Carl Barks was born on March 27th, 1901. So, today is his 118th birthday. If you have no idea who I’m even talking about, then you were never a kid and a comic book fan in the 1960s. Carl Barks is both Uncle Scrooge’s father and Donald Duck’s stepfather.
Carl is a personal art hero of mine. I grew to adulthood on the adventures of his plucky ducks doing duck adventures in Duckburg. I have written about my devotion to Carl in this blog before. In fact, here is the link; https://catchafallingstarbook.net/2014/09/27/carl-barks-master-of-the-duck-comic/
That’s essentially true. A large part of my character as a junior high school English teacher was based on what I learned about mentoring from Scrooge McDuck and about teaching important facts from Gyro Gearloose.
Carl was not immune to criticism. Cartoonists get blow-back, a fact of life. But he overcame it with a wry sense of humor and interesting views of how you pursue goals in life. He had a firm sense of fair-play and justice. You could get actual morals to the stories in a Carl Barks’ duck cartoon.
The characters were not perfect. They all had glaring flaws, the heroes right along with the villains. Of course, the villains never learned to change their ways, while the heroes often learned to improve themselves by working on the weaknesses, and it wasn’t all about becoming a gazillionaire (a term I think Barks may have invented).
I even learned a good deal about adventure story-telling from Carl Barks’ comic books about Duck people doing ducky stuff that was really about people doing people-y stuff in the real world. Yes, people in the world around me are very Carl Barks’ ducky.
So, happy birthday, Carl. 118 years young. And he’s only been gone from our world since August of 2000. He still talks to me and teaches me through his Duck comics.
You may not be able to rescue other people’s minds from being stupid. But what you can do and be artful about is… make them laugh.
The Bitter Black Hearts of the GOP
Yes, this is another pitiful attempt by Mickey to be a political cartoonist fighting the good fight by slaying the bad guys with really weak and awful satire. But I can’t help it. Just as Popeye had a powerful urge to sock goons in the puss with his spinach-fueled twister-sock, I have to throw some derfy toonage at the vile and heartless members of the GOP (Greedy Old Perpetrators).
After all, they are easy to make fun of. Republican job applications all start with the question, “Which cartoon Dick Tracy villain or comic book Batman villain are you most like?”
They do things like organizing an Oversight Committee for the sole purpose of spending millions of dollars to point fingers at Hillary and shout the name of a North-African town where diplomats died basically because of budget cuts to security ( a Republican budget) and shout it loudly until people begin to think Hillary must have had something to do with it because men with heads shaped like sports equipment are shouting it so much.
And Republicans are able to do this stuff because they know how to win elections and control the government.
Basically what I am saying is that Republicans cheat. They get to rule even though they generate fewer votes in the country.
And what do they do with that power once they have it in their tiny, tiny hands? They use it to make more money. The rise of the billionaire class in the last thirty years is evidence that they are insanely good at it. Do they use that money and power to help their neighbors and better the lives of everyone? Of course not! Why would you think that?
Republican priorities are obvious when you look at the first things on their agenda. They want to roll back environmental protections and pour more pollutants into rivers and into the air. They want to do away with Obamacare to eliminate the extra taxes that wealthy people have to pay. They want to prevent people from immigrating from lands where people don’t have white skin, because the only part of a Republican that can be black with the full approval of their party, is the heart. Yes, that part can be jet black and rancid.
Take that, evil Republicans! Wait, why are you laughing? Didn’t my satire slay you?
Oh, well, another day, another cartoon.
Oopsie! Wasn’t that heart supposed to be black?
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Filed under angry rant, cartoons, commentary, humor, pessimism, politics, satire
Tagged as cartoons, cheating, gerrymandering, Jason Chaffetz, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, political humor, rants, Trey Gowdy