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Mordillo, Hebdo, Humour & Murder - from Jigsaw to Jihadist

1/8/2015

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PictureNext piece please
I recently bought a jigsaw from my local library – the puzzle entitled “Next Please” is an image from the legendary Guillermo Mordillo that shows a ship of pirates queuing up in an orderly fashion to enjoy the services of a lone prostitute (the captain is first in the queue as befits his rank and status). See full image below.

The puzzle tickled my fancy because:

  • Seeing a Mordillo image took my memory on a nostalgic trip back to the eighties when his illustrations used to appear in my parents’ weekend Telegraph supplement.  Every week I used to look forward to seeing the illustrations and even cut some of them out and stuck them on my bedroom wall. 
  • The image is amusing and significantly orange (which is my favourite colour) and brown (which is my second favourite colour); making the completion of the jigsaw more challenging. 

The puzzle was only 10p so the purchase decision was an easy one and it is now on my dining room table in the midst of construction (in fact you can see the progress for yourself).

I rather enjoy making jigsaw puzzles and probably put together somewhere between two and three dozen during 2014. Although there is one jigsaw pictured in my Seventies Gallery (and even a published article) I normally avoid the subject because readers may think me less exciting than I like to think I am.

This week however the humorous images of Mordillo made me reflect on the carnage in Paris and the murders at the Charlie Hebdo (CH) offices.  The CH staff were targeted because the satirical publication used illustration to poke fun at the Muslim faith (though it also poked fun at just about everything else as well). The editor, Stephane Charbonnier, and the publication’s key illustrators were killed in the attack.

Now you, like me, may not be familiar with the works of Charlie Hebdo but just reflect for a moment how you’d be reacting if the murdering scum bags had burst into the offices of Private Eye and machine gunned Ian Hislop and his colleagues.

If all the horror in the middle-east right now isn’t bad enough, it’s truly bleak to think that extremist nutters are prepared to kill others (caretakers included) because they don’t have the intellectual capacity to process humour. Even the North Koreans in their fanatical support of Kim Jong-un stopped short of physically attacking the offices of Sony Pictures over the release of “The Interview”.

What will happen next? If Guillermo Mordillo draws an image that offends a jihadist, will he be gunned down as well? Will I be targeted for using my website to voice an opinion? What would happen if I added the “Je suis Charlie” slogan/image to my front page?

One thing is for sure, it is only a matter of time until the gunman are apprehended and justice of some sort is dispensed. Muslim society has been compromised again and the irony is that the damage the gunman have done to their own faith is far greater than any that a small circulation, relatively unknown, French language publication could ever have done.

Charbonnier is dead – long live Charlie!  

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