Friday 26 October 2012

HARDtalk: The Virtual Tour #34

Ludwig Van Aardvark
Sweet Cheezus at BLEEDING COOL asks:
Aloha Dave, As with all who are responding to your invite, I'm a long time fan of the Earth Pig born. Both art and story have kept my interest right to the end.It is the satire that I love the most and your ability to use this as a device to comment on what interests you, i.e. High Society and Church and State as a satire of government, Reads a comment on the Comics industry, Hemmingway, Fitzgerald et al. As not only an Atheist but an Anti-theist I particullarly enjoyed your views on Christianity and Judaism; I'm quite inclined to tossing babies of off porches and and kicking cripples of roofs. That being said, I'm curious; was it your self imposed limit of 300 issues that did not allow you time to comment, via satire, on Islam ? Or, as Islam seems to be your personal preference on the Imaginary Friend theme, did you not satirize it out of respect for the Prophet (so called ), a fear of being be-headed or just plain hypocrisy? Thanks for your time and for THE best comicbook series I have ever read.

...and Bunnuelista, also at BLEEDING COOL, asks:
This may sound like a rehash of Old Angel’s question, but there, I felt that you replied to a question about what *you think* with an answer about what *God knows*. I think I speak for a lot of comics fans when I say that I think you’re a great cartoonist, I would hate to see you leave the profession, and I’d love to sign the petition if I could.

The problem is that I’m not convinced that you’re not a misogynist. I’m also not convinced that you *are* a misogynist, and I would like to believe that you’re not, but there’s some strong evidence to the contrary.
That evidence has nothing to do with birth rates in North America, feminism’s intellectual foundations, or with the false choice between feminism and misogyny. It has to do with statements like these:

"a gender which has no ethics, no scruples, no sense of right and wrong"

"No one wants to be a woman"
"This is part and parcel of women being the silver medallists in the human race"
"Considering how dramatically limited the female intellect is"

Perhaps you have some kind of contextual justification for each of these statements, but, taken together with a lot of other statements like them, they certainly raise enough reasonable doubt that I can’t bring myself to sign the petition.
Are you willing to repudiate the following inference (inaccurate though you may deem it to be) from your writings about feminism: that you consider women incapable of rational thought, devoid of ethics, intellectually limited, inherently inferior to men (silver medalists), and unclean in their bodies?

Hit the link to BLEEDING COOL for the answers to those questions... and be here tomorrow for the very last HARDtalk installment.

2 comments:

Gabriel McCann said...

If you try and save the sketch it's named "sketch_mozart_cerebus" but I'm pretty sure that's Beethoven not Mozart.
http://www.wgbh.org/imageassets/beethoven_ludwig_250x269.jpg

Dominick Grace said...

Hmm. I can't believe I'm saying this, and I still have several problems with the very concept of Dave's petition, but after that answer at Bleeding Cool, I am going to change my long-standing position and sign it.