By the Comics Curmudgeon
I will not lie to you: Sometimes political cartoons can be confusing! Especially for you, the unwashed masses, who never got any proper art education in school because your elected officials decided that Americans needed to know more about “science” and “math” and a bunch of poindextery stuff like that. Fortunately, your Wonkette provides to you, free of charge, explanations of some of the more obscure cartoons, straight from the typing fingers of the world’s only professional cartoon explainer. Join us after the jump, and prepare to be AMAZED AND ENLIGHTENED! MORE »

By the Comics Curmudgeon
If there is one thing guaranteed to enrage America’s arbiter of good taste, it is making any kind of snide remark about Ted Kennedy when he is ill or, in the current case, dead. Naturally, this rule has been flouted relentlessly for the past two days by the crassest, most awful people in the world, which is to say political cartoonists. Who are these heartless monsters, and why do they try so very hard to ruin our national conversation about how much we love Ted Kennedy? MORE »

By the Comics Curmudgeon
It has come to our attention here at Cartoon Violence that many of you do not understand the difficult-to-understand details of the multiple mutually contradictory Obamacare plans currently weaving their way through the opaque, byzantine legislative process! This makes it more likely that you’ll fall for one of the terrible lies about health care reform that your aunt is sending you from her AOL address. In response, we have presented the only thing more convincing than an email that has been forwarded multiple times, with all the header information retained, and that’s a series of goofy cartoons! Once you read these and understand the truth, you are to call the CIA and have your aunt shipped to Bagram, at once. MORE »

By the Comics Curmudgeon
It’s absolutely true that politicians are, by and large, hideously ugly. So, if you’re going to get into the political cartooning game, you’re going to have to learn to enjoy inking the minute details of the sagging face-flesh, the terrible combovers, the faces ravaged by decades-old acne scars, the paunches ill-contained by aspirationally sized pants. Yet once cartoonists go down this road, they might find themselves actually enjoying it, like a professional dominatrix who got into the biz for money and finds herself unable to put down the whip in her off hours. (This sometimes happens! I saw it in, uh, a movie.) Anyway, drawing Karl Rove’s second chin no longer has any appeal for these depraved freak-loving artists! In this week’s Cartoon Violence, you’ll see what lies at the end of this very dark path. MORE »

By the Comics Curmudgeon
People, have you seen the famous terrible violent movie this summer, where the Batman is yelling angrily at the robots who became sentient and killed us all? And then also the other similarly terrible movies about the robots that are also cars, and also self-aware? Well, what if something like that were to happen, except instead of awesome robot cars, they were POLITICAL CARTOONS? Obviously, it would be significantly less terrifying and box-office-tastic, and it would look a little something like THIS. MORE »

By the Comics Curmudgeon
There is a certain class of American who cares nothing about the tales of economic carnage that fill our newspapers day after day. I’m talking, of course, about editorial cartoonists, whose jobs are basically guaranteed, and whose pay makes possible a lifestyle that makes AIG vice presidents look like starving hobos eating dirt under a rusty, leaky bridge. Of course, these princes of the pen also have the best health insurance, with fresh kidneys and livers delivered twice weekly to keep their insides smelling fresh. Nevertheless, as part of their job, they must pay attention to the day-to-day problems suffered by you, the “little people,” and have noticed that maybe things are not quite so rosy further down the socioeconomic ladder! MORE »

Look, our old friend Josh Fruhlinger has written a thing for “legitimate publication” Newsweek! It is a close reading of a zit ad of some sort, maybe? Click the clicky, comment generously, buy everything advertised everywhere on the site, and maybe he will write more things about zits. At the very least, he may be able to buy his wife and cat back from the pawn shop. [The Human Condition]

By the Comics Curmudgeon
Oh, the noble pig! This beast is the cleverest and friendliest of your barnyard animals — seriously, have you ever looked into the dim, soulless eyes of a cow or a chicken? — and is delicious when transformed into a whole panoply of meat products. Yet whenever it gets used in a cartoon, it denotes something bad! Why are America’s political cartoonists racist against pigs? MORE »

By the Comics Curmudgeon
Many differences of opinion mark the divide between real Americans and the sort of decadent, elitist sex-crazed weirdos who read this site. Perhaps one of the easiest ways to tell which category you fall into is to examine your attitude towards the Foreigns and sex perverts. Do you believe that America is a bastion of virtue and everything outside its borders is a giant orgy? Or do you believe that foreigners have a healthy attitude towards sexuality, and that it’s Americans who are all twisted up inside when it comes to sexual matters? As is so often the case in these disagreements, each side is right: both foreigners and Americans are filthy perverts. But only Americans are also furries. MORE »

By the Comics Curmudgeon
Readers, your Comics Curmudgeon apologizes for missing last week’s column, but you were all probably using alcohol, smoked meat products, and dangerous explosives to mask your self-loathing and economic despair and weren’t watching the Interhoo anyway, were you? You probably didn’t even notice that I was gone, after all I do for you, week after week … [quiet sobbing] … where was I? Oh, right, last week. Anyway, Sarah Palin quit and Michael Jackson died or whatever, so obviously this week’s Cartoon Violence is all about sex perversions involving moose and little people. MORE »

By the Comics Curmudgeon
Hey, everybody, did you hear about the Health Care? Health Care is a very important issue facing us all today, and Obama has promised to Do Something about the Health Care? There is one slight problem with this: Health Care is very, very complicated, and any configuration of it is pretty much terrifying, so nobody really understands what the deal is with the proposed Health Care Reforms (or, really, what the deal is with the current un-Reformed Health Care that we have now). How, then, are America’s great communicators, the political cartoonists, supposed to explain Health Care to you, the mouth-breathing masses? Well, if the following cartoons are any indication, they will do so with murder, hideous mutants, and anal sex. OH MY GOD IS THIS WHAT WONKETTE HAS DONE TO AMERICAN DISCOURSE? DAVID DENBY WAS RIGHT! MORE »