Ninth Art - For the Discerning Reader - http://www.ninthart.org
|
The List: Politics
In the atomic age of the 1960s, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's Marvel Universe was populated with superheroes whose powers were derived from a fateful brush with radioactivity - but instead of dying from cancer, they were 'living' proof of the wonders of nuclear science, a bright future that the rest of America was fully expected to share in. In Britain in the late 1970s, John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra created Judge Dredd, lawman of the future, whose stories, set in an American dystopia, explored themes of mass unemployment, social decay, and the ascendancy of fascistic law over individual freedoms through the course of the Thatcher years. The relationship between politics and comics is perhaps closer than many imagine, right through to today's tales of adventurism and regime change in titles such as THE AUTHORITY and THE ULTIMATES. Even President Luthor sent the JLA into 'Qurac', while Brian K Vaughan has placed a superhero in public office in his recent series EX MACHINA. (The book's initial marketing gimmick made it only available to registered voters. Readers in Florida presumably ended up with copies of ULTRAFORCE by mistake.) Yet many of comics' strongest political commentaries are not traditional power fantasies, but satires, memoirs and fables that deal with power's realities. On the eve of a US election that's guaranteed to have a profound effect on peace, freedom, security and liberty around the world, Ninth Art looks at how comics have explored these crucial issues.
GET YOUR WAR ON (Soft Skull Press) The comics community reacted to the World Trade Centre attack in 2001 in a number of different ways. Companies such as Marvel, DC and Alternative Comics released tribute books, to raise money for emergency service bereavement funds and the like. These books were moving and, on the whole, well-judged affairs. But once the immediate sense of horror, revulsion, and indignation wore off, things mostly returned to normal. But not for David Rees. Rees, whose clip art webcomic MY NEW FIGHTING TECHNIQUE IS UNSTOPPABLE had been earning a great deal of word-of-mouth admiration, turned his attention to America's slightly schizophrenic response to the 9/11 attack. While its leaders were trumpeting and stomping and beating mighty War Drums in preparation for bombing the fuck out of Afghanistan, many American civilians were becoming increasingly frightened and confused by the lack of clear objectives and apparent political accountability. It is from this punch-drunk nervousness that David Rees' webcomic GET YOUR WAR ON springs. Over the months and years since GYWO started, Rees' clip art cubicle drones have railed against the bombastic language, broken promises, cognitive dissonance and utter bullheadedness of the War on Terror. Articulate, well informed, and prone to bouts of explosively perceptive hysteria, Rees' characters perform an important function, and one missing from most modern comics: satire. [MC]
PERSEPOLIS (Pantheon) Marjane Satrapi has made a huge impact in the comics profession in the past year or so, riding a wave of personal journalism in sequential art established by works like MAUS and PALESTINE. The first volume of her memoir, PERSEPOLIS, has won several prestigious comic awards in France and has been translated into five other languages. The second volume was published last summer to equal critical acclaim, and her work has since appeared in a number of publications including the New Yorker. PERSEPOLIS begins with Satrapi's childhood in Iran in the seventies, as she describes the Islamic Revolution and the era of implacable religious dogma that it ushered in. The fact that Ms Satrapi was the daughter of radical Marxists and the great-granddaughter of Iran's last emperor only complicates matters for herself and her family, leading to her eventual need to escape to Europe. The wonderful thing about this graphic novel is the way it describes a complicated historical situation, unfamiliar to most audiences, through a child's perspective, giving the events described an immediacy and poignancy they might otherwise lack. The black and white artwork is striking and effective, transforming even the most complicated emotions into a clear visual language, and covers the whole spectrum from triumph to tragedy. If Satrapi hadn't decided to be an artist, her eye for detail proves that she could easily have made a living as a journalist. Her account of how her uncle was executed for spying, or how her parents risked imprisonment just to buy their daughter a Kim Wilde poster, demonstrates the daily pressures of living in a conformist society and of the myriad ways that people will adapt and choose to rebel. Some of those rebellions might be small, some of them big, but all of them are treated in PERSEPOLIS as equally significant, and this is the most important political message readers that will carry from this remarkable work. [BY]
THE BIRTHDAY RIOTS (NBM) Max Collins is a successful political analyst attached to an independent candidate in the London mayoral elections; a middle class family man with a country house in the commuter belt, a wife, and two teenage children. Except of course, he's a lot more than that too (or more accurately, a lot less): in the course of THE BIRTHDAY RIOTS Collins is comprehensively deconstructed and shown to be a traitor to his principles, his class, his marriage and ultimately even his children. Confronted by the stark truth of his betrayal through an ever-escalating series of personal apocalypses, Collins finally redeems himself in the only way left to him. Whilst THE BIRTHDAY RIOTS is an almost myopically focused personal story, the world of focus groups, sound bites and opinion polls provides the perfect backdrop to Collins' inner struggle. The landscape of political campaigning is shown to be littered with lies, half-truths and compromises just like Collins' own hypocritical existence, and whilst Collins is shown to have had feet of clay long before he becomes attached to the mayoral bid, it's also easy to see where Kanan is coming from in choosing to set his story in this particular milieu. Published in 2001, four years after a Labour government came to power on the promise of change that never really materialised, and in the year they were almost begrudgingly re-elected by a largely apathetic British public, THE BIRTHDAY RIOTS is a bold, penetrating meditation on the political landscape of the time, the personal compromises that were made to bring it about, and the people who made them. [NB]
CHANNEL ZERO (AiT/PlanetLar) Brian Wood's debut graphic novel looks at the consequences of allowing an evangelical puritan agenda to run unchecked through American society. Almost a political descendant of Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V FOR VENDETTA, the pre-9/11 CHANNEL ZERO turns New York into a police state, with ultra-restrictive laws governing speech and social conduct, and Deckard-esque "cleaners" shooting graffiti artists on sight. Isolated from the rest of the world (even the UN has moved to greener pastures), America turns in upon itself, content to let the godless rot. Into this mix comes Jennie 2.5, a countercultural broadcaster and cult figure who tries - and fails - to change the system overnight. CHANNEL ZERO was a direct response to the sort of censorship and Christian lobby power that Wood saw in American society in the early 1990s, and a damning indictment of the apathy of an American society that allowed the erosion of the freedoms it so loudly brags about. The book is part narrative, part dogmatic tract, with slogans and text bites strewn throughout the novel, and public domain flyers at the back. The most striking of these involves the juxtaposition of a semi-automatic weapon and a video camera, reminding the reader that there are weapons, and there are weapons... CHANNEL ZERO is a cold, hard slap in the face of the Big Brother generation. It preaches, in its own way, about the danger of blind faith, and the perils of swallowing everything the media throws at us - including CHANNEL ZERO itself... [MC]
PALESTINE (Fantagraphics) To describe PALESTINE as Sacco's journalistic account of the time he spent in the occupied territories, through the medium of comics, is entirely true. It's also a gross underestimation of the work's complexity, heart and soul. Like all superior political works, PALESTINE refuses to fit comfortably into any pigeonhole. Sacco's strength is his humanism - an overwhelming interest in people, the human aspect of the conflict, and how lives on both sides have been touched, sometimes ruined, by events in Palestine. It could be said the same thing is also his failing, as the book fails to put forward any kind of solution to the problem. But such an accusation would miss the point. Sacco makes no pretence of being a political analyst or a mediator. His interest is purely in the effect Palestine has on human lives, allowing an audience to draw its own conclusions and propose its own solution. Many modern journalists could do worse than look to Sacco's purely observational approach for pointers. PALESTINE has been accused of bias, and there's no denying that an objective reading can't help but finish the book with sympathy for the Palestinians portrayed within. But Sacco does make a point of spending almost as much time in Israel as Palestine, attempting to discern the prevalent, differing attitudes to the occupation from the view of those doing the occupying. Accusations of bias should thus perhaps be directed to the content, not the reporter. After PALESTINE, Sacco published SAFE AREA GORAZDE, his account of the war in Bosnia. The latter is a more sophisticated work than PALESTINE, and certainly more polished in its presentation. But PALESTINE remains a seminal work of both political journalism and comics, and it's for that reason it's included in this List over GORAZDE. [AJ]
BROUGHT TO LIGHT (Titan) Originally published in 1989, and sadly never reprinted (although Moore later recorded a spoken word version of the text, with music by Gary Lloyd), BROUGHT TO LIGHT can be considered one of Moore's 'lost' works, albeit a far weightier one than MAXWELL THE MAGIC CAT. Based on research by the Christic Institute, an activist-led legal think tank whose investigation of the 1984 La Penca bombing in Nicaragua exposed the CIA's illegal involvement in the contra conflict, as well as arms trafficking and drug smuggling, BROUGHT TO LIGHT is a savage, incendiary indictment of US foreign policy and over forty years of covert operations. Moore and Sienkiewicz get down on their knees and probe America's guts for evidence of a secret government, reconstructing a terrifying shadow history of American politics and foreign intervention. The entire affair is narrated by a phantasmagoric 'representative' of the Company - a whiskey-sodden, coke-addled bald American eagle - one of many disturbing touches that lend a darkly surreal flavour to this harrowing odyssey through a latter-day underworld. A dense, draining work, BROUGHT TO LIGHT at times feels like a wallow in the stuff of pure evil, all the more chilling for its basis in cold hard fact. As Moore continually reminded us, this is not a dream. [NB] Matthew Craig is a writer from the West Midlands. Ninth Art endorses the principle of Ideological Freeware. The author permits distribution of this article by private individuals, on condition that the author and source of the article are clearly shown, no charge is made, and the whole article is reproduced intact, including this notice. Back. |