By the Comics Curmudgeon
As your Comics Curmudgeon demonstrated earlier this year, political cartoonists love butts. Just love ’em! The ass is the most polysemous of images, representing everything from sex appeal to debasement and humiliation to an actual butt. So we’re presenting a panoply of ass shots this week, with a greater emphasis on sodomy. But those of you who aren’t butt fans (even though such a person is scarcely imaginable), fear not! There will also be severed limbs. MORE »

By the Comics Curmudgeon
Hey, kids, remember your civics class, where you learned that there are other parts of the government that aren’t currently controlled by Muslims? There’s the so-called “Supreme Court,” which everyone ignores most of the time right up until they legalize gayness; but then there’s this other thing, whaddya call it, Congress, and there’s like dozens and dozens of those jackholes, so even though they aren’t “worse” than President Antichrist on an individual level, there are more of them, so it kind of balances out! Anyway, one half of Congress just passed some crazy-ass law last week. How did they manage to do this? Simple: DEVIL MAGIC. MORE »

By the Comics Curmudgeon
Generally speaking, most Americans can barely be bothered to vote during important elections — you know, the ones with years divisible by four! It’s even harder getting them off of their Dorito-stained couches to cast their ballots when it’s a year that’s an even number that isn’t divisible by four, and when we’re talking odd-numbered years, well, you can just totally forget about that. I realize that all this math is way, way beyond what most Americans can handle, and yet through some instinct, they can distinguish; my theory is that they can tell how important an election is by the volume of the shouting from the glowing picture-box in the living room. Anyway, despite widespread apathy, there were several elections yesterday, and so, by Journalism Law, a few unlucky cartoonists were forced to briefly stop drawing insightful Balloon Boy cartoons to deal with them. After the jump: the goriest political cartoon in human history. MORE »

By the Comics Curmudgeon
Do you remember ’round about a year ago when it was all “hope and change” this and “yes we can” that, and everything was going to be fixed, forever? Ha ha! Obviously all of our problems are intractable and terrible and nobody can fix them, no matter how nice his teeth are. And so, we must muddle on with our sad, grey lives, turning briefly to media sensations for the brief peaks of joy we used to experience during holiday celebrations or sex. Tune in for more grim tidings, after the jump! MORE »

By the Comics Curmudgeon
Hello, readers, and welcome to a very special Carton Violence, in which we will turn our eyes away from the foul nightmare that is the editorial pages, and to the innocent, carefree comics pages, which are probably in the back of the section with the TV listings in your local paper! (Ha ha, just kidding, I realize none of you actually read the “paper”.) Do you know that this Saturday is National Make A Difference Day, when you’re supposed to, like, volunteer or something? Of course you don’t, and here’s why: because the White House apparently decided that the best way to publicize this to the masses was to encourage the writers of newspaper comic strips to plant pro-volunteering propaganda in their word-and-picture boxes. Do they think that it’s 1955? Isn’t this the same group of people who won a presidential election entirely by using Twitter? Anyway, the results, as you’ll see after the jump, are mostly laughable and terrible, when they aren’t actively offensive.

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By the Comics Curmudgeon
What is the most amusing part of the human anatomy? While there are a lot to choose from, I’d have to say the butt, mostly because asses and humor occupy the exact same overlap in the Venn diagram between “sexy” and “gross.” Because our dying media establishment is still clinging to antiquated concepts like “dignity” and “morals” and “for Christ’s sake people don’t want to see naked asses in the newspaper,” most political cartoons do not feature naked asses per se (though there are horrifying exceptions). Nevertheless, political cartoons cannot resist the laugh riot that even the fully clothed booty brings to the table. MORE »

By the Comics Curmudgeon
America might be a land of shouty illiterate fartsacks who will die of massive Hardees-induced coronaries in filthy hospital waiting rooms while trying to fill out insurance forms with numbing fingers, but at least we aren’t Europeans, am I right? I mean, Jesus, think about the awful nadir of degradation it must be, being one of those people. Wait, what, you don’t think Europeans are terrible mutant monsters? Oh, ho ho, do I have news for you, after the jump. MORE »

By the Comics Curmudgeon
Did you know that no object in the universe is entirely unique? It’s true! Many things, it turns out, look like other things. Sometimes things don’t look like other things, but they’re like other things, at their essence, in what we call a “metaphor.” Sometimes you see a thing and you think, “That thing can’t actually be what it looks like,” but have no idea what it actually is! And sometimes, very rarely, you find out that one of your neighbors is keeping the president’s corpse in his refrigerator. MORE »

By the Comics Curmudgeon
If Carl Jung were alive today, he’d see political cartoons as a shortcut into our collective subconscious. Those brave few Americans who continue to read newspapers have the honor or seeing the darkest, foulest recesses of the human mind barfed out daily onto editorial pages everywhere. In order to fulfill their appointed role of shocking a jaded nation, the cartoonists select only the most depraved, taboo-violating subjects for their art. What we’re trying to say is that this week’s cartoons are all about awful stuff, so brace yourself before you click the clicky and see the things in store for you. MORE »

By the Comics Curmudgeon
Hey, you know what, America: I want this health care dealio over with as soon as you do. Not because I care about my own or anyone else’s health, mind you; I am just tired of all the cartoons being churned out about it, when there could be cartoons churned out about something much sexier, like a sex scandal, or a gay sex scandal. But until that day comes, I will be forced to comment on the whole health care reform thingimabob. Fortunately, none of the cartoonists commenting on it understand it any more than I do, but they do sure do know one thing: poop is hilarious! MORE »

By the Comics Curmudgeon
The September 11 attacks were terrible for any number of reasons, with the exploding and the wars and the death, and so it’s obviously petty to bitch about the many terrible cartoons they spawned, with the Statue of Liberty, crying, but when it’s your JOB to think about cartoons, as it has, somewhat improbably, become mine, then this is the sort of thing you think about, sometimes, when you think about 9/11. And there were no 9/11 weeping Statue of Liberty cartoons this year, so, VICTORY, in that extremely limited sense! But there was still a bunch of other crap. MORE »