While visions of sugarplums and Wiis danced in your head over the holiday, blogs were abuzz over a promotional graphic novel attributed to the National Rifle Association of America (The NRA).
In short: Wonkette posted jpeg scans from a digital copy sent in by an anonymous tipster. Elsewhere, some at Daily Kos and a popular gun law forum (and, for a while, me) expressed doubts over authenticity (c’mon, it was so far-out! lobsterrorists!). Then, Wonkette shared the original doc with BoingBoing (PDF link), a Wonkette commenter determined it appears to have been illustrated by Chris Gall, and everyone agreed — not a hoax (though we’re still awaiting response from the NRA). Here’s a link to the updated BoingBoing post with embedded blog-drama, and there are fresh posts at Wonkette (Link), Kos (Link) and the CA-CCW forum (Link). And below — readers say Adobe Reader reveals what are apparently hidden notes from the NRA assigner to the illustrator.
IMAGE: Brochure excerpt. Guns will protect you from tsunamis. Who knew?
Previously on BB:
• Fear-mongering graphic novel attributed to NRA (UPDATED)
Reader comment: Josh Larios says Adobe Reader reveals “hidden” notes in the NRA pamphlet:
If you use the text selection tool in Adobe Reader and highlight some of the half-page graphics in the recent NRA illustrated pamphlet, you can cut and paste into a text editor to see some of the instructions to the illustrator for those pages. That last page with the tsunami was originally supposed to be very different:
Idea: Good (American values) and evil (anti-American influences)
are locked in a final, titanic moment of combat, and the reader
must act now.Concept: Iconic evil non-American figure with blazing torch seeks
to overpower and set fire to American flag defended by iconic
American muscular warrior. Good guy has death grip on
bad guy’s throat and on the torch, which has already caused
the flag to smolder. The balance of power is dangerously
equal; neither combatant has advantage.
Link. Also if you play it backwards, the brochure says “Paul is Dead.”
Vann Hall adds,
I downloaded the complete PDF and noticed ‘placeholder’ comments still located ‘beneath’ some of the images. (Quark layering, perhaps?) In any case, the artist followed most image concepts pretty closely, although he *did* un-Jewify (or maybe un-Scrooge-McDuckify) the recommended Soros image a bit, and what is now the closing ‘guns against tsunamis’ image was originally imagined as a bit more Captain Marvel-y. Per-page text, and my comments [wvh], follow.
(4) Idea: George Soros (God like) sitting on stacks of money, guns burning all around him.
[wvh: Final image is a falsely pious Soros; actually looks
more like a liver-spotted Walter Mondale.](6)
Idea: Globalist one-world anti-American types want to reduce our quality of freedom to that of the rest of the world.
Concept 1: Globalist holding blue earth in one hand and crumpled-up Bill of Rights in the other.
Concept 2: Globalist holds globe, from which the U.S. land mass has been plucked, oceans pour into the resulting void.
Cutline will help explain this.
[wvh: Concept 2 was the one used.](12)
Idea: Brutal, door-to-door, armed gun confiscations.
Concept: Four burly armed SWAT-equipped pol body-slam a fragile 71-year-old lady to the floor of her modest kitchen to wrest and recover her opened, non-threatening pearl-handled revolver.
Cutline explains this illustration depicts a true event that happened in post-Katrina New Orleans (see attached frame grabs).(14 – 15)
Idea: When disaster triggers collapse of society, all that stands between your family’s security and chaotic crime is a firearm.
Concept: Night scene of a horrifically ravaged middle-class neighborhood – by hurricane or tornado or riots or terrorist act – abandoned by police and left powerless against violent mayhem by roving gangs. A lone father stands guard over his home, wife and children with a shotgun.(20)
Idea: Criminal gangs are in all communities and of all races.
Concept: Clearly Asian, black, white and Latino gang members.
[wvh: Not sure which one of these brownish individuals is
supposed to be white, though.](29)
Idea: Good (American values) and evil (anti-American influences) are locked in a final, titanic moment of combat, and the reader must act now.
Concept: Iconic evil non-American figure with blazing torch seeks to overpower and set fire to American flag defended by iconic American muscular warrior. Good guy has death grip on bad guy’s throat and on the torch, which has already caused the flag to smolder. The balance of power is dangerously equal; neither combatant has advantage.
[wvh: Final version has nice, white, nuclear family (albeit 1.1
kids short) peacefully watching an approaching tsunami in the
final moments before it sweeps them away.]
BB reader WD45 says,
Just a comment on the NRA pamphlet — from a reluctant life NRA member. The most important thing in the pamphlet, the concepts, are right out of the NRA playbook, leading me to believe this is the real deal. Globalized gun bans, Hillary, Soros, Schumer and the animal rights depictions and mentions are their main points of argument in their mailings, magazines, and telemarketer phone calls.
It would appear that this is a new concept to lure those younger folks on the fence about the issue into the fold. I get all of their garbage in the mail, and will chime in, should it arrive…