Jen Sorensen Quotes

I'm ethically conflicted about eating something smarter than my dog

I, for one, think good political cartoons retain their value for decades. You can learn a lot from those old "Doonesbury" books. I might add that we cartoonists who lambasted the Bush administration from the beginning have been proven more accurate than most of the highly-paid gasbags you see on television. Historians and television producers, please take note.

Not too long after the Iraq War began, I read an article that quoted a Hummer "patriotic." I guess that's what counts as sacrifice for the war effort these days: driving an overpriced, gas-sucking monstrosity that resembles a military vehicle. I'm sure the troops appreciated this show of solidarity.

With all this talk of immigrants assimilating (or not assimilating) into "our culture," it's often implied that said culture is white and Christian. But if you consider that America is, in fact, a highly diverse nation of immigrants, the true outliers seem to be those who view the nation as a monolithic body resembling themselves. If anything, it is these folks who have not fully integrated, and who reject American values.

overzealous worship of the 'magic of the market' becomes a religious belief system

Many cartoons in this book are not overtly political. One can only write so many strips about torture before one needs to lighten up with a riff on Gucci flipflops. Lots of people seem to think we cartoonists will be struggling for material when Bush leaves office, but I will personally be relieved to get off this spiraling Swift Boat to hell.

I know it's my job to find humor in the gradual destruction of America as we know it, but I sometimes reach a point where I am so repulsed by the Bushies, and so exasperated by the Democrats, that I can hardly stand to draw cartoons about them. So I drew a cartoon about being sick of politics. Yes, even we cartoonists get discouraged.

There's often a "freedom from" that is the flip side of "freedom to." Isaiah Berlin wrote about this in his famous essay, "Two Concepts of Liberty." In an age when the word "freedom" is so abused, its double-edged nature is important to remember.

Understanding Comics author Scott McCloud says we identify with stylized characters like Charlie Brown more than with photorealistic ones. I agree, especially when it comes to CGI animation and video games. Give me Mario and Luigi in the chunky, two-dimensional mushroom kingdom any day.

My goal with 'Slowpoke' is to present a solidly-written piece of humor that usually entails some form of social or political commentary exposing distinctly ludicrous aspects of American life.

Democrats remain consistently cowed by the threat of Republicans calling them "weak on terror." They're going to be smeared no matter what, so they may as well go on the offensive.

A lot of my comics are informed by my background in cultural anthropology. That's what I majored in during college. I thought I was going to go to grad school and become a professor. There's a fair amount of overlap between cultural anthropology and cartooning, in that both are about observing culture and deconstructing all these things that we think are normal and set in stone. I've always found it fascinating to look at how we live and question why we do what we do. In college I started reading underground comics by Robert Crumb and Peter Bagge, and I was exposed to Matt Groening's Life in Hell and Roz Chast and Tom Tomorrow for the first time. I actually wrote my senior thesis about a womens' underground comics collective called the Twisted Sisters. One of my favorite cartoonists from this group was the awesomely funky Leslie Sternbergh, who I had the pleasure of befriending years later. Eventually, I got tired of writing papers and burned out on academia. I started to think that maybe I wasn't going to go to grad school, I was just going to draw cartoons.

It must be nice to live in a world where the truth is whatever you want it to be. In addition to the former oil lobbyist's edits shown in the first panel, the Bush administration also watered down a 2005 G8 statement on global warming. One of the changes was the deletion of the opening statement, "Our world is warming." Global warming is a perfect example of something often treated as a "liberal" issue, one side of a two-sided argument. But it's not, unless you're pro-drowning the people of Tuvalu.

When I first started out I wasn’t even really political. I just wanted to do surreal R. Crumb-ish comics. In the early days, I wanted to be as weird as possible. In the late nineties, in alt-weeklies, it seemed like we lived in times that allowed for absurdist humor. That would feel a little more frivolous now. Over time I feel like I have a greater sense of urgency to make a point and to tell the truth. Hopefully in an amusing way. I’m not trying to be as weird as I possibly can. I think I’m trying to make things a little simpler now, and more accessible.

Very Serious Thinkers are still churning out hacky columns using this dumb binary of "big" vs. "small" government. I saw an ad for The Economist bemoaning the unfortunate necessity of "big government" during the coronavirus crisis. As though the specifics of context and what that government is doing and who it benefits is secondary to some abstract notion of "size. The more relevant divide is "good government vs. bad," or "smart vs. stupid/sadistic."