The news of the massacre at the Charlie Hebdo offices has hit close to home. Cartoonists are always one of the first targets for repressive regimes and other psychopaths and Charlie Hebdo has not been shy about taunting authoritarian assholes; they already had their office firebombed by the same kind of idiot who got offended enough this time to kill. As Ted Rall put it:
Cartoons are incredibly powerful.
Not to denigrate writing (especially since I do a lot of it myself), but cartoons elicit far more response from readers, both positive and negative, than prose. Websites that run cartoons, especially political cartoons, are consistently amazed at how much more traffic they generate than words. I have twice been fired by newspapers because my cartoons were too widely read — editors worried that they were overshadowing their other content.
Scholars and analysts of the form have tried to articulate exactly what it is about comics that make them so effective at drawing an emotional response, but I think it’s the fact that such a deceptively simple art form can pack such a wallop. Particularly in the political cartoon format, nothing more than workaday artistic chops and a few snide sentences can be enough to cause a reader to question his long-held political beliefs, national loyalties, even his faith in God.
That drives some people nuts.
Twelve people killed so far, five of whom were cartoonists, some of the most famous in France and beyond: Charb, Cabu, Honoré, Tignous, and Wolinski. It’s a tragedy like no other that has happened to the comics community. Cartoonists have been threatened, assaulted and even killed for their cartoons, but on this scale?
And what may be the worst thing about this massacre (apart from, you know, the people murdered) is that the cartoons may just have been used as an excuse for some fuckwitted jihadist publicity stunt to heighten the tensions, wanting to rile up islamophobia by attacking a well known target in the worst possible way. The attackers know and count on innocent Muslims getting caught in the crossfire, but don’t care. All that matters is that they showed how big and scarey they are to be able to kill people only armed with pen and ink.
The danger is of course that the response to this attack will travel through the well worn tracks of outrage and Islamophobia, of uncritcally making Charlie Hebdo into free speech martyrs to rally people for another spot of Muslim bashing, as Geertje Wilders was already busy doing while the bodies were still warm.
For me personally, Charlie Hebdo’s satire about the Islam felt too much like punching down to be enjoyable or interesting; this tragedy doesn’t change that.
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