TERRIBLE CARTOONS:
The Artwork of Professor Dennis Baron

	Tortured artisan, Professor Dennis Baron

Recently, I stumbled upon an awful website dedicated to someone's hobby of cartooning while looking for images for this month's back-to-school story on Google. My first thought was that it wouldn't be right making fun of the kid who makes these cartoons because he's probably some 12-year-old with low self-esteem and a bad family environment. It was soon after this I found out that in actuality it's an English Professor at the University of Illinois who makes this bollocks! That's why I don't feel bad at all when I say that THESE CARTOONS ARE THE WORST FUCKING PIECES OF SHIT I HAVE EVER SEEN IN MY LIFE.

Baron's classic "When English Teachers Fight"

Now the art of cartooning consists of two main ingredients: An artistic talent and an ability to write humor. Professor Baron shows the remarkable ability to present NEITHER of those two skillsets in his cartoons. They are what's known in lay terms as "ABSOLUTE SHIT". (to put it in perspective, if you read Dilbert you'll notice that this comic strip is also neither funny NOR well-drawn.)

In "When English Teachers Fight" (left), Professor Baron is demonstrating his knack for satire by pitting two English teachers together in all-out Saturday Night Smackdown. Their belligerent jibber-jabber makes reference to comments commonly used while grading students' papers. I don't know what the fuck these people are yelling about, but its about as funny as the parlance between Balki and his wacky cousin in a "Perfect Strangers" rerun.

My Final Tally: We'll never know if Baron intentionally made the dialog balloons look like my lower intestine, but we definitely do know that this cartoon is a first-class piece of shit.

In "Postmodern Ninja Turtles" (below) Baron is attempting to make the brilliant connection between an arcane reference to famous postmodern artists of the 20th century with its juxtaposition with a modern commercial fad: the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The artists in question are: Pablo Picasso, French abstractionist Piet Mondrion, and Surrealists Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte.

Normally you do get good results when you weave two completely different realms together to produce something so random that it just has to be funny. But "PoMo Mutant Ninja Turtles" is like mixing human feces with brownie mix: horrible. You can tell that Baron got the idea for this cartoon because all of the actual Ninja Turtles are named after artists from the Italian Renaissance: Michelangelo, Donatello et al. and decided it would be wacky to use a different period in art history. A second generation of Ninja Turtles, if you will.

	Baron's wry commentary on art history is evident in "PoMo Mutant Ninja Turtles"

My Final Tally: Picasso had his "Blue Period" and likewise this cartoon blew, period.

Professor Baron is also an aspiring children's book author. He's been courteous enough to post his entire "book" online for viewing in hopes of being nominated for the prestigious Caldecott-award.

I have to be honest that while reading Mr. Baron's "book" I read pages 1-4 and then skipped right ahead to the last page, 30, for fear of feeling like I've just been brainwashed like when you actually read those pamphlets the Jehova's Witnesses leave at the laundromat which is just what they want you to do.

Final Tally: This book, pages 1-30, sucks 30 dicks out of a possible 30 dicks.

A scene from Baron's children's book: A voyeuristic dinosaur looks on as two ball players engage in a little "give and go" behind a rock

Don't get me wrong, Mr. Baron is a smart man. He's written books on the English language that I could only hope to understand (because I have only a rudimentary understanding of the English language since coming to America via a styrofoam beer cooler from Haiti), but the fact that this guy made a whole website dedicated to his terrible artwork stands out like an egotistical beacon on the shores of mediocrity.

I feel qualified to say that Professor Baron is a bumbling twit who can't draw OR write humor to save his life. Who knows, maybe its an attempt to bag college chicks. "Hey, wanna come back to my pad and check out my rad cartoons? Afterwards I'll draw your boobies."

You may ask, "do you really get some sort of sick and twisted self-gratification by making fun of this poor guy?" Absolutely! As far as I'm concerned, once you put your work on a forum like the Internet with a link asking people to check it out— whether it be your shit-ass cartoons or your terrible intellectual poetry, you give up your right to professional courtesy. I am allowed to to look at it, and if not entertained, review it and tell others how much I hated it.

In closing, I would just like to say that Mr. Baron's cartoons are a testament to the over-accessibility of the Internet and modern technology, proving that any chump who can get their hands on a scanner and modem can call themselves an artist. Some may call this a victory for socialism, but frankly, I'm fuckin' frightened about the prospect of Mr. Baron getting ahold of a how-to book on animation.

View Dennis Baron's terrible cartoons here:
http://www2.english.uiuc.edu/baron/cartoons/miscpics.htm

Editor's Note: EasyMidget is produced by two chumps who have access to a scanner and a modem.