By Magic Love Hose
By the time you see this, seven strips from the newly thriving webcomics section of OsborneInk.com will have gone live. Instead of updating today, I’m going to go into where this strip came from and why it is what it is. Here is an IAQ, an Infrequently Asked Questions list:
1. Where did you come up with the idea to put a webcomic on this website?
A good question! The answer is, after seven days and seven hours and seven minutes engaged in fourth-dimensional hyper-meditation, dueling with Maxwell’s Demon armed with the enchanted six-shooters of Bill Hicks, I woke up and the drugs wore off and I went for a pee.
Then Matt Osborne contacted me. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation on the subject.
Matt: Hey, how about doing some comics?
Me: O.K.
(This is basically our entire blogging relationship.) After the train ride home from work, I’d had the ideas and basic structures of all seven initial strips in place. I spent a lot of time on a long-forgotten forum doing the most horrible, filthy comic book remixes – seriously, these things would end marriages – and so I was already skilled in the arts of image manipulation, dialogue positioning and placement, and going into the most horrid sewers of my subconscious looking for jokes.
Matt has been generous enough only to make requests about matters of format, never of content (though he’s had great ideas there too.) I have made jokes about raped babies for seven days straight now and he has not once told me I was over the line or that my political opinions are incorrect. (Matt has full permission to erase that last sentence once the police come for me and they start asking what he knew and when.)
2. What are your political cartoon influences?
I like it when there is a cartoon and there is a funny animal in it with a label on it and the animal is interacting with something that ALSO has a funny label on it, and the joke is that this thing means this other thing and it’s all a metaphor, maaaaaaan, ha ha ha ha
Just kidding, I hate those. Most political cartoons sacrifice making a joke for making a point. I am of the school that says “is it too much to ask for both?” So my three biggest influences are Doonesbury, This Modern World and Get Your War On.
I learnt long ago that when talking to non-comics readers about the worth of comics as a storytelling medium, it’s best to skip over talking about Watchmen (where a guy in purple robes and a blue nudist fight to stop nuclear war from 25 years ago) and go straight to a comic they already have seen that’s won the Pulitzer Prize, and that comic is Doonesbury. Gary Trudeau’s been raising rabble longer than I’ve been alive and he’s only ever hit a fallow period briefly (lately he has been on fire.)
This Modern World is from the “never satisfied” school of liberalism, and wears that on its sleeve. I’ve never fully been comfortable with that school, but I see the appeal — damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, answering to no one but the artist’s own conscience and observations. What I’ve taken from TMW mostly is its sense of sarcasm — Tom Tomorrow is one of a very few writers who can convey sarcasm in the written word without the slightest misinterpretation of his meaning. His comic is close to the fumetti style that Political Gunpowder has — Tom uses a lot of photoreference, and when your target is the all too real (sometimes surreal) world of politics, that lends weight to the point you’re trying to make.
Finally, there’s David Rees at Get Your War On, which from the year 2002 to 2006, kept me sane. I bet he hears that a lot. David Rees’ work conveyed, with crystal clarity, what it was like to be a lefty back in those days (brother, if you think we have it rough now) when every left winger I knew felt like a crazy man screaming at clouds about how they could not motherfucking believe this fucking shit. David sticks with clipart and chooses to let his words do all the walking, and folks, no one in the history of political cartooning has a gift for words like David Rees. He’s retired now and sharpens pencils for a living. His gain is political cartooning’s loss.
3. Why ‘Political Gunpowder?’
I came up with the name before the reason. Matt & I solicited suggestions, but ultimately nothing quite had the ring I wanted until I hit upon ‘Political Gunpowder.’ It was just one idea of many until I did a Google check to see if the name was taken.
There is no surer sign of an imperfect civilization than a passion for noise. The Fejee Islanders, whenever they had secured a particularly fat family of foreigners for one of their national feasts, used to give vent to their delight by blowing through horrible tubes the most dissonant and far-resounding notes. The Chinese invented the gong, and forthwith petrified into eternal immobility. We hope there may be a few years of progress still in store for the United States, but really we begin to entertain grave doubts on the subject. The unbridled indulgence of our people in political gunpowder is entirely inconsistent with anything like a rational advance in the arts of life.
Ah, those dashed loud people, with their passions and their loud music and their hippity-hop and their Donkey Kong. The best part, is the publication date: May 21, 1860.
It’s oddly reassuring to know that people have been upset with those bothersome rabble for as long as they’ve had the language to express themselves. I have no idea who wrote this, but I set myself in eternal opposition to them, and I shall mind the caskets of political gunpowder, keeping them dry.
Because the author is right, but not in the way he thinks. (I am 100% sure the author was a he.) There is no surer sign of an imperfect civilization than a passion for noise. That’s what the noise is there for. It tells us what’s wrong. There’s a reason you train yourself to listen to your car. There’s a reason there are town halls. The author hears what’s wrong and decides that the problem is the noise, not what the noise signifies.
I’m a quiet man in person, but give me a keyboard and my mind just unzips and all the horror falls out. I see things wrong in the world and I see more reasons to speak up than I do to keep silent. So to hell with being quiet. The other guys have loudspeakers the size of entire TV channels. We have to give as good as we got.
Load up the gunpowder. Let’s make some noise.
