Stickfigures vs. Matriarchy

Wanting to run your own webcomic is all well and good, but if you’re too lazy to draw your own stickfigures then it might be time to reevaluate things. Alternatively, you could turn to Toondoo.

Tondoo is a website which uses a Flash-based interface to take all the hard work out of copy-pasting someone else’s drawings, giving you access to a few hundred pieces of vector graphic clip art that can be positioned on a one, two or three panel template. These images are divided into about a dozen self-explanatory categories – men, women, animals, children, objects etc. – although special mention must be made of the “Emoticon” category, which consists of false moustaches, headless robots, Manga-esque eyes and absolutely nothing that, by any stretch of the imagination, could be deemed an emoticon. But as far as I’m concerned, the problem with Toondoo is that all the images fit into one of two larger ur-categories, namely “Bland” and “Utterly Nonsensical”, with no middle ground whatsoever. You’re forced to choose between blandly anonymous Jon-from-Garfield clones with maybe three possibly facial expressions, or, say, the disembodied floating head of Benedict XVI. And although we know that a gag-a-day strip starring the disembodied floating head of Benedict XVI would be awesome – if only because it implies he’s been decapitated – the average Toondoo user lacks our glorious vision and sticks with the kind of robotic blandness that would shame Ctrl+Alt+Delete.

Mmm, cutting-edge!

Mmm, schadenfreude!

Mmm, matriarchy!

Yes, because the war against matriarchy must be fought on all fronts, Toondoo has its very own MRA strip, written and not-actually-illustrated by some dude called Renardgris. The above comic is actually his most impressive effort to date, even though he needs text labels to explain what’s actually happening, and even though despite this it still makes almost no sense if you don’t know the relevant background details. For those of you who aren’t keeping up with how awful women are at everything, a female astronaut (who only got the job ’cause she was sleeping with the man in the moon)  lost a bag of expensive tools while repairing part of a space station. So, much like Todd Holton, Super Green Beret before it, this is a comic with a solid foundation in fact. It does, however, take some creative liberties with the subject matter:

• The woman in question was not an eighteen foot tall mutant capable of  surviving unprotected in the vacuum of space (although I haven’t seen her since, and you know what cosmic rays are like).
• The tools were not in an enormous comedy treasure chest. This is standard NASA practice, as they prove difficult to unlock while wearing a space suit.
• The total cost of the tools was US$100,000, not millions.
• It was covered by US taxpayers, rather than “some man”.
• Many US taxpayers are, in fact, women.
• I attempted to work out what the actual cost to each individual taxpayer would be as a result of this, but the number was too small for my calculator program to display properly, causing it to crash.
• If you’re incapable of drawing your own stickfigures, you should really take a long hard look at yourself before criticising a fucking astronaut.

Ah, yes, stickfigures. Because Renardgris is obviously a busy, busy man, what with all the work he has to do to support deadbeat women who don’t work while simultaneously taking all the jobs from men, he can’t possibly keep up the above level of quality all the time. It’d be chaos. Therefore, when he set out to create his next comic, Pink vs. Blue, he did so using Toondoo’s posable stickfigures.

Now. I’ve read this over about a dozen times, and the best interpretation I’ve come up with is that… is that he thinks when women demand “equal pay”, they actually want to sit around doing nothing while receiving a payment equal to… their partner? All men? A mean average wage? Where, precisely, is she “paid the same for no work”, other than his paranoid imagination?

Pink vs. Blue continues on in this largely incomprehensible vein for some time, before Renardgris stops focusing on the horrors on misandry today and starts thinking about tomorrow. Yes, it’s a comic strip set in a dystopian matriarchy of the future, where feminism destroyed the world… one man at a time.

THERE WERE THESE FEMINISTS, SEE *mumble mumble mumble* AND AS A DIRECT RESULT, LIFE ITSELF WAS DESTROYED. Ask a scientician!

Not that I’d actually be in favour of it, but surely if you were setting up a totalitarian matriarchy in the near future, you’d just grow female children in laboratories and get rid of men entirely within a few generations, yes? So why are they still there, and why did the slighter fatter stickfigure only just notice? Also, you can just tell that the thin one’s been rehearsing that speech for ages, can’t you?

I know this isn’t the place for logic, but… If they all lost their jobs as a result of feminism, how can they be wage slaves? And we can’t assume that they just lost good jobs and are now slaving away in Dickensian workhouses, because this is apparently “their own society without men”, period. Is the pink carpet meant to represent the matriarchal influence?

Look, this is just too idiotic for… hang on–

Anybody familliar with the symbolism of double-headed axes will no doubt find their inclusion as an MRA weapon hilarious. Anybody unfamilliar, Google “Labrys” and enjoy.

Feministe Futur only lasts a few more strips before stopping without a proper resolution, although, thanks to Toondoo, anybody who feels sufficiently inspired can make their own. Here’s mine: