The following was posted on our front page on
Wednesday July 28, 2010. Click here to go to the full entry.
Update on a horrible item:
Hear ye, Sambos. It's Paul Revere's favorite comix.
THIRD ISSUE FOUND. ARRIVED IN AN ENVELOPE SO STIFF AND REEKING OF CIGARETTE SMOKE THAT WE'RE CONCERNED IT'S FLAME RETARDED.
July 28, 2010: A trip to our mailbox has yielded a good catch. Or a foul odor, depending on your mood. Third issue of TEA PARTY COMIX has arrived, and we're putting up a few more images. First a recap:
Tea Party Comix, Issues one and two.
We liked this blurb that followed the initial post:
"Crude, bizarro, outsider, and yes, racist. These are classics."
— Robert Newman Design on Tea Party Comix
We agree.
So what is TEA PARTY COMIX? We first posted scans of the horrible (wonderful and insane) thing in March in our inaugural "This month in Race Baiting" column. It's one of the weirdest comics we have on the site.
Gavel clank! Batman and Tea Party Obama debate the law.
At the time we couldn't really believe the thing existed - an odd blend of Tijuana Bible styled drawing with some sharp satire, or bigotry. But instead of Tijuana-flavored cartoon characters having sex with distorted genitals, we had Obama attacking superheroes, with distorted ear lobes and floppy lips. Sort of resembling racist childhood fantasies. You can peruse a lengthy excerpt, of course, right here.
Either this is surely a joke OR, if it's real then the mix of confrontation, sincerity, bad drawing, and interesting theme accidentally evokes the best of outsider art: The aforementioned T Bibles, but also Mingering Mike, Daniel Johnston. A hatemongering Henry Darger or Hasil Adkins with a pen.
And now ... arriving in a stink-bomb envelope where if I hold it up to my ear I still hear the shortwave radio Turner Diaries, we have ... a third issue:
Cover to Issue Three of Tea Party Comix, apparently published in May.
To be honest, when we first posted these things the sheer insult of a comic depicting Obama in blackface with gigantic rubber ears and shucking and jiving was, to put it mildly, a bit of a distraction on the rest of the plausible merits of the comic. We still think it's repulsive -- but having mellowed to that we now think it's interesting as a piece of comics. Which is to say we hesitantly really like them. For example there's the strange level of parody that, even it it's suffocating, shows a clever head at work:
This is actually pretty good.
These comics essentially re-cast Obama as the villian in about fifty classic DC and Marvel superhero covers. And some of the results are genuinely interesting. Issue three happens to have my favorite so far. A subversion of Zap Comix #0:
And what the fuck on this one, really.
Really, after the Zap Comix one I have to wonder: Who is this person?
Short of being insanely terrible and depressing, it's not that bad.
CLICK FOR AN IMAGE GALLERY OF TEA PARTY COMIX No. 3
CLICK FOR ORIGINAL POSTING OF TEA PARTY COMIX No. 1 and 2
Click for other items on this website - Odd documents, comics , etc.
