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STROLLING DOWN THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY
The Internet is like a cartoon. By and large, it is facile and
frivolous, displays a solipsistic irrelevancy approaching intellectual
onanism, and contributes approximately as much to the collective
life of the human mind as reality TV. Indeed, this willful triviality
seems to account for much of the appeal. Yet, as many an intrepid
advocate of free speech has discovered, the relative anonymity and
distance afforded those who work in these supposedly innocuous
mediums ultimately provides license to say or do what might other
wise be imprudent. As evidenced by the fracas slow-burning across
a disturbingly wide swath of the globe in past weeks, the exercise
of this latitude is liable to incite
the utterly humorless to acts that
any modicum of horse sense (or
any reasonably understood religious
doctrine) would deem far worse—
including pillage, murder and the
immolation the KFC Colonel. So
rather than cower in the shadow
of "sensitivity," bask in the lurid
glow of the following examples of
precisely what is possible when two
unfettered mediums marry.
Not surprisingly, the offending
set of Danish editorial drawings
that spawned the aforementioned
firestorm have made themselves
easily accessible. For those without
fear, a moment's gaze upon these frankly lukewarm little scribbles
at www.faithfreedom.org/Gallery/Mo_Cartoons.jpg should suf
fice to confuse most rational sapiens. However, these tactless
Danes are not alone in flouting the convention of not picturing the
prophet. Responding to the clarion call (and promised publicity),
"That Darn Chauncey," one of the web's most popular and consis
tently clever comics, adapted its minimalist form to depict a stick
figure named "That Wacky Muhammad" and his sidekick "Frank,
The Magical Talking Fox." While Chauncey has since returned to
the center of his eponymous cartoon, the momentary aberration
remains in the vast archives (just stroll backwards a few clips) at
www.stupidchildren.com, alongside an impressive collection of
news articles about stupid children.
Yet, lest one imagine the "enlightened" west impervious to the
scourge of overzealous cartoonish anger, recall a handful of years
ago when a president with an all too familiar surname decried the
moral degradation bred by America's favorite cartoon family: The
Simpsons. Despite the pious presidential caviling, the show has
gone on to earn the mantle of longest running sitcom and spawned
a rabidly devoted fanbase so broad that it is arguably more demo
cratic than that of the Shrub who
rebuked it. Ground zero for this
group of people, or anyone for
that matter who'd like to parse the
Sargasso Sea of references, tertiary
characters and increasingly con
voluted plotlines, is the Simpsons
Archive at www.snpp.com. The site
houses obsessive catalogues orga
nized by episode (even those yet
to be aired) and character, an enor
mous collection of interviews and
academic papers, and a regularly
updated news section.
Recently, a Greek court sen
tenced an Austrian cartoonist to
jail over his book The Life of Jesus
in which Jesus appears as a stoned-out surfer who cavorts with Jimi
Hendrix and has a penchant for hippie-dancing in the buff. Free-
art advocacy group Art Liberated has published one of the more
infamous images from the tome, a refiguring of "The Last Supper"
as a hookah circle, at www.artliberated.org/?p-cases&id«35. One
could be forgiven for failing to suss out precisely what moral power
informs these sanctimonious posturings, but a prime candidate,
particularly in this land of the free, is "Republican Jesus." A product
of the fevered imagination of award-winning blog satirist Gen. J.C.
Christian, Republican Jesus consists of a static single frame of the
savior in full business regalia, replete with blood-red power tie,
magnanimously bridging the numerous apparent chasms between
the diesel, cutthroat, gun-rack faith of the modern suburbs and
that of the good book. Scroll down the backlog at http://patriot-
boy.blogspot.com/2003_04_27_patriotboy_archive.html for the full
congregation, but, make certain to peruse the knife-wielding, heady
lampoonery on the rest of the site.
In truth, artists have used cartoons to strum the bounds of
social comfort for quite some time, as the collection of ancient
sexual art (including an early Christian phallic cross and flying
penises galore) at www.apollon1us.net/erotica.html attests. More
recent, more prudish ages induced the inquisitive and adventurous
to sketch out what it might look like if Wimpy cuckolded Popeye
in works known as "Tijuana Bibles," a large selection of which can
be found at www.t1juanabibies.org. The bibles contained both
famous and one-off caricatures in a kaleidoscopic variety of por
nographic adventures. Most were published in the United States
before and during the Great Depression. While playing footsie with
the limns of acceptability clearly still chafes those with too much
starch in the collar, many artists have found the union of the web
and the caricature the finest avenue for fingering the sore spots
in free speech. Ghastly of "Ghastly's Ghastly Comic" (subtitled
"tentacle monsters and the women who love them") lays a digit
on a hidden pulse by spoofing the idiosyncrasies of hentai, a form
of Japanese pornographic cartooning that has become rampantly
popular on-line (find these on your own if so inclined, this writer
is not an indiscriminate smutpeddler). His work at www.ghast-
lycomic.com, generally set in a bar named the Spanked Monkey,
features the aforementioned lascivious monstrosities alongside a
generous cast of sexually confused characters and three flavors
of Jesus: Drunk and Bitter, the ever-popular Aryan, and AK-toting
Jihad. In a less extrapolated (though no less cartoonish) imitation
of life, www.questionablecontent.net, quite possibly the finest
regular strip on-line, depicts twenty-somethings jawing, as they
are wont to do, with all of the messy, offensive reality of life at
the fore. While most would be hard-pressed to pull out snarky one-
liners with the clockwork regularity of these drawings, the underly
ing principle is universal: disagreeing is fine, but we should fight
to the death for the promise of the blank speech bubble—long and
sensitive toes be damned.
Brandon Waddell
Exercise your freedom of links and mail them to outthere@
flagpole.com with" A Million Monkeys" in the subject line.
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