Hey y’all, listen up. All you artists and political cartoonists and poets and photographers and short-fiction writers now have less than one week (yikes !) to send in your submissions for the very first Artists’ "Chap-Book" which is being compiled, as we speak, by our esteemed colleague cosmic debris.
The deadline for submissions is June 15th, folks !
.....More cartoons on the flip-side, Baby !
The Chap-book is being compiled in conjunction with the Arts & Extravaganza events at Yearly Kos. For more information (and a cool diary in its own right), go to cosmic’s most recent post about all the artistic happenings that will be going on at the Yearly Kos Convention.
So this is my shout-out to all the folks who are interested in contributing to the Chap-Book....
For those of you who are still scratching your head, pondering what masterpieces you ought to submit, allow me to happily encourage you to post some of your work in the comments section of this thread; maybe we can get a discussion going about what we all would like to offer.
As for myself, I don’t know what to send over to our Editor-in-Chief on this project. On the one hand, I don’t have much to chose from when it comes right down to it; in the (almost) one year since my first diary on this site, I’ve only posted perhaps a dozen or maybe fifteen total. Not much.
So it’s not like I’ve built up a big portfolio yet. For me, I want to stick with only political cartoons (though Ms. Cosmic has encouraged folks to submit any and all forms of artistic expression -– yes, the emphasis is on politically inspired work, but it is not limited to this).
So I want to choose a few that are representative of my efforts here since that first diary last summer where I made my first meager attempt at political cartooning. According to the guidelines, Ms. Cosmic is accepting 5 submissions per person. So I’m trying to decide what to send her way (another reminder folks: the deadline is this coming Friday...!)
As I understand it, she’s already received more than enough material to fill 75 pages (evidently there are a lot of folks here who are responsible and organized enough to have already delivered their work well before the deadline -– I curse you all! Artists have a reputation to uphold as being flighty and aloof! You efficient bastards!). Since she’s already got an abundance of material from which to choose, I’m thinking she might need to be real discerning about what makes the cut.
So. These were the ones that I was personally thinking of contributing. Please feel free to let me know if something’s too controversial, or if one piece works better than another, or what. I may choose a whole different five pieces, who knows.
Okay. So, I posted that new one up top, which comes from an allusion to the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima.
My chewed-up number-two pencil was working over-time to try to get the caricatures right. I think I sorta got half-way there. Here’s a couple of "studies" of this piece.
There are, what, eleven of these clowns running for the Republican nomination. At the first debate, they were all trying to out-Reagan each other.
I could have targeted any combination of them, I suppose, but I chose to focus my sharpened number-two pencil on Giuliani, Romney, and McCain, because they seem to be the top dogs, and most deserving of my scribbly snipership.
I haven’t had a teevee for a dozen years or so; I only know of these guys from transcripts and articles, so I don’t know what they look like. (I remember what Giuliani looks like, from when I lived in New York, but I was surprised when I went googling for images of him, and saw that he’s looking a lot older now -– he used to have that trademark comb-over.... I still sorta kept that, because I think it might still be embedded in our collective image of him, but I added a bit of gray). I didn’t know what to do with Romney, other than that he seems to have a very long face and a gigantic chin. McCain was a handsome guy in his youth, but now he’s quite old, and it seems to me that his face is like a big blob of lifeless translucent albumen, with a few orifices serving as nostrils and such.
For the dramatic background, I simply used the actual sky from the iconic photo of Iwo Jima. I photoshopped out the soldiers, patched up the sky, and overlaid my pencil sketch.
By the way, this political cartoon was originally published yesterday, at a new kick-ass website called Political Nexus. Check it out, if you want to hear some progressive folks talking in real-time about current issues. And you can phone in, and be a part of the action. The site was started by a few no-name dudes; some slackers called clammyc , thereisnospoon, and hekebolos. I dunno, maybe y’all have heard of ‘em.... Seriously though, give it a whirl; It’s interesting to hear the actual voices of some famous Kostopians (and several more who have called in to the recent broadcasts).
Okay, here are a few more from my portfolio.
I’ve tried to choose some that might still be somewhat topical.
The painful truth is that the Iraq Occupation continues to grind down our troops. The surge surges on. And for what. For what.
I did this one late last year, as I realized that the Supremely-installed Crack-head Psychopath would now be going into the seventh year of his squattership in the Oval Office.
Sadly, it’s still relevant; though he’s still fucking Iraq into the ground, he’s got a stirring in his war-mongering loins. And we all know that Iran is hawt. Let the itch-scratching begin.
This next one is no longer topical, but it still feels recent.
A commenter on this site took me to task over this one, accusing me of "one-upping" one tragedy over another, and somehow trying to prove that I "care more than other people". I thought this was really off-base and belligerent. Perhaps an explanation would have helped him understand where I was coming from -- The impetus for creating this one popped into my head the moment I read Bush’s quote in regards to the tragic events at Virginia Tech:
"Today our nation grieves with those who have lost loved ones at Virginia Tech. We hold the victims in our hearts, we lift them up in our prayers, and we ask a loving God to comfort those who are suffering today."
-- George Bush
And I immediately thought today...?
Today...?!?
Today singular -– whereas this war-monger is responsible for the murder of literally hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis -- day in, and day out. It was the seething hypocrisy of this stupid butcher’s words that had enraged me; that he would speak of prayers for the suffering while he is the one visiting endless suffering upon people of a sovereign nation. I pondered the censorship of the photographs of flag-draped coffins being delivered back home, and how the media won’t show the blood spilled in Baghdad’s streets from the slaughter of children. I couldn’t bear that final word in his quote, because this nightmare just goes on and on.
On a somewhat lighter note -– I went back and looked at some of my early efforts in political cartooning, and decided this was one of those first ones that I actually still like. As for it’s topicality, I don’t know what Lieberman’s relationship with Obama is these days; at the time I drew it, people were wondering if Joementum’s mentorship of this rising star from Chicago would mean that the corrupted Senator from Connecticut would be teaching his protégé the dark ways of capitulation and surrender to beltway isolation.
(And Lieberman does indeed look uncannily like the actor who plays Emperor Palpatine in those Star Wars flicks.)
For me, the image still somehow resonates.
By the way, when drawing Joe Lieberman, there are three elements that are rather distinct to him personally, therefore rendering him easy to satirize:
- the jowls
- the roiling, festering self-bitchification of a traitorous lying scumbag fucking whore
- the jowls
Okay, so that’s my five. I think.
Just for good measure, I want to add a recent one I did; I don’t think I would submit it for the Chap-book, but I haven’t yet included it in one of my diaries.
I was honored to see that Kagro X had run this particular caricature on the Front Page of this site a few days ago. But I got a little pang of worry, because images have to be presented quite small on the front page, and I wasn’t sure if people would even catch the crucial detail involved. So, for my own piece of mind, I’m posting it at a slightly larger scale.
This originally appeared on a website called Left Toon Lane, which was founded by our fellow Kostopian dhonig. It’s safe to say that dhonig has been and remains the golden standard-bearer for political cartooning in this community. His site functions as a clearing-house for lefty cartoonists, some of whom also post here, such as, just for example, the inimitable Storm Bear. Check it out; if you’re looking for an image to punch up your blog, or even for a diary here at the Kos, a political cartoon might be just the thing to buttress your thesis and liven things up.
One more note: cosmic debris has requested that for submissions of photos or graphics, that each file be a high resolution jpeg and that they be sent to her e-mail address (found in her profile). She needs to convert each image to a 300 dpi tiff file to deliver to the printer, so the higher the rez of the image the better.
So ! I want to once again encourage folks to post some images in the thread; I love to see what other folks are up to artistically; the mediums they work in, the concepts they’re developing, the feelings and impetus that drives us to create.
(And this also applies to poets and photographers and artists of all stripes -– post some tasty morsels to give us a taste of what you got cooking these days.)
Okay, enough of my yammering -– show us what ya got !