Faithmouse
From Encyclopedia Of Stupid
Faithmouse is stupid.
Faithmouse is a sometimes ridiculous, occasionally genuinely powerful, occasionally terrifying (the mouthless Terri Schiavo), often quite well drawn, often baffling, always retarded, Conservative\Catholic comic by one Dan Lacey. Can currently be found at Faithmouse Dot Com.
The characters include Faithmouse herself, a white rodent with a face that resembles a serious artist attempting to salvage a comic after his six-year old kid doodled a penis all over the main character. She has no discernable personality. There was Augustine Cat, who represented some kind of sidekick, or comic foil, to Faithmouse. He may have been backed up by some other creature in this role, but it's hard to be certain as none of them either have personalities or look like the animals they're supposed to be. Other recurring characters include a gay bear, apparently called GayBear, who was at least encouraging in that he was a positive homosexual character in a fundamentalist Christian comic strip - until he converted to heterosexuality, of course.
The most striking character is easily Ms. Starnose, a star-nosed mole who acted as a strawman for liberal and\or anti-Christian thinking throughout the strip's run, and was often seen dousing herself in blood to promote abortion, or being run over by the Pope's lawnmower.
These characters weren't actually seen terribly often, however, in the original incarnation of the strip, as Lacey used the strip to make points in more allegorical, artistic fashion. Which is all well and good but quite often all the neutral observer could see was, for example. the three main characters apparently leaping over a stylised field to escape a giant tampon vending machine while a monstrous combine harvester chewed up crucifixes in the distance. No doubt Lacey's fundamentalist audience could figure out what these things were supposed to represent, but without any frame of reference for the outsider, it was nothing so much as a giant circlejerk.
Not that Lacey's political strips were all abstract and representationalist. One famous example during the 2004 election featured a glyph of John Kerry which slowly became a nail in Jesus' hand.
On the 23rd of April, 2006. St George's day, Shakespeare's birth\deathday, and of course a Sunday, Lacey announced that Faithmouse was over. At the same time he also decided to bring up a then-recent forum controversy: the case of Jamie Rose Brolin, murdered and mutilated (not always in that order) by a sick fuck who happened to own a blog, the avatar of which was a Shmorky animation, and who, many people thought, had at least once posted on SA. The latter was eventually disproved, but that didn't stop Lacey from posting the following quote from the murderer's blog in Faithmouse's suicide note. (Quoted verbatim, as it was by Lacey):
"This guy was a poster at the somethingawful.com forums, where people like to joke about doing sick stuff like this, and some of the other posters there helped convince him to go ahead and kill and eat that girl. His avatar was drawn by one of the contributors of the site. They deleted the original thread, but they have a huge discussion of it going on in a thread created after news came out.
"I read about this on faithmouse. its very very true. something awful has been serving as a training and congregating ground for cyberterrorists and sociopaths for years apparently. i had to stop reading that thread because some of them were making fun of the poor girl. :(
"THIS CANNOT BE STRESSED ENOUGH!"
Barely a week beforehand, Lacey had announced that he would allow a more balanced interpretation of social issues to creep into his strip - which was big of him - and the Brolin case and its tenuous (and disproven) connections with SA somehow convinced him that in doing so he had lost his "discernment" - in so many words, he implied that he had sold his soul to the devil. Which presumably makes Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka, Satan.
Fortunately for all good Christians and lovers of phallic-faced rodents, Lacey changed his mind hours later and announced that Faithmouse wasn't dead after all, simply changing direction to be less political and more the sort of dopey, starry-eyed let's-all-pray strip that tend to eventually become calendars and greetings cards.
[Faithmouse Dot Com] has a sort of archive of strips. You're all but guaranteed to say "WHAT?!?" at least once rummaging through it.
Faithmouse Pornography
In February of 2007, Dan Lacey registered an account on the Something Awful forums and posted sexually explicit pictures of Faithmouse characters in FYAD, and again in GBS. Though his foray into furry porn was not well received by FYAD, who surprisingly enough seemed only to wish that he would never post there, GBS embraced Lacey's latest offerings as a sign of his spiral into insanity and began to request commissions. Richard Kyanka requested that Lacey collaborate with Shmorky in a flash animation project, but there has been no word on further developments. In 2008 Lacey, seemingly a little more stable, returned to the SA forums, posting random artwork in Laissez's Fair.
