Bors Blog
Archive for February, 2006
Podcast Appearance
I appear on the latest Podcast for the Humanst News Network discussing the whole Muhammad controversy along with fellow cartoonists Jeff Swenson and Mikhaela Reid.
Here’s the podcast homepage and a link to it on iTunes. Go Listen!
Village Voice update
Following up on my previous post, it has been relayed to me that the Village Voice will not be shifting away from political cartoons altogether, just shaking up their comic selection a bit.
BREAKING NEWS: newly unearthed comic reveals Matt Bors to be a Right Winger at age 9
A school project from 1992 recently unearthed from my attic reveals I wasn’t always a liberal and that I drew my first political cartoon about about nine years earlier than I originally thought. A scrapbook I had to make for school about the news contained one of my earliest stabs against the Big Government totalitarianism of Bill Clinton. In it I expressed my staunch opposition to the five-day waiting period in the Brady Bill.
New Toon: The Vast Homosexual Conspiracy
I mentioned a few weeks ago I may be doing a full page Brokeback Mountain comic. It fell through at the last minute so I cut it down for an Idiot Box.
If Capote sweeps the Oscars, conservatives may be upset upset for boycotting the wrong movie over the past four months.
Don’t forget, you can buy the latest collection of Idiot Box!
New illustration
This was to be a cover for the Boston Weekly Dig, but was killed at the last minute by the Publisher who wanted to go with something different.
click to enlarge
Here is a shot of the real bridge in Boston and a sketch drawn by the Art Director Tak Toyoshima (who draws the strip Secret Asian Man). Not really too much to talk about here. Tak did all the brainstorming and I just drew it. Thought I’d post though so at least some people would see it.
Village Voice to drop political cartoons?
Cagle’s blog reported a few days ago that the Village Voice would be dropping its political cartoons and moving away from politics:
Recently, it is rumored that the Voice is switching gears and steering away from politics. Even with the editors objection to the corporate office decision, the Village Voice is slated to erase cartoonists Ted Rall, Ruben Bolling and Matt Groening from its pages. The editors cannot win. New York City doesn’t need another free listing manual. New York City needs the raw political coverage, both national and local, that The Voice currently provides. This is a sad time for cartooning and also a sad time for alternative weeklies.
The Voice also runs Ward Sutton and Tom Tomorrow. This would coincide with the recent cancellation of the Bush Beat column. Hopefully the other papers in the merger don’t follow suit.
So what is it with NYC and comics? The New York Times hates editorial cartoons, the New York Press doesn’t run any political ones and switches its editors every few months, and now the Voice. The alternative weeklies are the last vestige of cutting edge comics in America (besides the internet), the most prominent one in the country isn’t supposed to be cutting them. Make sure your paper doesn’t cut any comics by organizing a riot outside their offices — whoops, I mean writing them a letter!
Because for us cartoonists, the website doesn’t pay the bills (well, except for a few morons).
Buffalo BEAST: Blasphemy issue
The BEAST reminds us that in these troubled times the best thing to do is to make fun of it all.
Depending on your point of view the BEAST is either genius, disrespectful, offensive, hilarious, worthy of death, or some combination of all of those. They’ve printed a whole slew of Muhammad related craziness along with my Toles/Muhammad parody and Iranian Gothic Illustration. Hopefully Warner Bros. does not raid their offices with AK-47s.
They’ve become one of the only American papers to reprint any of the Muhammad comics, printing the notorious “Bomb Turban Muhammad” as the BEAST page 3 Armageddon-Inciting Doodle. I don’t know if there is a large population of militant Islamists in Buffalo so their lives may be spared. Check it out!
- The lead editorial Laugh Riot
- X-treme Religion
- Faith Based Comics
- Color Me Tolerant coloring contest
Help support Idiot Box!
In addition to my post last week about picking up papers, it’s also important to stay in the papers I am currently in. Most people don’t feel the need to write an editor about something unless they’re are mad, so if you read my comics in any of the publications I’m in and enjoy them (and are also reading this post for some reason) take a minute to write the editor and tell them you like idiot Box.
The Free Press – truth@freepress.org
The Front – feedback@thefrontweekly.com
Seven Days – letters@sevendaysvt.com
The Buffalo Beast – aluthman@buffalobeast.com
campusprogress.org – campus@campusprogress.org
And if your local newsweekly doesn’t run Idiot Box, kindly notify them that they are missing out on the most bodacious weekly political/social commentary comic drawn in North Eastern Ohio! (no disrespect to Derf, of course).
New Toon: Remember 9-30
The bounty I refer to in the comic as 1 million dollars is already up to 10. The current death toll is 43.
Don’t forget, you can buy a print of this comic. Or even the original.
I ran out of names for my posts about Muhammad
I had a fun time last night on the Humanist Network News Podcast talking with Jeff Swenson and Mikhaela about the Muhammad comics. That will be available to download in about a week and a half. On the podcast Jeff informed us that the Vatican has come out against the cartoons because free expression “cannot entail the right to offend the religious sentiment of believers”(the Vatican’s words, not Jeff’s). Where does one draw the line on that one? Almost any religious commentary is bound to offend someone.
On the comic front Steve Notely comes through with a good one called Clownin’ Islam.
And via Cagle’s blog:
Remember “Freedom Fries”? AlJazeera reports that Danish bakeries throughout Iran have stricken the “Danish” moniker to protest the Danish Muhammad cartoons. Now Danish pastries are called, “Roses of the Prophet Muhammad,” by order of the Iranian confectioners union.
I feel a comic coming…..
UPDATE:
Holy shit (no pun intended)
PESHAWAR, Pakistan – A Pakistani cleric announced Friday a $1 million bounty for killing a cartoonist who drew Prophet Muhammad, as thousands joined street protests and Denmark temporarily closed its embassy and advised its citizens to leave the country.
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“This is a unanimous decision by all imams (prayer leaders) of Islam that whoever insults the prophet deserves to be killed and whoever will take this insulting man to his end, will get this prize,” Qureshi said.Qureshi did not name any cartoonist in his announcement. He did not appear aware that 12 different people had drawn the pictures.
Of course he didn’t. Like most of these protesters, indeed most of the world, they haven’t even seen the comics they are mad about!
Portfolio Update
I updated the portfolio with a new row of illustrations. Most have appeared here on the blog over the past few months.
