Here is something that is currently running over at Truthdig.com to commemorate the passing of one of America’s truly great political cartoonists, Paul Conrad.  Portions of the remembrance were originally published in the LA Weekly in 2007.

Here is a conversation that I had with Noam Chomsky about the counterculture.  In my description of the piece, which prefaces our talk, I say that it is the complete transcript of our conversation, which it is not.  The complete transcript is about 9000 words and Truthdig won’t post anything more than 5000.  Still, it’s a start.  Sadly, one of the things that got chopped was Chomsky praising Bad Religion.  Dig it.

Here’s something I just did for the Philadelphia CityPaper, which will be running my crap weekly now.  Dig it.

Here is a piece I did for Truthdig about me wanting to be Angela Davis when I grew up.  Dig it.

It’s time for all you self-anointed liberal New-York-Times-reading oh so highly pedigreed academic assholes to lick my crystal balls – specifically, you who argued so confidently with me at parties and who, beginning in late 2006 and ending sometime in early 2009, wrote hundreds of angry emails to me and my various publishers insisting that I shut my mouth about why I believed we shouldn’t be standing in line to stick our empty heads up Barack Obama’s ass.  Ironically, this is the same exact group that bemoaned the idiocy of the Republicans who so willingly shoved their own empty heads up the ass of George Bush when he was throwing Lady Liberty around by her hair and demanding that she call him Daddy! Sounds like another case of the pot calling the kettle nigger.  When will we as a culture learn to predict that Froot Loops contains no fruit without first having to suffer the unnecessary abuse of eating enough bowls to pinwheel our eyes, rot our teeth and transform us into mouth-breathing fatsos whose hearts are too diseased to bleed anything but fluorescent cheez, literally and figuratively?

These are some of the cartoons that attracted many of the most violent demands to cease and desist from my readers, the earliest one depicting Brother Barack considering becoming a candidate back in 2006 and the others running through his campaign.  All were published prior to his winning.

The best thing about being a political cartoonist is that everything will always suck – always! – and there will never be a shortage of God-awful bullshit for an artist such as myself to exploit for meaning or meaninglessness.  Sure, on occasion I can dive into a bucket of shit and come up with a rose in my teeth, but for the most part my teeth are used for a rather putrid digging through empty treasure chests and the graves of the mutilated discontent – which brings me to the worst thing about being political cartoonist:  the day in and day out attention I’m forced to give to the God-awful bullshit of which there will never be a shortage.  In fact, the only rainbows I ever notice anymore are the ones I see in empty parking spots after it rains – the same ones that my daughters notice and crouch down and try to touch ahead of my screaming, their faces alight with the hopeful expressions of believers meeting Jesus Christ, which, in my eyes, is exactly who they’re meeting.

Anyway, that said, I have indeed been shirking my cartooning responsibilities as of late, partly to take a break from my own nay-saying outrage and partly to finish up a 30-minute Mr. Fish animated pilot that I’ll be shopping around over the next few months.  More on that later.  In the meantime, however, here are some tasty stills from the 8 billion cells I’ve drawn over the last dozen weeks.

I found out last Monday that the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) had given me this year’s Sigma Delta Chi Award for editorial cartooning.  My wife, a graduate of USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, had heard of both the society and the award before and reacted with some measure of glee at the news.  I, on the other hand, having had no knowledge of the society or the award, wondered if, given the name of the prize, I was being honored by some Asian frat house that found my sacrilegious disdain for God and Country so in line with their own Caligulian philosophy that they needed to publicly recognize me.  Anyway, there it is and I thank Truthdig for submitting my work for consideration.  The award ceremony is happening in October, in Las Vegas, and I’m toying with the idea of sending Sacheen Littlefeather to refuse the award in protest of how little work the entertainment industry is giving to wisecracking midgets and hick southerners and  wily Chinese and lazy Mexicans and dumb, big-breasted blondes and drunk Indians and shiftless black people and mincing fags nowadays.  It’s an abomination, this dumbing up of our otherwise oh-so-entertainingly moronic American culture.

(Speaking of Sacheen Littlefeather, I always thought it was funny how Marlon Brando sent her to refuse his 1973 Oscar for The Godfather on the grounds that Hollywood was misrepresenting our Native American brothers and sisters and portraying them as primitive and obedient and, when not savagely uncouth, as servile dimwits.  I’ve always wondered if, after committing the outrageously servile act of doing something for Brando that he didn’t want to do himself, she also picked up his dry cleaning on her way back to his mansion.)

The Atlantic is running a Mr. Fish illustration in its May 2010 Fiction Issue.  This is what it looks like:

Here is a cartoon that I did about 22 years ago, back when I was but a wee lass with a paintbrush, a prostate and a crazy dream that one day I’d be able to blow a conch shell.  It’s funny how something so throw-away can suddenly become relevant with new political significance . . .

A couple years ago I did a cartoon that offended practically everybody who looked at it.  Even the radicals who I knew – a rabble of loud-mouthed nihilists unlikely to blanch even at the inappropriate touching of their own puppy-holding, kitten-kissing inner children – were visibly irked by the drawing I showed them.  Posted on the blog I maintained for the LA Weekly, drawing no comments from readers, and then buried in the site’s archive, which has since been deleted permanently, it seemed to stand as just another example of Mr. Fish not knowing when to quit.  Since then, however, I’ve received several emails asking of the cartoon’s whereabouts, most recently on the Saturday before Easter.  So, in the spirit of the holiday, I decided to yank this notoriously unpopular outlaw from his crypt and allow him the glory of getting to move among the living once again, this time – at least for some – as Mr. “We’re-all-going-to-Hell” Popularity.