Taking a Swipe at the Culture Wars!

Proving once again I utterly lack the subtle touch for editorial cartooning of my social betters (although the threshold has been lowered in recently decades), I offer my half-baked commentary on a current controversy in comics. Namely, should we kick the crap out of bigots, or ask for their autographs at cons?

Clarissa socks a White (and presumably) Nationalist penciller as Megaton Man, X-Ray Boy, and Gower Goose ponder the impact a pencil sketch will have on our civic discourse. ™ and © Don Simpson 2018, all rights reserved.

[More on the above drawing here!]

In case you don't recognize the inspiration, it's from an image by a couple of Jewish guys (who can never be replaced), punching the schnozz out of Der Führer (dictators seem to love flowing ties, don't they?!). Maybe the idea would be clearer if I caricatured more Neanderthal comic book creators calling for Whites-Only entertainment, or included more Nazis (is there a distinction?). But I'm too lazy, although I reserve the right to add more Nazis if and when I bother to ink this (you can never show enough Nazis getting beaten up).

Simon and Kirby beat up Hitler before Pearl Harbor, a reminder that cartoons can't always prevent actual war.

Here's another page from the sketchbook. Sorry these are only roughs -- I'm supposed to be grading art history papers this weekend (exploited adjunct is my secret identity when I'm not being a Social Justice Warrior), so two full sketchbook pages is really playing hooky.

Congratulations! If you clicked on this blog, you're not a racist! (If I had posted this same image on the Megaton Man blog, it would get three times as many hits -- sadly, this is no lie.)

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For more on the Culture Wars and Comics!

An all-new YA prose novel - new chapter every week: The Ms. Megaton Man Maxi-Series!

Sketchy Swipebook: Clarissa Studies!

Some recent sketches of Clarissa James, a.k.a Ms. Megaton Man, apropos of nothing at all (except the first one, which was inspired by a selfie by Paul Fricke who was holding up his well-read copy of Amazing Fantasy #15, to mark the passing of comics legend Steve Ditko) ...

Update October 6, 2018: Photoshop coloring over the original pencil sketch.

Clarissa hauls Preston Percy over the skyline!

Clarissa in pencil and Sharpie (non-permanent) Pen.

Clarissa in pencil - blue and graphite.

Felicia in a warm-up drawing.

Sandball Goddess: Some Art Historical Swiping

Just to show that I'm not always swiping from my old sketchbooks, here I am swiping from art history. In fact, when I taught a class in art history last fall at Carlow University, I realized that the work I was swiping (a sculpture from a niche at CMU) was actually a swipe of a specific figure from a famous temple in India:

Erotic figures, Kandariya Mahadeva Temple, Khajuraho, Madhya Pradesh, India, c. 1000 CE. Chandella dynasty.

Scribe figure, Fine Arts Building, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh (my photograph).

Clarissa in beach volleyball attire, sketchbook drawing, c. 2010.

What is interesting is that the first figure appears to be grinding makeup, while the CMU adaptation has the same figure doing something more scholarly, presumably writing on a notepad or book of some sort. I'm not sure what Clarissa is doing; perhaps jotting down a play for competition. I'd like to do a complete comic book someday that is nothing but swipes from various art historical sources, and let readers guess where each is from.