Revenge Of The Wrath Of The Return Of The Foreigns
By the Comics Curmudgeon
Happy Friday, liberal weenies! Or should I say "suicidally depressing Friday," because all of you are almost certainly suicidally depressed, what with the naked Republican Ted Kennedies and the coming corporate control of all elections and the bankruptcy of your precious liberal radio station ! Anyway, like your liberal weenie foreparents, you will respond to this setback as you have with all others: by sulkily claiming that you're going to move to some more enlightened Foreign country. But of course, you'll never actually do this, because it would be hard, and involve improving on those two years of Spanish you took in high school, but in case you ever get the urge to really, really make the plunge and become an ex-pat, you might want to check on the quality of the Foreigns' political cartoons. They aren't good! Do you really want to be looking at these in your newspaper every day?
Click the Foreign cartoons to make them bigger (but no more comprehensible).
We all know that you probably weren't going to move to Nigeria, because of your racism, but just in case you were thinking about it, you might want to check out this iconographical mess. Here you can see what appears to be the entire nation of Togo flying away from the enormous and terrifying crotch of some soccer player, who has written "African Cup Of Nations" on his sock, to inspire him to glory. In fact, it's just the Togolese soccer team, and it's flying away from the Angola-hosted African Cup of Nations because their team bus got machine-gunned , although you might assume from looking at this cartoon that they actually hit a mine, because of the giant land mine labelled "ANGOLA" right in the middle of the damn drawing. It's possible that having soccer played on fields (or "pitches," as they say among the Foreigns -- get this right if you're planning to move, as there's nothing the Foreigns love more than soccer, or "football") littered with land mines might actually make this sport more interesting, but I assume that this is not the polemical intent of our Nigerian artist. Probably.
As always, the Germans are much more straightforward in how they express things. They like the erotic feelings they get when watching a cybernetic octopus and an Asian octopus gently and slowly drape their clammy tentacles over each other, in a prelude to mind-blowingly hot cephalo-sex. They look angry at each other now, but that will only make the eventual slimy coupling all the hotter. I can't wait to see the Asian octopus tear off those square glasses with one appendage while using the other seven to sensually caress its lover. Of course, the Germans, ever culturally insensitive, have depicted the Asian half of this mollusktastic fuckfest as China. Silly Krauts, everyone knows that it's the Japanese who are into the tentacle rape!
Much more horrifying than any depiction of sea life gettin' freaky is this collection of terrible Celt-dwarves from the cheerful drunkards at Dublin's Irish Times. This cartoon is ostensibly about a pair of particularly squicky sex scandals going on in Northern Ireland (involving Jesus freak cougar financial impropriety and creepy molesty IRA guys ), but it mostly seems to be a showcase for these freakish gnomes, who are more terrifying than any leprechaun. This cartoon should be posted in doctors' offices everywhere to show what generations of fetal alcohol syndrome and dependency on potatoes for all nutrients can do to a people.
The Haitians are obviously too busy digging themselves out of the rubble to make a wry comment about their situation in cartoon form; so, in the spirit of helping, the South Koreans have done it for them! The ecumenically vague Creator is staring down on the flaming rubble that was Haiti, far at the bottom of his God-Cliff. Is He responsible for this destruction, as vengeance or as part of a larger, inscrutable plan? Is He right now helping to resolve the situation, with His magical deity powers? Or is He merely impassively observing the trials and tribulations of His creation? The South Koreans are not taking a stance on these theological questions, which I frankly feel to be something of a cop-out in a cartoon about God, you know?
Meanwhile, a naked Angela Merkel lounges erotically on an ice floe somewhere off the coast of one of Germany's most smog-choked industrial towns. She looks uncomfortable -- wouldn't you, if your naked buttocks were parked on some piece of no doubt soot-covered ice? -- but her sense of duty to the Fatherland and the Volk compels her to stay at her post. The Germans associate the bone-chilling Baltic and the sea creatures therein with sexuality, is what I'm getting from these cartoons.
Say, I'll bet our friends "Down Under" (i.e., the descendants of the dregs of Britain's 19th century prisons) have some cogent things to say about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in cartoons drawn when they were not at all drunk! See, the caption on this cartoon reads "Israel Builds Wall," and, uh, it's sort of a rebus, I guess! There's the Star of David, which is Israel, and then there's a wall, which is the wall, and then there's a pyramid, which represents "building," because in order to have a pyramid, you have to build it, see. They don't just grow out of the ground, you know! Don't trust those guys who who try to sell you a brick and tell you that it's a "pyramid seed"! It's a scam! Anyway, from the arrangement of these semantic components, we can tell that whatever language they speak in Australia generally has a Subject-Object-Verb word order, and that their writing system is a crude series of ideograms of various levels of abstraction. Also, we learn that the Australians don't keep up with the news much, since the wall in the West Bank has been in progress for something like eight or nine years now.
After consuming inordinate amounts of Foster's, Australians enjoy wiring up those babies that have survived dingo attacks with high explosives. Australians are the worst people in the world, basically.