Conspiratoons: A Look Back
Dark whimsies inspired by the past few decades of mass madness
A small but telling anecdote from my time in the newspaper biz, involving the above cartoon from 2011.
Some background first, going back to 9/11. Within mere hours of the terror attacks in New York, US broadcast media identified Osama bin Laden as the figure responsible. The Saudi-born terrorist promptly and sensibly disappeared, and there wasn’t all that much media commentary about his possible whereabouts, at least not until he was killed on May 2, 2011 during a raid by U.S. special forces on a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
No body was produced after he was gunned down. The official story was that Bin Laden's body was transported to Afghanistan for identification, before being buried at sea in the North Arabian Sea, in accordance with Islamic tradition.
Huh?
I had little reason to doubt that Bin Laden had been located and shot. But a culturally culturally sensitive sendoff from a ship deck? It seemed more likely that joyous US servicemen would have played soccer with his head before launching his bullet-ridden remains toward Mecca from a destroyer gun.
Anyway, without a body produced, my cartoon simply projected the question - where’s Osama? - into an indeterminate quantum state, a la “Schrodinger’s Cat.” Seemed fair comment to me, though perhaps my execution was a bit too science-y for the average reader. Yet that’s not what concerned the arts editor who called me up after I submitted the cartoon by email. I remember her objection: “you don’t want them to think we’re conspiracy theorists, do you??”
“Them” being the chosen pronoun for readers, presumably.
I wasn’t even questioning the narrative on 9/11 itself in the toon. So I share this story to indicate how little it took - and takes - to colour outside the lines when working in ‘respectable’ print media.
You’re not surprised, of course.
During my three decades in newsprint, I did manage to go further out on a limb than most of my fellow journalists, largely because I was working for an urban biweekly on the west coast of Canada, not some consent-manufacturing behemoth like The Washington Post or New York Times. I liked getting away with being epistemologically frisky. For example, questioning — if tentatively— Washington’s soon-to-be-disproved ‘weapons of mass destruction’ meme, which nearly all legacy media swallowed whole in the buildup to the 2003 war in Iraq.
Though the paper eventually folded (with me being shown the door a year or two earlier), I was still a contributor to Common Ground magazine, which allowed me even greater room to exercise my darker suspicions, both in text and toons.
And once on Substack, all bets were off. I could render any whimsy that entered my head and publish it without an editorial filter to a vast global audience (and if you saw my subscriber numbers, you’d appreciate the sarcasm). This came in particularly handy from 2020 on, when the world slipped into a dystopian novel coauthored by Philip K. Dick and Kurt Vonnegut, with illustrations by Hans Giger.
Here’s some samples of conpiratoons from the past few years. Enjoy.
I missed these toons somehow. But I was happy when I did rediscover your work in a COVID vax period edition of Common Ground and saw that your critical wit was alive and well . Glad also to see that Joseph had not lost the “plot”.
These are all brilliant but my personal fave is the one about the insufferable suffragettes. Nobody saw them coming...