SlowpokeBlog

I drew this to illustrate this week's column in C-VILLE Weekly by Dr. Annette Owens. It's about the health benefits of ejaculation (oh, the Google hits I will get now). I would link to the column, but I don't think it's been posted online. Here it is!

My web host moved my site to a new server today. You shouldn't notice any weirdness, but if you do encounter a glitch, please let me know.

Somehow I missed this excellent column by Billy Bragg in Saturday's NYT, but fortunately Matt Bors linked to it. You know something's gone terribly wrong when you have Billy Bragg demanding better protections for intellectual property. What Bragg says about the music industry and online content very closely parallels what is happening with cartoonists, as I discussed last week.

All too often, people tend to think of stealing music or other media online as a way of stickin' it to The Man. But rather than being an anti-corporate act, it's an anti-labor act. Musicians and artists may not be coal miners, but they need to eat too.

I'm beginning to think we will never have a black or female president as long as cable news media exists in its current form. For reason #4,592 why progressives should never, ever appear on Fox News, see Tom Tomorrow's posts here and here.

Here's something else that might help McCain shed that pernicious "rational male" stereotype: one of his economic advisers, the author of Dow 36,000, blames the current economic crisis on opponents of suburban sprawl. Hee!

On a purely ad hominem note, how on earth did McCain go from this handsome fellow to the lumpen-cheeked chipmunk that he is now?

Back to last week's beard cartoon for a moment, you will recall that one of the gags was a cologne called "Indifference" that smelled faintly of mildew. Well, a reader named Robin has informed me that an actual perfume shop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn sells a scent of grandfather -- specifically, the perfume-maker's grandfather. Once again, reality trumps satire.

Josh Marshall has laid out a very compelling case against McCain that needs to get some major mainstream play. Video version here.

Also, some very important words from Obama on Hillary's disastrous framing of both her and McCain passing the "commander-in-chief" test. McCain's zany judgment about the Iraq War as well as his confusion over basic facts about the insurgency make him a commander-in-chief test flunkie if there ever was one.

I engaged in a couple different email conversations last week on the subject of newsmagazine-type websites that do not pay. These conversations came hot on the heels of my encounter with the latest issue of Wired magazine which, a bit too giddily, touts FREE! as the "Future of Business." Wowee zowee, hot diggity dog! Well, maybe the FREE! model works for some businesses like Google, but things are trickier for freelance writers and artists, not to mention musicians who are not so well established that they can give away their albums online and rake in the dough from concert tickets.

I don't understand why paying for comics is considered out of the question for major web publications like The Huffington Post. What we make is a laughable pittance when you realize popular sites are pulling in $10,000/week or more from a single advertiser. Huffpo may be dazzling and stylish, but by not paying contributors, it sets a terrible precedent for the future of independent journalism. I guess the prestige of having your byline appear alongside the likes of Bill Maher and Alec Baldwin is supposed to be payment enough.

The obvious problem, of course, is that this model presumes that contributors have other sources of income that allow them to work pro bono. It serves to make the established more established. What about the exposure, you might ask? Well, at some point everything becomes exposure towards getting more exposure, especially as other sites follow suit. WorkingforChange used to pay me (though not without some wrangling at first), and then Huffpo came along and -- it is probably safe to say -- took a chunk of their readership. Several months ago, WorkingforChange did away with its newsmagazine format and dropped most of its cartoonists and columnists.

Suffice it to say, it was more than a little ironic to see sites like Huffpo covering the Hollywood Writers' Strike. Its content may be progressive, but its business model is most certainly not. Note that Huffpo describes its contributors as "bloggers" -- not writers -- evoking an open blogging community like DailyKos. Yet it presents itself as a newspaper, much more along the lines of the NY Times than Kos. The word "blogger" is being used to obscure what used to be called a writer. This is not a business model progressives should be embracing.

For more on the subject, I encourage you to check out this column by my colleague Ted Rall, from a few months ago.

This article about young people starting farms almost makes me wonder whether the author saw my cartoon:

Just a few years ago the prevailing style statement in Williamsburg featured metrosexually groomed urbanites wearing trucker hats and pristine Carhartt jackets and quaffing Pabst beer. Now some are choosing the real life behind the pose.

At a recent fund-raising party for Ms. Fleming’s film, in a warehouse next to the Williamsburg Bridge, men in shaggy beards and women in thick sandals sipped Sixpoint Lager from mason jars and snacked on Crane Mountain chèvre.

Guests included Rachel Mark and Betsy Devine, who own Salvatore Brooklyn, a cheese maker in Boerum Hill, and Rick and Michael Mast, tall brothers with Amish-length beards, who are starting a chocolate factory in Williamsburg.

I had a feeling this week's cartoon might trigger a response from some facial hair-advantaged readers. Sure enough, longtime reader Nick sends this rather amusingly doctored picture of himself:


I will say that Nick's beard is not quite the variety I was poking fun at in the cartoon; to me, his crop of facial hair says "friendly brewmaster" as opposed to "insouciantly disheveled Beard-as-Fashion-Statement."

Nick happens to be an animator; you can watch one of his short movies here.

UPDATE: A New Yorker writes in:

Oh...my...dear....lord!!

I live in the East Village and frequent "hip" parts of Brooklyn like Williamsburg and Bushwick (aka "East Williamsburg" for real estate types), and if there is any justice in this world, your brilliant cartoon should act as a magical neutron bomb and eliminate masses of the population of both places.

God bless you, Ms. Sorensen.

I usually enjoy David Carr's media column in the Times, but I can't believe he wrote this with a straight face:

There is a lot to be admired on the cable news dial. Wolf Blitzer seamlessly manages all the crisscross on CNN. Fox’s Brit Hume has a quick grasp of the moment, and on MSNBC, Chris Matthews has never got over his boyhood crush on democracy.

YUCK! From the context of the article, he's not being facetious, either.

Related cartoon: Chris Matthews, Nad Defender

I was working on a cartoon about a completely different subject, when I drowsily closed my eyes and envisioned the bearded hipster character shown in the first panel. (Some people see visions of sugarplums, I see hairy hipsters.) Wanting to preserve this little message from my subconscious, I drew a doodle of him in my notebook. Suddenly the phrase "metrosexual backlash" came to mind and, I decided to draw this cartoon instead.

To be honest, I'm not sure the untamed hipster beard qualifies as a full-fledged trend -- it's just something I've noticed. Its message seems to be, "I'm so cool and manly, I don't put effort into making myself attractive to women." One of its forbears seems to be Mike Watt, formerly of the Minutemen. When I saw him ten years ago, he shambled about the stage in his full-bearded, drunken ship-captain glory. Hence the Minutemen t-shirt in the first panel.

Now, let me reiterate that I do not eschew all beards. Some neatly-trimmed beards can look very nice. It is the crumb-littered mountain man beard on a hot young man I do not understand.

I have finally gotten around to posting email guidelines and a FAQs page.

Wow, Lara in Italy has sent me another scene from "Queer as Folk" featuring Slowpoke in the background. It looks like they blew up the cover of Café Pompous and made a poster out of it!


This is the episode (season 4, #3) that Taru in Finland told me about last year. I've been renting QAF a lot lately, but there are so many episodes that John McCain will be president before I get to seasons three and four. (Just kidding! Um, sort of.) I've actually grown rather addicted to the show. In addition to some good writing, you'll find plenty of excellent beefcake, ladies.

I wasn't going to mention it, but people have written me about it, so I guess I will. The overwhelming outrage over That Puppy Video (if you don't know what I'm talking about, be glad and just move along) once again clearly illustrates the point of this cartoon.

In response to Matt, I'm sorry to say it did not merit a sequel. I should also add, Matt, that next week's cartoon is not addressing well-kempt facial hair like yours, but the nappy, woolly variety.

It occurred to me yesterday, before Hillary's victories in Ohio and Texas, that it may not be the worst thing in the world for the Democratic race to drag on. After all, once it ends, the Republican slime machine will have center stage. The more time they have, the higher their mounds of grub-infested BS can grow.

You can't blame Hillary for staying in as long as she has even a remote chance; she owes that to her supporters. On the other hand, it will be problematic if she seriously starts jockeying to have the Florida and Michigan delegates added to her column, since the other candidates weren't on the ballot. (As most of you know, those states held their primaries early, in violation of the DNC rules. The DNC made the debatable decision to disenfranchise those states.)

I know the conventional wisdom about Ralph Nader these days is that he's irrelevant, but it bothers me that he's taking a lot of perfectly reasonable, mainstream ideas and selling them as Old Rumpled Fringe Candidate^® Brand. The medium is the message, Ralph! I know the major candidates aren't talking about some issues -- possibly because they'd be destroyed if they did -- but associating those issues with a guy who looks like he just stepped out of a 1978 wood-paneled Plymouth stationwagon powered by french fry grease isn't going to help shape the public consciousness for the better.

This is not exactly one of my more conceptually-sophisticated numbers -- I was frantically trying to get my book in to the printer the night before -- but it does the basic job of promulgating the fact that McCain actually sought the endorsement of, and personally appeared with, an obscenely bigoted Rapture Right nutbar. Meanwhile, Obama gets hammered by Tim Russert over an endorsement by Louis Farrakhan he did not want, and adamantly deplores.

See, this is why I don't feel very good about the way things are heading. Even though the country rejects most of what McCain stands for, he's still going to claim the mantle of "The Normal" and paint Obama as "The Other" through both his campaign underlings and his Big Stupid Media helpers. I've been troubled by the irrational exuberance among many Dems that the tide has turned, and we're going to win in a cakewalk. This ain't going to be a cakewalk, whether the nominee is Obama or Hillary.

Nickelodeon Magazine has just put out a slick and swanky collection of their "greatest hits," packed full of comics from lots of different indie artists most people know from other contexts. They reprinted one of my Valentine's Day gags from a few years back, featuring cupid's brother Stupid and a character who came out looking an awful lot like Jim Carrey from Dumb and Dumber. If you see it on a newsstand, check it out.

I just created a Facebook page for Slowpoke, which allows me to post event info, such as upcoming book tour dates. If you have a Facebook page, come on and be a fan!