(1) A number of you have alerted me to the latest Michael de Adder cartoon which is flying around the Magic Electric Internet. Yes, it looks strangely familiar. Oh yes. That's right. I did it, 18 years ago!

(2) Ya know, I’m willing to chalk this one up to “one of those things.” I don't know de Adder. I like his work. But if a cartoon is going to go viral (again), let’s give credit where its due.

(3) My “Dubya’s Inner Circle” cartoon was one of most well- known. I was roughly 50 papers, all alt-weeklies, of course, including all the biggest ones, the Village Voice, the Chicago Reader etc. This cartoon, too, flew around the Magic Electric Internet, such as it was in 2002.

(4) It’s also one of my most controversial cartoons. I got threats. It cost me FOUR client papers, who dumped the strip to appease the flag-waving rabble.

(5) After 9-11 and the build up to the disastrous Iraq Invasion, media in this country ALL fell into line behind the Bush-Cheney Regime, forsaking altogether their watchdog role. And in 2002. Holy Shit. were we in need of watchdogs.

(6) Big Media Inc. was now all owned by Corporate America. The courage that the news media displayed during the Vietnam War was all but gone. Big Media Inc. surveyed the situation and, with only a few exceptions, decided it simply wasn’t profitable to be seen as “unpatriotic.”

(7) So they bought it all, hook like and sinker. There were weapons of mass destruction, Saddam was in cahoots with Al Qaeda, he had helped with 9-11, when we freed Iraq we would “be greeted as liberators,” blah blah blah. The whole Neocon load of bullshit.

(8) Unfortunately, the alt-press, which was also becoming increasingly corporate as alt-chains (yes, there were such things) bought up scrappy locally-owned papers, and they, too, issued the same editorial orders. The exception were a few writers and cartoonists.

(9) The following tales were recounted in “Killed Cartoons,” by David Wallis (Norton, 2007), a book about the most egregious acts of muzzling cartoonists.

(10) There was a feisty little weekly in, of all places, Shreveport, Louisiana. You’re not going to fins a redder part of the country. This is Klan Kountry! But they had an alt-weekly owned and run by a local couple.

(11) It was a great, fun little paper, and it ran my strip, along with a few others. The owner couple really liked my stuff and delighted in pissing off the local rightwing stormtroopers.

(12) This was no joke, of course, especially after 9-11 when the Culture Wars first went into hyperdrive. They got threats, advertiser boycotts, bundles of papers gathered up and destroyed, the whole fascist bag of tricks.

(13) Much the same climate we're facing now, but before rightwing trolls weaponized the internet.

(14) At the beginning of 2002, the couple gave up and sold the paper to the Shreveport daily, a paper owned by Gannett Inc., the worst of the worst as far as media chains go. Gannett loves buying up every publication in a town: weeklies, shoppers, auto-traders, everything.

(15) The weekly was now put together in the feature department of the daily paper by the editor of that section, some overworked, underpaid drone who, let’s face it, was probably not a top-shelf newspaperwoman.

(16) She emails, informing me the Inner Circle cartoon is the last straw and that my strip is hereby dumped. What’s more, she writes: “I’ve had it with answering complaints about these comic strips, so we’re getting rid of them ALL!”

Just to be on the safe side!

(17) THAT perfectly sums up corporate newspapers in 2002. They've never recovered. Big media is even WORSE now! Its subservient role in installing Mad King Cheeto into power, for example.

(18) I was already backing out of newspaper comics in 2002, and indeed had just published my first long-form work earlier that year. This episode was confirmation I made the right decision.

(19) If you want to pinpoint the moment political cartooning died as an art form, it would be 9-11 and its aftermath, as the dozens of identical political cartoons depicting Lady Liberty weeping into her hands depressingly demonstrates.

(20) THAT was corporately appropriate cartoon commentary after 9-11, not depicting our leaders with their heads up their asses.

(21) Nothing against de Adder, whose work is excellent, as I wrote at the beginning of this thread, but my original is better.