Betsy's Plan for a Graphic Novel

Wow! I was going through some old files at home and turned this up! This is an outline, written a bit more than 3 years ago, for a graphic novel. It's depressing how current it still is. It needs some really great artwork to bring it to life. Any volunteers? Here is the outline:

Graphic Novel about G.W. Bush’s first term. “Chronicles of W, the First”
Political satire in text with vivid political cartoons illustrating the issues. Introduce the subject:

At the turn of the millennium, the people of the most powerful nation
on earth elected as their president, a Very Small Man. The man was so
small that his family and friends called him just by his middle initial, W.

(Image of G.W. Bush as a very small guy at the presidential podium)

Americans had been shocked and outraged that their last president
was a lecher. They cried out for a leader with VALUES.
W. ran against the heir of the lecher with the simple slogan (illustrate
Bush with sign):

W – He keeps his fly zipped.

W. was not stupid – he just had a knack for saying things sideways.
(Illustrate W with one of his classic Bushisms; I like “They misunderestimate me” – it’s true!).

W. succeeded through bulldog tenacity.
(Illustrate with Bush reading the children’s book to the class while the attacks on the World
Trade Center and on the Pentagon continued)

This is the Chronicles of the First Term of President W.

Either organize by topic (Environment, Taking Care of Business, War, Taxes, Religious Right), or by chronological order.

Examples of Environmental topics:

1.Smoky the Bear in front of a field of stumps, pointing at the viewer and the slogan

Only Clearcutting can prevent forest fires!

2. Rape of the environment – what was really planned at that secret meeting with Cheney and his picked advisors. A blackboard with plans on it, and a “photo” of a young, innocent-looking girl representing the American environment. Cheney is saying to those around the table:

Interior Secretary, EPA, BLM and Forest Service
will hold her down on the table, while you boys
have your little bit of fun.
The President and I will keep the press, tree huggers
and the public out of the tent.

Sitting around the table are Big Oil (an oil rig in a suit), Grazing Rights (cowboy), Timber(a lumberjack with a chainsaw), Mining (with a pickaxe), and Polluting Industries (smoke stacks in a suit). Possibly they have visible erections or are panting with desire.

3. Planned opening of the Alaska Wildlife Refuge to exploitation, compared to opening Oklahoma for the Great Land Rush. A top image of the Sooner Homesteaders lined up to run and a starter with a gun. A bottom image of oil tanker trucks lined up at the border of the Refuge and W. holding a starting gun.

4. Grazing rights like herds of locusts devouring every blade of green from public lands.
Maybe illustrate with a cowboy herding them.

5. Bush playing cards with Timber, Developers and Polluters.

Do you have a spotted owl? Go fish!

6. A national park with a thin row of trees along the roads where tourist drive along with cameras, but with clearcut stumps everywhere else, and off-road vehicles roaring around.

W. Preserves the national park system.

7. Refusal to sign the Kyoto Accords: an over-sized Uncle Sam looking like Rambo with muscles and weapons, with his back against the wall, threatening much smaller and weaker nations (Asian nations like China, India; Central and South Americans and African nations) and exclaiming:

We can’t sign this accord unless you guys give up the same things!
We’ll be at a huge disadvantage!

******************************

Examples of “Taking Care of Business”:

1. Halliburton as a tick. Cheney with a tick on a leash, leading it to the Capitol Building. In succeeding panels, the tick gets bigger and the dome on the Capitol begins to sag and deflate. Bush comes along and Cheney says to Bush,

Keeping campaign promises is so important!

2. Enron embarrasses other businesses in a Biz Pride march (like a Gay Pride March). Enron is like an over-the-top drag queen. One of the other business marchers says to another,

That bitch! Acting out like that sets us all back with the public.

3. Privatizing Social Security. Bush invites vampires to the retirement home.

4. Managing the media: Bush working puppet strings to manipulate a TV news anchor.

5. Bush as a Roman emperor offering bread and circuses to the masses as business interests burn down Rome (America) to toast marshmallows.

6. Bush offers candy tax cuts to the naive taxpayer, luring her into the car with a menacing pair, Big Business and Wealthy Few.

7. Bush and Cheney help Management turn the grape press to squeeze more value from employees.
Like squeezing blood from a turnip!

********************************

Examples of War:

1. Leadership in Crisis: After 9/11, W tells the American people that they can fight the terrorists by pumping business by consuming. He sets up a blood donation station where blood is drawn from consumers’ wallets and purses.

2. Rumsfeld and Bush are preparing to sacrifice Isaac (American youth) on the altar of Iraq.

3. Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush, all wearing flightsuits labled WAR AVOIDER, hold the door against deployed troops whose service period is expired, keeping them on the battlefield. Bush says

Mission accomplished, but you can’t come back yet.

4. Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush build a platform of American, Afghani and Iraqi war dead, to support their palace of lies.

5. Bush drapes a bunch of albatrosses around the neck of American Youth... labeled

World Opinion Iraq Afghanistan

6. Rumsfeld, with Marie Antoinette hair (is that possible?), sitting in an armored Humvee, leans out the window as they pass G.I.s digging in a dump for armor. He says,

Have they no bread? Let them eat cake!

7. A scene like the recent trials at the Hague, or the Nuremburg Trials, with Bush on trial as a war criminal. The prosecutor says:

J’accuse!

8. Bush’s attempt to manage his puppet governors in Afghanistan and Iraq fails because the governors can’t get the signal clear enough to repeat the slogans coming from their “bumps” under their jackets (or robes).

9. Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Congress all sitting in duck blinds, blasting away with shotguns. A dove of peace is fluttering, dying from the sky.

Who killed cock robin?