The Adventures of Unemployed Man

November 17, 2010 12:12 PM

It's a bird. It's a plane. It's unemployed... It's Unemployed Man. There was a snazzy flash feature on the main site, www.unemployedman.com, but it cost $20 a month and being unemployed, the authors couldn't afford it... Hence the main link to a preview thread on CNN. A comic about the Adventures of Unemployed Man and his heroic colleagues Wonder Mother, Good Grief, and Fellow Man.
posted by ShadePlant (24 comments total)

It's the Lottery!
posted by The Whelk at 12:18 PM on November 17, 2010 [2 favorites]

Satire in silver age style. Holy stinging societal commentary, *flying mammal* Man!
posted by LD Feral at 12:28 PM on November 17, 2010

He's probably also "unemployable man" at this point too.
posted by availablelight at 12:36 PM on November 17, 2010 [1 favorite]

It's simplistic, but if it gets even one jackass to stop nattering about the deficit and blaming anchor babies and welfare queens for the current economic debacle, it'll be worth it.
posted by klangklangston at 12:37 PM on November 17, 2010

...but if it gets even one jackass to stop nattering about the deficit and blaming anchor babies and welfare queens for the current economic debacle, it'll be worth it.
I seriously expect to hear the nattering class start blaming our economic woes on the unemployed. "If those lazy bums would just go get jobs, this economy would turn around!"

Of course, conservatives are already claiming that unemployment payments are keeping people from going out and getting jobs, so it's really simply a question of extending the fallacy just we bit further...
posted by Thorzdad at 12:49 PM on November 17, 2010 [1 favorite]

There still is a bunch of stuff on www.unemployedman.com.

I bought this from the writers at APE and went to a presentation they did on the UC Berkeley campus. It's a good comic and a good satire, but depressing as hell.

Fun fact: to get the silver age art right, they got a silver age artist, Ramona Fradon, to do most of the book.
posted by Zed at 12:59 PM on November 17, 2010 [1 favorite]

"Of course, conservatives are already claiming that unemployment payments are keeping people from going out and getting jobs,"

Or stabbing people.
posted by klangklangston at 1:08 PM on November 17, 2010 [1 favorite]

All my life, Americans have been pushing for more efficiency and told to do more with less. I graduated college during the last unemployment spike, and anyone who got a job stayed late and didn't complain. Over my working life, email and networked computers have come to mean 24-hour access. MS Office means one admin (or none) per office.

What if there will never be enough "organically" created jobs to keep Americans working? (Any sort of New Deal CCC-type job creation program would surely be called Socialism.) What incentive is there for anyone to hire anyone? Those of us with jobs are working scared. Those without will take just about anything. Isn't that exactly what big business (and their GOP lackeys) want?

For those at the top, maybe high unemployment is a "feature" and not a bug, is what I'm saying.
posted by JoanArkham at 1:29 PM on November 17, 2010 [16 favorites]

"Of course, conservatives are already claiming that unemployment payments are keeping people from going out and getting jobs,"

what about those of us who are unemployed but never qualified for unemployment benefits, oh that's right, we're discouraged... we need a superhero too: discouragedman?
posted by ennui.bz at 1:31 PM on November 17, 2010

For those at the top, maybe high unemployment is a "feature" and not a bug, is what I'm saying.

A reserve army of labour, as it were:

But if a surplus labouring population is a necessary product of accumulation or of the development of wealth on a capitalist basis, this surplus population becomes, conversely, the lever of capitalistic accumulation, nay, a condition of existence of the capitalist mode of production. It forms a disposable industrial reserve army, that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost.

posted by Abiezer at 1:55 PM on November 17, 2010 [6 favorites]

THESE COMICS THEY ARE NOT COMIC THEY ENGENDER DREAD AND SORROW

* hunkers down with Curtis anthology *
posted by everichon at 1:56 PM on November 17, 2010 [1 favorite]

Ditto as per JoanArkham.
posted by cool breeze at 2:18 PM on November 17, 2010

"Of course, conservatives are already claiming that unemployment payments are keeping people from going out and getting jobs,"

Or stabbing people.

No, it's the lack of affordable health care that keeps me at home and not stabbing people.
posted by cmyk at 2:25 PM on November 17, 2010

Oh, great. I'm a Marxist now? See what you made me do, Republicans?
posted by JoanArkham at 2:41 PM on November 17, 2010

I also picked this up at APE. It's funny and beautiful. The cover is not silver-age style for some reason. "Unemployed Man" is totally worth your last ten bucks.
posted by chairface at 3:55 PM on November 17, 2010

"What incentive is there for anyone to hire anyone? Those of us with jobs are working scared. Those without will take just about anything. Isn't that exactly what big business (and their GOP lackeys) want? "

Back during Clinton, the prevailing wisdom was that during Republican administrations, unemployment went up and interest rates went down, and under Democrats, unemployment went down and interest rates went up. Clinton was fucking up the program in one way (he mostly kept interest rates low), but Bush basically stretched it to its limit.

And fuck, man, has there been a good time to graduate college in the last ten years? We still hadn't recovered from 9/11 when the subprime banking implosion happened.
posted by klangklangston at 4:29 PM on November 17, 2010

I'm betting on a lost decade of college grads.

On the upside, that's a good book title.
posted by The Whelk at 4:52 PM on November 17, 2010

These dudes were at the Rally to Restore Sanity--they were all decked out in some sort of costume (sorry, too many costumes that day to remember) and someone was interviewing them. Interesting to see them popping up on the blue. Thanks!
posted by nonmerci at 4:54 PM on November 17, 2010

What if there will never be enough "organically" created jobs to keep Americans working?

If you look at charts of unemployment over the last 50 years, I think you'll come to the conclusion that it will take a long time to recover from a recession as deep as the one we had, but it will recover.

Of course there are smart people who think that unemployment will stay higher permanently too.

(I'm in grad school because I couldn't get a job though, so I'm not particularly happy about the situation either.)
posted by miyabo at 5:33 PM on November 17, 2010

How come we never hear about entrepreneurship during discussions about unemployment? It seems like those in charge pay a lot of lip service to "free markets", but everyone talks about "creating jobs". Why don't we look at the reasons people who are chronically unemployed aren't able to start business of their own and employ themselves? Instead, it seems like we're stuck in this permanent feudal mindset, where we're looking for masters to take more peasants under their charge.
posted by heathkit at 11:16 PM on November 17, 2010

Sure. You wanna increase entrepreneurship? Reduce structural risk and barriers by doing things like proving free health care and generous state pensions! That way people can succeed and fail without risking as much (like an LLC, but for each of us!).

But no, that's socialism.
posted by klangklangston at 11:44 PM on November 17, 2010 [2 favorites]

Sorry, that grumpiness isn't aimed at you, Heathkit.
posted by klangklangston at 11:47 PM on November 17, 2010

Because America hates entrepreneurs.
posted by The Whelk at 6:22 AM on November 18, 2010

Why don't we look at the reasons people who are chronically unemployed aren't able to start business of their own and employ themselves?

I don't think you're going to like the answers to those questions very much.

The middle class is a historical aberration. For the most of history, there are only two groups of people that "do well." One group are those who try, fail, try again, fail again, and eventually get lucky. The other group are those who are born to the first group and ride on the coat-tails of prior generational success. The rest of us? Either strugglers and failures, or apathetic and failures, with the overwhelming majority in the latter group, who don't really care about employment or business or trade or commerce except the bare minimum required to keep the roof over their head and their bellies full.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 6:47 AM on November 18, 2010