Two Left Feet: A (Mostly) True Story

Click to enlarge

The true part is that I rebroke my foot recently while Masheka was still in his left foot cast. The not-true part is that it was intentional--having a broken foot SUCKS. And HURTS!

Note: I rarely use photo references when drawing myself, but I needed them here--these are quite accurate recreations of how I broke my foot, the giant stack of pillows (complete with cats) I used to keep it elevated, etc. I even donned a wool coat in 80ish degree heat to pose for panel three!

P.S. Yes my foot is all blue and nasty under the cast--or it was last time. I'm sure it will be again when they remove the current cast.

Grading on the Condom Scale

Campus Progress has a piece grading some of Obama's budget initiatives on a condom scale drawn by yours truly.

From the pro-torture mail bag...

Kevin H. writes in response to my CIA torture cartoon:

1) We don't know what intel that was obtained at as a result of the waterboarding - curiously, that is the ONE piece of information the administration decided not to release. It is possible we learned quite a bit from this waterboarding that ultimately saved thousands of lives, but until they release all of the info about this, you and I will never know.

2) The two that were waterboarded 266 times collaborated with those who killed over 2000 people during 9/11. If it were me, I would waterboard each bastard once for each death they helped cause before I even started asking any questions. That would not begin to redress the loss they helped cause, but it would be a nice start. These aren't people, they are vicious animals, who would gladly do much worse than waterboarding to our captured servicemen if given a chance, before of course, they brutally be-head them (and by the way, their terrorist friends have indeed done much worse). And guess what? They will continue to do much worse, no matter how humanely we treat the terrorists we capture in the future. The only difference now is that they will have an easier time getting recruits to do their bidding, since the recruits know they won't be tortured if they are captured, and people like you and Obama will be more concerned about their rights than the rights of their victims. Frankly, I don't care what the CIA does with them, as long as they don't release them.

3) Its awfully easy to criticize when you are not the one responsible for keep our nation safe, and where you don't have all the facts. And you somehow conveniently forget the atrocities these monsters caused that lead to their waterboarding. Liberals like to point out how Bush never captured Bin Laden, well, did it occur to you that maybe they waterboarded these bastards that many times in an attempt to get information that would lead to his capture?

4) It would be nice if we all lived in a perfect world, where everyone respected human life and everyone threw away their guns and all nations, organizations, and groups strove to preserve basic human rights, such as not torturing anyone. I honestly would love to live in such a world. NEWSFLASH: We don't live in a perfect world, and we never will. Terrorists don't feel any moral obligation to observe any kind of code of decency or proper conduct, and I don't mind our Government returning the favor when we capture them, especially if we can get intel that saves U.S. lives in the long run.

My brother's burning house

Click to enlarge

Not at all comics-related, but I love these pictures. My brother and his wife bought a piece of land in Maine that had an incredibly decrepit unlivable old house on it, so the fire department burnt it down as a training exercise. Photo by my mother Beryl Reid.

Here's the final result:

Angie Zapata's killer found guilty

Justice won't bring her back, but it's better than nothing. Thanks to reader Brenda Ann for the link.

P.S. Much more coverage from Autumn Sandeen of Pam's House Blend.

Detroit SPJ Journalism Award

Just found out I came in third place for editorial cartooning in the Detroit SPJ Excellence in Journalism Awards for 2009 (after Henry Payne and Mike Thompson) for my cartoons for the Metro Times. (PDF with complete list of winners here.) The judges comments were: "Welcome breath of fresh air with great promise for the future."

Cool!

Update: More here.

Colbert's Big Gay Storm Ad

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Colbert Coalition's Anti-Gay Marriage Ad
colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest

If you haven't already seen it...

Toon: The C.I.A.: Can-Do Torturers!

Click to enlarge

266th time's the charm!

I broke my foot. Again.

I broke my foot AGAIN. For real. Same left foot. Different spot. And Masheka has a cast on his left foot now for a tendon problem. WTF?

More cartoons soon, by the way. About torture.

A Community Trapped in a Kafkaesque Nightmare: American Violet

Just came back from a sneak preview of the based-on-way-too-real-and-common-events film American Violet. Here's the trailer:

Like Milk, it's the kind of film where you leave the theatre wanting to march in the streets.

Amazon reclassifies LGBT & other books as "adult"

WTF is up with Amazon hiding/unranking LGBT and feminist books as "adult" today? I learned about it via Twitter #amazonfail while in the midst of framing the BattleStar Galactica propaganda poster ("Mechanics! ... Those Vipers Won't Fix Themselves!") I got for Chanukah/Christmas last year.

According to one tweet I saw, affected books included such titles as The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk.

Now I am just going to sit here and be embarrassed at how often I have shopped on Amazon.

Update on My Hacked and Delisted Website

After some diligent headscratching and web directory searching, I found three suspicious directories on my website that I had never created which seemed to be part of the attack on my website that Google notified me about earlier: "yptkl", "kjkpb" and "uiojc." They were created over the course of a few weeks, so I'm worried this attack is still active.

I asked Google to relist me, but that might take a while. And I'm not sure how to prevent the attacks happening again. So now a web search for my name comes up first with the MySpace page about my cartoons that I do not check or update. Blech. How exactly do I prevent this crap from happening going forward?

Toon: The Brighter Side of Auto Layoffs

Click to enlarge

Drew this the evening that Obama announced his restructuring plan for GM and Chrysler. It was a tough one, because I really did appreciate that Obama wasn't buying into all the anti-union and anti-worker rhetoric that swirls around stories about the demise of the auto industry ("how dare those workers demand fair wages! they're runing America!" etc!)

So I really did debate whether the woman on the right should say that Obama "won't" or "can't" do anything to save the jobs of the auto workers. I started out with "can't", but that made it seem like Obama was somehow helpless and had no power to help workers even if he wanted to. I settled on "won't", because in the end, this situation just sucks for the workers. Rick Wagoner gets a $20 million pension, and they get... crap.

Except maybe a visit from the newly appointed Director of Recovery for Auto Communities and Workers.

P.S. See also Kevin Moore's cartoon on this subject, "Lossy Compensation."

Toon: The Friend of My Friend is... (On Transphobia)

Click to enlarge

This cartoon has been brewing in my head for a while--it really depresses/irks me that in 2009, there are still numerous people in feminist and queer circles who actually think it is acceptable--even REASONABLE or RIGHTEOUS or FEMINIST--to be transphobic or to "debate" the inclusion of transgender and other gender non-conforming folks in LGBT and women's spaces.

Equality is SO not up for debate, sorry! It's one thing if someone genuinely is a bit confused on proper respectful gender terminology or genuinely doesn't know much about gender identity or transgender issues--it's another if someone has had ample opportunity over a long period of time to ditch their bigotry and emphatically chooses not to.

Anyway, the actual final cartoon came together after a fantastic panel at the WAM 2009 conference, "In/Out of Focus: Gender, Non-conformity and the Media," featuring Jack (Angry Brown Butch), Julia Serano (Whipping Girl), Miriam (Feministing) and Kate Bovitch. I asked the panelists what their opinion was on non-transphobic feminists/activists who continued to be close with transphobic feminists/activists, etc.

Julia Serano's take (and I apologize if I misquote, since this is based on scribbled notes) was that while some people are willing to listen, at this point it's clear that some people just aren't--which is just ridiculous in this day and age. "In 2009 there are very few feminists and LGB folks who haven't been exposed to trans people." Still, "a lot of times there's a lack of calling out. They want to give feminist friends the benefit of the doubt."

But "there needs to a shift from 10 years ago. People should know better."

Jack commented that this has all happened before, and gave the history of the exclusion of queer women from the feminist movement as an example.

And then my handwriting degenerated into illegible scribbles. Still, you get the idea. I'm reading Whipping Girl now and it's fantastic.

Toon: Apocalypse Iowa!

Click to enlarge

Even the happiest heterosexual homes will not survive the unstoppable juggernaut of... LEGAL GAY MARRIAGE!

Obviously I drew this before Vermont joined the equality party--they'll get their own cartoon next week. (Maybe something about how it's a short slippery slope to the evils of man/maple-syrup marriage!? But seriously...)

Google says I've been hacked--and they're delisting me? Help!

I got the following message today, and I followed all their instructions but I honestly have no idea where these hidden keywords are lurking on my site or how to find and remove--Google's documentation is really confusing and seems to assume I'm some paid fancy webmistress instead of a blogging cartoonist. Any help or suggestions are appreciated--I don't need to be any more obscure than I already am!

By the way, I did check to make sure this wasn't a spam email--I have a webmaster account on Google and it really is from them.

Dear site owner or webmaster of mikhaela.net,

While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that are outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769&hl=en. This appears to be because your site has been modified by a third party. Typically, the offending party gains access to an insecure directory that has open permissions. Many times, they will upload files or modify existing ones, which then show up as spam in our index.

The following is some example hidden text we found at http://mikhaela.net/:

# # fathers # ub # comunity # mambo # seam # denied # resellers # racial # knight

In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from mikhaela.net are scheduled to be removed temporarily from our search results for at least 30 days.

We would prefer to keep your pages in Google's index. If you wish to be reconsidered, please correct or remove all pages (may not be limited to the examples provided) that are outside our quality guidelines. One potential remedy is to contact your web host technical support for assistance. For more information about security for webmasters, see http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/my-sites-been-hacked-now-what.html. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en to learn more and submit your site for reconsideration.

Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team

This sucks and I am royally confused.

Now on Twitter, though not sure why, exactly

I'm m1khaela on Twitter, and here's my Twitter feed, but I'm not exactly sure what the point is, really.

Hurrah for Vermont!

The good news just keeps rolling in!

Hurrah for Iowa!

So Massachusetts, Connecticut—and, now, Iowa!—are officially the three coolest states in the union. I'm totally embarrassed for New York. Aren't we supposed to be, like, trendsetters or something? Lucky for me I'm really from Massachusetts. From Bay Windows:

The state supreme courts in New York, Maryland, and Washington State have ruled that laws banning gay marriage are rational even though the states’ reasons wouldn’t pass many people’s laugh test. New York, for instance, said banning gay marriage provided an inducement for straight people to marry. Washington said it "furthers procreation" among straights.

So banning gay marriage puts straight people in the mood? Like a fancy over-priced homophobic perfume?