Blog: Comica Part 2
Daniel Merlin Goodbrey's first installment of our on-line comic, Empire of Odd.
Comics have played important roles in wartime, for better or for worse. They have been a medium for vital health and safety warnings, for operational training and for boosting morale. But they have also been used for CIA bomb manuals and xenophobic hate-mongering propaganda.
For over 20 years Will Eisner, US pioneer of the graphic novel, worked for the Pentagon on a monthly guide in which buxom Connie Rodd shows dumb Joe Dope the benefits of ‘preventive maintenance’. Asked if he had qualms about crafting comics for the military, Eisner replied: "I felt that as long as we have a situation where somebody has to learn how to operate this kind of equipment… and men are being killed as a result of poor training or faulty equipment, then I was performing a service by teaching them how to survive." A recent surreal photocall of Donald Rumsfeld, side by side with superheroes Captain America and Spider-Man to launch a free Marvel comic for US troops, underlines how entwined America’s geopolitics and comic fantasies can become.
Thankfully, there are plenty of thinking, questioning mavericks, rebels and critics working on their own terms as cartoonists. Some cut deep to the bone, like Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz, whose Brought To Light uncovered the 30 years of CIA complicity in drug-smuggling, covert operations and gun-running which were lurking behind the Iran-Contra fiasco of the 1980s. Following a campaign that included a car bombing and burglary with aggravated menace, their publishers, the Christic Institute, were pretty much stamped out of existence by serial CIA lawsuits.
In Britain, Raymond Briggs took his title, When The Wind Blows, from a lullaby but his message was a wake-up call about nuclear warfare that stirred debate in the House of Commons. Japan’s Keiji Nakazawa went further and transcribed his boyhood survival of Hiroshima into Barefoot Gen. Behind today’s headlines, Belgium’s Jean-Philippe Stassen in Deogratias was one of the first Western authors to denounce the genocide in Rwanda, and in his In The Shadow Of No Towers Art Spiegelman grapples with 9/11’s personal and political aftershocks, although only one paper, New York’s Jewish Forward, ran his outspoken pages. As more proof that satire is still alive in the ‘Land of the Free’, Aaron McGruder, Reginald Hudlin and Kyle Baker respond to the Bush-Gore election fiasco in the graphic novel Birth Of A Nation, in which disenfranchised black voters secede from the Union to found their own state of Blackland. Whatever would Ben Franklin have made of this?
The power of autobiographical comics is that their perspective is unapologetically subjective. Joe Sacco’s ‘Palestine’, more or less a cartoon version of Gonzo journalism, immersed readers in the politically volatile situation in an almost tactile way, while Marjane Satrapi’s ‘Persepolis’ was a heartfelt testimony to a childhood in Iran that was poignant, shocking and funny – but never predictable. We are thrilled that both Sacco and Satrapi are involved in this project as their work has been such an inspiration for comics creators working in this arena.
Subverting the globalized, media-saturated age, the amazing array of individual, perceptive cartoonists, writers and artists gathered into this new comics anthology Ctrl.Alt.Shift Unmasks Corruption provoke us with their deceptively simple means, their ‘lines on paper’, that we bring to life in our minds and hearts.
Paul Gravett
Writer, Journalist, Broadcaster and Director of the Comica Festival
Consultant Editor of Ctrl.Alt.Shift Unmasks Corruption
www.paulgravett.com
