Tuesday, August 30, 2005

an opportunity to put the word "sex" in a title

Why we are stuck with oil

Monday, August 29, 2005

Silver lining

Saturday, August 27, 2005

Summer pisses,Winter smears


As the last days of August drown in the last summer rainfall,(no, it's not poetic, unless you find an open sewer poetic-then you are my kind of people),and the last vacationers are returning in droves, it's time to give a wet goodbye kiss to summer'05, with due praise to the unsung heroes of my holidays:

-Dimitris "screw the full moon, let's go eat some ice cream"
-Ms Stella "what do you need towels and night lamp for?They all steal 'em anyway"
-Anonimous "eat your banana while i peel you an egg" old lady in the bus
-You-know-who "check this out!you can calculate the age of my butt by counting the rings" nudist


...thank you all-you made the return to everyday Athens routine all that much easier!!

Thursday, August 25, 2005

The Time Machine


"I managed to quit coffee during holidays, but can't stay "clean" now.How else am i supposed to wake up in the morning? Why, how do YOU manage to wake up?"-that's more or less how a friend of mine made me ponder how much apart i am from the majority of the working population.
How do i wake up? Simple-i wake up when i wake up.I know few proffesions where that is possible (the most profitable being "permanent teenager"-provided you have "permanently middle-aged" parents).
We are not necessarily "the lucky ones" (p.c. speak for "lazy bums").Being yourself's boss usually means way longer working hours than the norm-but guess what?The way the current "job market" is behaving, chances are YOU are working way longer hours than is humanly acceptable.
You know the reason too: "Productivity". Which is what will help your company "get ahead of the competition".Fine-but what's in it for you? Chances are you are not the CEO who will pocket the money (i don't have CEO's in my readership).So why keep the Machine alive? Do you REALLY enjoy your life in the free market society?Is dozing off exhausted in front of the TV most nights the "model society" we are so keen on imposing on the "backward" middle-east nations?
And for that privilege-the abillity to choose and buy a brand new uuuhm...coffee machine, you let them -litearally-steal your dreams away?
Cause that's what happens when you don't let a human being complete normally the circle of sleep.
It's the most vivid explanation i can give you of how twisted the notion of work has become-and how a new and immediate revolution is needed to change it.
It's the only wake-up call you should accept.

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Mission (still) accomplished

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

Cartooning a tragedy

As i promised, i post today three sample cartoons from fellow fine professionals who managed to cartoon a situation that could easily lead to cheap sentimentality.Here, is cartooning in its excellence:

Stathis

Hadjopoulos

Anastasiou

Walls have (t)ears

"Radical Jewish settlers in the area set fire to an Israeli army vehicle, prompting a warning from Israel's chief of staff not to resort to violence."-from the "Herald Sun"

Hoo-boy! Look how quick Jews too can become "Terrorists" when forced off their land ("their land" being a nice topic for breaking the ice in a tea-party with Palestinians in attendance-the weather being a close second when someone from Thailand is present).
And while certain media would like to present the half-hearted abandonement of a handfull settlements as an event equal to the fall of the Berlin Wall, it would be nice if someone casually proclaimed on air "Ah, the Berlin wall! Now that you mention it, haven't those nice Jews erected a nice Wall of their own over there?"
-now,that would be a party urgently needing a good ice breaker.

Monday, August 22, 2005

April Fool's MayDay

As the mystery of the airplane crash continuous to unfold, everyone with an agenda jumps on the opportunity to:
-Discredit small cheap airlines ("they skip maintenance" the token liberal journalist will say)
-Praise small cheap airlines ("several of them have a zero-accident record" the token conservative will say)
-Conspiracy theory nuts ("it was just a rehearsal for a real big terrorist attack" and other theories too silly for my keyboard's tastes)
-Goverment suck-ups ("the goverment did everything by the book and averted the worst" the "connected" opinion leader will say)
I believe them all! I trust their good intentions and journalistic integrity, so i connect the dots they provide, and a pattern emerges clear as day:
-Small,cheap airlines are good-unless they aren't.
-The goverment faced a great dilemma: let 121 people crash to death by themselves, or just blow them out of the sky?
-The goverment decided to just sit and watch, a solution that, given that the "accident" was a terrorist attack in disguise,was a wise choise of action.


...and all that,reading the in-depth reports in the newspapers. If you opted to be informed by TV, new uncharted territories of finger-pointing and name-calling would open before your "informed citizen's" eyes.
News coverage conforms to the same laws as aviation:No matter how big, given the right amount of thrust, any bucket of nuts will fly...

Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Burned by the Sun

More then 120 lives perished in the tragic airline accident involving a Cyprian airplane owned by a company called "Hlios" which is the greek word for "Sun".
In a tragic revercal of the Icarus myth, it was the Sun this time that lost the ability to rule the skies,resulting in the tragic loss of entire families.
Being on holidays, i escaped the sad duty of having to do a cartoon of the subject. All the weapons of cartooning seem inappropriate and often backfire during events like these.Several greek cartoonists rose to the challenge, though, often emerging victorious, which in my book means avoiding the trap of over the top sentimentality.I owe it to them to post some of their work when i have the time and opportunity.They do credit to the proffession.

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

sailin' on a summer breeze

"Goin' where the sun keeps a-shinin'
through the pouring rain
goin' where the weather suits my clothes".
Unless something of histroric proportions happens, see you in ten. ;)))))

Tuesday, August 09, 2005

Man of Adventure

Monday, August 08, 2005

Sin shity (no, actually it wasn't so bad!)

Most people i know loved the "Sin City" movie. While i had a good time viewing it, i certainly don't agree it's the "Casablanca" of the 'OOs.
Whenever i say that, people jump to the easy conclusion: "of course-you make comic books, so you must have preferred the comic book" (the underlying argument being "of course you will have a nit-picking defence mentality of how they left this or that character/subplot/one-liner out of the script").
Quite the reverse.It's not my love of comic books that motivated my arguments, it 's my love of cinema.
The film version was so close to the original, that it forgot to be a movie. (or, as a like-minded friend put it, "it payed to the original the kind of respect Muslims pay to the Koran").Thinks like the continuous voice over and the bigger-than-life prose work fine in print, where you can choose the speed of reading, or imagine the voice of the "actor"-they can't be duplicated in another medium which works with different sets of rules.
What's the point of "translating" something to another medium without conforming to the new medium's rules? As often happens with translations, "the faithful ones ain't pretty, and the pretty ain't faithul".

Chick post-part 2

Only days later-all ready for the prom date!

Sunday, August 07, 2005

Summertime...and the bitching is easy-part 2




Yeah, i know...propably something in everyone vacationing and me being still here make me a mean sun of a beach.

Saturday, August 06, 2005

The "class of civilizations" rages on...

Friday, August 05, 2005

(Stag)nation building

...From "cursor.org":
"As four more U.S. soldiers are killed in Iraq, recent casualties are seen as sending a 'new warning sign' to President Bush, in an article that quotes a Marine general as saying that "We are never going to win this thing militarily, that is the bottom line."
...and yet another cartoon i made 2 years ago but can simply change the date and republish as new:


...which reminds me: Does anyone remember that story with the "anthrax letters" that broke out during the 9/11 events but was never heard from since?
True, it didn't have the benefit of being accompanied by images of bright orange explosions against a clear blue background, but boy, did it fade from memory...

There is a reason they are called "Windows".

...or at least that's what must have been going through my mind when i was drawing this screensaver. Feel free to download it:

Thursday, August 04, 2005

Things that make me wake up screaming in the middle of the night

-Too chicken to greenlight an original idea, some Hollywood producer will think it' s a great idea to make a movie out of "The Bold and the Beautiful".
-Some other producer will greenlight a remake of "Chinatown"-as a feel good musical starring Julia Roberts (as Jake).
-Somewhere out there, the "spice girls" are trying to blend with Earth's human population.Someday, they will succeed.
-One of these days i 'll bump upon a woman who 'll be about the same age her mother was when i was screwing her (pardon my french).
-According to my calculations, it's time to see another one of those dreams where i 'm back at school, on exam day, and totally clueless.
-Scientists prove that there's a finite number of possible decent movies to be made-and it ended with "requiem for a dream".
-It took me five minutes to come up with seven different reasons to wake up screaming in the middle of the night
-it will take me 15 years of expensive visits to a shrink to overcome one of them (no, it 's not number 4).

Wednesday, August 03, 2005

Grumpy old man-part 1

...And a good morning to you, too ;)

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Perpetual Peace*

This is the first installment of a series i ll be publishing in a new magazine (it's still under construction, as is its site, which you can visit for a first glimpse anyway: www.galera.gr.
The magazine, called "Galera",(greek word for those Roman ships running on slavepower), is put up by seasoned veterans and talented beginners in the areas of comics, political cartoons and journalism, all equally pissed off by the current state of the world and not finding it easy to express this in a magazine market mostly run by advertisers.
Anything i can translate in Enlgish, i ll post from time to time.I made a quick translation of this one, so don't crucify me for any mistakes:
(click to enlarge)








* The title refers to Gore Vidal's excellent book "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace".I 'd be grateful if someone did my homework for me and remind me whom the original phrase belongs to.

Monday, August 01, 2005

Chick post

Some weeks ago, i noticed that a pigeon had laid two eggs in an abandoned flowerpot in my balcony.Some days later, the eggs had given their place to this:














Ten days after, the situation was like this:













In another ten days i expect them to be borrowing my car.

The bottom line?
My house is a great place for chicks to hang around.

Private Functions

Private:Something that shouldn't become part of the public sphere.
Private:A military rank. (Or lack of it?)
The end of Privacy: when someone with a military rank (or lack of it?) monitors what shouldn't become part of the public sphere.
I know that i seem to be fixated on this subject.
Well, you can't blame me.
When the leaders of the Free World decide that the complex geopolitical reasons behind Suicide bombings can be reduced to the simple explanation "they hate our freedoms" and the solution they provide is "let's kiss our freedoms goodbye",they employ the best of the cartoonist's tactics: Irony and simplification.
.Like all artists, i become jealous when someone is doing better work than me.
I know that blog readers (most of them other blog writers) are the wrong crowd to talk about the value of keeping your private affairs private, but at least that would divert attention from the fact that the guy who values privacy so much, is a guy who "expresses his thoughts" to anyone who cares to listen.