Saint Valentine's Day Massacre

Today's WaynoVision comic features one bad-ass Cupid.

This guy's serious about romance!

The gag was inspired by that old standby character, the rogue cop, typified by Clint Eastwood in his Dirty Harry films. In an earlier sketch, I showed the pugnacious cherub toting an Uzi with a heart painted on its side.

Revisiting the drawing a few weeks later, I felt ambivalent about the choice of weaponry. It just didn't seem very funny to me, what with the numbing regularity of gun-related deaths taking place in the US. Although I'm not an editorial cartoonist, the gag looked to me as if it might be championing guns, which is certainly not my intent. The subject of guns, particularly automatic weapons is so loaded (sorry), that I felt it distracted attention away from the gag.

Not wanting to abandon the idea, I pondered it for a few more days, and decided to try it with a crossbow, which delivers the gag without the baggage an Uzi brings to mind. Perhaps I over-think these things, but the crossbow struck me as funnier, being a ridiculously souped-up version of the simple apparatus usually associated with Cupid.

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We'll close today's post with a musical take on the Eros myth, from good old Martin Fry and ABC: "Poison Arrow," from their 1982 debut LP The Lexicon of Love. This song was playing in my head when I drew the cartoon. Enjoy.