Who am I?

Hello defiant majority! I am Mr. Fish. If you don’t know who I am already it is only because your parents, priest or parole officer has decided to classify me as a bad influence and put me in the same depraved category as gas-huffing, not standing for the fog salute and public urination.

So who am I? I am a political cartoonist, cultural contrarian and mastur-crafter of exquisite dick jokes, arresting social satire and weaponized commentary. I am a pornographer of the naked truth and a high-minded moralist for the hard of sneering. My work has appeared in Harper’s magazine, The LA Times, The Nation, Vanity Fair, The Village Voice, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, The Advocate and Truthdig, among others. My books include Nobody Left, Long Story Short, And Then the World Blew Up, Go Fish: How to Win Contempt and Influence People and WARNING! Graphic Content, among others. My awards include The Grambs Aronson Award for Cartooning with a Conscience, TheSigma Delta Chi Award for Editorial Cartooning from the Society of Professional Journalists and The Southern California Journalism Award/L.A. Press Club, among others. I’m fairly well-known, like syphilis, and, like syphilis, will most definitely get you slapped hard across the face by your mother if you ever admitted to being well acquainted with who I am and what I do.

(An ever-deepening archive of my work can be found at www.clowncrack.com)

In other words, I have no real job and prefer to see myself as a public utility – a sewage system for the flushing away of bullshit and complacency – that needs to be regularly subsidized by those whose lives have been made better or easier or less shitty by my efforts. Specifically, because the work I create is rendered in contempt of advertisers and the corporate model of seeking to build a consumer base as opposed to a community-based audience, my income stream has always been dependent on the love and enthusiasm of patrons and likeminded riffraff.

What else?

Well, in addition to my steady outpouring of filthy cartoons and award-winning graphic commentary, I’m looking to expedite my infiltration of animated television by launching both a graphic novel called For Christ’s Sake, considered in pitch meetings to be too radical and probing of the public mind for commercial release, and a comic strip called HUCK, etc., which was nearly an animated television show produced by Bento Box before internal politics saw the removal of my boss and all the projects that he was working on, HUCK being one of them. The chapters and strips will be released as I complete them and the final versions of both will be published as big-ass books sometime in 2021.

Having been invited to pitch shows in the past by innumerable multinational media conglomerates only to be told that my work, while “genius,” was “too smart” and “too political” and needed to be dumbed down for “our boys” – our boys being the 18 to 34 year old white guys who have been determining the tone and tenor of the great American Experiment ever since the first non-white-male opinion was shooed away like a foul stench – I’m ready to present my graphic novel and comic strip in the same way that I present my single-panel cartoons: That is, free of all the content and artistic limitations imposed by those industry professionals too timid to offend, too sensible to be truly ecstatic and too fucking dim to enlighten.

Now what?

You decide.