I originally drafted this up during the wolf torture event that occurred back on February 2024 when Cody Roberts out of Daniel, Wyoming blazed over a wolf with a snow mobile and then tortured it until it died at the local bar. He was only fined $250 for transporting live wildlife, defined by the predator zoning where the strike took place, with additional, disappointing legislative failures to make killing wildlife illegal via snowmobile. ‘It’s fun’ became the overruling verdict. It was an immensely devastating story and deeply triggering to consider that if this person had such inclinations to torture an animal then he was likely to target women and children as well. That is pure speculation but these types of actions are relatable to each other: abusers are abusers and they are rarely held to proper accountability. In fact, they are excused in everyday circumstances. Most people cannot ‘see’ them, or they simply don’t want to. Consider the ‘nice guy’ trope or the wretched accusations pinned to the victims. It is intentional, just as the acts of harm are considered pleasurable by the predators.
I sat on this sketch until recently when I was invited to submit some artwork for the oil city news weekly newsprint that was scheduled to launch on July 11th 2025. The timing felt relevant to polish this up and revive it with the proposed cuts to medicaid that were sweeping across the country and further gutting the rural people from the already limited and stigmatized access to proper, quality healthcare. None of this is to undermine the committed people who do take exceptional care in these areas, or the communal efforts involved within, because that is how it has always been ~ but I am examining the greater issue of neglect through the prioritizing of suffering over wellness and how the rural persons continuously get underhanded. This is less about the political ‘left & right’ and more about the hard lines drawn between ultra wealth & poverty.
Here, Roberts became the example that set the precedent of how the historic normalizing of abuse has been unaddressed in this way. I never met the man but I have known men like him and I have lived in rural towns where bigoted behavior is not only tolerated, but encouraged. I also survived a domestic abuser and his cunning ability to fool the community until he was found out, despite my own attempts to share the ugly truth, was painful and alarming and not an uncommon detail in these types of stories. That’s where real narcissism lives, in the all-too-well adjusted lens of people only seeing what they want to see, and lacking any tangible experience to fully understand it until they are personally impacted by it. This is a void built on self-interest. The narcissism behavior exists on a spectrum and is not specialized to any one type of person. It defies genders, race, class. On one hand, it is learned and observed, and can be dismantled by tracing it to the origins. On another, it is so hard-wired and genetic that there is no way of changing it without deep and willing intervention. A catastrophe may become the catalyst for change and this, too, is as old as time itself.
Likely, Roberts had an abusive father, and his father before him, and his father before him. Generational trauma persists until it is touched. There is a powerful amnesia in this country over our own history and how the effects of it are still rippling out today. It is unfortunate that the narrative to understand and heal it has become laced with division and hate by abusers who do not want to be exposed. Especially when knowing where you come from is one of the most liberating keys to life.
I did not have any specific identity in mind for the therapist depicted but I have enjoyed the visual comparisons proposed by the friends whom I originally shared this comic with; that she resembled Edna from the Incredibles, or an older, edgier version of Daria, or V who wrote the Vagina Monologues. I likened her to be a trans woman who embodied all of these energies to bridge & balance whole and evolving healing into otherwise overlooked spaces. Preferably, she would be administering sacred medicine through ritual to initiate true internal transformation, but we might be a ways from that becoming ‘legalized’ in this state yet. Showing grief in this demographic is a suitable start.
The reality, too, is that some people are incapable of changing or just refuse to. But that shouldn’t deny them the right to a diversity of obtainable options, regardless of who or where they are.
