Inaugural Exhibition Opens TONIGHT + Featured Cartoonist

"G.O.P. Nuts" comic strip + commentary by Dale Rawlings & Interview + an In-depth look at the comics of Art Hondros

Jan 13, 2023

This ran a few days after the FBI raided Mar A Lago and Trump was reportedly frantically trying to discover who the mole was. To this day, their identity has yet to be uncovered. Noel Cassler who was a PA to the Trumps during the Apprentice claims that Trump snorts Adderall and has been addicted to it for over 30 years.

Continuing a series of strips I drew after the Mar A Lago raid, In the previous strip, Trump ordered Junior to go to Bedminster to visit his mother- and retrieve some files. Manty people genuinely believe he hid files he had stolen in the coffin of Ivanna.

This strip ran a couple of days after Ben’s speech in Philadelphia where he called the MAGA movement semi-fascist. Biden was wrong on that- they are completely fascist and if the jackboot fits…

A CHAT WITH DALE RAWLINGS (continued)

DWIGHTMESS: Before "G.O.P. Nuts," you were doing a run called "TRUMP'D" that featured media-appropriated photos and word balloons you scripted -- it's a format that allowed you to make muppets out of political leaders and media actors utilizing the language of the meme-verse, social media platforms, digital reporting, the internet.

These types of comics are very hard for me to trust - in fact your comics are almost always so timely, I sometimes fear that how you're operating now is sort of alongside the torrent of conspiracy theorists, bots, and Q believers,, while also being stridently against them, which is to say that maybe what I'm fearing that you may be sort of, 'in their gang' actually.

Without the so-called 'validation' of a major media outlet, comics with stories such as yours can breach ethics that any media company would immediately nix -- for instance the "TRUMPed" comics in which you portrayed Herman Cain as a ghost shortly after his death. "Too soon!"

But in those comics, you also seemed to skewer liberals equally. Tell me more about how you've evolved your comedic voice from 'TRUMP'D,' which seemed more impartial in its humor, to "G.O.P. Nuts," which seems to be strictly partisan, and why? What constitutes a 'bad' media actor to you?

DR: “TRUMPed” was my experimentation with fumetti (photo comics) as I decided that was the best (and fastest ) way for me to come at Trump with all the fury and condemnation needed. I never thought of “TRUMPed” as impartial in its humor as I always viewed it as one long troll against Donald Trump and his cronies. Trump is an extremely vain man, so I figured coopting the photos gracing newspapers and websites daily was a way for me to use his vanity as a cudgel against him. There was also a bit of my old school punk sensibility inspiring that decision as this was repeatedly done to Reagan during the hardcore punk days. The title “TRUMPed” was an homage to Harvey Kurtzman (who also experimented in fumetti) and had a very short-lived comic called “TRUMP,” published by Hugh Hefner, after he left MAD. It was also to troll Trump as he was branding everything with his name. Trump University, Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, etc. I added the ED in smaller case letters to the title to differentiate from Kurtzman’s book and to very subtly suggest Donald Trump suffered from erectile dysfunction because he kept lying about the size of his crowds and how rich he was.

That “TRUMPed” storyline you mentioned with Herman Cain is one of my favorites. It was a parody of A Christmas Carol as Trump was visited by the ghosts of Jamal Khashoggi, Herman Cain, and Jeffrey Epstein on Christmas Eve as the ghosts of past, present, and future. Did it cross the line in good taste? Maybe, but not as badly as January 6 did which happened mere days after the Herman Cain pages ran. Jan 6 took a lot of people by surprise, but Trump’s embrace of fascism was a running theme in “TRUMPed” from the very first story. It’s a strip that never would have existed with a major media outlet. I see as G.O.P. Nuts as an extension of “TRUMPed” but is more palatable because it is drawn in the style of Charles Schulz instead of using co-opted photos from the media. G.O.P. Nuts expanded the scope of my satirical targets to include everyone in the GOP.

Politics has always been full of bad actors, but the bad actors always seem to flock more to the GOP. The last six years has seen an erosion of norms I never thought possible. I thought Trump was done when he mocked a disabled reporter, but that display of cruelty only made him more popular. And it just kept snowballing. Calling the tiki torch mob at Charlottesville “very fine people”, his Covid response which killed hundreds of thousands of people, the blackmailing of Zelensky over funds needed to combat Russia, to Jan 6. Trump has normalized so much awfulness, stuff that used to sink careers, but now generates nothing more than a shrug from too many people. An unrepentant liar like George Santos never would have been seated in Congress if it wasn’t for the Trump effect.

INAUGURAL GALLERY EXHIBITION at DWIGHTMESS IN SILVER SPRING,MD

DWIGHTMESS is PLUMB STOKED to present its first exhibition in the gallery space at the compound, featuring the original #comics art of Takoma Park-based cartoonist Art Hondros! Printed copies of his various comics will also be available for purchase.

Art Hondros: CHIMERA POLITICK : :: examines creativity through the symbolic language of #comics & #cartooning when the same artist makes both political and surreal narratives for publication ::

FRIDAY the 13th at the gallery in Silver Spring, 805 Silver Spring Ave., 6-8pm, light refreshments [entrance on Ripley St.].

Exhibition Dates: Jan 13-31, 2023
Gallery Hours: Tues, Friday, 11-8pm, Saturday, 11-5pm or by appointment

DWIGHTMESS Cartooning & Comics Arts Compound is a new gallery, workshop, and illustration studio located in downtown Silver Spring.

CHIMERA POLITICK: In-Depth

When DWIGHTMESS first encountered Art’s work, we were throttled by the breadth of the artists’s interests, from the political hardlining in his one-pagers like “G.O.P. in N.Y.C.,” the historical wartime realism of cancelled project, “Prelude to a Dogfight,” to local lore in his comics such as “Maryland’s Goatman” and the b-movie references in “Hometown of the 50 Ft. Woman” and “Night of the Jackalope,” which riffs off the giant rabbit theme from 1972 film “Night of the Lepus.”

The DC area being what it is, there is certainly a forum for the subjects in both sides of Art’s work. The schlock film-screening scene in the DC-area has thrived for over two decades, in the forms of screenings at the independent theater E-Street Cinema in DC, screenings by longtime horror host Count Gore de Vol’s at AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring and weekly screenings sponsored by Washington Pyschotronic Film Society in Adams Morgan and Dupont Circle, led for many years by C.W Prather and the recently-deceased Carl Cephas.

But Art is also from Takoma Park, Maryland, which is widely-known as a sort of haven for radicals, artists, organizers and thinkers, liberals who don’t shy away from questioning policies and systems that dictate western democracy, but with the research to back up their complaints. Art is well-read and chooses his targets carefully, though usually humorously, and is just bit more of an artist’s artist than your weekly editorial cartoonist.

And daring to make grander statements about society, as any editorial cartoonist will tell you, can result in a narrowing of deployable symbolism because political cartooning is a medium for the masses. Art Hondros’ comics are of interest to DWIGHTMESS because of his openness to the wider comics language, to a wider positioning of the contemporary intrigues that dictate our politics, and to a wider inventory of references not only from film, but also animation, and especially the funny animal comics from the 1980’s which were based on an entire genre of children’s comics from the 1930’s and 40’s.