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My "Rudy Park" partner and I have a cartoon in today's New York Times, in the Circuits section. Check it out if you get a chance. I don't think they've posted it on their website, so you'd have to check out the dead tree edition.
This week's Candorville series contains a typo.Corrections were sent out to newspapers, but who knows whether they got them in time. I know comics.com didn't. OK, it's not exactly a typo so much as it is bad math. Mr. Nixton, a loyal Republican character who's been in a coma since the Carter administration, wakes up to find the country a very different place. Unfortunately, instead of writing he'd been in a coma for 26 years, I said he'd been under for 36. Sometimes I wonder how I made it all the way through AP Calculus...
Ironically, it seems possible that if "freedom" and "democracy" do take root in Iraq, it may be in spite of our efforts, not because of them.
From the London Independent:
"When the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq, they expected there would be a quick handover to carefully selected allies in a secular government that would be the opposite of Iran's theocracy, and perhaps even a counterfoil to Iran's regional aspirations. It is one of the greatest ironies of the US intervention that the Iraqi people instead used their first voting opportunity to elect a government with a strong religious base, and indeed with close links to the Islamic republic on their border. The US, having destroyed the sole major secular government in the region, is now at risk of replacing it with a theocratic regime."...
...Time magazine (27 September 2004) reported before the elections on a covert CIA operation to aid candidates favoured by Washington. It reported US officials as saying that the idea was to help such candidates, but "not necessarily" to go so far as to rig the elections. In the event, the United Iraqi Alliance of mainly Shia Islamist parties won only 48 per cent of the total vote, well below their share of the population. Interestingly, Reuters (13 February) reported a few hours before the election results were officially announced that "the United Iraqi Alliance said today it had been told by Iraq's Electoral Commission that it had won around 60 per cent of the vote in the country's election". This was later confirmed by the former US chief Unscom weapons inspector in Iraq, Scott Ritter, who announced to a packed meeting in Washington state on 19 February that the United Iraqi Alliance actually gained 56 per cent of the vote, and that "an official involved in the manipulation was the source"...
...The significance of this voting manoeuvre is revealed in a Washington Post report (14 February): "A senior State Department official said yesterday that the 48 per cent vote won by the Shia slate deprives it of an outright majority. 'If it had been higher, the slate would be seen with a lot more trepidation'."
There is already evidence of a strong movement in southern Iraq to establish autonomous Shia provinces as a precursor to introducing clerical rule in the whole country.These militias would be comprised of members of Saddam Hussein's (some would say Fascist) Baath Party.
To forestall a clerical-driven religious regime, Washington has a plan in reserve, according to Asia Times (15 February), to arm small militias backed by US troops.
So it's come to this...
I'm writing a letter to a friend in cursive right now, and I realize, it's been at least five years since I've written anything longer than my signature in cursive, by hand (and now that I think of it, my signature's degraded into a barely legible scribble that looks more like "Oin Zel" than "Darrin Bell"). I send dozens of e-mails per day, post in here and on other discussion forums nearly every day. I type over 60 words per minute.
But I've lost the ability to write in cursive without nearly having a nervous breakdown. In college, I could write longform as fast as I could type. I could make it through a whole day of final exams, filling up to four entire bluebooks without a sweat. After 5 years off, though, I'm finding it's all alien to me. It looks like a seventh grader's handwriting. I can't keep the @#$% lines straight. Keeping the pen pressed against the paper to make tight little turns and scribbles is excruciatingly mind-numbing. It's so @#$% slow compared to a keyboard. I can't remember how to write an upper case "J". I have a nearly irresistible urge to lift my pen from the paper after every letter, and IT'S DRIVING ME INSANE.
It's so frustrating, I wish I could hit delete and just start over in print instead of cursive. I've come to realize in the last few minutes that I may have discovered the only humane means of torture. Make a person either type or write in all-uppercase print for five years, then make him write three paragraphs in cursive. He'll tell you anything you want to know after the first paragraph.
I just had to release all the pent-up energy by typing this post. Now, back to the torture...
If you'd like to be notified when the Candorville book is released, or if you'd like to hear about appearances and other Candorville-related news or chat with other Candorville readers, you can sign up for the newsletter. You can choose to have it e-mailed to you or you can instead visit it on the Web whenever you'd like. All you have to do is send a blank e-mail to candorville-subscribe@googlegroups.com
Join Washington Post Comics page editor Suzanne Tobin online once each month to discuss the comics pages. From artists to writers to editors, Tobin is joined by a different guest for each show. This week, Tobin will be joined by cartoonist Darrin Bell to discuss his cartoon, Candorville.
Join Tobin and Bell online on Friday, Feb. 25, at 1 p.m. ET (10 a.m. PT) to discuss the art of cartooning.
I'll be manning the National Cartoonist's Society booth at Wondercon this Saturday from 1-2pm, where I'll be hawking Rudy Park books and reviewing portfolios. If you'd like signed copies of the two Rudy Park books, Peace, Love & Lattes and The People Must Be Wired, please stop by. Also stop by if you're an aspiring cartoonist who's looking for candid feedback about your work (make sure you actually bring the work with you - I don't want to see you pantomiming your comic strip. Well actually, I do - that would be cool). Or if you just want to meet me or other cartoonists, Wondercon's a great place to do it.
Too bad the first Candorville book won't be out unti September or October (sigh)...
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