Animation: Driving Misters Koch

This week's animated editorial column on Mother Jones, featuring Boehner and the Brothers Koch.

Here's a link to the cartoon on Mother Jones

Written, animated and acted by me.

Pianist Rudolf Buchbinder for the Wall Street Journal

I do a lot of portraits for the WSJ, sometimes painted, sometimes woodcut. Sometimes they're on a very fast deadline and sometimes I have the luxury of a day or two to do them. I did this one last week, I think it was a really fast turn-around; I also did one of Randi Weingarten, president of the UFT, but I like doing the woodcutty ones best: there's more freedom in working that way.

Animation: Taliban Newt

This week's animated editorial on Mother Jones, featuring Mullah Newt delivering god's will...

Link to the animation on Mother Jones

Newt's been in the news lately with his explaining away his various adulteries and dalliances with a tale of overheated passion for politics (this from the pol who directs us to trudge the Right and True Path of Righteous Family Values).

It's also lately come to light that he secretly funneled $350,000 to anti-gay hate groups in Iowa.

There are a lot of parallels between the Taliban and the extreme right in the US. They both use religion and "god's word" (as only they can interpret it of course) to justify political and cultural atrocities. They want to remove women's rights, they want to impose their religion on our country and make everybody behave accordingly (except for they themselves, of course), they're anti-education, anti-intellectual, virulently anti-gay, anti-human rights...in other words, they're pretty much indistinguishable from the taliban. 

Meet the Mullah.

Written, animated and acted by me. Sound effects from www.freesound.org

Animation: Boehner the Riveter

Here’s this week’s animation featuring John Boehner in a spin on Norman Rockwell’s famous Rosie the Riveter cover.

I've decided to use flat colors for the animations instead of the woodcutty textured look I've been using up till now. Last week I used flat color to do the Huckabee stained glass animation, and it looked way better at the low resolution that Mother Jones displays my cartoons, so I tried it again this week in the Boehner the Riveter art and it looks better too, so I'm gonna continue with the new approach.

Now what I want to do is try to get a way to fine tune the voice over so it's more natural sounding; when I use the Vocal Transformer control in GarageBand to change my voice from female to male, it comes out a little too distorted. I'd love to hear any suggestions about how to do that.

Here's a link to the cartoon on Mother Jones

Written, animated and acted by me.

Arianna in a Rush

I teach a class with Nancy Stahl on Tuesday evenings from 5 to 10 pm. Last Tuesday I got a call in class from Barry at about 8 pm that I’d gotten an email from The New Republic at 5:30 about doing a rush portrait of Arianna Huffington, due in 2 or 3 hours. I don’t know why the email didn’t come in on my cell phone, but I right away emailed them that I could do the sketches by 10 and the final by midnight.


I was sorta figuring that they’d say they’d already assigned it to someone else, but they took me up on it. So I ran out of class (thanks, Nancy!) and rushed home to get to work. The article was not flattering, so I got the chance to do a snarky portrait of her, which pleased me lots: I’m not a Huffington fan. So here she is, a rush job that had me sweating last Tuesday night.

Here's a link to the article in The New Republic

Huckabee's Sermon

New on Mother Jones, American "Exceptionalism", Huckabee-style .

Click here to see it on Mother Jones

Written, animated and acted by me.

Here are some related links about Huckabee

On Evolution

On Equal Rights

On his Christian Nation

On the Steve Malzberg Show

Attack of the Kochtopus Animation

The more I learn about the Koch brothers, the more convinced I am that they just might be the most dangerous people in the world. 

Link to cartoon on Mother Jones

Written, animated and acted by me.

In order to be timely, I do these animations over the weekend and send them in to Mother Jones on Monday. It's extremely time-consuming doing this animation stuff. It's more than extremely, it's insanely time-consuming: making the slightest change anywhere in the cartoon means going back and shifting and adjusting everything, including the sound. There's probably a faster, more elegant way to do it, but I don't know how ... yet.


Then I started thinking the teeth were too crazy on the Kochs; too distracting and bizarre. I dunno, when I was reading about them I just kept getting madder and madder, if I could have I would have put suture scars and frankenstein bolts in their necks...but no necks! So I stuck the crazy teeth on them.


Anyway, I guess this is me saying that I wish I'd had more time to work on it: I see a million things wrong with it. But there's no looking back, it's on the web and over and done, so now I have to start thinking about next week's.