So this comic isn’t related to Occupy but it’s still a political comic on a subject dear to any and all satirist’s heart (and we are satirists, god damnit). Current copyright law is farce, a million miles divorced from the original intent of letting a creator earn an honest living. Most of the original creators of famous money making properties are dead, and even when they are alive, they have usually been pushed out of the copyright by huge media conglomerates that are making all the money of the characters. Intellectual property laws get extended whenever Mickey Mouse or Superman are due to enter the public domain. Kids today are probably just used to the idea that these characters are owned, and will always be owned by ginormous and soulless corporate media machines, but that’s not the way it was supposed to be and it’s a goddamn shame we’re allowing it to continue down this destructive path.

Sondra wrote this issue and drew the banging cover, Mikey drew the 2nd, 3rd and 8th pages, Ram drew the 4th page, Justin drew the 5th page, Rio drew the 6th page and Audrey drew the 7th.

Oh yeah, the Sonny Bono reference is referring to the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act (or Mickey Mouse Protection Racket) which extended copy right law for an extra 20 years when the copyright on Mickey Mouse was due to expire. Read up on that, and also read up on the Gutenburg Project. They have the lofty goal of making public domain works available to everyone, and they do great work (great way to get free ebooks too).

So, just in time for May Day we have our 11th (maybe… kind of losing track here) Occupy Related Mini Comix… We’ll be handing out this one with all the others in San Francisco tomorrow thanks to a generous cash infusion from a local affinity group The 99¢ Print Committee. If you’d like to download a print template to photocopy and fold minicomix for your own Occupy event, you can download here and follow the minicomix folding instructions here.

This minicomic is about the awful Citizens United Supreme Court decision and the deleterious effect it is having on our democracy. It’s crazy, when corruption is seen as such a huge problem in government, that the Supremes thought it would be remotely acceptable to open the floodgates for millions of dollars of unchecked money into politics. Plus, we just plain disagree with the premise that corporations are people that was used as a precedent in this ruling.

Rio wrote this comic and drew the 1st and 6th pages, Mike drew the 2nd and 3rd, Audrey drew the 4th and 8th, and  Justin drew the 5th and 7th.

Ram Silverhawk started this one centered on the lies society tells us, from a very early age until right before you kick the bucket. Half of these seem to be aimed at keeping you striving and working, not knowing how hard the game is rigged against you. Another half seems concerned with keeping you with questioning authority, theirs and doubting capability to change things, yours. The last half just seems geared to making you as miserable and angry as possible, while directing that anger at each other (women vs. men, black vs. white, “legal” vs.  ”illegal”). I mean, the only reason I think people rag on masturbation is to keep people miserable, pent up and hating themselves. This works well for religions which get to tell you your bad for following natural urges and then provide salvation in return for slavish devotion to a retrograde agenda… Religion is a pretty outdated concept (but that’s a subject for another mini!) The list could go on, this minicomic doesn’t even nearly come close to covering it all, but we got some yuks in and there’s no saying we won’t revisit the “issue” in the future. Ram really should have been the one to explain it… but here’s Mikey with his parallel take on it.

Mikey: I think the title page he did says it all.  Society all makes you think someday you can be a millionaire.  In fact, that’s one of the tools it uses to keep all the working stiffs in place.  That is, the idea that you can be one of the rich people if you play their game.  But that’s just for starters.  The idea was to examine the tapestry of different lies we call society.   I only have one panel in this book: the one with the kid with the propeller beanie.  My idea was that the lie was twofold: 99.999etc.% of the time if you tell a little kid he can grow up to be president, you’re lying to him.  And then there’s the lie that being president is the apex of achievement(in the U.S.), that it’s the highest you can reach, when in reality presidents don’t have that much control and tend to be forced to do what a bunch of corporations want them to do.  When was the last president that was a good person that really helped society?  No doubt some tough choices have to be made, but when were they made with the well being of the majority in mind?  Nowadays presidents’ hands are tied, or they’re corrupted by the office they hold, or they don’t represent the interests of the people, have anything in common with them, or care.  Sorry, that was a bit of a rant.  Just fleshing out the lies within lies a bit.  You get the idea.

Oh yeah, Ram drew the 1st and 4th pages, Audrey drew the 2nd, Mike drew the 3rd, Justin drew the 5th and 7th pages, Sondra drew the 6th and Rio drew the 8th.

Now that we’ve finished our initial pledge of 10 Occupy themed comix, we’re ready to start loosening up with a wide variety of topics again. This one doesn’t even have a topic really, it’s just a straight comic art drawing jam.

Mike drew the 1st and 3rd panels, Spencer drew the second and part of the sixth, Nick drew the rest of the 6th, Sondra drew the 4th, Erin drew the 5th, Antonio drew the 7th and Rio drew the 8th.

That’s right, Mikey is cartoonist in residence at the Cartoon Art Museum this month and is starting out his reign of terror with an art showing this Saturday btwn 1 and 3.

Be there, or we’ll take a crap on your lawn.

Mikey says: If you like Mission Minicomix or want to find out more of what we’re about then come check out this show at the cartoon art museum. I’ll be there til 5 if they don’t kick me out…

So this is technically our 10th Occupy themed mini-comic, but we aren’t even done yet…

We recently had the opportunity to work with some of the stories from the website We Are the 99% at the request of the website’s creator in order to create some content for his new website which is going to be featuring a lot of art inspired by the stories of the 99%. It was a sobering and awe inspiring task. These people’s stories are so personal, so heart breaking and so soul crushingly sad sometimes that it almost seems like it’s pushing the boundaries of the mini comic medium to attempt to tell them.

But we’ve always considered ourselves boundary crossers, so what the hell. We gave it our best shot. I kind of envision this being a series… Soooooo. Yeah, about that whole “10 Occupy themed comix and then we’re done” thing… Both me and Antonio have already scripted more comix ourselves, plus I want to make a couple more comix with stories from “We Are the 99%” in the future. So we’ll keep on cranking them out on a semi-regular basis.

If anything is going to change, it’s probably going to be that I’ll be putting some other, non-Occupy comix up on our website again too. It’s been a great run, but keeping the streak of only Occupy related comix going on the site necessitated skipping a couple of our recent efforts that didn’t fit the theme, so I’ll be posting those and whatever else we come up all up on this site in the coming weeks. That just means they’ll be more comix coming your way, so in a way, we are all winners in this scenario.

Oh yeah, the 1st and 5th panels were drawn by Rio, the 2nd and 6th panels were drawn by Mike, the 3rd panel was drawn by Justin, the 4th panel was drawn by Audrey, the 7th panel was drawn by Ram and the 8th panel was drawn by Sondra. And all of the text (except for a couple speech bubbles) obviously comes from the We Are the 99% website.

Wow, almost to the finish mark! This is number 9 of our pledged 10 Occupy related minicomix. The campsites may have gone into hibernation for the winter, but we’re all excited to see what spring has in store for the Occupy movement. We’ll still be drawing comix after this point, and large number of them may still be Occupy related, but after the 10th one we’re going to be starting to mix in some of our regular programming  as well.

Mikey: David & Douchey was based off an old cartoon in Hi-lights magazines I used to get as a kid.  The cartoon was Goofus &Gallant.  Gallant is the goody-two-shoes doing everything right, Goofus is the Doofus doing everything wrong.  The cartoon would just show similar situations and how each of the characters would handle them.   There was actually something propagandist and creepy about those comics, so we decided to use the idea for some of our own propaganda.  I figure some people wont get particularly stoked when they read this book.  It’s true that we criticize, and to some extent satirize the situation, but we also try to be constructive as well, by talking about things people are doing that we think are cool.

Anyways, it’s not like were writing comics based on what people wanna hear.  We’re writing comics based on what we want to say, and how to say it.   If I had to change one thing about this book, I would kinda make Douchey a little less hippified, and maybe a little bit more burner, or just a random angry guy. Hippies are one of the first terms tossed around by conservative types when showing supercilious disdain for any progressive social movement or protesters.  Plus after going to highschool in the Haight for 4 years…He just got drawn that way, and I went with it.  It was neat that everyone had to draw David & Douchey in their own styles and try to make them look similar to the other versions for continuity, which got maintained. Also it was twice as much work as one of the minis usually is, so I think everyone really drew admirably and got it done in a good amount of time.

Oh yeah, this comic was written by Mikey, who drew the 1st, 2nd and last pages, Audrey drew the 3rd page, Ram drew the 4th page, Rio drew the 5th page, Spencer drew the 6th page and Justin drew the 7th page.

So for awhile now I’ve been wanting to write a comic that took certain protest tactics to task for being counter productive. I know this comic might piss off a number of anarchist kids (and a number of our friends as well, as that’s a Venn diagram with a high degree of overlap), but I think the point needed to be made, and we at Mission Mini-Comix have always prided ourselves at being equal opportunity offenders. I think the comic speaks pretty well for itself, but I don’t think it can be stressed enough how much it turns people away from a cause when the selfish actions of a couple deluded would be revolutionaries allow the media to paint an entire movement as being made up of violent malcontents. These people usually live in big cities and have no real tolerance of people who don’t think like them and no idea how much there actions are turning off potential sympathizers in Peoria or Middle America or wherever. Plus, its just kind of a dick move to antagonize the police and then duck for cover into a crowd of people who were just trying to show up for a peaceful protest… Not that the cops seem to need an excuse any of the time, but that’s kind of our point: if you don’t antagonize the police, then police brutality becomes the story and more people become sympathetic to your cause.

Anyway, enough bloviating. I tried to write this comic in a Dr. Seuss style, because I thought it would be funny and might soften the jabs I was making a wee little bit. And because Dr. Seuss is fucking dope. Look into your heart, kid. You know it to be true. But it was really hard to write, I probably wrote and rewrote these panels more than I ever have any script ever. Sondra rewrote her panel at my urging, because, even right until the last minute, I wasn’t quite satisfied I was giving both the message and Dr. Seuss justice. Anyways, I drew the first, 4th and 6th panels, Mikey drew the second and 5th panels, Audrey drew the 3rd panel, Sondra drew the 7th panel, and lets all have a big MMC welcome for Justin Gorski who came out to draw his first mini-comix contribution on the 8th and last panel of this bad boy. Looking pretty sick there, Justin.

Mikey: This comic was about how nonviolence is a good protest tactic, and how smashing stuff and being destructive is not as good. I know a lot of people out there have been blaming the failure of the occupy movement on the black bloc kids. I don’t think the destructiveness is helpful, but it isn’t the only reason things aren’t working. How people gauge “success” is important to begin with. There are aspects of occupy that are working, and how do you measure effective social change anyway? Did everyone really think if they occupied stuff and protested for a few months everything would get fixed? It’s slow and ongoing, and people have to keep at it. Giving up because the change isn’t broad sweeping and immediate is silly. People shielding themselves with other protesters so they can get a few cheap thrills vandalizing stuff is counterproductive, and the mass media then uses it against the protesters. If people want to smash or vandalize stuff, they should do it extra-curricularly and not piggy-back it onto occupy. The masks are understandable. Police reprisals are a reality regardless of how destructive people are. If they’re involved in protests on any level, it’s a possibility(sometimes justice must go masked). It’s not Burma, but anyone who thinks it’s not a police state has never been worked over by cops, or had their constitutional rights violated, or been imprisoned without an explanation and so on…sigh

I leave you with this quote:

“You listen to me: while I will admit to a certain cynicism, the fact is I’m a nay-sayer and hatchet man in the fight against violence. I pride myself for taking a punch and I’ll gladly take another because I choose to live my life in the company of Ghandi and King. My concerns are global. I reject absolutely revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method… is love. I love you Sheriff Truman.”

So we started this series of Occupy Wall Street related comix with the goal of achieving a higher level of moderate-ness in word and image than we had anytime elsewhere achieved. But now, rolling onto the seventh comic in our intended 10 comic run of Occupy comix, I feel a little bit of an antagonizing tone creeping in. Part of it is the subject matter, after months of hearing reports of cops pepper spraying peaceful protesters, women, grandmothers, students; one is bound to lose a little bit of patience with law enforcement. Part of it is probably just our underground cartooning upbringing pushing its way back out. But whatever, we only have three more comix to go to fulfill our pledge, and then we might just get back to cartooning on our own terms… That, and most of those piggie eyed violence junkies deserve a good swift poke in the eye.

Bonus fun fact, Mikey was pushing for me to draw the halo above the cop in the last panel as a donut, but I was already thinking the last panel was pretty harsh. Eh, maybe a missed opportunity there.

Oh yeah, this comic was written by Audrey, who drew the first and 5th panels, Mikey drew the 2nd and 3rd panels, Rio drew the 4th and 8th panels, Sondra drew the 6th panel, and Antonio drew the 7th one.

Mikey: This minicomic was a bit crabby, but sometimes there’s no way around that.  There’s been a lot in the news about police using excessive force on protesters, and at least in my mind there’s the police related fatalities by bart police, and SF and Oakland police that happened last year.  The focus on this comic was mainly about police over-use of pepper spray and tazers.  I think that it is to some degree a nature of the beast type of thing, absolute power corrupts absolutely.  If you have police, there will be abuse of power and corruption, but how do we minimize those things, or are we just stuck with things being the way they are?

Is it possible to have a civilized society without police?

I leave you with this William Godwin quote(I have no idea who this guy is, but I like the cut of his gib): ”(force)…is contrary to the nature of the intellect, which cannot but be improved by conviction and persuasion…if he who employs coercion against me could mold me to his purposes by argument, no doubt, he would…He pretends to punish me because his argument is strong; but he really punishes me because he is weak.”

The following is written by Mikey, who also did the writing for this latest group comic: So we made another Occupy mini…This one came together pretty well. The main idea was to examine different aspects of ways that corporations are involved in the inner workings of government and really shouldn’t be. A big part is how certain things in America shouldn’t be for profit, but are. I tried to just briefly touch on a lot of different issues, which is different from our usual approach of examining things a bite-sized piece at a time. This mini did get really crammed. The idea was that if any of the issues interested someone, they could take their own initiative to learn about it more, which I guess goes against the nutshell propaganda of it all. Or you could just take the brief descriptions of some of the issues and shout them real loud at town-hall meetings, but that’s so last year. So you get it both ways, the issues themselves to take and research (supposedly Reagan really did declare ketchup a vegetable so it would count as another serving of vegetables in school lunch programs and recently they lowered the amount of tomato paste that could be counted as a vegetable servings so pizza could be counted as having a full serving of vegetables in school lunches), or just be satisfied that we did the research and just learn that some of these problems exist in the first place. I think it boils down to the content that the mainstream-media chooses to show. A lot of people would probably be more pissed off if they just knew more about the issues, but it’s either presented boringly, glossed-over, or ignored altogether. Some of the stuff we covered in this book might actually require being examined over an entire mini at a later date. We just wanted to make it a little harder to ignore the problems, and point out how ridiculous everything’s gotten. The character on the last page is CEO Richman, a character that represents an archetype of a person high on the corporate food-chain that I use from time to time, cause there’s a lot of different parts to the corporate machine, and I try to have a cast of archetypal characters to represent them and their counterparts in the govermnent. The guys at the very top of the ladder are members of the board of directors of giant corporations.

Oh yeah, the first, second and last panels of this comic were drawn by Mikey, Antonio drew the third panel, Rio drew the fourth and fifth panels, Spencer drew the sixth panel and Audrey drew the seventh.