Meet George Alexopoulos, the Online Right’s Most Offensive Cartoonist

By Michael Lovito, March 19, 2023

Political cartoons have always held a special power in American politics. Thomas Nast’s late 19th Century illustrations helped establish the donkey and elephant as the Democratic and Republican Party’s respective mascots, and later cartoonists’ exaggerated depictions of Richard Nixon’s ski slope nose and Barack Obama’s prominent ears have endured well past their presidencies. In 1922, Columbia University even established the Pulitzer Prize for Illustrated Reporting and Commentary, codifying the artform as a valued facet of public discourse.

But wherever there’s tradition, there are rebels looking to cut against it. Perhaps that’s the easiest way to think of George Alexopoulos, a New Jersey-based cartoonist whose comics have become popular among the online right. Vibrant in illustration but crude in content, what Alexopoulos describes as his “current events strips” take aim at the abortion rights movement, the LGBTQ community, vaccine mandates, and even progressive trends in the gaming and comics industry with a vicious, spiteful tone that aims to provoke.

It’s difficult to reconcile Alexopoulos the man, who was very polite and open during our conversation over Google Voice, with Alexopoulos the cartoonist, whose work stretches the boundaries of good taste. At best, he’s a free speech radical who exercises his constitutional right to offend proudly – he even insisted that I not “pull my punches” in this profile. At worst, he’s representative of a particularly reactionary corner of the right that disdains subtlety and euphemism in favor of full-throated culture warfare, and occasionally dips into territory that feels extreme even for the post-Trump era of political rhetoric.

Driven from Reddit

An avid fan of anime and video games, Alexopoulos, who is in his late 30s, grew up in Bergen County, New Jersey and began doodling in elementary school. He quickly realized he had found what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. He attended and then dropped out of art school, picking up odd jobs at video stores and pizzerias to supplement his income as he pursued a freelance illustration career. Most of his early work was for authors and game developers, who approached him about drawing sprites, concept art, covers and interiors.

In addition to his freelance work, Alexopoulos posted four-panel comic strips of his own to online communities like Reddit under the name GPrime85, which he says helped him build relationships with potential clients and collaborators. In 2018, one of his comics, which made fun of Reddit’s tendency to turn on once-popular cartoonists, became the highest upvoted post on r/comics (a comics focused sub-Reddit) and reached the coveted front page of the site.

But with such popularity came scrutiny, and a backlash against Alexopoulos developed when redditors found out he was a fan of controversial psychologist Jordan Peterson and other right leaning figures. According to Alexopoulos, this kicked off a coordinated harassment campaign that eventually chased him off of Reddit and relegated him to sharing his work on other platforms like Indiegogo, Twitter (where he has over 147,000 followers) and Instagram (over 69,000 followers). Alexopoulos, who voted for Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson in 2016 and claims he was more or less “politically neutral” before the Reddit incident, says that this episode hardened his politics.

“Once the left decided they wanted to ruin my career, I thought, ‘If I’m gonna do the time, I’m gonna do the crime,’” he said.

Pushing Boundaries

Alexopoulos prefers to refer to his political content as “current events strips,” and insists that they’ve always been a secondary pursuit for him. While he does sell printed compilations of his strips on Etsy and did accept money from fans through a now suspended Patreon account, he says that most of his ideas for current events strips come while he’s working on non-political illustrations and listening to right-leaning content from commentators like Tim Pool, Ben Shapiro, and Steven Crowder.

“When I’m working on a project, my hand is moving but my brain is turned off,” Alexopoulos said. “As I’m listening to the news, sometimes funny images will pop up or a little quip will, and sometimes they take the form of a four-panel strip. It’s something I’ve always done on the side.”

Alexopoulos says that it takes him about half a day to work on one of his current events strips, and that he tends to get started on them shortly after he wakes up at 6 am with the goal of posting them around 10. While the themes of Alexopoulos’ strips will be familiar to any observer of right-wing media, he also dives into niche topics like the diverse cast of the “Hogwarts Legacy” video game and the redesign of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” character April O’Neil.

Even when Alexopoulos’ strips tread well-worn ground, they still manage to stand out in their intensity. The artist has drawn multiple strips that portray gay men as sexual predators who target young boys and compared abortion to ritual human sacrifice. Even his portrayals of Joe Biden (as a senile, wispy-haired old man) and Nancy Pelosi (a literal devil), two frequently caricatured figures, are uniquely unsettling.

“No One Has to Listen to Me”

Alexopoulos’ associations reach into the fringes of the online right as well. In 2021, he illustrated alt-right provocateur Lauren Southern’s children’s book “The ABC’s of Morality,” and has publicly praised StoneToss, a web comic that has published multiple strips that appear to deny the Holocaust. Despite these flirtations with extremism, Alexopoulos says he’s just trying express a degree of caution about recent societal changes.

“I lean conservative because I tend to wait,” Alexopoulos said. “In game development, when you make too many changes to code at once, you encounter bug after bug and you can’t find where the bug is coming from. I think we’re making too many weird moves, and we don’t know the consequences. I think we should examine one change at a time, sometimes shelve that change, just slow down and think about what we’re doing.”

Ever since his Patreon was frozen, Alexopoulos has slowed down his current events strips and redirected his energy to other projects. He’s currently writing and illustrating a sequel to “Goofberry Pie,” a children’s book he published in 2022, and collaborating with YouTuber Daniel Harris (aka RazörFist) on a Western graphic novel. But he anticipates that he’ll have ample opportunity to draw new strips and “piss off half of my audience” during the 2024 Republican primary, even if he doesn’t take his political commentary particularly seriously (Despite voting for Trump in 2020, Alexopoulos told me he’d prefer someone else receive the party’s nomination).

“If you package things as a joke, it’s a little more persuasive,” he said of his strips. “Not that I’m necessarily trying to persuade anyone. No one has to listen to me. I don’t even listen to me.”

Michael Lovito is a Brooklyn-based reporter and critic whose work has appeared in Salon, Brooklyn Magazine, Pavement Pieces, and The District. He also serves as editor-in-chief of the politics and pop culture website The Postrider.  @MLovito

Interested in more news about right-wing media curated especially for mainstream audiences? Subscribe to our free daily newsletter.