The forum has been pulled down for the second time this month. Spambots have been targeting it lately, and much as I’d love to turn this entire website into a shameless shill for online gambling, former-communist-block porno, and hot junk-bond investment tips, I’m afraid I must stand firm on one ethical stipulation. Spammers must PAY ME to be their whore. Otherwise I’d just feel cheap.

Measures are being taken to make the forum more secure. And by secure, I mean it will be SLIGHTLY annoying for the spammers to get their text onto the site. The extra ten seconds it will take them to flood every discussion thread will cut deeply into their busy day, and reduce their total spam output by as much as 0.0000000001%. We here at Eyestrain Productions stand proudly at the vanguard of internet security. The dam may have burst, but we’re still plugging holes with our fingers, never fear.

Until the forum is back up, you’ll just have to take my word for it that I’ve updated nearly an entire year’s worth of Movie Night Minutes. No, seriously. I’m not even lying.

Thankfully, I don’t feel alone. I’m not the only cartoonist under siege these days. Remember the good old days of The Satanic Verses, when you had to write A WHOLE BOOK to get a jihad slapped on you? Now you can earn one with a lousy single-panel comic strip.

Although the offending political cartoons first saw print in September, the Muslim world continues to work diligently on a body count that will get the world media to sit up, take notice, and debate whether they should reprint the catalyst strips yet again. Keep putting out those oil fires with gasoline, guys. It’s funnier than anything on the funnies page.

It’s been a long time since this many people died over a comic strip. Millions of Americans continue to drop dead each year by going on the Garfield diet, but cartoon historians will point to more specific examples of attributable fatalities. Spousal-abuse homicides peaked in 1976 during a particularly brutal two-week Andy Capp drinking binge. At least a dozen deaths among young professional women were blamed on the Cathy strip that featured a detailed, but highly hazardous homemade abortion guide. And, of course, there are the three slayings confirmed as being a direct result of the controversial Ziggy “Kill your parents” panel.

Only one conclusion can be drawn from the continuation of violent protests among radical Muslims so many months after the fact. We need some new offensive cartoons. People have been too pissed off for too long over old material. In this spirit, I have come forward and offered the world media outlets publication rights to my greeting card line of the prophet Mohammed in a Santa Claus suit wishing everyone a Happy Hanukkah. I believe this will serve to refocus everyone’s rage in a new and exponentially more violent way, and really light a fire under the Molotov-cocktail and burning-effigy economies.

So far no takers.