Congrats to Colleen Frakes!

Colleen, center, beaming at the CCS table at SPX this weekend. Photo (and the one below) by Joe Lambert.

CCS graduate Colleen Frakes has won a Xeric Award!!! Well deserved, Colleen, and big-time congratulations all around! More info later this week, along with links, etc. Congrats, Colleen!

Joe Lambert, cartoonist extraordinaire/CCS senior/Sundays co-founder & co-editor/One Percenter and oh so much more, has posted

this great photojournal of his SPX weekend, including the beard-o video!

And yes, I had a great time last night at the Main St. Museum, listening to Mooneye. My son Dan sang two of his songs to wrap up the set, and then I gave Dan, Sam and Ruth a tour of CCS. Much of the CCS community turned out -- you'll have to ask them what they thought of the evening, though, as I'm prejudiced on this one. Though the microphone didn't service the band's lyrics well, it was a grand evening and this poppa's heart soared. Bought a copy of everyone's CDs and will be drawing to their music all this and next week and beyond.

They're now on the road -- as you read this! -- and I'll post their schedule later today.

I'm sorry, though, that I've missed 2+ years of CCSer music at the Main St. Museum. It's a marvelous space, and I know Sam Gaskin, Gabby aka Ken Dahl, Cat aka Cayetano Garza and many others played there many times over the past two years, when I still lived 90 minutes away (three hour round trip) and just couldn't attend. Damn! Well, I'll be able to make it now...

CCS at SPX, SpiderBaby Halloween Horrors I

Just a quick reminder that The Center for Cartoon Studies is a real presence at the Bethesda, MD SPX convention today! It's the only place in the world you can pick up my new creation (the six-page story "Tenderfoot") in the new CCS anthology Dead Man's Hand, but more importantly the CCSers are out in force with their new work.

Allow me one more time to steer you to

the official SPX website.

CCS will be at table W22, near the door and registration table, and I Know Joe Kimpel has a table on the floor, too, as does JP Coovert, Stephen Floyd and Joe Lambert's imprint, One Percent Press, at booth H1.

One Percent Press has its own website, here.

For those who can't be there, I'll be posting followup ASAP, as information, art, links etc. are made available.

Dead Man's Hand has a website, here.

If you're there, check 'em out, please! A new generation of cartoonists are sharing their visions, pick 'em up!

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It's October, Halloween is a'comin' in, and I feel the need to share with you some of my personal favorites among the countless horror films I've savored over the decades.

Understand, for me, the genre has always served a vital function. From the tender age of four and five, when I saw films like the Korda Brothers's The Thief of Bagdad, Eugene Lourie's The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, and Gordon Douglas's Them! (the 'holy trinity' of my formative years) repeatedly on television (The Early Show on Channel 8 out of Poland Springs, Maine), I felt I'd found a secret map to something magical and important. The fantastique spoke to me in secret languages, and often did so with more clarity, honesty and integrity than any other kind of cinema. Horror films above all did so with a power I could not shake and eagerly embraced. I've spent my life -- and it's been a good life, thus far -- steeped in all the horror cinema I could see, reach, find and experience. Here's a few of my personal favorites, films that have been touchstones for me over the years. There's many others I haven't time or inclination to share in the short time between now and Halloween 2007, but I'll return to the 'list' from time to time in the coming year.

Let me begin with a film I first experienced as an adult, about 25 years ago, and which remains among the most truly adult of all horror films. It's also a film which never fails to move me deeply whenever I revisit it, in part for reasons I shall get into here...
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SpiderBaby Faves:
David Cronenberg's The Brood

David Cronenberg, as he looked two decades ago

I caught David Cronenberg's latest feature, the extraordinary Eastern Promises, two weeks ago, which prompted my revisiting an earlier Cronenberg favorite -- and my thoughts on that classic kicks off my Halloween season overview of personal favorite horror films.

To my mind, David Cronenberg's The Brood (1979) is his first masterpiece.His debut commercial feature -- Shivers, aka They Came From Within (1976) -- still packs a wallop three decades later, as it did on first viewing; and his second commercial feature, Rabid (1977), isn't too shabby either. Rabid was the first theatrical film I recall seeing (in the long-defunct theater on Blackwell Street in downtown Dover, NJ, where I was attending the Joe Kubert School) that really got to me on a physical level: once Marilyn Chambers was on the prowl, but Cronenberg had yet to reveal what that -- thing -- was turning her every embrace into a feeding process, my body responded to the unease (dis-ease?) the film generated with waves of involuntary shudders. This was new to me: the film was plugging in on a cellular level. The Brood took that to a whole new level, and I was a Cronenberg convert for life thereafter.

Attention all Marvel zombies! Forget the Chris Claremont & Dave Cockrum 'brood' from the early 1980s The Uncanny X-Men comics...

Prior to his breakthrough commercial shockers, Cronenberg had begun charting his unique brand of imaginative, speculative and decidedly intimate science-fiction/horror in a pair of odd semi-underground features, Stereo and Crimes of the Future. Whereas those films were austere, narratively defused and emotionally sterile, and Shivers and Rabid were obsessively consumed by their multi-character mini-apocalyptic scenarios, The Brood brought a new focus to Cronenberg's transgressive scenarios. The Brood depicted a more personalized apocalypse, and it was all too human in every way -- ugly, beautiful, touching, terrifying, sorrowful, and ultimately unflinching in its exploration of the depths and extremes of human need, pain, anger and love.

...here's David Cronenberg's Brood, pre-dating Claremont's Alien ripoff -- and a far greater horror!

Make no mistake, silly as its central conceit may seem if articulated outside of Cronenberg's carefully-crafted narrative, The Brood is a profoundly potent horror film -- among the best and, sadly, least-screened of all Cronenberg's works. Dominated by autumnal and winter Canadian suburbs and countrysides appropriate to the film's soul, comfortable only for the snow-suit wearing titular brood itself, The Brood also established a union of emotional and environmental landscapes instrumental to all Cronenberg's subsequent work. It was one this native New Englander responded to with more fidelity than the insular apartment complex of Shivers or martial law urban horrors of Rabid; those were alien environs for me. The Brood spoke directly to me like no other Cronenberg film -- and curiously prepared me for the dire family issues that would dominate my own home life in the 1990s.

For me, The Brood's power only grew in later life. It became the most personally affecting of all Cronenberg films in hindsight and subsequent re-viewings. A few years after my first wife Marlene (then named Nancy) and I first saw The Brood at the (now defunct and long gone) Deerfield Drive-In (in Deerfield, MA), our family life was ravaged by her reawakened memories of sexual abuse she had suffered as a child and teenager. Our lives were irrevocably shaken, turned upside-down and inside-out.

The Brood: Frank Carveth (Art Hindle) bathes his daughter (Cindy Hinds) after her visit with her mother, and is horrified to find evidence of physical abuse

While we quickly found the professional help she needed, there were precious few anchors or life buoys in that stormy sea for myself as Marlene's partner, husband, lover, friend, and as our children's father -- there were no support groups, no community network, and for the first year I could not even tell friends what we were dealing with. I felt utterly alone. We all came through that ordeal, reinvented ourselves in the process, and remain close friends to this day, but it was an agonizing process.

Not to in any way trivialize that terrible reality of those years and its consequences for all of us, I have to acknowledge the import The Brood carried in the wake of those revelations and the very tough years that followed. Books like Allies in Healing (which was, in fact, the only book available to someone in my position at that time) and intensive shared therapy sessions helped enormously, but only went so far in recognizing and coping with my own confusion, sorrow and rage, which found its mirror in Cronenberg's strange masterwork. Horror films heal, too, in part by positing more extreme (and hence more concrete) metaphoric mirrors of emotional terrain that is too treacherous and/or traumatizing in life to initially grasp. By adhering to his own coda of his art -- "speak the unspeakable, show the unshowable" -- Cronenberg vicariously (and quite directly) addressed that in my own life I was for a time not permitted to speak of, and thus was unable to communicate or articulate. Somehow, Cronenberg's cinematic externalization of his trauma gave me one more tool to deal with my own situation: one facet of the power of art. (Note, too, that Marlene's key tool amid this tortuous process was the creation of her own artwork, which was from the beginning a real lifeline; some of her work from this period was published in Taboo.)

When I first saw the film, however, I had no idea all this lay beneath the surface of our own life together, much less what lay ahead for us -- and I vividly recall my first impressions, sans the future personal associations, and the grip The Brood held upon me.

As if any writeup can recover from that personal a bombshell in this context, let me return to discussing The Brood as a movie, specifically as a Cronenberg film. Though there's no feces-like venereal parasites slithering about or phallic blood-drinking organs sprouting from someone's armpit in The Brood, the film is no less disturbing or horrific for that. Yes, there are 'monsters' -- the snowsuit-wearing mongrel brood are among the most chilling 'bad children' in cinema -- and there is blood... a lot of blood. But terrible as the overt horrors onscreen, it's the emotional wounds, damage and repercussions The Brood charts that cut deeper than ever before. For the first time, Cronenberg was tapping deeper nerves and matters of the heart in ways he would not approach again until the grand guignol heartbreak of The Fly.

If anything, The Brood marked the maturation of writer/director Cronenberg. It is wholly original and unlike any film before it, completely transcending the somewhat imitative aspects of Shivers (derivative, in structure and some imagery, of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead) and Rabid (derivative of Romero's The Crazies aka Code Name: Trixie) and drawing from far, far more personal emotional turf than any Cronenberg film before (or, arguably, after).

Censorship cuts for most North American markets during the film's original theatrical release made this key sequence much nastier than it is in the film's full narrative context -- which I won't give away here!

Cronenberg was on the rebound from a particularly volatile marriage breakdown, and he allowed The Brood to manifest many of the negative emotions and experiences from that terrible family situation. In doing so, he also anticipated the societal zeitgeist of the coming two decades.

The Brood uses one of Cronenberg's most potent metaphoric materializations of transformation and internal rage (in fact, a fictional book entitled The Shape of Rage is central to the film) to explore the generational shock waves of child abuse in a more direct manner than any film of its era. There had been exploitation films before The Brood tapping the subject for its shock value -- Hammer Film's reviled, rarely-seen but really quite good Never Take Sweets From a Stranger and Sam Fuller's marvelous, infamous The Naked Kiss in the early '60s, '70s borderline-adult films like Toys Are Not For Children and Matt Cimber's still-shocking The Witch Who Came From the Sea, etc. -- but no filmmaker had explored this dangerous emotional turf with any gravity or consequence.

Exploration is a world away from exploitation, mind you; Cronenberg was exploring, not exploiting, and doing so with every tool at his disposal. Not until the Canadian TV docudrama The Boys of St. Vincent and Tim Roth's directorial debut The War Zone would another film unreeling in North American theaters dare to so potently confront the devastation wrought by child abuse -- though Cronenberg does it, of course, in a far... uh, more biological manner than any filmmaker before or since.

Family ties: The Brood attacks Candance (Cindy Hinds)

As Cronenberg was fond of pointing out in the '80s, the popular drama Kramer vs. Kramer was in theaters as The Brood opened. Both dramatize the repercussions of separation and divorce, but while Kramer vs. Kramer curried Academy Awards and mass acceptance by soft-pedaling its core issues as pop soap opera culminating in a traditional courtroom climax, mediated by all the legal trappings of that civilized realm, The Brood charts its family tragedy across generational lines to no comfortable resolution. It's an aggressive, angry, messy film in polar opposition to Kramer vs. Kramer's niceties. It also pulls together its seemingly unrelated narrative threads into one of the most mind-bending (and, for some, nauseating) climaxes of its era. No, I've already said too much -- and don't go reading online reviews. The less you know before you watch, the better!

The Brood: The Cronenberg 'hero' adrift: Frank Carveth (Art Hindle) confronts Dr. Raglan (Oliver Reed, left) with news of his daughter's abuse

The Brood also boasts the first dimensional characterizations and performances in Cronenberg's body of work, which is now studded with many bravura performances in films like The Fly, Dead Ringer (which should have earned Jeremy Irons his Academy Award, rather the following year's "safer" Reversal of Fortune, a fact Irons himself acknowledged while accepting his Oscar), A History of Violence and his latest, Eastern Promises. The Brood is saddled with yet another ineffectual male hero (a staple of Cronenberg's first quartet of films) -- though here, the protagonist's inability to function, to engage, to change or shape or ultimately deal with events, is key to the narrative and film's ultimate point (and oh, how that stings every time I see the film, having experienced similar powerlessness in the grip of our own family crisis). Samantha Eggar's disturbed matriarch of the titular 'brood' is an unforgettable character -- that said, many critics (Robin Wood prominent among them) considered the role inherently misogynistic, though upon repeated viewings it's hard to fathom such a one-dimensional dismissal of Eggar's remarkable character and performance.

The Brood: Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed) cradles Candace (Cindy Hinds) and cold steel

The most affecting turn, surprisingly enough, comes from vet British thespian Oliver Reed's central 'mad doctor' Raglan, whose radical theories of 'psychoplasmics' are the true mother of the film's horrors. Reed, renowned for his many roles in 1960s Hammer Films (Paranoiac, Captain Clegg/The Night Creatures, Curse of the Werewolf, etc.) and 1970s breakthrough parts for director Ken Russell (Women in Love, Tommy, and best of all The Devils), works quiet wonders under Cronenberg's direction. The synthesis of writer/director and performer steers Raglan and our reactions to the character into unexpected terrain, lending cumulative gravity to what is, after all, among the most genuinely tragic of all horror films. Reed lends Raglan a fierce male intelligence that resonates uncannily with the almost feral maternal intensity of Eggar's 'queen bee.' Once Cronenberg moves his cunning tale to its chilling final act, the sparks between the characters and frightening immediacy of its one-of-a-kind climax moves all involved -- and the viewer -- in mysterious and shockingly primal ways.

Technically, The Brood was also the most polished of the director's films to that point, and to me the far more successful (in boxoffice terms) Scanners was a step backward. Now-veteran Cronenberg collaborators were firing on all cylinders here -- Carol Spier's art direction, Howard Shore's musical score (which is brilliant), etc. -- and most of the folks who worked on The Brood have remained steadfast creative collaborators on all Cronenberg's films since, right up to Eastern Promises. This is where it all began to really click, the fusion and fission point.

The original New World ad campaign art (UK promo, but the US campaign was identical) failed miserably to express anything about the film, the title or its content.

Alas, the usually dependable showman Roger Corman had no idea how to market Cronenberg's confrontational, offbeat shocker. Acquired by New World Pictures -- Corman's experienced hard-sell supplier of drive-ins, nabes (indy neighborhood theaters) and grindhouses which had fanned Rabid into a hit with its potent advertising campaign that bought Cronenberg the added commercial clout to up the ante with the higher-profile cast of The Brood -- the film tanked when it opened. Clueless as to how to sell its titular menace, and unwilling to build its promo around the adult content fueling the film, posters and ads featuring shapeless blog-like sacs with glowing eyes understandably failed to draw audiences. The key promo and poster art looked like a tawdry knockoff of the ad art for John Frankenheimer's risible mutant bear opus Prophecy from a year or so earlier. The Brood was one of New World's few commercial flops, alongside Monte Hellmen's Cockfighter aka Born to Kill and Larry Cohen's similarly tough-to-market (and, if anything, even more subversive) God Told Me To, aka Demon.

UK DVD packaging incorporating the original 1979 promotional art, as did the US videocassettes and laser discs.

Even eager Cronenberg fans like me -- yes, his cult was growing by '79 -- were hard-pressed to find a theater showing the film, which many caught on second-run as a companion feature to more marketable (and safe) New World fare. That's when Marlene and I saw it at the drive-in about 1981, around the time the Boston alternative arts newspaper critics were (among the first) championing the film, and it gradually gained the reputation it always deserved, though it remains rarely screened.

None of the films' various home video releases -- not video, not laserdisc, nor DVD -- have mounted a better sales campaign. All featured the same amorphous graphics the lousy posters sported, or a poor substitute, despite Cronenberg's much higher profile since The Fly and Naked Lunch and the film's incredibly provocative, rich imagery. Hell, just a shot of the Brood in their snowsuits would have done a better job (echoing as they do the red-garbed spectral child of Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now), or the most frequently seen still of Candace in the grip of the brood's bloodied hands breaking through a door. Neither image gives away too much, either is preferable to the amorphous Glad-bag birthsac, taloned hands and glowing eyes. Thankfully, the cover art for the most recent US DVD release (below) is far more effective, though it still communicates nothing of the film's imagery, content or power.

The Brood is a film ripe for rediscovery, and essential viewing for adventurous viewers, horror fans and Cronenberg devotees. Make it part of your Halloween seasonal viewing this month -- you won't be disappointed.

The current US DVD cover art, the packaging to look for!

SPOILER ALERT --- For the best online analysis of The Brood I've read to date, click on this link -- though beware, major spoilers! Just looking at the site will give away too much, trust me. I recommend you see the film first -- but if you've already seen it, this is a terrific essay.

I especially urge you to see the original before the damned inevitable remake hits screens -- here's the first news on that -- as noted, The Brood is among the most personal of all Cronenberg's films, so the thought of a remake truly rankles!

More SpiderBaby Halloween Horror Faves to Follow... have a great weekend!

* CCS at SPX *

Well, it's Friday -- SPX begins today, and a major chunk of The Center for Cartoon Studies community is there! If you're in the Bethesda, MD area, make sure to pop in to the convention and pay the CCS folks a visit.

The amount of work that's been pouring into individual comics -- and anthologies, like Dead Man's Hand, which I'm part of -- has been enormous. Diehards like Robyn Chapman, Sean Ford (debuting Only Skin #2), Joe Lambert, Alex Kim, JP Coovert (all debuting new work which I haven't seen as yet), and many more have been burning the midnight oil in the CCS Colodny basement studio and the senior Verizon studio, some for weeks... it's amazing.

One more preview page from my story "Tenderfoot" debuting at SPX this weekend in the CCS anthologyDead Man's Hand; page/story copyright 2007 SR Bissette

Lacking the relatively available lead time we all had back in the spring for MoCCA, there simply wasn't time to rally interviews, graphics, etc. for everyone's comics; the few interviews we did initiate are still dangling unfinished, so the best I can do this time around is steer you to

the official SPX website.

CCS will be at table W22, near the door and registration table, and I Know Joe Kimpel has a table on the floor, too, as does JP and Joe's imprint.

For those who can't be there, I'll be posting followup ASAP, as information, art, links etc. are made available.

Dead Man's Hand has it's own website, here,

and I'll be posting sales links and more info after this weekend, as the DMH editors pull that together (of course, the past weeks have been entirely intent upon getting everything done and ready for SPX).

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For a peek at last Friday's day-trip with my amigos G. Michael Dobbs and Joseph A. Citro -- Mike and Joe -- click here for Mike's overview with photos, scroll down to his "Monday, October 08, 2007" post.

Also note Mike's pix of the Main Street Museum, which I'll be posting more about this weekend as my son Daniel and the band he's a part of -- Mooneye -- will be playing live there this coming Tuesday. More info soon!
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I'm home sick as a dog, so I'll also be posting here off and on the next three days to make up for the slack of this week's posts.

Have a great Friday, one and all, and stay warm and well...

It's James Sturm's America -- He Just Lets Us Live Here!
An American trilogy of Religious Fervor, Greed, and Entertainment Through the Eras Arrives At Last!

Hey, all -- top o' the morn to ya. My amigo, fellow author, artist and the dearly beloved Center for Cartoon Studies co-founder and Grand Omnipotent Inkslinging Stomper James Sturm has a new book out, and you need it!

As James puts it, "the modestly titled James Sturm's America: God, Gold and Golems has just been published. The book is the definitive collection of my American history stories."

Here's the front cover, folks; I didn't have a scan of the full wraparound to post, but trust me, it's a beaut.

Here's the hard info on the book itself, which collects all three of James's Americana graphic novels and novellas, The Revival, Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight and the celebrated The Golem's Mighty Swing:

"Focusing on less sensational times in U.S. history (non-war and pre-Depression), James Sturm's America draws a portrait of the people and their dreams that make up this country. Comprised of three chapters... the story grows as the country grows; from pioneers searching for a place to call home, to ghost towns gutted by greed and racism, to the distractions and fantasies of popular entertainment."

How to get your copy? Read on, and act!

If you're in the White River Junction VT area, James is having a celebratory signing this Thursday, October 11, at the stylish recent addition to WRJ drining holes, Elixir. We CCSers frequent Elixir every Tuesday night, after CCS movie night, and it's sweet. Elixir is located just a short walk from CCS itself -- at 188 S. Main St. (802-281-7009).

James says, "The signing is from 6-8pm but if enough people buy me a drink I may be there longer (luckily I live within walking distance)! I'll have my pens on hand and will adorn your book with some original artwork. If you haven't been to Elixir it's worth checking out, it's a swank tapas/martini bar in the beautifully refurbished freight house." Indeed it is.

But wait, there's more! The wonderfully independently owned Norwich Bookstore will selling copies of James Sturm's America there, at Elixir -- but, if you want to buy a signed book but cannot make it Thursday night, call the Norwich Bookstore now (802-649-1114 ) and reserve a copy -- James will happily inscribe it for you.

Cool -- but what if you live far, far away? What if you are in another part of America, or not in America at all? Well, fret not, constant reader.

My fave online source for all things comic-like, John Rovnak's renovated (and amid renovations) Panel to Panel.Net, is offering James Sturm's America to you via online purchase with a signed bookplate featuring an exclusive full-color image created by James Sturm.

Here's the link to the PaneltoPanel purchase page,

and note -- while supplies last, order James Sturm's America now and receive a free, signed copy of his out-of-print 2004 Eisner Award winning Marvel Comics graphic novel Fantastic Four: Unstable Molecules!

PaneltoPanel.net also has a new exclusive interview with James online, which you can get to from this link -- enjoy!

And oh, the quotes James has amassed. Read 'em and weep:

"Original and fascinating." -- Garry Trudeau

"James Sturm's graphic narratives make us re-imagine our shared history. This is historical fiction at its best." -- Russell Banks

"Sturm's America is the one glimpsed through the holes in the flag: rooted, grim and enduring. His line of his drawings has a pure grain like that of the voice in William Carlos Williams' epic poem Paterson, or the singers on Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music. Fables like these are an antidote to cultural amnesia." -- Jonathan Lethem

"Sturm's prose is as elegantly understated as his line work. And every now and then he throws the heater: 'They've been waiting for their Messiah a thousand years,' says one opponent. 'So they know how to wait on
a curveball.' A-." -- Entertainment Weekly

"Luminous... The revival, as Sturm gleaned through careful research, offered an oasis of companionship, entertainment and brief salvation from the land itself. One can see how Americans...would have yearned for a
message that this dangerous, lonely place was actually part of some divine plan." -- New York Times Book Review

"Sturm is a master of nuance, whose economical drawings effectively evoke the era, while his thoughtful compositions impressively capture action and atmosphere." -- Booklist

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Work continues on various Center for Cartoon Studies creations for this weekend's SPX convention in Bethesda, MD -- as previously noted (see last week's posts), I won't be there (my convention days are over), but my newest comics story will be, via Dead Man's Hand, a new anthology of western comic stories.

No, we don't have great quotes or a signing at Elixir, but we do have a mighty stylish hat and hankerchief, and there's enough of us to drink James Sturm under the table if we have to.

Here's the link to the Dead Man's Hand site --

-- updates, art and more info awaits you there!

OK, 'nuff ballyhoo for one day -- follow through, and have a great Monday!

Tenderfoot Teaser 1
(& Denial Is A Vast River Dividing Our Nation)

Yesterday's CCS teaching duties kept me clear of the keyboard, but here's the promised first-look at my new 6-pager "Tenderfoot," debuting in the upcoming CCS anthology Dead Man's Hand -- debuting, in fact, at the CCS and I Know Joe Kimpel tables at SPX in a couple of weeks.

Page 1 of "Tenderfoot," copyright 2007 SR Bissette

More (but not much more) "Tenderfoot" preview, and much more on Dead Man's Hand and CCSers and their new work betwixt now and then!
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President Bush's sudden embrace of 'fiscal responsibility,' manifest in his veto of the child health care bill endorsed by both the House and the Senate, is a hideous disgrace after seven years of his squandering the greatest surplus any US President ever inherited and racking up a historic record-shattering deficit, largely to bankroll (persistently off the books: e.g., not included in his annual Federal budget) his fucking unjustified, unprovoked Iraq War.

That his veto is exercised even as his Administration is demanding another obscene 150+ billion to continue financing the war is monstrous beyond imagining, but -- hey, business as usual.

How does the populace deal with this spectacle, this schism, this madness and shame? I have received the following pair of emails from no less than eleven family members in the last two days. Read 'em and weep...

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Subject: Wealthy or Poor?

Putting things in perspective:

One day, the father of a very wealthy family took his son on a trip to the country with the express purpose of showing him how poor people live.

They spent a couple of days and nights on the farm of what would be considered a very poor family.

On their return from their trip, the father asked his son, "How was the trip?"

"It was great, Dad."

"Did you see how poor people live?" the father asked.

"Oh yeah," said the son.

"So, tell me, what did you learn from the trip?" asked the father.

The son answered:

"I saw that we have one dog and they had four.

We have a pool that reaches to the middle of our garden and they have a creek that has no end.

We have imported lanterns in our garden and they have the stars at night.

Our patio reaches to the front yard and they have the whole horizon.

We have a small piece of land to live on and they have fields that go beyond our sight.

We have servants who serve us, but they serve others.

We buy our food, but they grow theirs.

We have walls around our property to protect us, they have friends to protect them."

The boy's father was speechless.

Then his son added, "Thanks Dad for showing me how poor we are."

Isn't perspective a wonderful thing? Makes you wonder what would happen if we all gave thanks for everything we have, instead of worrying about what we don't have.

Appreciate every single thing you have, especially your friends!

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How cozy -- and timely, circulating even as President Bush rails against any meaningful health care shelter for children in families earning $80,000+, while he pushes for a more punitive variation on the current program he has vetoed.

The above sickening homily posits a la-la land in which the 'have-nots' have more than the 'haves,' evoking an American land-based (agrarian) spiritualism and asserting Christian values even as it inverts the pyramid with mock piety.

My gorge rises along with my blood pressure; are these the little lies spread to justify ongoing support for the President and epochal shift in the American economy that is enriching insurance and pharmaceutical interests while banking on the misery of an increasingly stranded once-middle-class strata? The poor -- well, fuck the poor, they can just suck dirt -- oh, sorry, I mean, "Thanks Dad for showing me how poor we are." Suck it up, America.

Here's another headbanger from an email circulating among my elders:

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Subject: The Scary Truth About Canadian Healthcare - A Must Read!

Absolutely true - we've been there!

I received this today from a career Marine, he just happens to be a Canadian. I believe his thoughts on the recent health care proposal might be of interest to some.

Subject: Health Care

Hey Guys; I saw on the news up here in Canada where Hillary Clinton introduced her new health care plan. Something similar to what we have in Canada. I also heard that Michael Moore was raving about the health care up here in Canada in his latest movie. As your friend and someone who lives with the Canada health care plan I thought I would give you some facts about this great medical plan that we have in Canada.

First of all:

1) The health care plan in Canada is not free. We pay a premium every month of $96. for Shirley and I to be covered. Sounds great eh. What they don't tell you is how much we pay in taxes to keep the health care system afloat. I am personally in the 55% tax bracket. Yes 55% of my earnings go to taxes. A large portion of that and I am not sure of the exact amount goes directly to health care our #1 expense.

2) I would not classify what we have as health care plan, it is more like a health diagnosis system. You can get into to see a doctor quick enough so he can tell you "yes indeed you are sick or you need an operation" but now the challenge becomes getting treated or operated on. We have waiting lists out the ying yang some as much as 2 years down the road.

3) Rather than fix what is wrong with you the usual tactic in Canada is to prescribe drugs. Have a pain here is a drug to take- not what is causing the pain and why. No time for checking you out because it is more important to move as many patients thru as possible each hour for Government reimbursement

4) Many Canadians do not have a family Doctor.

5) Don't require emergency treatment as you may wait for hours in the emergency room waiting for treatment.

6) Shirley's dad cut his hand on a power saw a few weeks back and it required that his hand be put in a splint - to our surprise we had to pay $125. for a splint because it is not covered under health care plus we have to pay $60 for each visit for him to check it out each week.

7) Shirley's cousin was diagnosed with a heart blockage. Put on a waiting list. Died before he could get treatment.

8) Government allots so many operations per year. When that is done no more operations, unless you go to your local newspaper and plead your case and embarrass the government then money suddenly appears.

9) The Government takes great pri de in telling us how much more they are increasing the funding for health care but waiting lists never get shorter. Government just keeps throwing money at the problem but it never goes away. But they are good at finding new ways to tax us, but they don't call it a tax anymore it is now a user fee.

10) My mother needs an operation for a blockage in her leg but because she is a smoker they will not do it. Despite her and my father paying into the health care system all these years. My Mom is 80 years of age. Now there is talk that maybe we should not treat fat and obese people either because they are a drain on the health care system. Let me see now, what we want in Canada is a health care sy stem for healthy people only. That should reduce our health care costs.

11) Forget getting a second opinion, what you see is what you get.

12) I can spend what money I have left after taxes on booze, cigarettes, junk food and anything else that could kill me but I am not allowed by law to spend my money on getting an operation I need because that would be jumping the queue. I must wait my turn except if I am a hockey player or athlete then I can get looked at right away. Go figure Where else in the world can you spend money to kill yourself but not allowed to spend money to get healthy.

13) Oh did I mention that immigrants are covered automatically at tax payer expense having never contributed a dollar to the system and pay no premiums.

14) Oh yeah we now give free needles to drug users to try and keep them healthy. Wouldn't want a sickly druggie breaking into your house and stealing your things. But people with diabetes who pay into the health care system have to pay for their needles because it is not covered but the health care system.

I send this out not looking for sympathy but as the election looms in the states you will be hearing more and more about universal health care down there and the advocates will be pointing to Canada. I just want to make sure that you hear the truth about health care up here and have some food for thought and informed questions to ask when broached with this subject.

Step wisely and don't make the same mistakes we have.

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The plethora of bullshit in the above is so daunting, I haven't time to even begin addressing it this AM.

Taking just one point -- #7 -- my dear friends Randy and Jean-Marc L'officier were just last week in the US, dealing with the death of a dear one who died, after a lifetime paying into health insurance, because the HMO denied diagnosis and care so long that a treatable condition proved fatal. It gets worse: in his final hours, moved to hospice overnight without notification of his wife, she arrived at the hospital to be rerouted to the hospice, where -- on a Saturday -- they demanded she pay $3000 on the spot or she would not be permitted to see her husband on his deathbed and further care would be denied.

The lies, obfuscation, misery-profiteering and absolutely out-of-control spiraling costs of profit-based insurance and health care in the US is a system shattered beyond comprehension and desperately in need of major redress. This President and Administration, and the House and Senate's, complicity in this process is incalculable -- while we, the taxpayers, pay for 72%+ of their health care costs as a perk of their station. Bush has no concept of life for any family earning $80,000 or less in this country -- for that matter, he hasn't a clue what it's like for any family earning under $1 million or more.

The GOP and lobbyist-controlled spin on the issues calculated to further impoverish and deny any modicum of health care to all but those who have yet to be bled dry, or those above being bled dry (the rich) is an abomination, and these kinds of email propaganda campaigns are a major sign of the times.

Gotta run, have a -- well, a Thursday...

October Offerings at the Center for Cartoon Studies:

Dead Man's Hand & Doonesbury Delights

As noted in the last two posts, I wrapped up my own six-page contribution to the upcoming CCS-spawned anthology Dead Man's Hand, brainchild of CCS seniors and the portmanteau's editorial team of Christopher Warren, Denis St. John, Matthew Young, Morgan Pielli and alumni Jon-Mikel Gates.

Chris (who did the production on my son Daniel's and my own "An Alphabet of Zombies" for the Accent UK Zombies anthology) scanned, cleaned up and prepped my story for publication last night, so I'll be posting a page or two of the story here starting tomorrow.

In the meantime,

here's the link to the Dead Man's Hand site -- updates and much, much more art to follow, as the team gets the book together for its SPX debut!

Here's the SPX link for more info on the convention itself --

-- and note that CCS once again has a table at SPX. SPX will be held in Bethesda, MD on October 12th and 13th; CCS will be at table W22, near the door and registration table. I won't be there (my convention days are over), but that's where you'll find Dead Man's Hand and many, many other great CCS student/artist/faculty creations!

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Garry Trudeau Visits CCS in October...

Garry Trudeau is coming to CCS later this month -- and here's the promised link with the particulars!

"Garry Trudeau, creator of the Pulitzer Prize winning political cartoon Doonesbury, is making a rare public appearance on behalf of The Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction Vermont on October 22, 2007..." Seating is limited, so if you're in the area and you're a Trudeau/Doonesbury fan, don't wait to snag your ticket ASAP!

Furthermore, Garry has generously donated a Doonesbury original (pictured above, from his recent spring 2007 'Vermont Town Meeting' sequence) to the CCS fundraising effort; CCS will be actively promoting this online auction beginning October 17th, but here's the current announcement:

EBAY AUCTION
ORIGINAL COMIC BY GARRY TRUDEAU

Original comic art donated by Mr. Trudeau to be auctioned online. The piece comes professionally framed in a black metal casing and white and black matting, compliments of Junction Frame Shop.

Size of original framed:
12 1/2" x 22 1/4"

DATE AUCTION BEGINS: Wednesday, October 17
DATE AUCTION CLOSES: Tuesday, October 23

A direct link will be posted here on October 17.
You will be able to click here to place your bid!

Ditto from here. More info as we get closer to Garry's visit...
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The leaves are changing color here in Vermont, and it's fall, folks. As an email from Jamaica (VT) amigo HomeyM notes this AM, "All leaves have embedded in them three pigments: chlorophyll (green colors), carotenoid (the yellow, orange and brown colors), and anthocyanins (red, blue and purple colors). During the long days of summer, chlorophyll is continuously being produced, resulting in green leaves. As the days get shorter and cooler, chlorophyll production slows and eventually ceases. When this occurs, the carotenoids and anthocyanins present in the leaves are unmasked and show their colors. The timing of these colors varies by elevation and by tree species." It all adds up to the trippy Vermont autumns I love, just by opening my eyes every single morning!

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That's all for today, have a terrific Tuesday... "Tenderfoot" peek tomorrow, and more!