The Greatest Political Comic Never Published

July 13, 2010 7:45 AM

Terrence Nowicki, Jr. is different than most political comic writers. Many political comics today are more about kneejerk satire as part of a zeitgeist than exposing politicians and the tragicomic predicaments of the United States. Yet, the format is capable of so much more. Terrence Nowicki, Jr.'s This Is Historic Times is not your usual comic. In his comics, profligate use of explanatory words are gauche, and the message has to reverberate.

Much time and meticulous effort is visibly spent on writing many of the comics. Just try to crack this intricate comic.

His gets his messages across in multifarious ways with references reaching far beyond the political spectrum. Many of them hark back to such things as popular culture, movies, Disney, and comic books. On rare occasions, he even lets his readers believe that there is hope.

Want a kicker? No publication wants to hire him.

posted by blook (64 comments total)

I've been familiar with Nowicki's work from the Something Awful forums, where he has a thread devoted to his work, for quite some time. His inability to get hired is an absolute shame, particularly while hacks like Stephanie MacMillan and Ted Rall are drawing.
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:52 AM on July 13, 2010

Just try to crack this intricate comic.

Here's the working link

But unless I'm missing something, is there really a deeper meaning than "American flag made out of bullets and bullet holes"?
posted by Think_Long at 7:52 AM on July 13, 2010

In his comics, profligate use of explanatory words are gauche

CLEAN ENERGY
FOSSIL FUELS
posted by Greg Nog at 7:53 AM on July 13, 2010 [1 favorite]

I love the idea this post describes. And I like these comics. But your post does not describe these comics.
posted by DU at 7:56 AM on July 13, 2010 [5 favorites]

But unless I'm missing something, is there really a deeper meaning than "American flag made out of bullets and bullet holes"?

There's bullets and there's spaces. You might even say that there's a pattern consisting of two elements.
posted by Pope Guilty at 8:02 AM on July 13, 2010

Oddly, the description above really made me think of Bryant Paul Johnson's decidedly non-political (and now sadly defunct) Teaching Baby Paranoia.
posted by Shepherd at 8:04 AM on July 13, 2010

Wow Shepherd. That Lochland Cairn fellow got 15 years hard labor for killing chickens! They weren't his chickens but still that's a pretty hard core attitude towards crime.
posted by Tashtego at 8:09 AM on July 13, 2010

there's a pattern

What's the pattern, Kenneth?
posted by Trochanter at 8:10 AM on July 13, 2010

There's bullets and there's spaces. You might even say that there's a pattern consisting of two elements.

hmmmm . . . I will keep pondering then.
posted by Think_Long at 8:11 AM on July 13, 2010

The "words" link is to a Married to the Sea comic, reproduced without attribution at that Eat Liver site. Originally here.
posted by magnificent frigatebird at 8:30 AM on July 13, 2010

I'll always have a soft spot for Tom Toles, because of this comic. I love it.
posted by Trochanter at 8:34 AM on July 13, 2010

My very first thought was that the bullets might be spelling something in binary. But come on.
posted by DU at 8:44 AM on July 13, 2010

The guy I wonder about is Glenn McCoy. He's so far out, I've sometimes thought he's playing some sort of opposite game.
posted by Trochanter at 8:45 AM on July 13, 2010

Is that flag some sort of magic eye dealy?
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 8:56 AM on July 13, 2010

yeah, for real, someone just explain the flag bullets-and-spaces thing without being cute about it, please.
posted by shmegegge at 8:59 AM on July 13, 2010 [2 favorites]

See, it's a flag, but it's designed with bullets for stripes and bullet holes for stars. The bullets are arranged in a pattern which may or may not be some sort of code for something, but no one will ever know because seriously who gives a shit what a political cartoonist decides to embed in a cartoon in code?
posted by rusty at 9:12 AM on July 13, 2010 [5 favorites]

This is my new favorite cartoon ever.
posted by Jon_Evil at 9:21 AM on July 13, 2010

Bullets-and-spaces? I'd guess that it's an aesthetic choice, not a code. Solid stripes of bullets would be too dominating as a design element in relationship to the smaller square marred by bullet holes. Plus, the bullets are more recognizable as individual implements of destruction. My question is: why is just one bullet (in the top row) missing its cap, hence, used? To indicate the loss of one life? To represent this court case as one more...um, something?
posted by kozad at 9:47 AM on July 13, 2010

Rusty,

That was either inspired snark on the current anti-intellectualist trend, in which case you are clever, or you aren't and this thread is not for you.

In the latter case however, rest assured that while you may not care, other people do; just as they may not give a damn about NASCAR or synchronized cow-tipping but you might.

There is room and to spare for both groups. Your disinterest or disdain notwithstanding.
posted by nonlocal at 9:55 AM on July 13, 2010

Great post, great subject, comments notwithstanding.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:56 AM on July 13, 2010 [1 favorite]

. . . just as they may not give a damn about NASCAR or synchronized cow-tipping but you might.

ha ha, what? Are we about to have a class war over the value of political cartoons?
posted by Think_Long at 9:58 AM on July 13, 2010 [2 favorites]

Um, seems to me the spaces indicate dead people.

The flag is all shot up, it's ironic that the freedom symbolized by the flag and the symbol, so cherished by the right/gun owners, is in tatters.

I dunno, just my two cents.
posted by Xoebe at 10:02 AM on July 13, 2010

I don't think one needs to be anti-intellectual to be unaware that you might have to break out your Intro to CS textbook to decode a political cartoon.
posted by DU at 10:05 AM on July 13, 2010 [1 favorite]

nonlocal, instead of snarking, could you please just explain what's so clever about that comic? Because I sure don't get it.
posted by straight at 10:07 AM on July 13, 2010

The bullets are ones. The spaces are zeroes. This is a binary to ASCII converter.

I just got the impression that people might enjoy trying to puzzle it out. Sorry.
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:10 AM on July 13, 2010 [1 favorite]

Is it some sort of "Lots of Computer Geeks are Libertarian Gun Enthusiasts" joke?
posted by straight at 10:12 AM on July 13, 2010 [1 favorite]

I mean, it's not really necessary to appreciate it, it's just a little extra built into the strip that most people probably won't even notice.
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:12 AM on July 13, 2010

Spoiler: the secret code is "Error: Malformed binary. Your binary code is must be divisible by 8."
posted by ook at 10:15 AM on July 13, 2010 [2 favorites]

Why does he avoid profligate wordiness in the comics, only to give exceedingly dull director's commentary below? (Minus the bullet code easter egg, natch.) That's super annoying, like having to explain the joke.

I don't buy the implication that his views are too harsh to get him hired. Are the powers-that-be quaking in their boots at his (frankly, forced) metaphors? No. Do his references to comic books and movies threaten to finally wake the slumbering masses? Gonna say no. Dude is not the Bill Hicks of the op-eds. He seems no better or worse than most editorial cartoonists; I'm sure he's not the only one who's looking for a steady gig.
posted by Kylio at 10:15 AM on July 13, 2010 [2 favorites]

This image may be of help.
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:16 AM on July 13, 2010

I tried to count rows and got 28, 28, 28, 28, 53, 53, 53 = total of 271 bits.
You need to be divisible by 8 to encode text in binary. However there's that little bullet nub which might be some kind of marker. If you knock of the first 6 bullets and the nub and start counting after that, you have 264 bits, which could give you a 33 character message.

I tried transcribing the binary and got this pattern:
10101100101010101010111110101101
10111010101100101011101010111100
10110000101010101010110110101011
10101100101010111010110110110110
10110100101110101010110010111011
10110000101010001011000110111000
10101010101100011011110010110000
10110001101010111010110110110000
10110011

And then dumped it into a binary to text translator and got this:
¬ª¯­º²º¼°ª­«¬«­¶´º¬»°±¸ª±¼°±«­°³

Maybe I'm doing it wrong? No guarantees on the accuracy of my transcription.
posted by PercussivePaul at 10:25 AM on July 13, 2010

B-E S-U-R-E T-O D-R-I-N-K Y-O-U-R O-V-A-L-T...
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 10:29 AM on July 13, 2010 [5 favorites]

I've followed this guy via the SomethingAwful thread as well, he is really talented. This one is one of my favorites.
posted by furiousxgeorge at 10:34 AM on July 13, 2010 [1 favorite]

ok, I guess I can't work the binary calculator. it keeps telling me my digits must be divisible by 8. what did I do wrong?

alternate solution: memail me the answer, if anyone feels like it?
posted by shmegegge at 10:41 AM on July 13, 2010

I solved it. Should I just post the answer?
posted by PercussivePaul at 10:49 AM on July 13, 2010

Ok, so there are 51 "stars" and 351 spaces, if you go by the graph pic. Is this using a 7-bit code by chance?
posted by lysdexic at 10:54 AM on July 13, 2010

Sorry, 371. Or 7 * 53 spaces on each line.
posted by lysdexic at 10:55 AM on July 13, 2010

I give up, now I get 49 stars.
posted by lysdexic at 10:58 AM on July 13, 2010

Dammit! I thought I nailed all the links.

I dig the surly people who are upset that there's a puzzle they can't figure out. :)
posted by blook at 11:07 AM on July 13, 2010

Man, I'm being one of those guys, but I have to agree with Kylio mostly – this guy can draw well but he's a dead standard newspaper editorial cartoonist in the post-Herblock tradition and most of those guys can draw well too. His politics probably do keep him out of papers, to the extent he's not getting in them more than anybody else is. I'm sort of mystified why internet people are creaming themselves over this stuff - is it because they agree with his politics or because he spends paragraphs explaining his jokes for stupid people? I mean, he's fine, I guess. Is it time for the great resurgence of traditional editorial cartoons or something?
posted by furiousthought at 12:02 PM on July 13, 2010 [3 favorites]

If anyone wants the answer: (spoiler)


My previous comment above was correct, except I got the 1's and 0's backwards. So it begins 01010011 instead of 10101100. Flip the entire string, and dump that into a text-to-binary calculator.
posted by PercussivePaul at 12:12 PM on July 13, 2010 [1 favorite]

(Bender panics and runs screaming from the room.)
posted by Trochanter at 12:28 PM on July 13, 2010 [1 favorite]

His politics probably do keep him out of papers, to the extent he's not getting in them more than anybody else is. I'm sort of mystified why internet people are creaming themselves over this stuff - is it because they agree with his politics or because he spends paragraphs explaining his jokes for stupid people?

for me it's the politics, but there's more to it than that. it's that he references media people are familiar with that is largely ignored by other editorial cartoonists. I find it refreshing to see a cartoon that looks like a comic book cover from an era of superman I recognize, or a reference to Full Metal Jacket. I also think a lot of his stuff is funny, which eitorial cartoons almost never are any more. it's also that his politics aren't necessarily about party as they are platforms and ideals, so he's willing to both criticize and defend obama, instead of simply doing one or the other rabidly. but yes, the fact that he shares my political beliefs is a big deal to me, since way too many editorial cartoonists seem to be rabidly conservative these days. I would happily take anything this guys writes over the dozens of "lol global warming is a myth cause it's snowing" cartoons that got posted 4-6 months ago every damn day.
posted by shmegegge at 12:35 PM on July 13, 2010 [1 favorite]

editorial cartoonists seem to be rabidly conservative these days

Second that. It's a reflection of the editorial bent of the papers and their owners. Pretty easy to hire some hack who'll toe the line.

I love Kelly at The Onion. But it must be getting harder to go far enough to be recognized as a parody.
posted by Trochanter at 12:46 PM on July 13, 2010 [2 favorites]

Unless there's still something I'm missing, the flag cartoon just doesn't work. The old Adbusters cartoon substituting corporate logos for the stars in the flag at least has a point to make about the priority of corporate interests in our government.

But the Stars and Stripes is, among other things, a battle flag. It's been flown and carried in lots of wars. It's been shot at. It's had bullet holes in it for real. There's nothing incongruous or ironic about associating guns and bullets with the American flag. It's like cartoon that shows an American soldier holding...A RIFLE! DUN DUN DUH!
posted by straight at 12:51 PM on July 13, 2010 [1 favorite]

I suppose having tuned into pop culture sometime in the last 20 years counts as a breath of fresh air in editorial cartoonist land. He's fine. I don't hate his stuff or anything.

A number of cartoonists on the left side of things aren't particularly party loyalists though.
posted by furiousthought at 12:54 PM on July 13, 2010

That was either inspired snark on the current anti-intellectualist trend, in which case you are clever, or you aren't and this thread is not for you.

No, it wasn't snark on anti-intellectualism, it was commentary on the pointlessness of embedding a secret code in a political cartoon, which is a medium whose very essence and reason for existing is to make the complex simple. The whole point of a political cartoon is to take what would be, in text, a long and detailed political argument and distill it to a single image that anyone can immediately grasp, and, ideally, to make that image so viscerally compelling as to persuade the viewer that the position is right.

Ben Franklin: "JOIN OR DIE." That's a political cartoon right there. Maybe Ben encoded a statement about the Natural Rights of Man in the arrangement of the snake's scales? If so, it would be entirely irrelevant to the cartoon. Political cartoons exist to make the explicit explicit.

So, by my comment, I meant only that the message of the cartoon, as far as I can see, is either that America is a violent nation in love with its guns, or, if I were of a more right-leaning bent, that American freedom is ensured by a strong second amendment. In containing these two opposite meanings without any apparent way of deciding what it was supposed to mean, it is a failure as a political cartoon. Embedding some secret message in it in code doesn't change that failure.
posted by rusty at 1:18 PM on July 13, 2010 [1 favorite]

(By the way, I'm not saying he's a bad cartoonist or anything. Just that that one doesn't work. The rest of them are good, but I agree with the various people upthread who said that much of his work looks like Standard Political Cartooning After Herblock.)
posted by rusty at 1:26 PM on July 13, 2010

01010011010101010101000001010010
01000101010011010100010101000011
01001111010101010101001001010100
01010011010101000101001001001001
01001011010001010101001101000100
01001111010101110100111001000111
01010101010011100100001101001111
01001110010101000101001001001111
01001100

=

SUPREMECOURTSTRIKESDOWNGUNCONTROL

Awesome. :-/
posted by 2bucksplus at 1:27 PM on July 13, 2010 [2 favorites]

Ha. So even the embedded message doesn't help clarify the point of the cartoon.
posted by rusty at 1:31 PM on July 13, 2010

Well, the same weekend the supreme court struck down gun control (in Chicago), there were I think 58 shootings with 10 killed in that city. In that context, I read it as a lament that American civil society is overrun with firearms to the point where it's unsafe - where flags that fly in public streets are ridden with bullet holes - and an opinion that the lack of gun control is to blame. (The secret message doesn't really add anything, as he mentions the context of the comic right below.)
posted by PercussivePaul at 2:17 PM on July 13, 2010 [1 favorite]

I read a few and found them impossibly tedious. I can see why he doesn't get published. And, really, if you're going to use steganography then use it to say something clever.
01010101010101010101010101010101010101010110000110011110000101010011110011000101
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:05 PM on July 13, 2010

I'm a dedicated lefty, but I just find these cartoons consistently shrill and only occasionally clever. It feels more like the stuff churned out by the far right, only from the left.
posted by Jezztek at 8:21 PM on July 13, 2010

It feels more like the stuff churned out by the far right, only from the left.

What are editorial cartoons are supposed to be, if not opinionated?
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:59 PM on July 13, 2010

Feeling things is for extremists.
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:02 PM on July 13, 2010 [1 favorite]

SUPREMECOURTSTRIKESDOWNGUNCONTROL

Fuck, really? It may as well have been "Be Sure To Drink Your Ovaltine". It would have worked well with the whole dog call(?) pop culture thing he has going. Seriously, just because you skootched an acknowledgment that you're ripping off The Simpsons at the end of the little explainers you post because you apparently think your audience is too dim to get anything deeper than Evil Dead references, it still doesn't mean you're not ripping off The Simpsons.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 10:06 PM on July 13, 2010

If there's a trade that by design preaches to the converted, this is it. You don't create these things to change people's minds. You don't want to convince people to agree with you, you want to agree with them. You want them to nod their heads. You want to tell them what they know, and make them feel good for knowing it.

That's not to say you can't be very good at doing it...
posted by Trochanter at 10:10 PM on July 13, 2010 [1 favorite]

Are there conservatives who think that all political speech should be reasonable and moderate and aimed at convincing the other side?
posted by Pope Guilty at 12:35 AM on July 14, 2010

Do you mean conservative artists or citizens? I don't follow too many right wing cartoonists. They make me angry, and they're not funny very often.

For instance, I just went and looked at some Glenn McCoy, and the man's a pretty good cartoonist, but I don't believe he believes half the things he says. They're just exactly what the RNC would have him say if they were paying him.

Having said all that, like it or not, he's got this one about right.
posted by Trochanter at 1:09 AM on July 14, 2010

Glenn McCoy is the most egregious perpetrator of what I call Der Ewige Goren- the insane propensity of right-wing cartoonists to draw Al Gore as a Jew from Nazi propaganda pictures.
posted by Pope Guilty at 1:27 AM on July 14, 2010

I hate cartoons with labels in their pictures. You can't tell me that this cartoon is as powerful as this one, and when I see this one I start wondering if he draws for The Onion in his spare time.
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:46 AM on July 14, 2010

Can someone contact the artist and ask him to please do the Metafilter flag using only a plate and beans? With a secret message of course.
posted by chavenet at 3:13 AM on July 14, 2010

People really fixated on that one comic.
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:23 AM on July 14, 2010 [1 favorite]

Why does he avoid profligate wordiness in the comics, only to give exceedingly dull director's commentary below? That's super annoying, like having to explain the joke.

Coincidentally enough, I was watching the local news last night and they actually had a segment where the local ditorial cartoonist (Robert Ariail, who actually avoids shrillness most of the time and whom I reasonably respect) comes on and explains his cartoons. If your viewers are so stupid they actually need a single pane cartoon with everything labeled explained to them... no wait, it's South Carolina, it doesn't change a damn thing I think about this poor state.
posted by 1f2frfbf at 9:51 AM on July 14, 2010