The newest solo comic from Mikey ended up generating a lot of controversy! Well, maybe not a lot, but it ticked this one guy off so bad he wrote us the following diatribe (which is one more person than we’ve had write in to our new email address (minicomix@gmail) before):

I just bought this comic from a very nice man by 16th st. As a liberal illustrator and political comedy writer, I just wanted to say i found the writing lazy and a little embarrassing to know I share so many political beliefs with the makers of this comic. Showing an actual anal rape of someone who spoke out makes this comic look like it was written by Glenn Beck. It’s lazy, it’s gratuitous without being illuminating, and it makes liberals look like lunatic birthers. It’s basically identical to the fringe right wingers and their claims that “Obama is arresting republicans to stop free speech.” There are a LOT of horrible things happening in this world, many by the US govt, so humorlessly making things up out of whole cloth is detrimental to the entire anti-war movement. When exactly has a citizen been detained or abused for their beliefs under this administration? Or is this just a heavy-handed go-to government criticism that is simply assumed to exist?

If you want to be a voice of progress you need to actually use reality to base your attacks, otherwise you will be a tool of the Right to prove we are all delusional and childish.

Seriously, do you believe Osama’s death was faked? Because if it was meant to be a joke there was no tone to imply any sarcasm or irony; as it seems, this comic would be compared to people who think 9/11 was committed with remote control planes or the moon landing was faked.

I say all this because I care about the importance of underground media and a strong liberal voice, so i’m very critical of anything i think undermines us.

– David

So what do you think? Was Mikey off base in his scurrilous sketchings or is this David character taking it just way to seriously?

Is Mikey undermining underground media and liberal voices?

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Mikey, you can add whatever commentary you want to this thingie here.

(this was Mikey’s email response to Mr. David)

Dear valued reader,

let me assure you that the lateness of this response has nothing to do with the content of your letter.  It’s simply because I don’t have my own computer and it took me this long to borrow one for a minute, and due to that, this response may be somewhat shorter than I’d like.
First off, thank you for taking the time to write, since not that many people do.
Secondly,  I hoped that the over the top nature of the material would itself suggest satire.  (Also it says slight dramatization on the first page.)  Semantics aside, I believe satire gives us the freedom to explore extreme notions without necessarily crediting them.
In all fairness, criticizing Obama even satirically might be counterproductive, but on the other hand, I feel that a lot of people are so desperate to not have another Bush (type) in office that they let a lot of things slide that our current administration is doing for fear,  only instead of fearing terrorism(or in addition to it)they’re afraid of more republican “leadership.”  This is strange but understandable.  But do we always have to pick between the lesser of two evils?  Doesn’t thatin of itself point out a basic flaw in our democratic system?
As far as the thing with the detention facility, that again was satire.  But if somebody is detained in a manner like this, they sure wouldn’t be able to tell us about it.  The truth is there are and continue to exist places the US uses to circumvent due process and the Geneva convention when detaining people and not all of them are terrorists.  These places aren’t on US soil, but the need for information and control justifies their existence after a fashion, it just makes us hypocrites.  But even local police have detained and beaten people without reading their rights or charging them with anything.

These probably aren’t the best arguments defending my work I could come up with, but without the internet and the time to do research, it’s the best I could do right now.  I’m getting hungry and I need to give up this computer.
Let me assure you though that Mission Minicomix does do work about local politics(and not so local) that are actually well researched, and that we’re a group that sometimes collaborates, but when I made this comic, I acted alone.

Thanks for your time.