Welcome to the In Contempt archive. From 2001 – 2009 I published a political cartoon strip called In Contempt aimed at the alternative weekly press market. Strips appeared in The Skanner, Z Magazine, a few college papers, and in Attitude 2: The New Subversive Alternative Cartoonists by Ted Rall.
I have been drawing political cartoons for a very long time, starting in high school and college and continuing on and off to the present day. Politics is in my other comics work as well, especially the webcomic Fetch, and even the child-friendly Wanderlost.
This site collects work that appeared in Anodyne Magazine, The Skanner, In These Times, The Nib, and wherever I felt like posting them. Sometimes they appeared under a comic strip title, such as Full Metal Stomp and Off My Chest. More often they were just random cartoons I posted to my main site Mooretoons and social media in response to issues that bothered me. Much of the work I did from 2014-2015 led up to the development of Fetch.
I have gathered all of these strips here for posterity and for anyone interested. I am proud of this work, including the stuff I look back and cringe a little at. It’s all part of artistic growth.
Politics has a short shelf life. Every few strips I would work on more evergreen issues like poverty, war, social injustice, etc., but more often I was responding to the issues of the day. I tried to put current events into a broader historical context, such as ongoing patterns of U.S. imperialism or racism.
Nonetheless, as I prepared these strips for this site I found a few whose context I barely remembered or entire political figures I had completely forgotten. (Porter Goss, anyone?) Under each post I have added what historical footnotes I could find to explain the cartoon, as well as comment upon how history has reframed or rendered the observations I was making at the time ironic.