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Abuse.
It is Halloween weekend and if I were a 10-year-old child I'd be getting my costume ready for trick-or-treating. But since I am ancient and my sciatica is acting up, I'll probably stay in with my nurse and have her rub liniment on my lower back. Did I mention my nurse is a 24-year-old student from Sweden?
A few years ago, I started doing "Scariest Halloween Costumes of (year)" Sunday cartoons and have kept that tradition. Here today are all of them since 2007 when I began.
(click the cartoon images for a biggerer view)
As you can see, the first one is graphically fairly simple in comparison to what I did in later years. In this one I referred to global warming, the lead toys from China scandal, NFL quarterback Michael Vick's dog fighting problems, more about the environment with the over-zealous breeders, and the consistently abhorrent anti-role models, Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. Strangely, I got the most hate mail about the population crisis. Many fundamentalist Christians took exception to my contradiction of their lord's instructions to "be fruitful and multiply." I still contend He was talking about practicing your math skills.
In '08, an election year, I touched on the collapsing economy and blamed it on the Republicans, which everyone but a die-hard Republican would agree with. I also hit the TV writer's strike, which has pretty much been forgotten by now. I expected hate mail about the drunken elephant and got some.
2009 brought the term "Zombie bank" into the popular lexicon, which was a natural for this. It was also the year Kanye West made an ass of himself at the MTV awards (or whatever it was), Michael Jackson died, and Fox and it's minions funded and organized the faux grass-roots protests about health care reform. I got hate mail about the health care reform aspect on this one, of course.
This year's cartoon does not touch on political events at all, though there were plenty of easy targets. The Fox News funded and organized, faux grass-roots Tea Baggers would have been an obvious choice but American politics have become so incredible incendiary and stupid that I no longer bother to editorialize. (Except here on this blog.) I've decided that such things do nothing to change anyone's mind and amid the current epidemic of idiocy, I might get tarred and feathered or lynched. Still, I think the three topics I chose are funny, especially the little Jesse James Nazi kid with his toy chopper bike. Although Jay Leno stealing candy from a baby makes me smile, too. I can't imagine what hate mail I could get from this one but I'm often surprised. I'll keep you updated.Have fun on Halloween this year and be safe. Unless being safe ruins your fun, in which case you should just go for it. What's a few less humans on a crowded planet?
