I’ve been trying to figure out what to write about Dan Lacey’s blog/cartoon/orthodox-Catholic-outsider-art-fest/huh-wha, Faithmouse, ever since I started writing this series.
Laceys’ a local cartoonist and artist who’d been getting some international play (he’s being published in a UK magazine, now; he’s gotten his stuff in the NYTimes). A few years back, when the City Pages still openly recognized conservative blogs, Faithmouse won the rag’s “Best Conservative Blog” contest…
…which set a lot of conservative bloggers to wondering. Lacey is orthodox Catholic and very very pro-life; he also admits to “wandering toward the center” in one long discussion forum thread, which to the City Pages is probably all the same. It’d be a stretch to call him a “conservative blogger”.
What his stuff – the Faithmouse cartoon and his other art – is, is edgy, thought-provoking, genre-bending, maddeningly elliptical, uncompromising, sometimes inscrutable, sometimes looking like the downstream side of a fever dream or paint-huffing acid-dropping Hunter S. Thompson bender rendered in ink or acrylic, the kind of thing that’s prompted some of his critics to hop up and down like poo-flinging monkeys and call him a “pornographer”.
He’s also by a long stretch the best cartoonist within a day’s drive of the Twin Cities’ blogosphere.
I particularly liked this piece; God and Michael Jackson:
It’s not all safe for work. But then not all art should be.
I think Lileks would have fun doing a critique of those paintings.