WARNING! Graphic Content: Political Cartoons, Comix and the Uncensored Artistic Mind

by Mr. Fish

Have your IDs ready and your intolerance for incendiary pictures and controversial ideas checked at the door for it’s time to step into the head of the unabashedly liberal, award-winning cartoonist and writer Dwayne Booth (aka “Mr. Fish”), where inflammatory ideas meet deep insights and something like inspiring woe, discouraging indifference and gleeful nihilism are born! In this new book, "WARNING! Graphic Content," Mr. Fish examines the past, present and future of art as commentary, deciphering its substructure and translating its unique alphabet into a wholly accessible vocabulary. Through extensive interviews, numerous audio and video clips and more than 400 provocative images, he demonstrates unequivocally how uncensored art and weaponized jokes from cartoonists, satirists and fine artists through history provide humanity with its most thorough and revealing self-portraits. Find out what is right and wrong with the profession of political cartooning. Discover the truth about why our visual language is so much more adept than our verbal language at explaining and understanding the existential stuff and nonsense that elates and burdens us every day. Have you ever What’s the difference between art and craft? Why are artists so poorly paid? If Yoko Ono sat silently in the middle of a crowded auditorium in her underpants and everybody was there to see it, would she make any sense whatsoever? What is a "bogey ball" and does it really need to be made out of real snot to be impactful? Mr. Fish answers all these questions and more in this book! This is work that provokes thought and debate and great peels of laughter, but is NOT intended for the faint of heart.

470 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 10, 2014

Reviews

[Dan Smith · Rating 1 out of 5]

I just didn't get into this book at all. I suppose it was a review of political and subversive cartoons, but the analysis seemed meandering and with any coherent structure or thesis, and none of it really grabbed me in any way. I also found many of the cartoons with multiple panels practically impossible to read on my Kindle, so it might well suffer from that format.

Sorry, I expected this to be much better.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

A necessary collection of subversive material from more the fringes of the cartooning world than the Sensible (TM) Serious (TM) Center, as well as ruminations on the importance of influence of such art.