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My Cartoon Reviewed By Toonpool


Caricature Of Kim Jong-il by ~davidbdr on deviantART

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Dr. Strangejong or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb


While Stalinist despot Kim Jong Il is making his depleted country and his world's fifth largest army (1.2 mill. soldiers) ready for the nuclear age, a unique art exhibition is running in the Art Center Berlin: "Art from Pyongyang" . The artworks are made with loving hands, yet mostly kitschy and available for buyers with little money. They almost seem to be off this world. Among the exhibits are artworks with a clearly propagandistic statement - without compromising the capitalist enemy USA.

In the work "Kim-Jong-iL", artist David Baldinger addresses the leader with a clear statement: Kim is the despot who is gone berserk, the one who spends the national budget for his military despite the big poverty in his country - his eyes always pointed at the atom. He's the little boy who spends his lunch money for tiny tanks.
The strong colors and the fierce stroke of Baldinger which forms the waving hair, the snarling teeth and the socialist's jacket is showing Kim in a parody of 20th century's iconografic fascist posters: he is ready to fight - but who is his enemy and what's it all about, again?

It's easy to imagine Crazy Kim riding The Bomb like Baron Münchhausen or, with the same destructive attitude like General Jack D. Ripper in Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove" (starring Sterling Hayden), rushing in enemy territories while singing and yelling.

It's a pity that the people of North Korea is not able to see this cartoon (except of few employees of the government). But changes are about to come, at least in this case - hungry, but online.
(toonpool.com 09/08)
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