Anatomically Incorrect

Pages 6-7!

2007-05-10T18:23:05Z

Good enough for today!

Comic post:

2007-05-10T15:16:26Z

First comic from first book (following a Scientific Introduction on the Nature of the Blastula): pages 4-5:

And here's a panel from the original version, so you can see how messy it used to be (these two pages have been completely redrawn):

And a previous "redrawing," from when Bernard the Blastula was going to be a Chick-shaped comic booklet:

. . . although I think I like some of the art a little better. I've been falling back on the "bucket fill" function a little much with the new version..

I'm setting myself a goal for this week of two pages finished per day. It's kind of sad how much time I spend on my crudely-drawn blastulas.

EXCOMMUNICATED!

2007-05-10T02:28:10Z

So Pope Ratzi's excommunicating people left and right over the possibility that some Latin American countries might take steps toward decriminalizing abortion a tiny bit:

Under Church law, someone who knowingly does or backs something which the Church considers a grave sin, such as abortion, inflicts what is known as "automatic excommunication" on themselves.

The Pope said parliamentarians who vote in favor of abortion have "doubts about the value of life and the beauty of life and even a doubt about the future".

SO SUCK IT UP, LADIES. Unless you want to be known as a FUTURE-DOUBTER.

In a perverse way, the Church's slow-motion dive into the LaBrea Crazy Pits makes me feel kind of ok about the future. I'm sad that the Church that was the scary-gorgeous exoskeleton of my childhood, in all its dented, thwarted, post-Vatican-II peripagentntry, has made itself completely unlivable. But on the other hand, won't it be kind of funny when there's NO ONE LEFT TO EXCOMMUNICATE? I mean, seriously. You want to excommunicate every Catholic who's ever had an abortion, that's a huge chunk out of the communion right there, and if you're going to start adding friends and supporters to the pile-- well, don't be surprised if you start having a LOT of leftover wafers around the sacristy. And then I'll laugh bitterly and blast some Latin hymns out the window of my babykilling sinmobile. CATCH YOU ON THE FLIP SIDE, RATZI!

Oh, hell, what am I talking about? The Catholic Church survived the imposition of clerical celibacy and it'll damn well survive this nonsense. So much the worse for the Catholic Church.

First comic post! An Unanswerable Question

2007-05-09T19:56:50Z

Based on this hilarious real-life conversation with actual talk-show guy Andrew Wilkow. Thanks, Mike Stark!

Ouch. I have no idea why one panel is so much smaller than the rest. New weekend project!

Surviving a Holocaust the REALLY Easy Way

2007-05-09T19:25:03Z

Hey, kids! Do you ever feel left out when your friends get together and talk oppression? Are you tired of racial minorities, whiny chicks, and gaymos snapping up all the attention while you languish at the punch table, alone with your privilege? SURVIVORS OF THE ABORTION HOLOCAUST HAS THE ANSWER!

"If you were born after 1972, we challenge you to consider yourself a Survivor of the Abortion Holocaust. 1/3 of your generation has been killed by abortion in America!"

That's right. Just by making it from conception to birth in the climate of unmitigated fetus hate brought on by the Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade, you have earned the right to call yourself a survivor! After all, millions of your fellow embryos were annihilated with the full consent of the law! Maybe you should write a memoir? I bet we could get you a lecture tour if you don't mind getting stuck in the suburbs. After all, it's not like there's a shortage of you, right? "Everyone born after 1972" is a hell of a lot of people. But never mind that; YOU ARE A SURVIVOR! You've walked face-first into the abyss of the twentieth century and lived to tell the incredibly depressing tale-- and all you had to do was be born! Hey, why isn't there a monument about this?

The website juxtaposes the classic bloody-fetus photos (and a nifty "skeleton fetus" cartoon) with images of the actual Holocaust. Well, I guess you can't be fussy about "good taste" when there's a holocaust on.

Kids and young people are relatively easy for the anti-abortion groups to put their hooks into. I'm speaking from experience, here. Strong church ties are a plus, but never having been in a serious relationship probably helps a lot, too, especially when you're pushing the "actions have consequences so can't you just hot-glue your legs together or something?" angle. It's a lot easier to dismiss sex as What You Would Have Done if You Wanted to Get Pregnant, LOL, if your experience of it consists entirely of your mom fast-forwarding through the bra scene in Big. Plus, there's the camaraderie, the thrill of raging against the machine, the vague sense that you're part of something dangerous and important, and yeah, it can look like a pretty sweet ride. I'm not saying there aren't plenty of committed, clear-headed anti-abortion youth activists. There are, and they freak me the hell out. I'm just saying it's a lot easier to convince someone relatively young and sheltered that her reproductive organs are legitimately subject to state authority.

I was never one of the fetus-tshirt girls (there was a whole clique at my middle school, for serious!) but I was susceptible in middle and high school to "slippery slope" arguments and I tended to think of the whole shebang as much more an interesting moral debate than anything that had to do with me. That's because in my sheltered and safe adolescence, I never had cause to think of bodily sovereignty as anything but a given. Leaving for college, being in a relationship, and having to make decisions not just about sex and birth control, but things like what kinds of clothes to wear or whether or not to walk down the street to the all-night coffeehouse at two am made that foggy dew of innocuous philosophical speculation dry up pretty damn quick.

But the problem with Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust isn't so much that it takes advantage of certain young people's carefully cultivated innocence and idealism. The problem is that it's Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust. Ok, so there are a handful of people who were born after an attempt to abort the pregnancy failed, and if they want to call themselves abortion survivors and wave the bloody fetus banner, they're welcome to it. Free country, right? I don't think it conveys on them any special right to determine the fate of All Fetuses Everywhere, but at least they've legitimately survived an abortion. I was born after 1973, but since my mother didn't attempt to abort the pregnancy, I'm not an "abortion survivor," any more than I'm a survivor of any of the wars my taxes paid for. There's no one corralling pregnant women onto cattle cars and shipping them off to Planned Parenthood clinics. We don't get waylaid in the parking structure by gangs of nurse-midwifes with sawed-off vacuum aspirators under their arms. No one's putting RU-486 in our breakfast cereal or mercury in our K-Y Jelly. Women who chose abortion chose it in spite of all the shrieky state-mandated warnings, fetal pain pamphlets, and official disapproval, and often despite some guy standing around the clinic with a wall-sized poster of a stillbirth. That's a crucial fact too often neglected in the whole "Abortion Hurts Women" / "One Dead, One Wounded" / "Feminists Want To Make You Sterile Because They're Ugly and They Hate Their Mothers" rhetorical constellation, and it's necessarily neglected in equating abortion with mass murder, too. Of course, these slogans aren't made for analyzing; they're made to hacked like little poison loogies at the girls down at the clinic, so it's only natural that they'd go for maximum venom with minimum internal consistency. But still, you guys, Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust? Way to play vive-la-resistance while incurring absolutely no personal risk whatsoever.

Anyway, Survivors is affiliated with Operation Rescue. Surprise, surprise! And no, I'm not going to link to either. Google "Abortion Holocaust Survivors" if you don't believe me. The skeleton fetus is real!

GREETINGS, AIR-BREATHERS!

2007-05-09T18:17:17Z

This is the journal for the comic strip "Bernard the Blastula," currently undergoing a grueling process of computerized betterification in preparation for SGC 2007.

Bernard is an intelligent and occasionally Machiavellian ball of embryonic cells. His call-in talk show, Anatomically Incorrect, is syndicated in wombs across the United States and Canada. He is also active in several pro-life organizations and recently acquired a position as spokes-blastula for Sav-A-Life Pregnancy Centers, though he frequently finds his own concerns difficult to reconcile with the fetus-centered rhetoric of the mainstream pro-life movement.

It's also a space for reproduction-related news and assorted awfulness that may or may not make it into the comic, such as Operation Rescue's "Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust" youth group and the latest stupid thing said by the pope.

You may find the comic funnier if you are acquainted with Gary Cangemi's original wisecracking fetus on Catholic.net, Umbert the Unborn. It was also inspired in part by this brilliant comic from Bruce Tinsley, the genius behind Mallard Fillmore.

Stay tuned for comics! Unlike Umbert, we are not going to be "under construction" for six years, I promise!