Boston-area readers, please help save Mikhaela's cartoons!

I've mentioned before how crucial letters to the editor are in keeping cartoons in a newspaper. Lately the Boston Phoenix (my first paying client and my largest-circulation paper) has had quite a space crunch, resulting in my cartoons not appearing for a few months. But I am still drawing and submitting them. So if you dig my cartoons and want to keep seeing them in the Phoenix, PLEASE write a nice letter to the editor letting them know how much you miss me and look forward to my cartoons every other week (address is letters@phx.com . And tell your friends and anyone else who digs my work. So you can keep reading cartoons like Conservative Children's Classics, Bush vs. My Cat, Guzzle-icious Spring Fashions, Every Sperm is Sacred, Your Yucky Body and many more!

Please! Pretty please?

Or else my little kitty-kat will get all stressed out and CRY and have another asthma attack like this one! (He really does have asthma, and this is an actual coughing fit he had on Masheka's shoulder, poor baby... so I got vet bills to pay folks!)

If you're not a Boston-area reader, you can still help me out with my other papers or websites. And I will adore you forever.

P.S. If you do write a letter, feel free to forward me a copy, I'm curious!

Pictures from ECBACC and She Draws Comics

Masheka and I had a great time and met many awesome people in Philly last weekend at the East Coast Black Age of Comics Convention--the above is a picture of us at Masheka's table, and you can see the rest of the pictures here.

Later that night while Masheka was still tabling, I hopped on a bus in order to make it to the She Draws Comics exhibit at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art. (Which is still up for a few months, so get your butts down to Soho and check it out, all you-NYC area people). The show was curated by Trina Robbins in response to the all-male Masters of American Comics exhibit and book, which I blogged about not-too-long ago ("Silly Girl, Only Men Can Be Masters of Comics!". So it was very cool to be part of that response.

The above is a photo of Katherine Arnoldi, Tania del Reo, Raina Telgemeier, and me. See my full photo gallery for pictures of cartooning pioneers like Hilda Terry, still going strong at 92. And get more coverage and photos from the Beat.

New Cartoons: "Romney's Youth Pride" and "Dire Consequences of Not Enacting an English-Only Law"

In case you don't live in Massachusetts, you should be aware that Mitt Romney is a sodding self-centered twerp who puts his Republican presidential ambitions above the lives of kids. Recently he he temporarily disbanded the Governors' Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth and tried to trash the Safe Schools program and its funding. As a former president of a Massachusetts Gay/Straight Alliance (Lowell High School, baby!) I can tell you how crucial these programs are for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered youth--not just for suicide prevention, but to have anything approximating a happy enjoyable (or less awful) school experience, with a minimum of fear and bullying and such. GSAs are awesome and Romney is so not. Thankfully lawmakers are moving to put these programs safely out of his reach.

Since my Bay Windows cartoon this week was so Massachusetts-centric, I decided to do an extra toon for people who don't know who the heck Mitt Romney is. Course none of you are reading this anyway since it's Memorial Day weekend, but hey, for you diehards, I have a very informative graphic:

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New Cartoon: Conversations Bush WON'T Listen in On.

Enjoy the new cartoon, Masheka and I have to go catch the Chinatown bus to Philly.

Surprise: I'm in the She Draws Comics exhibit!
Opening tomorrow night in NYC

I've just learned that one of my cartoons is going to be in an art exhibit called She Draws Comics at MOCCA in NYC. I'll probably be arriving at the opening around 8 or 8:30ish (with Masheka in tow) so please say hi if you're planning on going!

------------------------------------------
She Draws Comics:
100 Years of America's Women Cartoonists

Curated by TRINA ROBBINS

May 20 to November 6, 2006
Opening - May 20th, 7PM
Presentation - May 22, 6:30PM

Celebrate a century of the greatest female practitioners of comic and cartoon art that America has ever seen, from the Nell Brinkley Girl of the turn of the century to the wartime adventures of Miss Fury and Brenda Starr, to today's cutting-edge manga and graphic novels! With over fifty artists participating and over 100 artworks shown, this is the largest women cartoonists' show in history! Curated by noted scholar and artist TRINA ROBBINS, who will appear in person at the opening.

OK, off to Philly now!

Mark Your Convention Calendars!
Masheka and Mikhaela appearing in Philly this Saturday May 20 and in NYC Sunday June 11!

I am busy and tired, so I just swiped this from the Sheke's blog:

Short notice but if you happen to be in Philadelphia, PA this weekend, stop by the East Coast Black Age of Comics Convention (ECBACC) where I will be hawking my wares (including my previous toon collection What Masheka Did, my new collection Not Just Knee Deep, color prints, original art, and buttons, buttons buttons!!). And wish me a happy birthday!!

Then next month, Sunday June 11th, I'll be at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MOCCA) with the beautiful Mikhaela B. Reid to premiere "Ask Me About My Nut-Kicking Business". We're not on the exhibitors list (yet), but we'll be there. More info to come!

Now, since ECBACC is a celebration of black comics and cartoonists, I won't actually be exhibiting at the table with Masheka, but he will have my books for sale and I'll be wandering around the general vicinity all day if you want to say hi.

Oh, and any suggestions for good places to eat in Philly are welcome. But let us know now in the comments, as we're leaving tomorrow a.m.

New Cartoon: "Conservative Children's Classics"

Last week I made fun of what conservatives wear, and now I'm mocking what they read to their children. I'm so ashamed.

But seriously... Much has been made in the mainstream media of the so-called backlash against feminism. Writers like Caitlin Flanagan, John Tierney and Charlotte Allen would like us to believe that feminism has made women unhappy, and that professional women are leaving the workplace in droves for the joys of homemaker-dom (see Caryl Rivers for an excellent debunking of this insubstantiated hogwash).

Meanwhile, conservative parents in Massachusetts and elsewhere are outraged that their children are being exposed to insidious diversity tolerance propaganda, like the sweet and innocuous fairytale King & King. They'd much rather their children be read books like "Help! Mom! There are Liberals Under My Bed!" and other Conservative Children's Classics.

P.S. Join my weekly mailing list by sending a blank message to newtoons-subscribe@mikhaela.net!

Masheka's New Toon: CEO Pay
"How do YOU spend your $13,000 an hour?"

For more on crazy executive pay, see this graphics package from the New York Times.

Anyways, Masheka and I are back from Austin, Texas (hurrah for delicious cheap food and giant urban bat colonies) so there will be more cartoon goodness from both of us to come this week. Until then, here is a random bonus photo of Masheka in front of some blue tiled building in Downtown Austin:

And here's me ankle deep in Barton Springs:

New Cartoon: "Conservative Spring Styles... Guzzle-icious!"

So the other day I was walking down the street and I see the random guy pictured in the upper right hand corner dressed to the nines in fancy new sneakers, perfectly baggy new jeans and ... a Viagra jacket? I later discovered it's a Nascar jacket that happened to have the Viagra logo, but still. And thus this cartoon was born.

I was originally going to just do Big Pharma fashions (fancy jeans with "Ex-Lax" in rhinestones on the rear, etc.) but that didn't go very far, so I just decided to have fun.

P.S. Join my weekly mailing list by sending a blank message to newtoons-subscribe@mikhaela.net!

From the mailbag
Fans and pans

Since I don't have time to blog much myself, here are a few recent letters. Lindsy from California writes:

Just wanted to tell you that your cartoons are so right on! I love "It's My Religion", you really nailed the absolute hypocrisy of the "religious" right with the frame at the end- really speaks to how this belief system has taken on a racist/sexist/homophobic/politically-oriented mind of its own. Also loved the Conservative spring fashions- "Schoolhouse Frocks"!! So nice!

Alex in Iowa City agrees:

your latest cartoon was perfect. as a former xian protstnt fundamentalist/evangelical, I have chafed at the terrible logic and ethics of my former way of thinking and the control of many by this insidious "people of faith" movement. you caught the hypocrisy and the tactics perfectly.

But Tom K. in Grosse Pointe, Michigan does not:

Your cartoon "It's My Religion" was seroius bullshit. Muslims, many of whom favor female mutilation, honor killing and forced marriages of 12 year olds make the fundamentalists (contemptable as they might be) depicted in the cartoon seem like pikers. Yet the cartoon targets the parking ticket scofflaws and lets the serial killers off easy. If you only have the balls to go after soft targets who you know would never hit you back, you're in the wrong business.

What you decide to draw cartoons about matters. When a paper gives you a forum , you have a moral obligation to make the best use of it.

I agree whole-heartedly with that last sentence. Here was my response:

Thanks for your thoughtful letter. I hope my cartoon didn't give the impression that I am not whole-heartedly against Muslim extremism as well or that I am not deeply concerned with the oppression of women and gay people under Muslim fundamentalist sharia laws in Africa and the Middle East. I have written about these topics in my blog (for example Iran's recent execution of two teenage boys for the "crime" of being gay) but that was not the topic of this cartoon.

You are certainly right that what a cartoonist draws about matters. But it also matters that cartoonists not just all draw the same thing. Opposition to Muslim fundamentalism is a topic well covered by my fellow cartoonists, whereas very few other cartoonists deal regularly with gay issues and women's issues, the subject of this cartoon.

An individual cartoon can not encompass all issues or it winds up being a kitchen sink and not making a coherent point.

Regards
Mikhaela

Greg writes in response to Bush vs. My Cat:

This was a great cartoon. However, I feel very guilty because I voted for George W. Bush in both of the last elections. I might be going to HELL after the disastrous, illegal war in Iraq. Some 2400, or so, U.S. soldiers have been killed. I don't know how many other people, Iraqi and others, have died. All for no reason!

I belong to a right-wing church that absolutely HATED Bill Clinton. George W. Bush was God's man for the U.S. Presidency. Well, under President Clinton, the United States was doing quite well financially. Under President Bush, the United States is now indebted over $2 TRILLION to Communist China. I hate to admit that the right-wing churches just don't seem to understand that George W. Bush is leading the United States down the path of financial ruin. Really!

How I wish that I would have "consulted" my cat Buddy, now deceased, before I voted for George W. Bush. At least I wouldn't have felt so guilty about things. This country is getting "worse" in things like: Government Finances, Military, Honesty, Domestic Affairs, Foreign Policy, etc. I think that most of the world now HATES the United States.

Your cartoon "speaks" the truth LOUD and CLEAR. When us people get to make decisions and choices that are "worse" than those of animals, like cats, I can only think that God is very unhappy with this nation. George W. Bush is telling the very people, who elected him, a bunch of lies.

Perhaps we should elect a CAT to be the next United States President!

Hey, like I said in 2004: anybody but Bush. Actually, the whole Bush vs. My Cat cartoon was inspired not only by my beloved cat's idiotic attraction to electrical wiring, but by a long passage from one of my favorite books of all time, Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.:

I urged that kings were dangerous. He said, then have cats. He was sure that a royal family of cats would answer every purpose. They would be as useful as any other royal family, they would know as much, they would have the same virtues and the same treacheries, the same disposition to get up shindies with other royal cats, they would be laughably vain and absurd and never know it, they would be wholly inexpensive; finally, they would have as sound a divine right as any other royal house, and "Tom VII., or Tom XI., or Tom XIV. by the grace of God King," would sound as well as it would when applied to the ordinary royal tomcat with tights on.

"And as a rule," said he, in his neat modern English, "the character of these cats would be considerably above the character of the average king, and this would be an immense moral advantage to the nation, for the reason that a nation always models its morals after its monarch's. The worship of royalty being founded in unreason, these graceful and harmless cats would easily become as sacred as any other royalties, and indeed more so, because it would presently be noticed that they hanged nobody, beheaded nobody, imprisoned nobody, inflicted no cruelties or injustices of any sort, and so must be worthy of a deeper love and reverence than the customary human king, and would certainly get it. The eyes of the whole harried world would soon be fixed upon this humane and gentle system, and royal butchers would presently begin to disappear; their subjects would fill the vacancies with catlings from our own royal house; we should become a factory; we should supply the thrones of the world; within forty years all Europe would be governed by cats, and we should furnish the cats. The reign of universal peace would begin then, to end no more forever...... Me-e-e-yow-ow-ow-ow -- fzt! -- wow!"

(Emphasis mine, and you can read the rest of the chapter if you need context)

So, yeah... my dumb cat for President! Keep the letters coming, folks!

(And apologies to Stuart who wrote me a letter about immigration that I intend to respond to in detail when I get back from a wedding in Austin, Texas.)