Fighting Words Blog: January 2009

Monday, January 19, 2009

Fighting Words: 1/19/09 Cartoon... and the "end" of Bush?

"Trav'lin' with Post-Presidency George W. Bush"...

Classic Fighting Words this week, as I have been utterly swamped with freelance design work. How, you ask, could I possibly not have a Bush retrospective cartoon on this, the week we're finally rid of him? See last week's 'toon on life in our new Great Depression... gotta pay the bills...

But, in all honesty, one big reason is that I do not plan to stop doing cartoons about him any time soon. I tried for weeks to come up with some kind of "goodbye" comic or special animation. The reality, though, is that most of our biggest problems right now were either directly caused by decisions that he made (Iraq, the degradation of civil liberties and the rule of law) or were problems that were made worse by his decisions (the economy, the environment). So many of the issues that we will be dealing with for the foreseeable future were basically his fault, I don't see any reason why he should automatically disappear from political cartoons just because he's not in office anymore. I would hope that I won't be like some conservative cartoonists who are still talking about Vince Foster and Whitewater 8 years after Clinton has left office, but neither should Bush/Cheney be allowed to ride off into the sunset.

But mostly it's the paying the bills thing... which Fighting Words doesn't really do. Want to keep seeing regular cartoons, from me or any of your other favorite political cartoonists? Write to your local newspaper and tell them!! There are a ton of portal sites like this one with links to all local papers, or you can look up your local Alt-newsweekly site here. If you only read comics like this online because you can't find good comics in the newspaper, write to them anyway and tell them that... maybe they'll finally get the idea that getting rid of all their best visual content may have something to do with them losing so much money.