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Movie: Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991).
Monthly Archives: October 2017
Ginger Vee goes to the movies
Ginger Vee goes to the movies
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Movie: Dances with Wolves (1990).
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Ginger Vee goes to the movies
In the early 1990s, the video rental industry flourished. Nevertheless, as is shown here, people still went to the movies.
Just as media formats change yet produce the same effect (consumption!), plots may change yet reflect the same underlying ethos (consumption!).
Take a walk down memory lane with Ginger Vee, her chum Marla, and stick figure screen stars who exist uneasily in their three-dimensional garments.
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Movie: Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991).
Graphic and Fact Sheet. Abortion Rights After Texas – AwakenMichigan
We continue to share cartoons created for other organizations. This second post on abortion jurisprudence – published following the Hellerstedt decision – was created for AwakenMichigan: Reproductive and Sexual Justice Project.
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EXPLANATIONS AND ATTRIBUTIONS
Frame 1 depicts, of course, Justices Ginsburg and Kennedy. For RBG’s portrait, we used an image from the marvelous coloring book created by Karen Cox/She Knows.
Frame 2 shows an abortion clinic administering a medication abortion in the surgical-grade premises that would have been necessary had the Texas law been upheld.
Frame 3 lists other common abortion restrictions – most of which are currently in force in Michigan. Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt does not invalidate any of these restrictions; further court challenges will be necessary to determine if they constitute undue burdens.
Frame 4 broadens the scope even more to show that securing abortion rights is only one small part of the full spectrum of reproductive rights – which itself is just one aspect of Reproductive Justice. The two panels read:
The right to have a child, the right to not have a child, the right to parent my own child. This is Reproductive Justice. 4000 Years for Choice.
You deserve to choose not to parent regardless of the circumstances of your pregnancy and how much money you make. Affordable abortion access is Reproductive Justice.
We thank Heather Ault of 4000 Years for Choice for permission to use her work.
The latter panel is from the Repeal Hyde Art Project. The image is licensed under a Creative Commons license. We changed this image by cutting off the far right edge and manipulating the contrast for increased legibility.
Ginger Vee: source of nourishment
It is hard to think of a historical period when women’s bodies were not scrutinized and judged. However, in the 1990s, a fear of fatness, rising publicity surrounding eating disorders, and the emergence of feminist psychology all combined to suggest that anorexia – and later bulimia, too – served to redirect women’s attention from social progress achieved during the 1970s and early 80s to an activity more … all-consuming: watching our weight. The key texts that encompassed these theories included Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (1990) and Susan Faludi’s Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1991).
This cartoon features another vampire – not the kinder, gentler vampire of Ginger Vee saves a jar, but one whose natural drives allowed him to exploit the 1990s zeitgeist. What this says about man-woman symbiosis is for you, Dear Reader, to determine.
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Ginger Vee saves a jar
Remember the vampire craze of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s? Movies about vampires abounded, including The Hunger (1993), which starred Susan Sarandon, Catherine Deneuve, and David Bowie (be still, our beating heart!) – and featured six actors billed only as “Cadaver.” Werner Herzog’s haunting Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) featured Klaus Kinski and Bruno Ganz (one day a vampire hunter, the next an angel!). Frank Langella played Count Dracula in a 1979 film that followed his wildly successful performance of the same role on Broadway several years earlier.
So it was only natural in 1992 for your cartoonist to turn to the figure of the vampire to share thoughts about violence, social conditioning, and of course, menstruation. We’ve altered a reference to the “Sensitive New-Age Vampire,” but the rest is pretty much the same, 25 years later.
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Ginger Vee ponders the options
This post introduces a new series, Blast from the Past. In the early 1990s, long before Mama was Mama, and certainly before she’d discerned the full potential of digital media, there were stick figures – one of whom turned into Ginger Vee. There was also radical feminism, reproductive rights, and take-no-prisoners commentary on any number of other issues.
We bring you these cartoons mostly untouched. A few edits have polished and sharpened our youthful thoughts, but the passion in these cartoons reminds us to keep the faith, carry on cartooning, and to always expect a better world.
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Image Credits
- The Macintosh Classic (1990) shown in the logo is from Wikipedia Commons. We removed the mouse. The photo is shared under a Creative Commons license.
- Bill Clinton, exhaling our blast from the past, is selected from this 1994 photo in which Boris Yeltsin looks on with apparent delight at Clinton’s prowess. The photo is in the Public Domain.
Mama's Got a Plan: 
