Trump-Loving Cartoonist Ben Garrison's Avant-Garde "Masterpiece"

Cartoonist Ben Garrison is known for many things. He is known for being the most partisan of political cartoonists, an unapologetic, shameless Trump cultist who has consistently depicted the President in his work as a cross between Tom Brady, Jesus Christ and Winston Churchill. 

In Garrison’s revisionist cartoons, the portly senior citizen with the famously terrible hair and ungodly orange pallor is re-imagined as a golden God with the body of a twenty-something Adonis, a glorious mane of thick blonde hair and a steely, confident expression conveying his unflappable nature. 

In Garrison’s upside down world, Trump never breaks a sweat. He never loses his calm. He forever retains a perfect poker face while his weasel-faced, snake-like enemies seethe with rage at perpetually being bested in the never-ending 5-dimensional Chess game that is Trump’s professional and political career. And when it comes to 5-dimensional Chess, you better believe Trump has attained a level of mastery Bobby Fischer would envy.  

Garrison is also known for being invited, and then conspicuously un-invited to a Trump-hosted social media conference for right-wing crackpots once it became agonizingly apparent that Garrison was, in fact, too extreme, too racist, too conspiracy-minded and too bonkers even for a famously racist, extreme, conspiracy-minded and utterly bonkers White House. 

That’s because Garrison is an anti-vaxxer as well as a Pizzagate proponent. 

Garrison is also notorious for the heavy-handed nature of his work, with its extensive over-reliance on labels, paranoid worldview and child-like conception of the world as an epic war between the forces of good, as epitomized by Donald Trump, versus the forces of evil. 

Garrison’s hero worship of Trump and fierce, spittle-flecked hatred of anyone he considers the president’s enemy are so comically over-the-top that they’d seemingly be impossible to exaggerate or parody without almost immediately veering into Nazi propaganda. 

Garrison is nothing but clumsy, enraged, perpetually hysterical politics yet a Garrison strip that made the rounds recently for all the wrong, and all the right, reasons, was uncharacteristically apolitical. 

When Kobe Bryant shocked the world recently by dying young in a helicopter crash despite being rich, famous and powerful the political cartoonists of the world out-did themselves in a furious contest to see who could create the most nonsensically maudlin tribute to the Laker great. 

Our boy Ben Garrison won with a viral cartoon of a smiling Bryant alongside a giant anthropomorphic basketball head symbolizing the essence of basketball crying a series of smaller basketballs, each contained within a tear of its own. 

Now usually Garrison is helpful enough to trot out labels to clear up any possible confusion, even when those labels are extremely, even comically unnecessary. So it is out of character that this bizarre basketball/human abomination does not boast even a single label letting us know, for example, that it’s the “Essence of Basketball” that is crying, and each of those basketball-tears represents, I dunno, the Deep State? 

Why is this basketball-head crying basketball tears? Is it painful to cry small versions of yourself? Is this like Shaq crying tiny little Shaq tears? If the basketball-head is alive and capable of experiencing and expressing deep emotions then are the basketball tears also sentient? 

His work is usually a little more like this

We may never have definitive answers to these very important questions. All we know is that Ben Garrison is a hilarious fucking hack and even when he strays far from his wheelhouse deifying Trump and his evil minions he’s still capable of provoking both uproarious laughter and a sort of awe, albeit not in the manner the iconoclastic cartoonist intended. 

We are forever laughing at, not with, Ben Garrison. In that respect, his lazy yet insane Kobe memorial strip might just be his masterpiece, or “masterpiece”, as it were. 

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