"Anger and passion slipped inside a fun cartoon coating"

My book Attack of the 50-Foot Mikhaela is one of the premiums in In These Times magazine's fund drive (along with a magazine subscription and a Noam Chomsky book). As part of the campaign, they've done a nice little interview with me where I ramble on about what makes me mad and what keeps me drawing (it's certainly not the money or fame!).

Give some money and get some books!

Mikhaela in the news: "Political cartoonists sing hail to the chief"

My cartoon "Bush vs. My Cat" (above) is currently featured in the exhibit "Bush Leaguers: Cartoonists Take On the White House" (at American University's Katzen Museum in DC, on view through July 29). I've even been mentioned in an article about the piece in the Examiner:

Through “Bush vs. My Cat,” freelancer Mikhaela Reid envisions a battle of wits. One of several women selected for the show, this hot hand is among the growing number of female cartoonists.

Full article here (warning: link is to a PDF).

I was also included in a story in Editor and Publisher about the AAEC convention panel on cartoonists and blogging. I was actually in the audience, but panelist Tom Tomorrow kindly suggested I might have two cents to put in:

Mikhaela Reid, speaking from the audience, said cartoonists such as herself who aren't daily newspaper staffers often want to do a blog because it helps build readership. She added that freelance or self-syndicated creators may not do as many editorial cartoons each week as staff creators do, so a blog can be "a valuable place to vent" when not drawing a cartoon that day.

Which I did.

Mikhaela in the news: "Hitting the funny bone"

Ethan Jacobs has a cool piece in Bay Windows this week about the Life Without Fair Courts contest, with a good dabble of quotes from me. Here's one segment:

Reid said the five finalists took very different approaches to tackling the subject of fair courts. Rall, Fox and Bors all painted nightmarish visions of a world without a fair judicial system, with gay couples exiled to Antarctica and people thrown in jail for either engaging in or facilitating sodomy. By contrast, Johannsen and Cruté used a more personal perspective, showing how a lack of legal protections would impact their own lives as an M-to-F lesbian transwoman and a bisexual woman respectively. Reid said the contest is a great way to acquaint people with cartoonists like Johannsen and Cruté who do not yet have a large following.

And

Reid said that Lambda Legal selected her in part because much of her own work focused on similar themes as the Life Without Fair Courts campaign.

“I have a somewhat dystopian view in a lot of my cartoons of what the future looks like when we have people in charge who do not care about equality for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people,” said Reid.

Don't forget to cast YOUR vote!

Mikhaela in the news!

Check it out:

• Metro Times (Detroit): "Drawing Ire" by Sean Bieri
• The Villager: "Cartoonist Mikhaela Reid gets graphic" by Rebecca Cathcart
• Chelsea Now: Cartoonist makes mark with biting political satire"by Rebecca Cathcart
• Between the Lines: "Bi, bi Bush: Cartoonist Mikhaela Reid finds 'boiling point' in political climate" by Cornelius Fortune

Here's a quote from the Metro Times (Detroit) piece. I'm blushing!

If easy jokes or pop catchphrases show up in Reid's strip "The Boiling Point" — which is featured weekly on MT's letters page — it's only because she means to subvert them on her way to striking at the heart of an issue. Doublespeak and spin are among her favorite targets, and she often counters them by mashing them up against images of the ugly truths they seek to obscure. Her cartoons are never glib — they're wordy, meaty; there's a lot going on in them. Even her inky, thick-lined drawings suggest the gravity of her subjects. She's topical but not slavishly so, prefering to address the latest wrinkles in the issues she's passionate about rather than jump on whatever media bandwagon happens to be rolling by. And she's not afraid to make issues personal, even appearing in her own strips from time to time to address the reader directly. In a field of sound-alikes, she's a fiercely singular voice.

Mikhaela (and Masheka) featured in press on Other Heroes

The Associated Press did a brief piece on the " OTHER HEROES: African American Comic Book Creators and Characters" show currently up at Jackson State University in Mississippi, and they called me today to ask for permission to use a photo of my cartoon from the exhibit.

(Just in case it's not already clear from my photos and self-portraits, I'm not black--I was included in the show because I frequently draw black characters, and the show was about black comics creators AND characters. I explained this to the photographer and suggested he might want to use a different image, but he said he wanted to use it anyway and he was also using images from two of the black cartoonists from the show, Kyle Baker and Mshindo Kuumba).

Anyway, here's the photo of my cartoon "Let Them Eat Toxic Sludge" on Yahoo News. Fun facts: I drew the cartoon at 3 a.m. after coming home from a 2005 Katrina benefit show featuring Dave Chappelle, Q-Tip, Dead Prez and Talib Kweli.

Update: The Freedom Gravy cartoon was also used to illustrate a more detailed story in the Jackson Free Press, and they fittingly discussed my work and Masheka's work (not to mention Keith Knight's work--go CWA!) in the same paragraph:

Almost every viewer should find something in the show that resonates. My favorites include a poster by Mikhaela Reid advertising “Freedom Gravy,” the Bush-family solution to the post-Katrina food shortage in New Orleans and coastal pollution problems all at once. “Let Them Eat Toxic Sludge!” the poster proclaims while a wrinkly, pearl-wearing Barbara Bush offers a green spoonful of Freedom Gravy to a young black girl, saying, “Open up dear—I’m sure this is much nicer than what you people are used to eating.” Also interesting is Masheka Wood’s “Ask CEOs” comic strip, where she asks hideous white male CEOs “How do you spend your $13,000 an hour?” Replies from the executives range from the hilarious—“Imported cashmere wipes for my delicate buttocks.”—to the disconcertingly realistic—“Oh ya know, buying politicians and whatnot.” By juxtaposing both types of answers, Wood asks a pointed question: “Which is more outrageous: Cashmere butt-wipes or buying out politicians who are supposed to represent our best interests?” Also noteworthy for his biting political and racial satire is Keith Knight, whose understated visual style allows his wry observational genius to shine through.