Slightly predictable but funny in the execution: at the new parody webcomics review site Modern Humor Authority, there's a contrarian review of Chris Crosby and Owen Gieni's insight-free political satire/gaming comic Sore Thumbs:
Owing equal amounts to Paul Conrad and Calvin and Hobbes, Chris Crosby and Owen Gieni's Sore Thumbs is a blunt yet pointed satire of leftist thought in the United States. The strip uses the device of its protagonist's fantasy world to poke fun at popular Democratic-party standards, while simultaneously endorsing the creators' own ultraconservative ideals in the subtext.It's easy to mistake the strip as a raucous, nasal Democratic broadside, and no doubt some readers remain blissfully ignorant in that belief....
The punchline:
...The double-edged politico-comic is a clever idea, but leftist Bruce Tinsley has been doing the same thing with his own Mallard Fillmore for over a decade.
Comments (2)
Hee hee!
"Insight-free" is definitely the correct phrase. It shows all of the political knowledge of a guy who spends his every waking hour in front of a Playstation 2, and all of the gamer-subculture identification of an old man who watches C-SPAN from his nursing home bed.
Posted by Garth Wallace | July 20, 2004 6:08 PM
Posted on July 20, 2004 18:08
Me-ow! Remind me not to pick a fight with you.
Actually, the big problem is that Sore Thumbs treats politics on the level of pop culture, rather than as something that people get a bit heated about because it affects their lives and livelihoods. It's the cagle.com syndrome squared.
I don't actually think the cagle.com site is bad; it performs a valuable service in showing how bad political cartooning has become. The modern political cartoonist's idea of, uh, an idea, is to take two unrelated headlines from the news and smoosh them together, e.g. the 12.257 "Mars Lander Finds Bin Laden" gags. Sore Thumbs is like that only much worse.
Posted by reinder | July 20, 2004 6:53 PM
Posted on July 20, 2004 18:53