« Luckily She Brought A Wheelbarrow To The Tattoo Parlor | Main | The Incredible Shrinking Mind »
May 13, 2007
I Guess Winslow Found Some Petrified Mutant Scorpion Eggs Too
I'm not really sure where to start with today's Prickly City. This is a political comic strip usually, right? So I think today's PC is a metaphor for the war in Iraq, but I doubt Stantis intended it that way because it makes him and the rest of his Republican friends come across like dicks.
Winslow says, "Riding a scorpion isn't so dangerous, Carmen." He then gets stung a bunch of times and says, "Until you get off."
Alright, let's stop and think about this for a minute (which is longer than Stantis took to think it through when he came up with this "brilliantly hysterical" idea). If this is supposedly political commentary, which it should be since that's the only reason Stantis has a space on the comic pages, then the scorpion should represent the war in Iraq. So why is Winslow the one riding it? Shouldn't that be Republican Carmen up there, whooping it up like it's fun? Saying that it's not dangerous while our men and women are dying every single g*ddamn day? Because that's truly how chickenhawks like Stantis think - sure he's a fit, able-bodied man not yet 40 and he could easily be fighting in this war, and it sure does look like fun to get to blow up dem terrorists, but gosh darnit he can serve us better by offering "witty" insights through his comics.
Then we get to "getting off" the scorpion, or trying to get the hell out of Iraq. I'm with Stantis here - this is a tough part. And apparently if the Dems try to get us out of Iraq, then we'll all get stung repeatedly. That's not nearly as fun as staying on the back of the scorpion forever, right Stantis? Because that's what you and your neo-con friends really want - to stay there for as long as possible.
(Until there's a draft and someone you love is sent over there, then you want our military home ASAP. Isn't that usually how it goes, Stantis?)
Sorry, I just don't know what else to say about this. Odds are Stantis saw another comic strip somewhere else that had a similar theme - a guy riding a bucking bronco, gets kicked off, and says "it's not the ride, it's the fall that hurts" - so Stantis ripped it off and since Prickly City is set in the desert he put Winslow on top of a mutant scorpion. But if you're going to spend your week criticizing Harry Reid and the Democrats for saying the war has been lost militarily up to this point and has to be won another way (leaving out the whole "militarily" part because you know he's right), then on Sunday talk about how something isn't really all that tough and you just have to stick it out for a little longer but if you get off now that's when you'll really get stung, then isn't that begging for a comparison to the war in Iraq?
So in summary, Stantis thinks fighting the war in Iraq is easy but getting out is hard. And no, I don't think means getting into the war was easy - otherwise he should have said that.
Today's strip could have been saved AND made sense. All he had to say was "Getting on the scorpion is easy, Carmen. Getting off is the hard part." That would have been a great metaphor for Democrats that signed on to Bush's war without end like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden that have since realized it was a mistake to go to war and are trying to explain themselves now that they're running for the White House.
But nope, that's not what Stantis said. And that's why he's the worst political comic strip artist ever.
