23Jan/13
Lance’s Harsh Landing
I highly doubt that Lance Armstrong will need to apply for demoralizing low-wage work to make ends meet. Dude could live quite handsomely off the value of his real estate holdings alone. But it's a nice fantasy. The thing that really bothers me about Armstrong is not so much the doping, since pretty much everyone seems to have been doing that, but rather the way he made life hell for people who told the truth about him.
While doing this strip, I noticed that drawing Lance is oddly like drawing his fellow Texan George W. Bush.
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Meta
January 25th, 2013 - 08:19
Conservatives all look alike to me. But I’ve been bashing them for decades in my blog and book, Bike&Chain. This is why I’ve gravitated towards your amusingly crisp and politically remarkable cartoons.
http://bike-n-chain.blogspot.com/
Surviving cancer doesn’t give you the right to cheat and lie, but can’t you forgive his wanting to win at all costs? Doping seems like nothing after abiding chemotherapy.
January 25th, 2013 - 09:05
I’ve also gravitated here because of the quality of the output — brilliant political satire illustrated as powerfully as anything I have ever seen, you name it: Constantin Guys, Honore Daumier, Thomas Nast, Herbert Block, and such illustrious contemporaries as Steve Brodner, Barry Blitt, and Tom Tomorrow. I click on this site often, and for the life of me I cannot understand why Ms. Sorensen is not better known. Sorry, I had to say that.
January 25th, 2013 - 10:21
I’m bummed about the whole thing, especially that road cyclists had a popular hero for a while. Those of us who like to go out on a weekend and belt out 40 or 50 or 60 miles know that we’ll take some verbal abuse from people who scrape their knuckles when they walk and shout at us from pickup trucks. “Haw haw haw! They’s wearin’ them tight pants, muss be a buncha sissies!”
(The fact that football players wear tight pants, then go into huddles, pat each other on teh butt, dance in the end zone and afterward take showers together is never brought up)
But for a few summers it was much cooler to be a road cyclist, because we had a hero who, in the popular imagination, was kicking Euro butts. We should have acknowledged that it was too good to be true, espcecially when he won an incredible seven Tours. If he’d stopped at two, like Greg LeMond, I wonder if there would have been the same drive to investigate him. And to some people, the drive to investigate and re-investigate him looks like Ken Starr’s attempts to get something, anything, on Bill Clinton.
BTW, he does have that pinched-face look of Bush, but Bush was born in New Haven, Connecticut.
January 25th, 2013 - 11:40
All pelaton racers have pinched faces… sort of a sharklike adaptation to wind resistance not to mention lean muscle. But having met him recently Lemond these days is just as out of shape as me. What, Landis doesn’t count? Don’t need heroes to legitimize or love riding a bike. I, as did activist Ken Kifer, drive a truck with a bike rack on back, give cyclists right of way, and have been known to stop and fix a flat for them like a sag wagon.
http://bike-n-chain.blogspot.com/2012/10/blown-acclaim.html
Acclaim belongs mostly to those who train in perpetual obscurity.
January 26th, 2013 - 18:46
Thanks for the kind comments. It would be nice to get more professional respect, but at least I get to make a living doing this. I think if I were as widely-published in any other field, I’d be “famous,” but cartooning is a weird art form that people don’t take seriously unless you produce a Profound and Depressing Graphic Novel. Which I could do, but ugh.
Re: Lance, I actually find the whole thing more fascinating than a source of schadenfreude. Doping is one thing, but to be so aggressive against people who inevitably start to talk… well, I just don’t know how he slept at night. Lots of exercise, I guess!
My pet theory before his confession was that he had doped earlier in his career, but kept returning to the Tour de France to show he could do it without doping a certain number of times. Guess I got that wrong.
January 28th, 2013 - 11:25
About 7% of society can read and cares about cultural issues. Appealing to the masses with conservative fearmongering, gross entertainments, and reality programming seems to be what advertisers back and majority craves. Beautiful, intelligent takes on life’s ironies requires hard-to-find brainy audiences. But Alan Moore style violence doesn’t have a lock on graphic novels. Consider Majane Satrapi’s “Persepolis” or Dennis Welch’s and Mike Dowdall’s “Humans”.
Let’s not forget that Lance won TdF 7 (SEVEN) times over an entirely doped field, still amazing. He AVERAGED 35 mph on some stages. As a cyclist who knows racing, that is mind blowing self propelled performance that doping only slightly influenced. Those who complain about doping just want to increase the suffering of a 3,500 mile race in one month.
January 28th, 2013 - 15:46
Funny that you mention Mike Dowdall’s “Humans” — I read that book over and over as a kid.