Honest Miranda Warnings
June 27th, 2024 Barry Posted in Social Justice | No Comments »
Timelapse video of me drawing this cartoon.
TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON
This cartoon has four panels, each panel showing a different scene. A caption under the cartoon says HONEST MIRANDA WARNINGS.
PANEL 1
On a litter-covered city sidewalk, a cop is pushing a prisoner. The prisoner, a young Black man wearing an orange t-shirt with a cartoon cat on it, has his hands handcuffed behind his back.
COP: You have the right to remain silent. I have the right to brutalize or kill you, and even if there’s a video I’ll probably get away with it.
PANEL 2
We are in a tiny windowless room, where the arrested guy from panel one is sitting at a table, opposite a balding man wearing a suit. The arrested guy listens with a blank, somewhat surprised expression while the suit-wearing man talks to him, one palm held open in a “let me explain this” gesture.
SUIT GUY: You have the right to be provided with an insanely overworked public defender like me. I won’t have time or resources to defend you as well as I’d like, and I’ll tell you to take a plea bargain even if you’re innocent.
PANEL 3
We’re in a prison visiting area, the kind with a sheet of glass between prisoners and visitors. The same young man is on the prisoner’s side of the glass. On the visiting side of the glass is a woman with her black hair in a bun, wearing a business jacket over a black blouse and blue pinstriped pants. She’s pointing at the prisoner, and grinning as she talks.
WOMAN: As your prosecutor I have the right to lie in court to withhold key evidence, and basically to do everything I can to destroy you while I remain totally unaccountable.
PANEL 4
We’re in a prison cell. There are two prisoners here, our main character, who is still looking stunned, and his cellmate, a bald man whose arm and neck are covered with tattoos. The cellmate is lying with his eyes closed on the lower bunk of a bunk bed, and speaking. The main character is sitting on a plastic chair.
CELLMATE: We’ve got the right to be beaten by other prisoners and by the guards. We’ve got the right to be charged $50 a day for this crap.
MAIN CHARACTER (thought): Sometimes I want fewer rights.
CHICKEN FAT WATCH
“Chicken fat” is an outdated cartoonists’ expression for unimportant but hopefully amusing little gags and references in the art. Lots of chicken fat in this one, for some reason.
PANEL 1
On the main character’s t-shirt is a picture of Jiji, the cat from Kiki’s Delivery Service.
The cop’s tattoo shows a tic-tac-toe game in progress. “O” is a terrible player and “X” is guaranteed to win.
Graffiti on the wall behind them says “Barry was here.”
A newspaper page lying on the sidewalk says “Local News: Litter Bug Drops Paper.”
Other little scraps of paper say “Don’t read this” and “or this.”
There’s a single glove lying on the sidewalk. That’s not much of a gag, it’s just that I always see single gloves – or worse, single shoes! – lying on the ground and wonder how that came about.
PANEL 2
A sheet of paper the lawyer brought with him has the heading “Blah Blah” at the top.
The main character is wearing the same t-shirt, but the character on the shirt is now a different Studio Ghibli creature – a susuwatari from “My Neighbor Totoro.”
PANEL 3
A sign on the “visitors” side of the glass partition says “do not give prisoners cigarettes porn or hope.”
PANEL 4
Four books are stacked on a wall shelf. Their spines say “Snoopy” “Charlie” “Lucy” and “Linus.”
A poster on the wall behind the bunk bed shows an angry/determined looking superhero flying through the air in the classic Superman flying pose. The caption above the hero says “Super Hero Film Franchise.” The smaller caption below the hero says “The only kind of story anyone needs!”
A poster on a different wall shows Andy and Ellis from the movie “The Shawshank Redemption.” The large caption above them says “Please Don’t Move Poster.” The smaller lower caption says “There’s no hidden escape tunnel honest.” (The poster is obviously hiding a tunnel, we can see the sides of the tunnel where it’s wider than the poster.)
