Corporate raiders

From the Telegraph, of all places. (Click to enlarge.)

Truthy

(By gaping void)

Artillery

Taken out of context, with no knowledge of the artist or his/her intentions, is this cartoon an attack on Islam? Or on terrorism – implying that terrorism is a betrayal of Islamic principles? Or on art? And if we do interpret it as anti-Islamic, where do we place it on a theoretical continuum of offensiveness, with Koran-burning at one end and maybe this

at the other?

Name that toon

This made me chuckle:


And Everett reminded me of this:

Footprint

The things you find when you self-Google... The Footman was apparently created in the early 70s as a curmudgeonly counterpart to the horribly ubiquitous Smiley. You know the rest of the story: Smiley became associated with everything from acid house to Nirvana to e-mail, while the rival went Betamax.

Obviously the world would have been a far better place had the Footman, with his cynical, pessimistic demeanour, achieved cultural supremacy. But would he have ended up in Watchmen?

Nazi punks fox off

Something to cheer you up on what, for many of us, is a rather glum day. I think it’s a parable about the joys of a multi-racial, pan-cultural, mongrel society, and how silly it is to be scared of difference. Or maybe not. Whatever, it’s bloody *F*O*R*E*I*G*N*, which should be enough to annoy those people who deserve to be annoyed:

Terrible grunt

(from xkcd.com)

Monkey* gone to heaven

I don’t know whether the above cartoon, published in the New York Post earlier this week to much brouhaha, was intended to be racist. As Gawker has pointed out, the artist, Sean Delonas, doesn’t appear to be a particularly sophisticated political thinker, but his peculiar obsession would seem to be homosexuality rather than race.

As with the Danish cartoons controversy (see here and here for previous rumblings), I think the aspect that everyone’s overlooked is that Delonas’s cartoon is completely crap, a far greater crime on my charge sheet than any perceived sociopolitical insensitivity.

He does, however, follow in a glorious tradition of bad, reactionary cartoonists. I have particularly fond childhood memories of leafing through my grandparents’ copies of the Daily Express and enjoying the foam-flecked daubs of the veteran Cummings. Here are a couple of his gems, that make Delonas look like a woolly liberal:





*Although, as the deliciously preposterous Al Sharpton failed to acknowledge, chimpanzees aren’t monkeys.

PS: And, if you really want to see people living up to derogatory ethnic stereotypes, here’s an Irish joke to beat them all.