Ben Garrison: Episode 1

Preamble: Ben Garrison is a fucking lunatic. Okay, well, let’s start at the beginning; this blog is nothing if not fair to the idiocy it mocks, at least. If the name “Ben Garrison” isn’t immediately familiar to you, and your mind isn’t thus flooded with imagery of Donald Trump’s head (full of hair) placed on the body of a sculpted Adonis, then it’s likely you’ve at least seen a few of his comics posted around. He’s kind of hard to miss, being that he’s pretty much what StoneToss would look like if StoneToss was ever successful.

Ben Garrison is a self-styled anti-censorship political cartoonist who has been making cartoons, at least in his current style, since around 2008. His early works are very tame compared to where he’s come today: mostly he just drew weak, unoriginal “the government sucks” stuff that didn’t express much political leaning. If anything, Garrison often insisted that both Democrats and Republicans were puppets of an Illuminati regime that controlled the country from behind the scenes.

It wouldn’t take long for Garrison to develop his now iconic style of 1.) Making batshit crazy comics and 2.) Unnecessarily labeling every single god damned thing in his batshit crazy comics. It’s not unusual for political cartoonists to label their metaphors or specific people if that person’s caricature won’t be recognizable on its own, but it was not with an artist’s adept observational skill that Garrison adopted this practice. Rather, it was more like Garrison was a fucking space alien attempting to emulate human behavior to “blend in” with the natives.

In 2015-2016 Garrison’s political cartoons swiftly began to lean more and more to the right, until eventually his depictions bordered on softcore pornography of Donald Trump, this brash movement brought him quickly into a viral eye and elevated him from “random political cartoonist who whines about the American dollar” into “incoherent old man/Trump lover”. This is in stark contrast to a 2015 statement Garrison made where he professed an admiration, but not support, of Trump as a candidate. Some have explained that Garrison’s bizarre style and choice of content comes not from genuine beliefs the man himself actually holds, but that Garrison merely “people pleases” by giving his supporters what he thinks they want. Whatever the truth is, the end result is the same: Ben Garrison is a fucking lunatic and he draws some of the strangest “political comics” mankind has ever seen.

I’m going to cover Ben Garrison on this blog. But I’m not going to do it like I do StoneToss or others. The reason for this is because, first of all: Ben Garrison’s comics rarely convey any deep meaning and therefore can not be analyzed like a StoneToss comic, and second of all: Ben Garrison is a fucking lunatic. But I don’t want to deprive anyone of Ben Garrison. I would never dream of that. And so, dear reader, I treat you to the first of what will likely be many in what I call: Ben Garrison Is A Fucking Lunatic.

Comic Name: A Rendezvous With History

Here’s a fun fact: Ben Garrison’s website is fucking terrible. He’s a fellow WordPress blogger, and the “I’m a demented 65 year old Trump crony who draws stupid fucking comics” energy is very strong with his blog’s layout. Because it’s a mess. Apparently he has a younger person helping him (a daughter or a niece or a child bride of some sort?), but whatever aid Garrison receives with his blog seems to be moot, because despite only being a website to host comic images, it’s a tough to navigate. It’s actively difficult to browse his comics, given the layout of the blog and lack of any “Next/Previous” buttons on the actual comic pages. Somehow the most BASIC of webcomic functions eludes Garrison, which makes sense given the sum total of his knowledge appears to be drawing perspective incorrectly and fantasizing about his wife getting railed by a ripped Donald Trump. Ben Garrison is old! And a shill! Don’t bully his crappy WordPress blog please 😦

His comics do not include their creation date, and he doesn’t date them on his blog. It’s as if the passage of existence in the Garrisonverse is a kind of stagnant, constant purgatory rather than a procession of events that can be dated. You won’t find a publication date on the website, but what you will find under each and every comic is multi-paragraph ramblings written by Garrison as he explains what the comic is supposed to mean. That Garrison draws an over-labeled “Where’s Waldo?“-esque visual cacophony and still feels the need to include half a page of follow up ranting is proof that the ability to speak does not equate to intelligence.

Garrison is an avid supporter of conspiracy theories, and lent the QAnon movement one of its strongest “legitimate” voices, actively supporting the movement. This extended, as you can see, to support of the now infamous January 6 riot. Funny, if it weren’t so pitifully sad, to imagine a comic where a bald eagle (who Garrison draws with bulging, muscular mutant wing-arms, because Garrison can’t go a single day without homoerotic sexualization of American iconography) circles a calendar date with an AMERICA BRAND(tm) flaming heat pencil whose flames literally spell out “MAGA” directly aided/promoted domestic terrorist action that resulted in multiple people dead.

Also, what is the eagle doing, exactly? He’s ‘circling’ the date, but he seems to be drawing around it in a spiral, rather than ever completing the circle. Is the eagle having a motor skills issue where he actively can not attach his stroke to the end of the circle, thus spiraling out of control? Garrison tried to draw the eagle with a kind of “determined patriot” look on its face, but it comes off more like the eagle is staring, mouth agape, as he desperately tries to just draw a god damned circle. On a more serious note, the way Garrison displays all the other dates as “faded” out, but with the 6th in bold black, it’s as if he’s telling his readers “The 6th is the only date that matters, nothing before or after”. Which might’ve seemed like a great idea at the time, though the capitol rioters are learning the hard way that, shockingly, the world actually continues existing after breaking the law.

Seemingly, Garrison no longer draws QAnon nor “January 6 Protest” comics. Of course it’s sort of hard to tell, given the clunkiness of his website and the total lack of dating when his comics are drawn or posted. You mean to tell me that Ben Garrison creates media under a false pretense of supporting things in order to profit from it, while at the same time deriding the very same principle when he witnesses it in people he doesn’t like? A dishonest and self-serving Conservative? There’s just no way!