Clueless Fosdick, as he's known, is based on a character called Fearless Fosdick, who was a parody of Dick Tracy, appearing in Al Capp's Li'l Abner cartoon in the 1940s. Clueless Fosdick has Fearless's lack of guile, and, like the original, is riddled with bullet holes that give him a Swiss cheese-like appearance.
But this time around, the hole-ridden character has more in common with Attorney General John Ashcroft than with Dick Tracey. "The fact that he has absolutely no success doesn't discourage him," Epps explains.
Yet despite a string of failures, Clueless Fosdick (and Ashcroft) both pursue their goals with dogged determination. Exhibit A: the Brendan Mayfield case. Under Ashcroft's direction, FBI authorities took Mayfield, a former U.S. Army officer and Muslim convert, into custody on May 6 in connection with the March 11 terrorist train bombing in Madrid, Spain, which killed 191 people and injured roughly 2,000.
"It was an alarming set of circumstances," says Epps, "A native-born American citizen arrested on secret evidence on charges they won't spell out."
The FBI kept Mayfield as a material witness based on "substandard quality" digital copies of fingerprints found near a Madrid train station -- despite the fact that Mayfield had not left the country and that his passport had expired in October 2003. He was jailed for almost two weeks until U.S. officials flew to Madrid to look at the original print that Spanish officials had. Eventually, they linked the bombing to an Algerian man with a criminal record.
For Epps, who, along with his colleague Aoki, is an aficionado of old-style newspaper comics like Li'l Abner and graphic novels like Maus and Ghost World, "it seemed like a perfect subject for a cartoon strip."
Clueless Fosdick's future is uncertain, says Epps, explaining that the character may appear in another cartoon — or he may simply retire. In the meantime, Epps and Aoki are working on a new strip. It's called John Ashcroft's Torturing Machine.
Anna Palmer is the Prospect's editorial assistant.
