Wasting Time

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Bizarro is brought to you today by Advanced Self Defense.

I’ve done quite a few cartoons about the famous “Ascent of Man” illustrations. This one is specifically about the tech age and how so many people have utterly abandoned their bodies and “real” lives for online substitutes. It would take who-knows-how-many years to get to this point in evolution, of course, and we’ll likely kill ourselves off as a species long before then.

More fun than that doomsday scenario is this bit of hate mail that I got last week about my Old West chiropractor cartoon from a couple Sundays back:

“To whom it may concern: In regards to the comic posted in the Detroit Free Press recently, ‘In between crime waves, we let the chiropractor use it’. This comic showed a picture of a person hanging in reference to chiropractors. I as a chiropractic assistant found this extremely inappropriate along with several patients and the Chiropractor himself. To all of us who believe in chiropractic we found this very offensive and would ask you to refrain from such absurdities in all other comics in the future.”

I never cease to be amazed by the way America has become a nation of thin-skinned, humorless victims who seemingly look for an opportunity to be offended by a casual comment or joke. I can’t for the life of me imagine being insulted by this kind of gag, no matter how religiously dedicated to chiropractic I might be. I blame the culture of “political correctness” for this kind of wasted indignation. As a nation, we are so used to seeing public figures deliver “humble” apologies for hurting some sector of the public’s feelings that we think we are owed an apology every time we see something that falls short of venerating something we are or hold dear. In my opinion, this isn’t just a waste of time and effort but is childish and ridiculous. So, rather than apologize for publishing a cartoon that fails to hold chiropractic up to the high standards that this particular reader deems “appropriate,” I offer the following cartoon about chiropractors from 2008. In this one, I managed to offend both chiropractors and mobsters. Can’t wait for the hate mail to come in and the bullets to start flying.