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Thursday, October 25, 2007

That damned bumper sticker

What's Mallard raving about today?

China, Volvos.

This is vintage Mallard.

First you have the amazing self-absorption inherent in assuming everyone knows what bumper sticker he is referring to, you know, the one that pisses him off so much.

Next you have the carefully-chosen detail that the sticker is to be found on Volvos, which I assume is code for something, but I am not privy to his fevered imagination, so I don't know what. But let's assume that in Mallard's world, Volvo's entire customer base is Liberals, the French, or Liberal French people.

Then we have a murky juxtaposition between that sticker and the Chinese Olympics. Though the parallel is impenetrable.

Finally we have the delusion of grandeur, in which Mallard appears to be making an utterly futile call for a boycott of the Olympics. Modeled no doubt after Bill O's famously effective French boycott.

8 comments:

BillyWitchDoctor said...

I assume it's the "what if they gave a war and nobody came" bumper sticker. (In Tinworld, peace is hackneyed.)

This strip illustrates why, visually speaking, Mallard Fillmore is almost the bottom of the heap. (I'd have to say Day By Day is a rung lower for the preposterous attempts to look hip and sexy combined with the effed-up anatomies and all that cut-and-pasting.) Mallard may not have cut-and-pasting, but it might as well; it's the same crap we see almost all the time from Tin-Tin: the same drawings of his dumbass duck, dry bursts of lecture text that aren't half as witty as Tinny thinks, and some half-finished, astoundingly unimaginative illustration in the middle so no one mistakes it for a repeat (which it, in truth, is).

You compare this to whatever Non Sequitur or Candorville or even that liberconservatarian nonsense Prickly City has going on, and you see; the difference between people of varying skills who draw comics because they love it, and a helpless schmuck who does a comic strip because he feels it's the only way he can get people to pay attention to his crapthought.

The sad thing is, it's one of the very few things he's right about; like a street "artist" who makes puppets out of his bowel movements, the sheer spectacle of Bruce Tinsley's life-failure draws a crowd. And here we are.

Matt Ramone said...

I'm surprised Mallard doesn't view the Olympics as one more brick in the infrastruture of One World Guvmint.

I would expect any acolyte of Walter Williams to despise the idea of team sports, anyway.

Anonymous said...

Bravo, bwd. Well said.

I think you can probably still find that bumper sticker if you look really hard, but it's not really a current reference.

It should be obvious that to preface your gag with "This is based on a hackneyed idea" is to sabotage it. It's a clear demonstration that Tinsley doesn't understand humor.

The bumper sticker reference doesn't add anything to the comic except an obligatory irrelevant dig against liberals. If he just wanted to criticize China, "What if they gave an Olympics and nobody came?" with a visual China reference would have been much more effective.

Of course, Tinsley can't draw a visual China reference.

Anonymous said...

To gain the international support one would need to make this more than a silly "don't I feel better about myself by slapping on a bumper sticker", the US would first have to clean up its own act and its own human rights violations.

Nobody likes a hypocrit and Mallard, you of all people with your hatred for all things hippiesh should know that nobody likes a protest where "it's the thought that counts!"

Michael Foley said...

I LOVE this cartoon. Hopefully he'll devote an entire week to banning the China Olympics, and mention on the third day that it has a "groundswell of support".

BillyWitchDoctor said...

It's a little off-topic today, but I just found an article that gives a little insight into the mind of someone like Tinny:

http://tinyurl.com/2s7gjy

Look at number two on the list.

I have no stomach for rummaging around in right-wing sites any more than I'm likely to listen to some bathless creep at the bus stop talk at length about how he strokes off to slasher movies. Bless those who do have such fortitude, and report the gist of what they find to the rest of us.

Anonymous said...

what a crap cartoon. he could have done a play on the man standing up to a tank in Tiananmen Square.. have a backwards Volvo driving away with a bumpersticker instead of a tank. whatever! i thought that up in about a minute.

but what does he do? some dumb joke with a horrible drawing that you can't even tell what its supposed to represent...

Anonymous said...

The USA currently has one of the highest incarceration rate of its citizens of any nation on the planet. It certainly has the highest rate of any western developed nation.

I'm just sayin', Ducky; glass houses and all that.