That’s right! No card cutouts this year! I got a different idea, one that’s bathed in satire.
You know what’s REALLY HARD about political satire in this day and age from my standpoint? I love hyperbole. My general technique is “push stuff to a hyperbolic level to mock points of view I think are dumb/that I don’t like”. And LET ME TELL YOU following the news of late has made this very, very hard; I have thrown out so many ideas in part because I couldn’t figure out how to mine humor.
LOOK HOW FAR I HAD TO PUSH to be able to go “okay now I have some ridiculous satire” and EVEN THEN this feels too inside the realm of possibility the way things have been going. I mean, goddamn, I made a joke about “I thought we cut civics funding” last year… and here they’re talking about cutting federal education funding EVERYWHERE outside of the proper channels because, well, the incredibly unsubtle toku monster in this comic.
Just ugh.
As for the design of our antagonist, well… would you believe that there’s an actual Kamen Rider monster known as “Starfish Hitler?” (That’s the actual translation. It’s a homophone/pun in Japanese!) I spent half the week unable to come up with an idea for how to portray him, so I crowdsourced with friends and got reminded of this fact. And couldn’t NOT draw it and laugh.
…and writing this I just realized that, making this even MORE on the nose, he turned up in “Kamen Rider X.” COME ON, reality.
