2025 Political Rising Stars To Keep An Eye On

Political discourse is saved.

The original “Political rising stars” comic was the second comic I ever posted online, 7 years ago. In creating this sequel, I took great pains to ensure it was visually identical with the original— surprisingly not as easy a task as it sounds, since the primitive drawing program that the original was created in no longer appears to exist. The original comic, and in particular the Holden Bloodfeast panel, has been passed around so much at this point that it appears to the average viewer as authorless, almost apocryphal; if anything about the sequel appeared even slightly ‘off’, it would likely appear to many people as merely being fan-made. And even though my art has improved to the point that capturing the original comic’s delightfully amateurish energy was virtually impossible, I’d like to think that most people will still be able to recognize hallmarks of my original design sensibility in there. The same goes for the writing, which I made a very conscious choice of wittling down as much as possible. It still ended being more verbose than the original, but not excessively so. Let’s go through some notes on our new star players:

1. Madizone Muce: The name ‘Chocolate Chip Cookie Musk’ was rolling around any my head for quite some time. It’s so laughably infantile and self-evidently stupid, in a way I think is funnier than a parody name like ‘Starcraft TI-84 Musk’. Elon is a moron. Chocolate Chip Cookie is what a moron would name their kid. 

2. Herman Oyster The Crypteenth: Originally was going to redraw him, but ultimately decided that being physically kind of difficult to look at is probably perfect. The Achaemenids, or Persians, were the ones who defeated the Babylonian Empire, allowing the exiled Judahites/Israelites to return home and construct their second temple. So to his credit, at the time, 2500 years ago, supporting the return of Israelites to their ‘homeland’ would probably be seen as a humane position. 

3. Eugnot Bensinger: Named after the comedian Jack Bensinger, due to the Bensinguillian nature of the character. How curious…

4. Clue Freeman: Briefly changed his name to ‘Smirk Zingmaster’ to better chase the self-explanatory format of the iconic ‘Numbers Fuckstein’, before changing it back because it felt fakey and tryhard.; this DNC astroturfed nothingburger contains multitudes.

5. Democrat Prime: Remnant of a scrapped comic comparing the status-quo fetishry of the DNC to that of superheroes. Loosely modeled after Obama, who remains an object of liberal adoration despite changing substantially almost nothing. This is the democrat ethos embodied; even when handed the power to accomplish anything, they are completely unwilling to use it, because they have no real beliefs— hence, the ‘2008’ mention. 

6. Ongdak Boruto Hitler-Garcia: There’s such a comic tragedy to these types. It was difficult to make clear that this was an unambiguously brown person without dipping into ugly racist stereotypes. I’d like to hope I accomplished that task. If you nixed that swastika on that drawing, I imagine a lot of people on Twitter would start asking who the dashing butch was

7. Ava Shamash: Named after the mesopotamian sun god. The giant 99 cent Arizona can is a universal working-class city thing that I think it transcends any specific state, standing in for New York, Philly, Chicago, really any urban metro of that size and character, becoming a sort of urban populist totem, ya feel me? An obvious Mamdani nod. Let’s hope he doesn’t blow it 

8. The Weeping Lurch: lol

9. Mundy Bloodfeast Jr: The apt term ‘anti-civilization’ was cribbed from Twitter user Sturgeon’s Law. Essentially ever republican, trumper or no, is an apocalyptic freak, and I hope we haven’t lost sight of that in all the fervor about Trump’s crassness, or stupidity, or blatant self-serving. These ‘old school’ types are still demons from hell 

10. Bo Job: C’mon, that’s a funny ass name. Probably looks the most like one of the original 2018 drawings. A stab at “fell for it again” podcaster (or anyone, really) types who cast a purely vibes-based vote and then stood slack-jawed when everything everyone else knew would happen, happened

11. Ghislaine Maxwell: The reason why Epstein jokes were conspicuously absent from the rest of the comic, building up to this punchline. Far-fetched? Of course. But it’s really genuinely sickening how much rape and pedophilia has become a total non-disqualifier to most of the right, and in some of the more extreme enclaves of the online right these days, they’re actually positives, in a way that made the whole culture so fucking nasty that for a long time, I really didn’t even want to make a comic like this one. There was an unused character based on those online ‘Bronze Age’ weirdoes, which I had to scrap, because in a lot of ways you can’t really even meaningfully expose them in any way. You point out, hey, you want to go back to the bronze age even though it was a hotbed of rape and murder and pederasty? And instead of going “no, it wasn’t like that, blah blah blah” like they might have done during Trump 1 they say: Yes. You’re right. Those are the exact reasons. Really dark nihilistic stuff that I don’t remember being quite as prevalent during the ‘Trigger the Libs’ era of the 2018 alt-right; maybe it’s rose-colored glasses, maybe it’s just that Twitter got sold and all those guys got unbanned. I dunno.

Okay, okay, sorry to get kind of serious for a moment. Can I go viral now please?