Comix

The remarkable hostility of comics criticism against context

Comix
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Noah Berlatsky hits the nail on the head when describing a certain defensiveness with which the comics world has talked about the context in which the Charlie Hebdo massacre took place:

Since McKinney urges context, I should say that the context of his own remarks is clear enough. At least since Frederic Wertham pointed out that comics were often racist, sexist, violent, and kind of crappy, the comics community has been exceedingly sensitive to any criticism that calls into question the moral or social content of cartooning. On top of that, comics have long been seen as childish, largely aesthetically worthless pulp crap; comics scholars have waged a long, difficult campaign to get them recognized as complex artistic expression, worthy of study. McKinney, then, is not really trying to add nuance to the Charlie Hebdo discussions, which is why he adds none. He is instead repeating (under the validating mantle of scholarship) the same arguments that comics has used for decades to defend itself against hostile critics. To wit, comics are complicated and moral, and if you disagree, you’re a Puritan thug and a fool.

The thing is that Wertham and the other fifties critics of comics were right about the worthlessness of a lot of comics, the sexism, racism and crudeness that tainted a lot of the medium. Their mistake was that this was inherent to comics as a medium, rather than just a reflection of the societies these comics were published in. Wertham was a progressive critic, but his work was largely used and abused by conservatives and those who’d rather retard the medium to safeguard their profit than allow it to mature. This sordid history has saddled comics with an often justified persecution complex, making it hostile to anything and anybody wanting to look at wider societal concerns when criticising the medium.

Not so much superheroes these days, when Islamophobic advertising is defaced with Ms Marvel cartoons and nobody bats an eye. It’s more the serious comics press that still has this problem and it’s come out the strongest in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre as a) obviously nobody wants to sound even remotely like they blame the cartoonists for being murdered and b) all the old self defense reflexes come back to the surface. We also saw that during the original Mohammed cartoon saga back in 2004 when the coverage in the comics press revolved around the right of the cartoonists to draw what they wanted.

Which, to be honest, is not a bad first principle in the wake of organised terror or state suppression, but it does make it difficult to talk about the limits of cartoon satire and lampooning and where it shades into Islamophobia or racism. The temptation to believe that because they were murdered for their cartoons, that makes these cartoons retroactivily justified. Not something said in so many words perhaps, but I taste that in a lot of the coverage surrounding Charlie Hebdo, the desire to absolve the murder victims from any sin of racism or sexism, when of course that shouldn’t matter. Nobody believes that the victims were to blame for their own murders, especially since they appear to have been chosen to get the maximum publicity for their murderers, rather than because of the supposed offence they caused.

If we really believe comics are worthy of study, of being taken seriously, we need to be able to also study and criticise them in a broader context than just the artform, we need to be able to talk about what Charlie Hebdo did and didn’t do wrong, whether or not their satire of rightwing tropes actually shaded into using these same rightwing tropes and what their impact was, positive or negative. without shouting down discussion with freedom of speech. That’s a given.

A new kind of comics criticism

Comix, Fandom
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David Brothers has just published a post on Comics&Cola, which talks about his frustrations with addressing racism and the like in comics and how there should be a place for a new sort of criticism in comics:

But the new criticism, the criticism that is largely coming from black and brown and Asian and Muslim and gay and trans and feminist circles and even more besides, doesn’t have an established place in comics yet. The culture is not used to it. The culture doesn’t know how to react to it, because it often comes from a deeply personal place and is accompanied by emotion instead of rote facts about first appearances and career milestones. The result is a constant diminishing of the concerns of the essayist and mocking of their context.

We talk about outrage culture and never stop to ask ourselves why someone saying “This hurt me, here’s why” is offensive, but a white man creating a comic where women are raped and non-whites are racially stereotyped is not. We scream “Free speech!” in the face of people who say “This is messed up.” We never examine why someone is angry before dismissing them for their anger. We demand perfection and eloquence from someone who has just been confronted with the unbridled contempt someone else has for them and everything they represent.

Much of what Brothers is talking about is of course the well known Tone argument: “I’m not going to listen to you as long as you’re shouting at me”. Another part comes from what Laurie Penney calls nerd entitlement, a toxic mix of historic victimhood and elitism that makes comics, perhaps more so than any other nerdy pursuit, hostile to everybody “not like us”, women and people of colour especially; the stereotypical nerd being portrayed as white and male even though women and people of colour have always been present.

That’s where comics particular history reinforces those already existing tendency. Because it’s been used so often as a scapegoat for all sorts of social problems like juvenile delinquency, has been the victim of official opprobium, has had retailers prosecuted for selling material “not suitable for kids” or artists put in jail for what they put on paper, any criticism based on larger societal concerns is immediately met with hostility. And it isn’t so much the fanboys that are the problem, attached though they are to certain questionable superheroine outfits.

No, rather it’s the critical press and the socalled art comix community that’s the problem. Unlike what’s been happening in related nerd fields like science fiction fandom, there’s very little attention within serious comics circles for issues of representation, diversity and the systemic effects of racism, transphobia, sexism or homophobia. Most of the serious commentary still seems to believe in art in a vacuum, without much attention for how it reflects or even encourages racism or sexism. There’s this very baby boomerish idea of the freedom of the artist to do what he wants, without much curiosity about why it is always he doing it. It’s why you get glitzy thrash like Fukitor published by Fantagraphics, something that’s supposed to be transgressive but only deals in the same tired stereotypes you could’ve found in an eighties Chuck Norris action movie.

What critical tradition (American) comics has had, has largely come around through the efforts of The Comics Journal: no other critical magazine has had its longevity and influence. Yet that influence isn’t always benign; molded after the personalities of its founders, Kim Thompson and especially Gary Groth, it’s always been macho, aggressive and sometime disdainful of concerns outside of pure art. So you get this sort of sneering too often, a defensive response without any attempt to understand what it is sneering at.

What comics needs is the equivalent of Racefail in science fiction fandom, when long simmering issues of representation and diversity came to a head and all the underlying racism & sexism boiled over. Science fiction finally had to come to terms with the idea that fans of colour weren’t rare, weren’t hidden and owned science fiction as much as anybody else. Comics still hasn’t woken up to this.

Je ne suis pas Charlie

Comix, politics
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I’m always wary about people being overly supportive of causes that already have the support of everybody sane and the wholesale embrace of Charlie Hebdo and the right to draw cartoons offensive to religious nutters fits this to a t. It’s not just the War on Muslims terror fetishists like Nick “glug glug” Cohen who come crawling out of the woodwork whenever some atrocity happens close enough at home, but also all the earnest decent people on the news and out on the streets showing their disapproval for murdering cartoonists. What do you want to achieve with this, or with having Je Suis Charlie graphics on Facebook or Twitter? Especially if you don’t live in France? The murderers don’t give a shit and your government will only use your abhorrence as another excuse for more “security measures”.

I do understand the impulse to do something in the face of atrocity; it’s the same impulse when a particularly well liked celebrity dies a horrible death, that objectively has nothing to do with you perhaps but because you know so much about them, it still hurts you and you want to show that you sympathise with their friends and family. It’s a very human impulse and while we may often sneer at it, it is heartening to see those waves of sympathy cross the globe in the wake of tragedy (or even good news, as in every time an American state legalises equal marriage).

And on some level, the attack on Charlie Hebdo does touch me, not because it’s an attack on my freedom of speech, but rather because they are part of my tribe, of the great global comics family. Those were people I’ve heard of, have read strips by, knew about before the news broke about the attack. I knew of Charlie Hebdo and its irreverant humour even before their first Mohammed cartoons controversy, knew their history of kicking over any sacred cow they come across.

But I still don’t feel comfortable saying “Je suis Charlie”.

For two reasons. First, the murders are not actually a threat to our freedom of speech in Europe. Though it may seem strange or even callous to say this, it’s not actually that brave to make fun of Mohammed here. There isn’t the need to show you approve of the right to make fun of Islam because that’s already a given. Governments won’t prosecute you for it, newspapers won’t censor you, your neighbours won’t shun you, even with the threat of nutjobs coming after you. Yes, Salman Rushdie, yes there’s the murder of Theo van Gogh, yes, there are the Charlie Hebdo murders and there are always other headbangers wanting to martyr the next high profile cartoonist, but doesn’t actually challenge anything to joke about Mohammed or Islam here, in secular Europe. The vast majority of threats to free speech on this subject happens in countries like Egypt or Malaysia, countries our governments are happy to support, and comes in the form of state repression: fines, blasphemy trials, censorship. You don’t face that kind of everyday oppression here for being mean to Muslims, indeed your career can thrive on it if some government official does get shirty with you about it, as in the case of Gregorius Nekschot.

The second is, as I said in my first post, that I didn’t necessarily like what Charlie Hebdo did before the shootings and I don’t believe their murder should change that opinion.

Charlie Hebdo

Comix, Islamophobia
Published on Leave a comment on Charlie Hebdo

Latuff cartoon on the Charlie Hebdo massacre

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.