True freedom

It's not a bug. It's a feature.

Believe it or not, the first several drafts of this one were even darker!

Striking out

New rules

Monetary motivations

Compromise

I don't have an oppressor-to-oppressed dictionary handy, but I'm pretty sure this means roughly, "We are very scared now and we really hope it's not too late to appease you into stopping before we lose the power to oppress you."

So, uh, don't stop.

Gotta rest up for the next waking nightmare!

Abolish the tone police

The Marsha we need

Deathbot factory

They're programmed to fear and hate, not protect and serve. And they're very, very profitable.

On neutrality

Stick and carrot

It's foolish and short-sighted, of course, but the authoritarians who use it can hardly be accused of coherency, decency, or any other virtue.

We can't afford to let them keep hitting, and we can't afford to forget how they act while they hold the stick OR the carrot.

Foundations of straw

Arguing on the internet with enthusiastic grift victims sure is fun and cool.

Dangerous questions

Maybe there are better things than mere safety anyway.

An approved message

El espíritu de investigación

Amigos y amigas hispanohablantes que buscan el cómico, que ustedes salten la explicación en inglés.

Sometimes, I find copies of my comics on places like Pinterest, imgur, and the Facebeast without attribution. That's why I started adding the web address to each image, in fact. I don't get too upset at the breach of internet etiquette itself, but I oppose the stealing of these comics without attribution for two main reasons:

1. If people like the one cartoon they see (heavily JPEGged copy-of-a-copy though it may be), I want them to know where to get more, and
2. I sometimes include text related to the cartoon, and stealing just the image is like pirating the first 120 minutes of a 130-minute movie. That's just stupid.

So a weird thing happened the other day.

I saw a cartoon I had drawn about 9 months ago, one that gets copied with and without attribution quite a bit; that wasn't the weird part. This one happened to be in Spanish, and it had been redrawn (probably in MS Paint) in a pretty close imitation of my style. I'll insert that one at the end of this post, but first, I have used my original drawing with the Spanish translation in my own handwriting. I'm not a native Spanish-speaker and my much greater French fluency tends to intrude on my Spanish efforts, so mis amigos y amigas hispanohablantes, please send me corrections if something here isn't quite right. And if you want other comics translated, we can make that happen.

Oh, and also: there was text accompanying this one. Here's my best effort at translating it as well:

¿Deseas mantener un modelo geocéntrico del universo? ¿O nunca curar la poliomielitis? ¿Sí? Pues sigue haciendo así.

And here's the promised remake. I'm honestly kind of impressed. Only a little, though.

A serious setback

Inquiring minds

Do you want to maintain a geocentric view of the universe? Or fail to cure polio?
Because this is how to do that.

 

An added note on 2021-05-09: Multiple disingenuous bad actors have stolen the above comic, cropped off the attribution at the bottom, and shared it as part of science-denying, conspiracist, and frankly evil agendas, particularly in anti-vax circles. Let it be known in no uncertain terms that CrustaceanSingles thoroughly and unequivocally condemns the anti-vax movement, its ideas, and every last ignorant, selfish, reckless person who espouses them. Such people are callously endangering the lives of disabled and immunocompromised people including the author of this comic.

Generous sponsors

Cocaine: you'll never want to stop.

Cocaine: so good, you'll sell your grandma's insulin just to get a fix.

The CIA: "How were we supposed to know the Taliban would be bad?"

The CIA: Seriously, overthrowing democratically elected governments when they feel like it.

To fit a description

Mental Health

The Royal Society for Pedantry and Quibbling faced a serious dilemma: against all odds and in open defiance of every expert's prediction, the nation's youth were learning every pathetically tiny detail the RSPQ could throw at them, learning them and mastering them and even sending tomes of correspondence requesting clarifications on rules that the RSPQ had never even thought of.

After months in a private chamber, the robed sages, defenders of detail, debated what to do next. Some claimed that their purpose had been fulfilled, and they should disband. Others saw no harm in their taking a less active role, since enforcement of technicalities now needed so little attention. But the vastest contingent pushed forward a new idea, one that gained followers and increased in devious design until it was officially approved by the entire council:

 "We propose to maintain the spirit of the RSPQ in the face of this development by undertaking a campaign of obfuscation: every rule currently mastered by the public will be altered, but unpredictably. Some, we will reverse, while others will change only slightly. The end result will be mass confusion and an opportunity for us to retake our lost ground."

After another week debating the merits of hyphenating or not hyphenating 'retake', they reached an accord. And so began the Grammer Warz.