Politics

Cartoonist Susie Cagle -- who was previously teargassed during another confrontation -- was arrested as part of the Occupy Oakland protest on Wednesday night. Cagle was not there as a protester, but as a reporter, covering the scene for Spot.us. According to Cagle's father, Cagle was arrested despite having a prominent press pass and the arresting officer actually knowing her and her work. After being held overnight at Santa Rita Jail, Cagle was released, and charged with the misdemeanor of "present at raid." On her twitter stream she mentions she's currently trying to retrieve her wallet and housekeys from the Oakland police.

Snowtober didn't drive them away, and now that the weather has warmed up again, Occupy Wall Street is going strrong -- and now with added superheroes. but not just any superheroes, but the characters from THE ADVENTURES OF UNEMPLOYED MAN, a GN anthology that came out last year. Written by Gan Golan and Erich Origen, the book was way ahead of all this 1% vs 99% rhetoric with the story of an unemployed man who gathers a team of misfit superheroes to fight the self-interested villains from the Hall of Just Us. (And why not be way ahead of it since income inequality has been a looming issue for years?)

From reading her comments here and elsewhere, we knew that cartoonist Susie Cagle was tough as nails, but interviewed about her experiences at Occupy Oakland on Tuesday night when police teargassed and shot beanbags and rubber bullets at Cagle and hundreds of other protesters in Oakland, you'll see how tough.

Reported worldwide today, Syrian political cartoonist Ali Ferzat was abducted early Thursday morning by pro-Assad forces. Beaten near the airport, his hands were broken "as a warning", and then abandoned on the highway.

In a change of policy, the New York Times' venerable Week in Review section will go from running a round-up of editorial cartoons on the topics of the week to specially commissioned work. Among those tapped, Brian McFadden, creator of Big Fat Whale. McFadden is 27 and lives in Massachusetts, giving the section a younger perspective, to say the least.

ACTION COMICS #900 is a momentous occasion for many reasons -- both numerically and thematically. The issue includes stories by an all-star line-up of folks including Paul Cornell, Damon Lindelof, Richard Donner, David S. Goyerm and Geoff Johns. It also includes a mild little tale by Goyer wherein Superman decides to help out some Iranian protesters and gets chided by the US government for getting involved in "policy." Prompting Superman to proclaim that he's not a US citizen but a citizen of...the universe! Or, as Fox News succinctly puts it:

Superman is no longer an American.

Dov Torbin and Asher Berman

are two Americans who happened to be in Egypt when the recent revolution broke out. The Revolution Will Be Televised is Torbin's comics account of two American travelers who, through clouds of tear gas, watch a country evolve and find themselves altered by the experience. It's launching today on ACT-I-VATE.

While Beat pal and cartoonist Batton Lash probably wouldn't mind being on MSNBC, this may not have been the context he'd have preferred. MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell attempted to go Olbermann last night on Obama Nation, the cartoon by James Hudnall and Lash that runs regularly on the right-wing Big Hollywood website. O'Donnell is not a fan of Lash's cartoon stylings in a comic that mocked Michelle Obama's ongoing battles against American obesity, which some think have gone too far by banning the kind of unhealthy crap that makes life worth living:

Even our congressmen are getting bitten by the graphic novel bug, as Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) is signed with Top Shelf to co-write March, the story of his involvement in the civil rights...

Cartoonist Matt Bors, who recently went to Afghanistan undercover, writes to tell us about Cartoon Movement, a new site devoted to editorial comics from a worldwide cadre of cartoonists. In his letter he notes that "Unlike other websites, we pay our contributors and and are working to make this a sustainable enterprise." He'll be covering his Afghanistan trip for the site. Above cartoon by Israel's Shlomo Cohen. PR below.

Awesome-o.

You'd think a graphic novel drawn by Ramona Fradon, Rick Veitch, Michael Netzer and Terry Beatty would have gotten some attention, and it has, but not in comics circles. The Adventures of Unemployed Man by Erich Origen and Gan Golan, authors of the best-selling Goodnight, Bush. As you might guess, the topic at hand is an explanation (from one point of view) of why jobs are scarcer than a mint copy of CHEW #1. As a preview at Huffington Post shows, the story is a didactic allegory using superhero tropes to illustrate income disparity and the decoupling of profit from employment and...also how people turn into the Hulk from being exposed to too many Fox News rays.