“Ray's Exterminating” by Zachary Kanin, October 24th, 2011

The New Yorker : “Ray’s Exterminating” by Zachary Kanin, October 24th, 2011, p. 78

Here’s how the caption reads:

Instead of poison, I introduce liberal, intellectual ants into the population, eroding the ant’s patriotism and causing them to question the authoritarian rule of the queen. Slowly, over generations, it weakens the ants’ genetic resolve to the point where they stay in the nest at all times, watching television and writing letters to the editor.

Zach Kanin is a staff cartoonist at The New Yorker. One can browse some of his cartoon at The Cartoon Bank. The Cartoon Bank’s blog recently published an interview with Kanin: “Meet the Artist: Zach Kanin” (by Chris Fiore, April 30, 2011). Kanin also has a blog, but its entries are as strange as the cartoon he draws.
Finally, here’s an excerpt of an interview he did back in 2007:

What is your best cartoon?
My most popular cartoon is a tombstone with the inscription “Wouldn’t Stop Picking At It.” My least popular cartoon was two guys with scalpels operating on something on a table and saying “There’s gotta be an easier way to get candy from a baby.”
That seems a little out there for The New Yorker.
A lot of people wrote in. One guy wrote that injury to an infant is unacceptable to the species. People thought that I (and therefore The New Yorker) was advocating dissecting babies for their candy.
And you weren’t?
I submitted a follow-up cartoon that had two guys holding a vacuum cleaner to a baby’s mouth and saying “There’s gotta be an easier way to get an appendix out of a baby.” It didn’t fly. (Riff Market: “Exclusive Interview: Zachary Kanin”, October 16, 2007)

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