In case you missed it, Raj Malik arrived home in November after doing a package tour of Afghanistan and Pakistan prisons, freshly tasered and in a coma.

Raj had been shown photos of Donya and Celia in bed together while being interrogated by American CIA agents in Afghanistan. However, the photos were out of context (and not as explicit as Horst's imagination), as the complete cartoon from May 2007 makes clear.

Two Resolutions

A friend of mine gets frustrated when I interrupt the storyline to tackle political themes directly, that is, outside the framework of this strip's characters. I've long been ambivalent about such current event-fueled digressions. I enjoy caricature. Directly attacking the asinine rogues at the top is satisfying. But it does distract from the thrust of the strip's story and may leave readers feeling a little lost when the story resumes, as it does this week. I've wondered if this uneasy amalgam weakens it.

So, my primary resolution is this: If I can satirize politics within the framework of the plot, or build stories around current issues, fine. If I can't, resist the temptation to go ballistic. After all, the original premise of the comic strip when I started out in 1994 was to reflect our zeitgeist on a personal level. Politicians would turn up as cameos, but my characters would be the primary focus.

This restricts my ability to be timely but enables me to dig deeper into the personal side of political and, I hope, engage readers. I see the current strips as weekly chapters of a longer work. A satirical graphic novel (though I dislike that term), that reads as such, not as a collection.

It is sometimes easier to be reactive, to use anger and disgust as creative flames, as with the just-completed three-parter on the Bali climate change conference. But I hope to structure my time so that I have more for cartooning, and find another outlet for this caricature-based comic. (I also run my own graphic design studio, LINDdesign.)

As for my other resolution: Be concise. I'm always trying to chop my cartoons down (something you'd sometimes never guess), to distill them to their essentials, to try to figure out where the nub of the situation lies. A lot of my time is spent editing and rewriting. This is a continual challenge: So much to say, so little space to say it.

Blogs benefit from brevity too. So I'll heed my own words and sign off now.