up the most coherent aspect of the anti-intervention position with eloquence and cool art.
Though I rather like Nick Anderson's depiction of the aforementioned foaming at the mouth.
There is so much incoherence rocketing around that it's hard to know where to start. Which is not good, because there is also a lot of pressure to start RIGHT NOW without bothering to figure out where and how, much less why and if.
I watched the POV program about Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers the other night, and was struck by how much deeper and more thoughtful his dissent could be than that of Manning or Snowden (neither of whom had yet acted when this film was made), because of the times and because of the technology, as well as because of the fact that his revelations came, not from a young man shocked by what he had discovered, but from an insider shocked at what he had been part of.
Granted, the person who evacuates a family from a house engulfed with flames will always been seen as a bigger hero than the person who makes them all go stand on the lawn while he unplugs the malfunctioning toaster that would otherwise have (probably, possibly, surely) set off a blaze.
Still, there was an essential difference in how everything unfolded back when everything unfolded more slowly. There is a lot to be said for living in a world where you have time to think, though, admittedly, one of those things to be said is "that was then, this is now."
And it's certainly true that we had plenty of time to think back in the wake of the War to End All Wars, when the collective arrogance of the West set up not only the ongoing conflicts of the Middle East but those of Africa and some of Asia as well.
And the smaller the world becomes and the faster death can be dealt over an increasingly wide area, the more toxic and insoluable those foolish, condescending decisions turn out to have been.
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