Redress of Grievances – (2003)

George W. Bush’s Iraq war began in March of 2003, and this comic was published some time in April.

Remember, this was long before Obama, long before all the hope and change stuff. Long before political quotes were pasted on a stoic image of Thomas Jefferson and passed around on Facebook as indictment of the opposite sides of the political spectrum.

In retrospect, the tone of the thing probably borders on Tea Party rhetoric. And although it seems a bit dramatic now that most of the events surrounding it’s development seem to be long forgotten by the public consciousness, I still agree with most of the sentiments. It’s also a logical (if dramatic) second step from my 9-11 tribute comic.

Formally, the whole thing is a bit more more successful.

I wanted to create a seamless metapanel with an overlaid text narrative. I didn’t want any overt gutters or visual stops. I’m pretty sure I wrote the text as stream of consciousness, then tossed it down in a giant Photoshop file and began to intersperse images.

It’s also seems like I was still enamored with the idea of reconciling traditional media and digital, hence the classical artwork with a processed sheen to them.

The text trails seem over the top. I mean, there’s no real way to miss the next bit of text coming up, and although they act as  paragraph breaks somewhat, they don’t add much to the way you process the visual information. But hey, it was the early days of webcomics we HAD to use trails, or they took our McCloud card away.

You can read the comic here.