Below is the latest The Pain -- When Will It End?
Updated 1/03/07

 

Artist's Statement

This week I can offer you only these two pretty ridiculous cartoons. What can I tell you? I’ve been sick for a very long time. A few days ago I became delirious and had a conversation with a dead person. Also, for the last ten days I’ve been on a regimen of hydrocodone, an excellent cough suppressant that’s also a mild narcotic, the same stuff they put in the painkiller Vicodin. This cleared my bronchitis right up and is also the perfect drug for the holidays—makes shopping stress-free, and the hours with relatives pass swiftly—but as far as creative inspiration goes, well, let’s say it’s no laudanum. It also proves to be less than ideal for the complex spatial relations skills required to help one’s nephew transform a gigantic missile-bristling battle droid into a nearly identical but differently configured gigantic missile-bristling battle station.

I drew the first cartoon last year, as a sequel to the previous year’s New Year’s Eve cartoon. (I cannot exactly credit myself with the prescience of H.G. Wells because I predicted that the violence in Iraq would have worsened by now.) I was too ashamed to post it last week, but then I got an admiring note from a friend who saw it in print in the Baltimore City Paper so I figured, okay, what do I know? Maybe it’s hilarious. The second is a cartoon I’ve had in mind for a while now and finally broke down and drew for lack of any better ideas when I had an early deadline. (Thanks to City Paper art director Joe MacLeod, who supplied the title, which at least renders it marginally relevant.) My cat’s idea of utopia would be for me to sit or lie perfectly still with her sitting on top of me, forever. Not entirely clear here whether I have been bound and abandoned by some lover and left to the cat’s convenience or whether the cat herself has somehow contrived to tie me up with her clever little paws. I try to keep all kindly or sentimental aspects of my nature rigidly repressed in my work and public persona, but once in a while a glimpse of my true faggy cat-loving self slips through the façade. (I have another idea for what I believe is a brilliant New Yorker-style cat cartoon, showing a boss dictating a letter to his secretary, who is a cat, who is typing: "Meow meow meow meow meow. Meow meow meow. Meow meow meow meow meow meow meow.") Well, so what. Fuck you. Many, many bitterly misanthropic and pessimistic artists have been secret faggy cat-lovers: Louis-Ferdinand Céline, William S. Burroughs, Stanley Kubrick, B. Kliban. The key is not to get a second cat. Once you have more than one cat, you become Cat Guy, and then you are doomed.

I’m feeling much better now and have kicked the hydrocodone. Already I am at work on a poignant cartoon about poor old Saddam.


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