In the wake of the Senate’s failure to move forward on gun regulation last week, one of the most-repeated points of discussion has been the gap between the 90 percent of the American public who support a system of expanded background checks that purchasers would have to pass before buying weapons and the cravenness of members of the United States Congress. And if efforts to adopt a more sensible purchasing system aren’t to end in that vote, one of the politically important elements in resurrecting that fight will be to translate that abstract figure into the faces and voices of individual voters. Former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords has stepped forward as a powerful voice in the debate, but we need many other people like her.

It’s for that reason that I found this video made by cartoonists ranging from outspoken liberals like Garry Trudeau of Doonesbury and Tom Tomorrow of This Modern World, to less politically predictable artists like Jeff Keane of The Family Circus and Bill Amend of Fox Trot is so striking:

These cartoonists have wildly different core concerns that animate their work. Lalo Alcaraz has been a key commentator on immigration issues for decades, both in his strip La Cucaracha, and in his editorial cartooning. Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman spend most of their time sketching deft portraits of teenage suburban life in Zits, a comic that gives us some sense of how the main character of Calvin and Hobbes might have grown up and approached high school. But what this video does is make visible the consensus that has existed among them all along, and that has become more important to them in this political moment.

It’ll be striking if they decide to continue that work in their strips as well. It would be complicated for the syndicated strips to coordinate all taking up gun regulation on the same day, given production deadlines, the different syndicates’ relationships with papers and online outlets, and the fact that individual outlets could decide simply not to run gun regulation-themed strips. But it would be extraordinarily powerful to see them take this message from a PSA into their day-to-day work. It’s one thing to see an abstract number like 90 percent. It’s quite another to see or to hear what an overwhelming agreement on a public policy issue actually looks like.

I caught up on Avatar: The Legend of Korra, the sequel to the critically acclaimed and totally awesome Avatar: The Last Airbender cartoon, about a world where certain people can manipulate the elements, yesterday. Overall, The Legend of Korra is a fantastic second series, and does an excellent job of moving the concepts that the original series laid out so well—that there are benders who can manipulate one element and an Avatar who can control them all—from a feudal setting into an industrialized future, and in giving the original characters descendants who share some of their characteristics while standing fully on their own as characters. One real standout for me was Lin Beifong, the chief of Republic City’s police force. And her arc at the end of the season embodied what I’ve seen as a small trend in female action stars: sacrifice, and a recognition that not everyone can get out alive.

That arc is as follows: Lin, having started the season skeptical of Avatar Korra, who’s been a somewhat disruptive presence in Republic City, has become Korra’s strong ally. After the forces controlled by Amon, a radical who wants to forcibly eliminate the powers of all benders, take over the city, Lin flees with Master Tenzin’s family, determined to protect the last surviving airbenders. And when it becomes apparent that Amon’s forces will overtake them, Lin sacrifices herself. She takes down one of Amon’s ships in a colossal act of metalbending, and when she’s captured, she refuses to compromise. In one of the quietest sequences in the show, Amon takes Lin’s bending from her, the lull in the soundtrack a powerful representation of the sudden absence that has made Lin much of who she is.

The sequence actually reminded me of what I thought was one of the most misunderstood elements of Zack Snyder’s fantasy action movie Sucker-Punch. That film, about girls confined to a 1960s mental institution where some of them are forced to undergo transorbital lobotomies, contains two major sacrifices. In one, Rocket (Jenna Malone) suffers a double death, protecting her sister Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish) from the blast of a bomb in the movie’s fantasy world, and stepping in front of a cook’s knife to save her in the world in which the girls are actually living. And in the movie’s conclusion, Baby Doll (Emily Browning), submits to the lobotomy she’s loathed and feared so that Sweet Pea can escape the asylum. It struck me at the time that there was something uniquely female about recognizing how tightly the jaws of the system were clamped around these girls, the tremendous effort it would take to free just one of them, and the decision by the main characters to prioritize the love between sisters and friends rather than themselves. The uniqueness of that perspective seems to have gotten lost in other critiques of Sucker-Punch, but it’s stayed with me, a specific rebuke by Snyder to the rather manly idea that competence and bravery will see all the main characters through to the end of most action movies, no matter the odds.

Lin has a happier fate in Korra: after communing with her past lives, the Avatar is able to restore her lost powers, and to a certain extent her lost self. But there was no such guarantee when she lept from her safe perch to go up against a system more powerful than she was, and in defense of something other than herself.

There’s no publication in America that does more with its cover and interstitial art than The New Yorker, whether it’s Art Spiegelman’s lovely, heartbroken commemoration of the September 11 attacks, his commentary on the Crown Heights riots in 1993 or Barry Blitt’s wicked satire on the so-called “terrorist fist bump.” So it’s a pleasure to see them do it again this week with a series of illustrations interrogating Geraldo Rivera’s idiotic declaration that wearing a hoodie made Trayvon Martin seem more legitimately suspicious to George Zimmerman.

The magazine’s hoodie-wearing figures include an older man with a cane, a woman in elegant heels, a child, a vigil attendee. In their quiet way, they illustrate how irrelevant the piece of clothing is—a hoodie can be a tool for a playful peekaboo or a shy glance out at the world, a solemn frame, or a simple convenience. And you can look beyond the hoodie, and still fail to see the full humanity of the person underneath it.

Man, does Super Best Friends look great:

One thing I thought Grant Morrison got right in Supergods was the complaint that our superheroes have gotten a tad mired down in depressive contemplation of their own powers and responsibilities. There’s no reason this stuff can’t be fun, and dashing, and kind of silly—it’s one of the reasons She-Hulk’s affinity for partying is so much fun. If you lived in the Avengers Mansion, why wouldn’t you throw ragers there when you save the world? There’s nothing wrong with using your resources for fun as well as for the greater good.

And because I’ve been thinking a lot about the way Sex and the City’s been demoted to a second-tier show in the Golden Age of Television assessments, I’m also excited for a show that seems like it has the potential to illustrate that you can both want to mess with your ex and kill it professionally, especially when that means saving the world. Just as Ron Swanson’s performance of traditional masculinity is in no way in conflict with his respect for strong women, wanting to buy awesome shoes (or joyride Wonder Woman’s invisible jet) doesn’t automatically melt the part of your brain that values justice and makes you super-great at fighting evil.