Confessions of a Bibliovore

No new news re: England for today, chicos and chicas. I was just feeling rather pensive, for obvious reasons, and decided to put this together.

After the attack, there were innumerable artistic tributes. Things like “Empty Sky” and the Ground Zero project have already been documented, but what about the more easily overlooked elements of pop culture? One of them is comic strips.

I’m no artist and have never pretended to be, but comic strips are one of my great pleasures. Their reactions and tributes didn’t make it to us until around the 24th of September, and probably seemed like too little, too late. However, comic strip artists work on a lag time of about two weeks from their drawing board to your eyes. So the strips that we read and put into the recycling bin were the gut reactions of these often disregarded artists. I’ve managed to ressurrect a few of these from the archives, but most of the ones I’ve linked to here are the one-year memoriam tributes.

My tastes are wide-ranging, and so is the spread you see here. Some are satirical, some are patriotic, and some just express the grief and shock that we still feel, over a year later.

Big Top
9/11/02

The Boondocks
9/24/01
9/11/02

Curtis
9/11/02

Foxtrot
9/24/01
9/25/01
9/26/01
9/27/01
9/28/01
9/29/01
9/11/02

Grand Avenue
9/11/02

Heart of the City
9/08/02

Mutts
9/11/02

Over the Hedge
9/10/02
9/11/02

Overboard
9/11/02

Preteena
9/11/02

Raising Duncan
9/11/02

Rudy Park
9/08/02
9/11/02

Sally Forth
9/11/02

Note: These last three aren’t exactly traditional comic strips, but they were tributes/meditations that meant something to me, so I included them.

Lalo Alcaraz - a political cartoonist
9/12/01
9/17/01
9/04/02

Megatokyo - a webcomic, only available on the Internet
9/11/01
9/11/02

The Onion - a satirical newspaper. I’ve linked the one article that I remember most clearly, but the rest of the issue is well worth reading
God Angrily Clarifies “Don’t Kill” Rule

I have a day-to-day calender of Shakespeare quotes, and I'll close with the one that was printed for today, September 11th, 2002: "Honor's thought reigns solely in the breast of every man." Henry V

We are ultimately all responsible for our own actions, and it's when we forget that honor that things like the attack on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the American psyche happen.