Scum [Back] On Top: Resurrection

 It's definitely not the resurrection we need, and I regret to inform you that recent events sort of necessitate returning to something I hoped would stay in the past.

"Scum [Back] On Top"

Toiling In Obscurity

Now that I'm 60, I assume I've earned the right to complain about a few things. For instance, unless whoever is in charge of the UFOs means to save us from ourselves, all of this could be an odd cosmic accident in which a planet teeming with life had one species somehow get lucky, populate the hell out of it, take it over, and finally ruin it, killing themselves after killing off everything that was not themselves. (That is a complaint about -- among other things -- global warming due to our industrialized overkill, as the planet Venus is our ultimate but rapidly approaching fate.)

Or I could engage in more stereotypically crabby behavior befitting the elderly and mention my surprise (over the past decade) to learn that people in their twenties and thirties know everything there is to know about everything. (So, I'm sure they know that a tendency to "telescope" language -- FWIW, LOL! -- was some of what Eric Blair was talking about in his mid-twentieth-century warnings about totalitarianism. The idea is that debasing language of meaningful content can help to limit anyone's capacity for more than superficial thinking. You could look that up in books if you can still find a "library" with these "books" things.) But we all think we know it all in our twenties and thirties, and since I've hardly been able to stand the political realities of the past few years, I can only imagine how awful they must seem to young people.

I should note that I've not been completely idle in addressing a few of those painful realities, and this toiling in obscurity can be a pain in the ass. But while I'm not a good salesman, you inevitably want some regard for what you're trying to do. So I will give a little background on the "Thus Spake Steve Bannon" cartoons I started over a year ago -- to indicate some of what I've been doing the past twenty years or so -- to what effect, who knows?

 

1) An original inspiration for "Thus Spake Steve Bannon" came from comments made by Nigel Farage at a political gathering in Louisiana, at which he introduced Bannon as a kind of intellectual savio(u)r of the West. (That would be silly enough without someone from the United Kingdom expressing it in so incongruous a setting; did Farage win a free gun?) I also read that Bannon had an affinity for certain ideas of Lenin and a quirk of reading a passage from one book and then reading another from a different book. So, I called him a "bibliomancer." I carried over the "cyborg" aspect from depicting Dick Cheney as one in "Is The Dow Rising?" (with a cast iron stove seeming funny and more "rustic" – i.e., Bannon wants "Country" [white] folks to know him as one of their own). I wanted him to be a fan of GWF Hegel and surrounded by images of various Rightist and Fascist theorists, like Heinrich von Treitschke, Giovanni Gentile, and Carl Schmitt.

2) Having a regular job and other aspects of life to deal with, it takes a lot of work to make cartoons using only Microsoft Paint. For instance, in "Is The Dow Rising?" I did six panels per episode (the better to tell a story) and had to stop sooner than expected because the Bush Administration ended before I could go on. So when I started "Scum On Top," I initially went with three panels, then found that was still too ambitious; I wound up limiting the episodes to 1-2 panels each.* With "Thus Spake Steve Bannon," I thought to cut the workload even more by having cyborg Steve in a standard illustration without much background variation, appearing as a pompous soothsayer shelling out tidings of woe worse than any Fox News broadcast.

*(I worked doggedly week after week, month after month, during the Trumprussian regime. [Religious themes became increasingly prominent as the series wound down.] The biggest problem with the work is current events constantly outpacing planned drawings and episodes. When I kicked off "Thus Spake Steve Bannon," I felt immediately obligated to address another round of gun massacres along with the US Supreme Court striking down Roe v. Wade.)

3) The title is in homage to early English translators of Fred Nietzsche's work, Also Sprach Zarathustra: they took it so seriously as the work of a prophet that they felt the need to present it in the language of the King James Bible. The introductory exposition under the title is in homage both to Superman and to Marvel Comics of the 1970s, the latter having (at the top of the splash page) a brief presentation of the origins or raisons d'etre of character(s) starring in the comic book. (A representative sample: "Five hundred years ago he was killed...but he did not die. Today, Quincy Harker, Frank Drake, Rachel Van Helsing, and Blade, the Vampire Slayer -- stalk him...as this unliving Lord of Vampires spreads his reign of terror across a twentieth century world." from Tomb Of Dracula, Vol. 1, No. 61, November 1977.) And Bannon's dialogue in Part One is from "The Phantom Of The Opera" (1925).

4) I don't know how much more I will do with it, if any. At this point, I'm just getting rid of drawings I've had a while.