ehj3

[ehj3]

NOT TROOPING

This one’s based on the famous 1970 picture of the UK queen riding past a fainted soldier during the “trooping the colour” event. It’s been done over there since 1748 on or close to the symbolic, not the actual, birthday of the then reigning monarch. It does not resemble the recent,  as described by a North Korean presenter: “gaudy and vainglorious display of [the USA’s] dwindling military…

[ehj3]

‘TWAS BOOTY THRILLED THE BEAST

It wasn’t the airplanes—or the tanks—‘twas booty thrilled the beast. Dead center is the dome of the USA “capital,” (sic) the scene of the scheme where the legislative branch does, or doesn’t do, its constitutionally mandated duties. Atop the dome is a bronze lass wearing a Greek chiton, a native-american blanket and a helmet made of an eagle and stars. She also holds a sheathed sword, a shield…

[ehj3]

IT GOES ON

When you were young, to get along socially you had some abilities everyone of your kind had plus some inborn talents unique to you. These tools allowed you to survive long enough to learn the tricks necessary to thrive you could only pick up by trial and error. You became no longer young. You now have a few friends, a career path, and a family. You are theoretically thriving. While the…

[ehj3]

SIEGE ENGINEERS AND DRAWN BRIDGES

“What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own.” — Theodor Adorno Defining what is art and what is not is a messy task. Not trying to over simplify—much—but the difference between making art and doing work could be as…

[ehj3]

RED, WHITE AND BLUE, AND YELLOW

This one is the top half of the previous one. There, I wanted the red, white and blue—the USA’s and about 28 other countries’ theme colors. For “us” they are always stated in that order—of the overlong tie, the plain though no doubt expensive shirt and the baggy suit let you know who it was about. It was not planned at the time, but a day after the posting of the first one, making a part II…

[ehj3]

 “Draw something about the B!den clone’s crime family of robots”

…orders the elephant editor of the frog cartoonist. “I would prefer not to” replies the amphibian artist/illustrator. He’d rather caricature and critique the 800-pound gorilla that ironically the elephant in the same room won’t admit to noticing. Lately, ���all the news that’s fit to print” is about that great—no, greatest, just ask him—ape. There was a time long, long ago when that was not so. I…

[ehj3]

CREATURES OF THE NET

Above we see an ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) style home-wrecking scene. But here the agents of destruction are not TACO DOGE MAGAs, they are anthropomorphic avatars created by equally inhuman mathematical algorithms, themselves assembled solely for the increase of shareholder value by humans whose humanity was not all the much to begin with.  They are shown invading a peaceable…

[ehj3]

SELFISH MUSE

Here we see A imagining B, with some small adjustments, becoming who she wants him to be. He’s not sure he can, but as who she wants him to become is by most social standards a better person than he is now, he’s willing to try to be this theoretically better person or at least let it happen. It doesn’t. Maybe because B was only trying to be who A wants him to be because she wants him to be that…

[ehj3]

AN ANACHRONIST OUT OF TIME

Here’s an out of time—on deadline or old fashioned?—editorial cartoon of an editorial cartoonist trying to figure out what to draw. He’s drawing at a drafting table more suitable for a content creator from about 50 years ago, and he’s old enough [looking] that even though the drawing was made in 2025, he could have been a working artist back in the “good old” 1960s or ‘70s. The drawing in the…

[ehj3]

A SHAMAN IN SUBURBIA

This drawing began as a Paleolithic scene of a shaman-like fire dancer (vaguely autobiographical odd loner with limited social skills) casting an artist-shaped shadow on a cave wall with a pack of shadowy others outside the overhang watching him. Compatriots or predators? Hard to say.  Now those others are 21st century suburbanites. The alienation remains, but the dancing has become less…

[ehj3]

GARDEN OF GOODS AND EVIL

THE PART OF THE EVE AND ADAM MYTH pertinent to this post (principally Genesis 2–3, but variations elsewhere) goes like this: Long ago and far away a pair of young, though adult, humans are hanging out in a comfortable garden where they and all other creatures live peacefully.  The pair are told by a fatherly deity that they can eat any fruit they find except from “the tree of the knowledge of…

[ehj3]

IMAGES HAPPEN

Unlike my previous post, this one has little here/now relevance. It was inspired by Goya’s black painting, “The Dog”; a Hopper cityscape, “Approaching a City”; and a Vallotton theater interior “Box Seats.” It and those are dominated by an inscrutable flatness, a space with no answers that structures the content. So, I can’t say this picture is about the humans vs robots future—a fight that won’t…

[ehj3]

[untitled]

“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” ―André Gide What can I say? What can I add in words to this? Not much. OK, maybe it’s an idea too obvious—and not new—that a professional cartoonist has already published. I’m just a retired creative technician, (that job description is from a pre-fame R. Crumb workplace for…

[ehj3]

CON SELLING

A system that promotes unfettered greed is not a good one for its citizens. Some fettered greed is good, as it can encourage efficiency and innovation, but here now we have too much of the unfettered sort. Let me call our system “Grueism.” We need more of its opposite, I’ll call that “Bleenism” for simplicity’s sake. Grueism is where everything is monetized, every action, object, even person has…

[ehj3]

BAR AND GRILL

Bar OR grill more like it. Not the American term for pub or cafe where alcohol and snacks are served casually. Not nouns, but verbs; “bar” meaning to prevent entry outright or “grill” to require an unpleasant interrogation. Is this post an illustration for philosopher Sartre’s embarrassed observer observed? Or is it about the less observant antagonist of “To a Louse”—the church lady, not the…

[ehj3]

ABJECT D’ART

You could say that there’s nothing new here, that this post is just another variation on imagining an artiste manqué interacting with an éminence grise interacting with her latest monopolist, the anthropomorphizing of the old “Art, Arbeit, Amour” label again, or just another bitter rant by a weird loner, yours “truly.” But there is something actually new this time, the portrayal of the explicit…

[ehj3]

HOMO HOMINI OVIS

Yes, this is a triptych. OK, it’s actually just a picture of one. Yes, it’s shown in a house of worship and yes, the scene shown has its roots in one mentioned in the holy book of the most popular religion around here. The story in that old book (John 10:1-21 and elsewhere) is literally presented as a metaphor so even the most literalist followers of that faith should take it as such. But they…