josheiserike.com - Josh’s Comics & Writings Online

President Barack Obama sits in the Oval Office, his back to us. He’s finishing up a phone conversation with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. An Islamic call to prayer fills the room from a nearby minaret. Obama says goodbye and gets up from the desk. We see him wearing a one-piece tunic and a kaffiyah. He rolls out a prayer mat. His wife, Michelle, bursts through the door. She’s mad as hell, screaming at him. There’s no way she’ll wear a burqa. She’s much happier with her military fatigues, afro and AK-47. Obama pleads about the need for “change,” but she’s not having it. Read the rest of this entry »

That’s right that’s right it’s SHOWTIME motherfuckers!

Assholes #2 will be updating about once a week or so right here. In about a month, give or take (probably give), you’ll be able to purchase a hard copy.

Kudos to Mitch for writing such a hysterical story. Hope you folks enjoy… and then it’s onto our conclusion and, I’m told THE ASSHOLES HANNUKAH SPECIAL. But that’s not for some time.

Until then enjoy brand new vagina jokes!

I like comic books. I like movies. So when I respond to the frequent question “excited for the new Batman movie?” with a negative, people are a bit surprised.

Sure, I’ll see “The Dark Knight.” I’ll probably enjoy it. Early reviews have been stellar. It’s tracking at a 100 percent fresh on rottentomatoes.com (although that number will come down, I suspect it will remain in the 90s, or at least around “Batman Begins” 84 percent).

But I’m not looking forward to it. Read the rest of this entry »

I wrote a story yesterday about how rising gas prices was affecting local bands. Kind of a no-brainer story that everyone seems to be doing these days (doing better than me at least, but it’s a good story for any features writer to steal and localize).

Staff photog Jason Hornick took a bad ass photo for my story, which I couldn’t help but reproduce here.

They’re called Madison Apart, they’re a local pop-metal band.

There’s a Jewish holiday about once every three days, which you would think would be a fantastic way to grow up. Not really. I had to explain to several teachers throughout my public education — even the Jewish ones — that yes, Shavout was a real holiday, I’d need to miss school for a couple days, here’s a note from my mom to prove it.

Serendipitously, this got me out of frog dissection in the seventh grade, but that’s the only good thing to come of it. Even my less-observantly-raised Jewish friends didn’t believe these were real holidays and didn’t want to hear my complaining when I was playing catch-up with all the class work I missed. Never mind the fact that my “days off” were spent bored to tears in a stuffy auditorium listening to prayers in another language. (You Catholics don’t know how good you have it with an hour-long mass). Depending on the holiday there might be some decent food afterwards, or no food at all, or worse yet, Passover food. None of it was worth the time away from school.

All of which is precisely why I love the Fourth of July. There’s zero responsibility, which come to think of it, is a pretty good metaphor for America. Read the rest of this entry »

On various message boards and music blogs people have been discussing the year’s best music for some time (especially now that 2008 is about half over). I’ve been quietly protesting this tendency to immediately categorize and rank music (or any other kind of art) as soon as it flies off the shelves. Instead, why not discover and enjoy the music on its own terms?

But I won’t be complaining, except for that preceding paragraph. Instead of getting nostalgic for the past six months (Vampire Weekend! Death Cab!) let’s look ahead to the future. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday the American Film Institute released a new series of lists, “AFI’s 10 Top 10.” It’s a pretty simple premise: Top 10 films across 10 genres: animation, romantic comedies, western, sports, mystery, fantasy, sci-fi, gangster, courtroom drama, epic.

It’s also the most bone-headed series of lists ever produced by the AFI. It’s virtually impossible to divide all the different kinds of stories produced both inside and outside Hollywood into 10 genres. Why “romantic comedy”? Why not “slacker comedy”? Or “T&A comedy”? And by what logic is “Back to the Future” on the science fiction list, “Caddyshack” on the sports list and “Field of Dreams” on the fantasy list? Read the rest of this entry »

My friend Greg drives about 900 miles coming home to DC from Berkeley in one day, crashes (sleep, not a car crash), and then e-mails me the following:

Weird. I dreamt about you last night. You put on this big video showcase of some of your films. I was there with some foreigners who didn’t laugh but I was cracking up because these videos reminded me so much of you. Then there was a revolt at the end of one of the videos and I wasn’t sure if you had instigated it or not with counterfeits in the audience. There were tons of people in white suits running on top of the crowd. This revolt ended with some dude rubbing his penis on a woman and doing tricks with it and saying something about how he could masturbate without his hands. Then Susan Sarandon came to the microphone and started complaining about your videos. You then came to the microphone and insulted her as a Ashkenazi Jew. Then you showed a PowerPoint slide showing nude torsos of Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, with the Ashkenazi one all shriveled and nasty and the Sephardic one nice and supple. Then Sean Penn came to protest, but you ridiculed him as well. Then the dream ended. Odd.

Getting started on that powerpoint now…

… so I do a weekly video feature for work, reviewing comic books. This is good because it a) is Web-based, which the editors seem to want, regardless of quality and b) lets me spend my billable hours on something I enjoy more than writing about bake sales. Here’s a link to the video… but the reason I’m even mentioning it is because of this is because the editor of our company-wide blog (entire company, all throughout the Southeast) just posted this, letting other papers know about the vlog:

“When I was a kid, I read around 10 titles of comic book each month. I thought I was quite a big fan, particularly of one or two. So when I got to college and saw there was a comic book club, I went. That’s when I learned that I was a piker, a dilettante, a rube in the world of comics. I had just fallen off the comic turnip truck. Josh Eiserike of the Potomac News/Manassas Journal Messenger is a comic book fan, and that, combined with his casual, easy on-screen manner, make his weekly comic book review video blog (vlog) very cool. Also, excellent editing, cutting in scenes from the comic books as he talks about them and ending the video with info about each comic reviewed for anyone who wants to buy one of them. For any community paper, this is proof you don’t need metro resources to do a great weekly vlog.”

 To paraphrase Jon Stewart, what say you, Ogre?

Indulge me with a favorite childhood memory: It’s 1989. I’m 8 years old, in third grade. It’s probably winter break. My father takes my 6-year-old brother Benny and I to the movies.

We see “The Wizard,” a 90-minute Nintendo commercial disguised as a Fred Savage movie.

First, the trailers: Dark ominous music. Thugs cheering. A familiar silhouette of a samurai-esque helmet and cape. A deep voice.

“It’s the new ‘Star Wars!’” I say to my brother.

“No,” he says. “It’s better.” Read the rest of this entry »