Cobu Comix – The Ringleaders.

Here are a couple of cartoons I made during lighter moments in the church.   Both of these are from around 1990.  (Things got a lot worse a few years later and there weren’t many things to laugh about.)  These were drawn during a period of time when Stewart was doing what was like a divide and conquer technique among us, for whatever manipulative ends he had in mind.  He isolated all the brothers in the church who had leadership potential, calling them the “Ringleaders.”  He accused them of having some conspiracy to ruin the church.  They were to be separated from us and they could live apart from us.   Some of them went to live in Reading.  The Ringleaders could be “operated” by the rest of us, that is, they would have to be accountable for their actions to us and they had to do what we told them to do.   In general this technique was to hold down those men among us whom we (the other older church members and the new people) might look to for inspiration or direction, being that this would be an alternate or competing loyalty to Stewart.  And in general also liked to keep people in their places through humiliation techniques.

Some of it was a little entertaining for the rest of us, because of the terms Traill would use.  They had to be “operated,” which is diametrically opposed to what their personalities were like, as these were men who liked to lead.

The first cartoon here is about “operating” one of the “Ringleaders”  (Kevin), getting him to pass out a church tract and to make a commitment speech about how he promises to behave well.  (You can click on the picture to enlarge it to read the captions better.)

The next cartoon is about how we were supposed to make a separation between the “Ringleaders”  and the rest of us.  (Making categories of people and setting the groups against one another was one of Traill’s favorite techniques.  He played with us like we were his chess pieces or toy soldiers and got us to fight battles against each other.  He also created artificial crises for us to solve and to keep us involved in.)

In this cartoon, I was exaggerating the idea of how far we had to separate ourselves from the Ringleaders.  We sent them to another planet.  In order to communicate with them, we were using an observatory.  It was time to “check our fellowship” and get a “claim” from each and every person in the church as to whether they were putting themselves forward as faithful to Christ.  Someone asks, “I wonder if they’re using this (separation from us) to take a vacation.”   “Taking a vacation” was a serious crime in COBU, as we were to be working every waking moment, as Traill said, “Christians don’t take vacations.”

(There was very little left to laugh about in COBU by 1992 or 1993.)