Dickie Does America by Pieter De Poortere

Dickie is a comic strip equivalent of slipping on a banana peel at a funeral—horrifyingly inappropriate, yet somehow laugh-out-loud funny. It’s a grotesquely charming blend of cynical wit and childlike doodles, like someone illustrated Black Mirror using crayons. Beneath its deceptively innocent surface lies a brutal takedown of both historical icons and contemporary clowns, skewering everything from geopolitical disasters to our most sacred cultural cows.

Who exactly is Dickie? If you’re in North America, chances are you’ve never heard of him—and that’s a cultural crime worth correcting. But over in Europe, Dickie is a beloved (and hilariously blasphemous) antihero crafted by Belgian cartoonist Pieter De Poortere. In his native Dutch, he’s called Boerke, which loosely translates to “little farmer”—though don’t let the humble name fool you. This “little farmer” has plowed through the fertile fields of pop culture, history, and politics, leaving behind a scorched trail of visual punchlines and existential despair.

Think of Dickie as the bastard child of Monty Python and a silent movie—equally smart, savage, and side-splitting. If laughter is the best medicine, then Dickie is the prescription that comes with a warning label: may cause uncontrollable giggling, mild shame, and existential reflection. That’s Dickie—a well-meaning dimwit with the emotional intelligence of a toaster and the luck of a character in a Coen brothers movie. Whether he’s bumbling through war zones or misinterpreting the Ten Commandments, he reliably ends up face-down in the dirt, victim of yet another cosmic joke.

Dickie is what happens when innocence and idiocy collide with the worst moments of human civilization. Through a series of brilliantly wordless panels, De Poortere ransacks the sacred cupboards of history and culture, dragging out the skeletons and dressing them up in slapstick. From religious blunders to political disasters, Dickie strips down humanity’s most embarrassing moments and parades them like a grim vaudeville act—all without a single line of dialogue.

What makes Dickie disturbingly delightful is its refusal to talk down to the reader—or talk at all. It weaponizes visual sarcasm to universal effect. It’s an R-rated absurdist punch to the gut for the inner 12-year-old anarchist in all of us.

In a time of social media outrage and ideological purity tests, Dickie is a hilarious middle finger to tribalism and cultural hypocrisy. Like The Far Side after a three-day bender or The Simpsons exiled from network TV, it shines a dim, flickering light on the absurdities of modern life—and then lets you laugh until you feel guilty. And that’s the beauty of it: Dickie is the comic that leaves you cackling… and questioning your place in the moral food chain.