In “Minimum Security,” a diverse group of friends confronts all sorts of obstacles to pursue big dreams. Whether it’s to save the world or just live a decent life unmolested by mortgage brokers, they’re willing to use everything from plucky grit and unrealistic expectations to willful denial and high-powered explosives to achieve their goals.

The title comes from a prisoner who, after being released into general society, noted, “I’m still not free; I’m just in minimum security.”

Characters:

• Bunnista: The adorable yet furious bunny escaped from a cosmetics testing lab (where one of his eyes was destroyed). His mission is to destroy evil, starting with the laboratory and extending to any corporate institution that harms the Earth and its inhabitants. Not so unrelatedly, he’s an ardent explosives and weapons enthusiast.

• Kranti: Kranti wears leaves and lives outside in a quest to rewild herself and to restore the planet as a whole to its natural state. Beneath her harsh, uncompromising exterior is a person who’s really hard to get along with.

• Bananabelle: With her good heart and cheerful nature, Bananabelle just wants everyone to get along and for everything to work out in the end. To keep hope alive, she embraces denial as her most effective tool.

• Nikko: Kranti’s brother deploys his considerable charm and intelligence to achieve a life of glamor, fun, comfort and junk food.

• Javier: Nikko’s boyfriend is passionate about politics and art. He’s convinced that the most effective way to change the minds of millions, and thus save the world, is by playing Animist riot-polkacore music on the accordion.

• Chip: He’s filthy rich, he’s narcissistic (not that those things necessarily go together, ahem), and he burns with the desire for true love (without really knowing what that is).

• Other characters include Fluffy, a dog who wants nothing more than a colossal mountain of bones (with little bits of rotting meat still attached), Bunnista’s mom, who wields her cleaning implements with fierce determination, and a polar bear who eats oil company shareholders in an attempt to save the polar ice caps (plus they just taste so good).

About the artist:

Stephanie McMillan decided at age ten that she would become a cartoonist, and spent much of grade school reading Peanuts and copying the characters. She later revised her goal to animation, and created her first short animated film during the summer after high school at the film studio near Bonn, Germany that had been founded by her grandfather, animator Hans Fischerkoesen (”Das Loch im Westen,” “Der Schneeman,” “Die Vervitterte Melodie,” and “Das Dumme Ganslein”).High school also brought the beginnings of a political awakening, and she wrote her first article for the high school paper about the dangers of nuclear war. She went on to work for many years on issues such as reproductive freedom, immigrant rights, police brutality and anti-imperialism.

Stephanie graduated from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University in 1987 with a BFA in film, studying animation under Richard Protovin and John Canemaker. During this time she worked painting cels for an animated motivational film for Huggies, and as an intern for stop-motion animator Jane Aaron. She received an award for her student film.

Turning toward political activism as her main focus, she worked in a series of retail, light industrial and low-skilled office jobs for the next few years. In 1992 she was hired by a weekly magazine as an editorial assistant and offered her first professional cartooning opportunity. In 1999 she began self-syndicating political cartoons for other publications. Her work has appeared in dozens of publications including Monday Magazine (Canada), Comic Relief, Impact Press, Clamor, Comic News, The Funny Times, Megh Barta (Bangladesh), San Francisco Bay Guardian, Casseurs de Pub (France), Boston’s Weekly Dig, Anchorage Press, and The Word (Canada).

Currently her cartoons are syndicated online by United Media’s comics.com, where they run five days per week. They remain self-syndicated in print.

A collection of her cartoons, “Attitude Presents Minimum Security” was published in 2005 by NBM Publishing. She co-created, with writer Derrick Jensen, a graphic novel “As the World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Stay in Denial” (2007, Seven Stories). Her work is also included in “Attitude: The New Subversive Political Cartoonists” (2002), as well as in various textbooks and several books in the Opposing Viewpoints series by Gale Publishing Group.

Her cartoons have been included in exhibits at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (New York), the San Francisco Comic Art Museum, the Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh), and the Institute for Policy Studies (Washington, DC), among other venues.

Professional Organizations:

* AAEC (Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, since 2007)
* Cartoonists With Attitude (founding member, since 2006)

Awards:

* First Place, Excellence in Postal Union Journalism, APWU National Postal Press Association, 2003 and 2005
* Honorable Mention, Creative Resistance Contest, Adbusters, 2000
* First Place, General Excellence in Editorial Cartooning, Florida Press Club, 1997 and 1994
* Second Place, General Excellence in Artist Illustration, Florida Press Club, 1996

Clients:
(selected list, past/present)

* ACTivist Magazine
* Against the Current
* Al Eqtisadiah (Saudi Arabia)
* Alki (Washington Library Association journal)
* American Libraries
* The Anchorage Press
* Asheville Global Report
* Boston’s Weekly Dig
* Casseurs de Pub
* City Link
* Clamor
* Comic News Weekly
* Comic Relief
* Eat the State
* Funny Times
* The Humanist
* Impact Press
* The Iowa Postal Worker
* Monday Magazine
* Moon Magazine
* New Standard News
* off our backs
* San Francisco Bay Guardian
* Syracuse Peace Council newsletter
* Tribuno del Pueblo
* UComics
* The Word
* Working For Change
* Z magazine