KWONG IN RHINOLAND

With today’s cartoon video,  political satire returns to Prescott eNews.  Readers may remember our experiment last year with AI generated cartoons.  From April 12 to September 20, 2025,  we published 24  original cartoons satirizing as many state and local elected officials as we could get to.

AI generated content was an experiment  for eNews.  The concept for a particular cartoon  originated with eNews staff.   But we relied entirely on Chatgpt  for the artwork.   Admittedly,  some of the cartoons were a  little amateurish and silly.   But a number of  them—the Water Czar, the Mean Girls, Tomorrow The World, to mention a few—hit a nerve with readers and were widely viewed.    Eventually,  we fell into a rut with the Tweed Lady.  Coming up with something fresh every week got to  be a chore.

We decided to retire this  satirical  feature  in September when Rep. Quang Nguyen claimed the cartoon character,  Kwong Wong,  was him  and complained to the Arizona Bar Association about yours truly, the publisher of Prescott eNews. Rep. Nguyen,  a Vietnamese immigrant whose understanding of  American traditions of free speech and political satire is a little shaky,  claimed  he was the target not just of a joke but of a racist attack.  Imagine that, an immigrant playing the race card?

In totalitarian societies like  the one Quang Nguyen comes from, making fun of a government official is a punishable offense.  That must have been what the self important  Mr. Nguyen   was hoping for  when he wrote a complaint on his official government stationary to the Arizona Bar Association.  The  Bar Association had the good sense to dismiss the complaint on First Amendment grounds and took no action against me or Prescott eNews.

Politicians who understand the US Constitution  know  that its OK for their constituents –even lawyers who are bound by a professional code of ethics—to satirize and mock them.   That may be news to ‘Cry Baby’ Quang Nguyen.  But not every high and mighty elected official can be expected to have  a sense of humor.    Prescott eNews is not in the business of deliberately hurting people’s feelings.   But then again,  if you can’t handle satirical humor and being called bad names, maybe politics isn’t  your calling.

Here we are in the summer of 2026 and the political season is in full swing.    A colleague recently brought to my attention the remarkable advances in AI in just the last six months.   Last year’s cartoons were all modeled on  the four panel narrative familiar from old fashioned comic strips.  But today’s GROK, among many other new and improved  versions of AI can take a short written script and turn it into  a video with sound,  scenery, characters and  dialogue beyond anything we can create in-house.

Given the history of our experiment with political satire, we thought readers might enjoy  picking  things up with our favorite oddball cartoon character,  Kwong, an inexhaustible source of humor and disgust.   Let us know what you think.