Light a candle...
The Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi is the Mr. T of the banking crisis. Here’s a bit from a recent blog piece he did on one judge who is calling out regulators for handing out pathetic fines to banks that played a significant role in the recent meltdown: Imagine a car thief who, when caught driving a stolen Lexus, tells the police he simply stepped into the wrong car and drove off by mistake.
Prosecutions of financial criminals continue to plummet
Coming out of the dot-com bubble, the United States prosecuted a lot of people. I have no idea how many of them were related to the bubble and I have no idea if it was nearly so many as deserved to be in cuffsl, but a recent report shows that in the first couple years of his term, Bush, Jr. prosecuted some 3,000 potential financial criminals across the country.
Philadelphia Zine Fest Funnies
While I was hanging out at the Philadelphia Zine Fest this weekend, I drew some little simple comics. This first one is about the guys who are really awkward and don’t get when their conversation with a creator has ended. This happens, in particular, between fans and creators who have met before. I’ve watched this one a million times, but I watched it twice in a row in the morning at Zine Fest.
Ezra Sees Esther
Esther looked at herself in her bathroom mirror. She only had her panties on so far. She looked at the way her mouth always seemed to have a bit of a frown to it, even if she smiled. She spread a make-up base over her face to cover up the damage from her acne years. Then she put on her eye-shadow, sensing Ezra leaning in her doorway and watching her. She put on a light shade of brown over her whole eyelid, and a darker shade along the lower edge.
Some graphs about inequality
I got interested in what folks were saying about income inequality in the U.S., and found some interesting stuff. First of all, an economist named Dan Ariely has found that no one perceives income inequality accurately. The following graph (from the post link), shows how much of the total income in the US is controlled by each quintile of earners. The width of the color band represents the proportion. So the top band is how it really is and the subsequent bands are how the different groups designated perceive it.
6 longform webcomics that keep me reading (plus some bonus ones you already know about)
Here’s the problem with long-form webcomics (narrative comics, story comics, whatever you want to call them) — if the creator is any good at all there will be enough going on in the story by the time you find it that picking them up will be frustrating. You’ll want to go back and read a bunch of the old comics in order to figure out what’s going on. But who has time?
The Robber Barons, by Matthew Josephson
] I’ve been reading this book, The Robber Barons, for like… a year. No joke. Long time. Finally finished it. It’s about the turn of the century masters of money who were willing to basically crush anyone to accumulate more and more. Things you learn from the book: the robber barons were boring, dull people. They were cheap. They didn’t much appreciate culture. They were all idiosyncratic. They didn’t much like each other, either.
7 alt-funny comix
Humor is no joke to me. Seriously, I love it. In my opinion, the essence of humor is surprise, and since there is nothing new under the sun, it gets harder and harder to surprise an audience anymore. We have heard all the jokes before right? All jokes are oldies but goodies. Maybe so, maybe so, but I think these seven comics are pushing humor in new directions: Tim Lahan’s Today or Tomorrow
Ryan Eckes Found Poem
I went to a slam writing show and it was opened by a poet named Ryan Eckes. He presented this awesome found poem that is now also up on his poetry blog. I want lots of people to see this. He opened up a copy of The Bhagavad Gita and found a notecard with some instructions to a CVS employee on it. He read the text of the book and the instructions side by side, as he had found them, and realized he had a pretty great found poem.
Umm, I thought I already brought the shit. No?
Jesse Moynihan is bringing the shit. Jesse was a Philadelphia cartoonist for quite a while. Now I think he’s living in LA. I am sure he has a perfectly good reason for moving to the wrong coast, but I can never really support anyone heading in that direction. Go East, young man, I say. He’s making some awesome comics out there, despite the Wrong Coastishness. I’ve stolen a bit from page 16 of a comic that’s already up to 75 pages (all the links in this post, tho, go to the first page of the comic).