Matty Boy Anderson at a Trump rally in Atlanta, early 2016. “IDIFTL,” said Anderson, who has received over fifty emails a day from Donald Trump since then.
As a professional cartoonist with underground roots for over three decades, Matthew “Matty Boy” Anderson has been struggling to stay afloat in our current timeline. With censorship openly enforced by government and tech companies, multi-millionaire celebrities endorsing fascism towards their detractors, and “Redditors” eager to surrender freedom for unnecessary conveniences, how can any legitimate artist continue to make a living?
In 1993, Rhino Records released the two-volume hardcore punk compilation Faster & Louder, containing a cornucopia of gems from the golden age of the genre. The covers unfolded to reveal spectacular art by the great Gary Panter (above image, Jimbo), and incisive liner notes that briefly break down every track, by Brooklyn record collector and writer Johan Kugelberg.
When you’re polishing the brass railings of the HMS Titanic, it’s important to remember one thing; do it with style. Otherwise, why bother? The more you polish, the better you get. So what if the ship hits the iceberg and sinks?
Since 1998, largely to keep myself out of a rut, I’ve changed the heading of the Bands I Useta Like strip every few years. In the very beginning (when it was self-published), it looked like this:
We need to talk. Does that phrase make you uncomfortable? Good.
Because yes, we’re breaking up. It’s been a long time in coming.
The problem is, you want to be uncomfortable, and you want everyone else to be even more so. You’re just a malcontent. A killjoy. And despite what you might presume, I am not.
Mad medicine was everywhere in the 80s and 90s. There were toys and playsets endorsed by mad doctors, for use by kids. Every time you watched cartoons, you saw a skinny dude with crazy hair in a white lab coat, maniacally mixing chemicals and potions for some nefarious purpose. Under the influence of this, I created my own mad medicine man; Dr. Kill-Everybody.
Dr. K (no hair), with Fronkin Steen and Psuto Moto.
Either the trope became shopworn around 2001, or something happened that discouraged children from playing with chemicals. You don’t see mad doctors and scientists like you used to. Maybe this is a good thing; maybe the concept was subconsciously driving impressionable kids away from lucrative STEM-field careers. I don’t know.
What I do know is this. Mad doctors once flourished in our society, even though they were annoying, and generally sucked.
You must be logged in to post a comment.