90 thoughts on “Spirou and Fantasio: Racism for Kids”

1. You kind of stole my thunder here, Alex. I was going to talk about Thomas Nast’s racist cartoons during the Reconstruction era and raise several of the points you do here…but I think it’d be too much of a retread now, so I’ll have to recalibrate.

   I think your point about the fact that the skill of the execution makes things worse not better is especially interesting. In practice, that often isn’t how these things are thought about. For example, “Birth of a Nation” is seen as formally worthwhile despite its racism, rather than as being more racist/more effectively racist/more vile because of its formal virtues.

   I take your point about Ebony White too…with the caveat maybe that in some cases patronisingly racist may be marginally better than just plain racist. Though I guess when you’re parsing it at that level, there’s a good case to be made that you should just give it up.

2. It’s interesting how this reverses the Ghandi manga critique! I write about excellent execution of repellent content, she about wretched execution of worthwhile content.

   I could just shrug this book off in normal cases, but it’s the kidbook factor that really angered me.

   It also struck me as being not just reflexive, stupid racism — but intelligent, malicious, bad-faith racism.

   Oh, and please do the Nast post!

3. Wrapping an ugly message in pretty packaging might help the distribution of that message, but I don’t see how that works against a formalist appreciation. The formalist can still claim, and has (as with Birth of a Nation), that this or that approach could be used for some other message. It’s not like Welter couldn’t draw non-racist imagery with the same ability. If some formal innovation came about while serving a racist ideology, then that means some aesthetic good was there. I don’t see that as dismissive of the racism. One can readily acknowledge both without a conflict.

4. Hah! I knew you’d disagree.

   I think the question is whether the racism doesn’t undermine the argument for formalist appreciation in some ways. For example, Birth of a Nation was seen by many, many more people, both at the time and since, because of its formal excellence. There’s some evidence that the formal excellence and the message directly influenced national policy; Woodrow Wilson was a fan of and promoter of the film, and referred to it in ways which suggest that the formal qualities were part of what he reacted to (he said something like “it is history written in lightning.”)

   Of course, Wilson was a despicable racist to begin with…but people aren’t less affected by a formally powerful message because they happen to agree with it — on the contrary. You say that “pretty packaging” might help distribution, but formal qualities are more than pretty packaging, right? If you think art is formally worthwhile, and that that formal worth is powerful/worthwhile/affecting, then using those powerful formal qualities for evil has to matter.

5. Maybe we’re not disagreeing. An untalented artist can be just as evil as a talented one, right? Using the hedonic calculus might suggest that the art which is more likely to be widely distributed is the more evil, though. Also, at this point in cinematic history, should they both begin to support some racist party, Michael Bay’s incompetence would more likely be seen and enjoyed than Bela Tarr’s competence. Wouldn’t we still be able to make an argument independent of the utilitarian argument for which one is a more talented, or skilled filmmaker?

6. I was astonished by Yves Chaland’s insanely racist Freddy Lombard comics, but I hear tell that it was intended as satire. I suspect that’s true, though it’s sometimes had to distinguish between satire and the real thing. What was really frustrating about it was that Chaland’s bestial Africans look cool as hell. (A relevant article: http://www.savagecritic.com/reviews/desastre-hurlant-t18-a-suivre/)

7. It seems to me that this specific Spirou and Fantasio made use of stereotypes and ready made images but posited them as imported artifacts (the Marlon Brando lookalike is a giveaway, for instance). To my mindIt made this album pretty similar in intent to what Moore did with the first arc of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. This seems to me to be pretty different from the “irony” argument which you mentioned.
   The problem here is not such much the work itself as its probable reflexion: stereotypes are only amusing when they are identified as such. I remember reading the album when I was 11 or 12 and recognizing the clichés for what they were, but I had received an early education in reading popular culture. From my recollection, the tone of the album suggested it targeted early teenagers rather than children, but I may be wrong on that point, and Spirou as a magazine (was there a pre-publication there ? Spirou does not pre-publish complete stories anymore, I think) definitely targets kids.

   In retrospect, I have to agree it was pretty tasteless. Racist, though? I’m not sure.

8. Fantastic article. Reminds me of the (much worse) anti-Semitic content in the “Far Country, Neighbor Country” comic series for children in Korea. That came out in 2004.

   http://www.rjkoehler.com/2007/02/09/wiesenthal-center-denounces-korean-comic/

   Good discussion in this thread, too, but don’t expect it to resolve anything as this debate has literally been going on for thousands of years.

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgias_%28dialogue%29

9. “An untalented artist can be just as evil as a talented one, right?”

   Well, I think that’s sort of the question. It depends on how you see evil, or what you see evil as, I guess. If evil is about one’s own choices, then right, talent doesn’t matter. If evil has something to do with effects, though, it would seem that those who were better at promoting evil are in fact more evil. (Not that those are the only two ways to think about evil; just the two that come most readily to mind/seem most appropriate here.)

   I don’t think that it’s necessarily a utilitarian argument either. The greatest good for the greatest number…racism might be a greater good for more folks, if the minority singled out was sufficiently small and the enjoyment of racism of the majority sufficiently large.

10. Aaron: Chaland’s comics are definitely ironic in their pseudo-racism. Moebius had said about Chaland that “he’s giving the older generation the slaps they deserve.” If you’re put off by Freddy Lombard, then by God steer clear of Bob Fish!

    Nicolas: an intelligent digression. Recall, however, that by no means all 12-year-olds reading this had your background re: stereotypes!

    Ben:phrases like “fantastic article” are what we vain posters live for, so thanks! And those links you gave are fascinating.

    It’s not just Korea, Japan has been inundated with the crudest anti-Semitic propaganda, too. The weird thing is that very, very few Koreans or Japanese have ever met or dealt with a Jew. To them, Jews seem to be fabulous monsters like unicorns.

    About the moral aspects of aesthetic mastery…I need to think on it.

11. “The greatest good for the greatest number…racism might be a greater good for more folks, if the minority singled out was sufficiently small and the enjoyment of racism of the majority sufficiently large.”

    One could counter that the racism isn’t good for the racists, either. But that’s not all that relevant: unless you’re saying the evil is inherent to the formal ability being used (which I assumed you weren’t since that’s ridiculous), then you’re talking about the effects of using this mastery for an evil message. I don’t see how you make a claim about how mastery or innovation is worse in the case of delivering an evil message unless you’re saying that it spreads the evil more widely than a poor mastery or lack of innovation would. You’re making a utilitarian argument.

12. Charles…that makes sense. But at the same time…I feel like it would also be possible to say, maybe, that art which was more formally powerful in an evil cause was more evil than poorly done art in an evil cause, even if no one saw either of them.

    Maybe doing evil well seems like it would be a more realized example of evil, which would be worse art.

    Maybe Jones’ll show up and tell me why that’s logically incoherent….

13. “Maybe Jones’ll show up and tell me why that’s logically incoherent….”

    Ha, not at all — although I think Charles is right that utilitarian concerns provide the most convincing argument that formally adept racist art is morally worse that inept racist art. But, Noah, you shouldn’t be freaked out by the idea that you might sometimes perform the utilitarian calculus to figure out what to do. Surely it’s sensible sometimes to distribute scarce resources on the basis of where you think they’ll do the most good — e.g. deciding which public health initiative to fund. Even diehard anti-utilitarians should think that the right thing to do sometimes depends at least in part on the greatest good/bad; where they get off the bus is the further claim, definitional for utilitarianism as an overarching moral theory, that that’s all it ever depends on.

    Alex, good piece as usual.

14. Jones, I’m not categorically against it being a utilitarian calculus…I’m just sort of wondering if I think there’s something else there as well I guess…

15. Jones, thanks.

    I think formally adept art showcasing evil ideas is far worse than formally inept art serving the same ends, because the former is far more seductive. This is the craft of propaganda at work, for instance.

16. Maybe one reason that brilliantly executed art with a racist (or objectionable for some other reason) message seems worse than a poor or merely competent one, is that we hold an individual of talent to a higher standard? It’s always seemed to me (and I know it’s completely absurd to expect this) that DW Griffith with all his gifts for story-telling and cinematic innovation (which I think is a kind of sensitivity) should have had a deeper sensitivity than to have promoted the racist message of Birth of a Nation, to have understood the injustice he was perpetuating and exacerbating. A racist silent film by some lesser director might have been just as racist, but it wouldn’t make me as angry from a 100-years-later vantage point (even if it had been popular at the time), it would just be another manifestation of regrettable cultural tendencies. But I’m not only angry at Griffith for his contribution to the racism of his era, but for tainting the art of cinema itself — not because “the evil is inherent” in the formal innovations, but because he made one of cinema’s important masterpieces and at the same time made it un-watchable as a work of art because of the evil message. In other words, I’m not just upset by the film’s/Griffith’s racism because of its betrayal of African Americans’ struggles, of humanity, I’m upset by its betrayal of cinema.

17. I think “betrayal” is definitely a big part of the dynamic I’m talking about. Great artists working for evil seems like a betrayal of their talent, a betrayal of the audience, a betrayal of the medium. They’ve been false in a way that a lesser artist couldn’t be.

18. I agree, Noah, but alas– as you know, artists are as susceptible to wickedness (which I define as knowing evil) as any other human.

    Caravaggio was a murderer. So was Ben Jonson. Thomas Malory, the author of ‘La Morte d’Arthur’, was a convicted rapist and brigand. Leonardo da Vinci was a pedophile. William Shakespeare was a grain-hoarding speculator who struck it rich in times of famine. Picasso– we hardly have space to detail what a monster he was…

    So, unfortunately, such betrayals are to be expected routinely.

19. Yes, of course, artists are no better than anyone else. The cases where they use their art explicitly for untoward ends are particularly depressing, I guess…but perhaps I’m just insufficiently cynial…

20. It seems to me you’ve caught one good example of one 1980’s pervasive trend in Franco-Belgian comics, that of revisiting the by then already classic comics of the 1950s while making obvious their racist, mysogynist, reactionary content. That trend was started by Chaland in the late 1970s with works such as “Bob Fish”, it was continued and made even more popular by writer Yann, working with artists such as Conrad (“Les Innomables”, “Bob Marone”) and Hardy (“La Patrouille des Libellules”). If you look at the dates (Chaland and Yann’s peak of popularity is in the mid-1980s) you can see that the 1987 “Spirou à New York” comes at the tail-end of the trend, when it has become widespread enough to include even works purportedly aimed at children and teenagers. Tome and Janry’s Spirou was in many ways a re-using of the familiar Franquin drawing style on the series with scripts carrying a little further the Greg tradition of sophisticated and irony-laden scripts.
    The problem which you’ve quite rightly identified with the whole trend was when does the irony stop being ironical? This was a very real problem with Chaland’s comics, when one couldn’t help wondering if he hadn’t started to take seriously the kind of racist clichés he’s first made use of in a tongue-in-cheek fashion.
    Still, to be fair to Tome and Janry, you should keep in mind that at the time that “Spirou in New York” was published, Tome was also writing a contemporary cop thriller set in New York, “Soda”, and that the strip was not racist at all.
    So yes, the satire in “Spirou in New York” was heavy-handed, over the top, and made fun of cliches that were already old-hat by then but I don’t think it should be put in the same category as the racist representations of the 1950s and earlier.
    But you do have a point : when does satire of racism stop being satire and become plain racism ? Robert Crumb faced this quandary when his “When the Jews take over America” was run without his consent in a far-right newspaper.

21. Hey, Jean-Paul, thanks for the context– very well put. Yes, Bob Fish is unambiguously satire of racism, but Chaland did go on a little too far.

    In the beginning, though, his work was an incredible slap in the face to French tropes of racism and imperialism — I’m thinking particularly of ‘Jim Sahara et l’Aventure’, in fact of most of the strips done in collaboration with Cornillon collected in ‘Captivant’. (Cornillon himself went on to some rather dubious right-wing company, notably in the Jalons group around Basile de Koch.)

    By the way, JP, it’s a pleasure to hear from you after so many years. Reminding me of those days over a quarter of a century ago when we both worked on ‘Scarce’…

    — Alex “Wolvie” Buchet

22. I think Jean-Paul Jennequin has it exactly right. (Another cartoonist using extreme racist imagery satirically in the 1970s and 1980s: Joost Swarte.) If you assume the readers of SPIROU are sophisticated enough to recognize the silliness of the racial caricatures, then it’s a relatively harmless book that skirts tastelessness. But if you think the readers of SPIROU will genuinely take these absurd caricatures to heart as part of their world view, than it’s a profoundly evil racist work.

    Personally, I think France has/had achieved a level of cultural diversity that even the adolescent SPIROU readers were capable of filing those characters away as playful stereotypes that had nothing whatsoever to do with the real world, and if anything have to opposite effect of pointing out their ridiculousness — a junior version of the INNOMABLES and Chaland effects. But that’s of course endlessly arguable.

    I also think there’s a certain continuum of literal-minded naïveté that stretches from Fredric Wertham’s conviction that readers of TALES FROM THE CRYPT will think murder is fun to GLAAD’s conviction that viewers of BASIC INSTINCT will think lesbians are all icepick killers to Alex’s unbridled horror at SPIROU here.

    Which is not to say there aren’t explicitly, viciously racist or misogynist or homophobic works out there (TINTIN IN THE CONGO remains inexcusable by any metric) or that a culture that continually propagates the same insulting stereotypes doesn’t eventually do some cumulative harm. But if anything the over-the-top ridiculousness of the imagery in SPIROU works in its favor. THE SOPRANOS is probably a lot more insidious than a clearly parodic spaghetti-slurping mafioso like the one here.

    I always found Tome and Janry’s SPIROU technically proficient but uninteresting and have read only a couple of them, so it’s not as if my ox is being gored here.

23. Wow…okay. Didn’t think this would get any defenders…but just goes to show.

    I think your argument is really weak, Kim, and rather naive. I think maybe the essential problem is the argument that “over-the-top ridiculousness” constitutes an even marginally effective critique of racism. This is used to defend Crumb too, and it simply doesn’t work. Racism is not based in reality. It’s fantasy…and as such, there’s no exaggeration that can deconstruct it. That’s why Crumb’s exaggerated satirical anti-racist comics are easily appropriated by racists. It’s not that the racists are dumb; it’s that Crumb doesn’t understand the workings of the things he’s satirizing. He tries to undermine it with exaggeration — but there is no exaggeration that can ever make racists say, “oh, yes, this isn’t real” — because there’s no grounding in reality to begin with. You don’t convince a paranoid that he’s crazy by telling him that there are even more people after him.

    The appeal to sophisticated readers also seems off-base. Sophisticated readers can also be racist, and enjoying racist caricatures with sophisticated nostalgia and winking doesn’t seem better in kind to me than less sophisticated enjoyment. You might watch “Bamboozled”? It has some pretty acid things to say about the highbrow ironic consumption of racist caricatures.

    In addition, the gratuitous waving of Wertham gets really old. The fact that Wertham overreacted to horror comics a couple generations ago doesn’t give all comics a pass forever to spew racist crap. Alex isn’t calling for censorship; he’s just saying the comic is awful. And I think he makes a pretty good case.

24. I think there’s a huge difference between Crumb, who’s trying to honestly explore his own misogyny and racism, and someone like the Tome/Janry team, who are just moving around stereotypes for, basically, the fun of it. I suspect they would be horrified to learn that anyone thought any of their readers might actually allow their silly depictions of Asians, Blacks, or Italians to ooze into their word views.

    And I absolutely do not think Crumb’s racist strips were aimed at convincing racists of the error of their ways (so their “failure” at doing this is a moot point, and an unfair gauge of the work).

    Yes, I understand the difference between Wertham’s calls for censorship and more modern, gentler, kinder voicing of indignation that scrupulously avoids calling for censorship. Call it censor vs. censure (only the vowel changes). I do still think the literal-minded assumption that the depiction of something goes straight into the mind of the reader or viewer is a depressing constant among the censoriously or censuriously inclined. There isn’t that much difference between “This is evil and is warping children’s minds and should be censored” and “This is evil and is warping children’s minds but should not be censored” so far as I can tell.

    I don’t know that I’m really defending SPIROU IN NEW YORK. I’ve never read it, and the samples seem dumb and in dubious taste at best. And I do think the history of racial caricature in comics is very problematic. I just don’t think this particular book deserves as shrill, even hysterical an indictment as it being given here.

    Maybe I just think modern comics audiences are fairly smart and you guys think they’re impressionable idiots.

25. But…if you don’t think art affects it’s audience, why talk about it? If it isn’t meaningful, or doesn’t connect with people, why does anyone bother with it? Wertham at least thought comics mattered…which is not incidentally why a good bit of his criticism was actually fairly insightful (Wonder Woman really did have tons of lesbian content, for instance — a fact he recognized and lots of critics haven’t.) If we’re all so sophisticated that what we read doesn’t affect us at all, then why read it to begin with?

    The issue isn’t whether readers are smart or stupid; there’s going to be some of both, surely. The issue is whether the comic in question is racist…and, in this case, whether and how racist caricatures are acceptable in European comics, and whether that’s a good thing. You say that the comic is just moving around stereotypes for the fun of it. But the idea that racist caricatures are a fun and worthy object of nostalgia seems like one way that racism has been systematically excused. “We don’t mean anything by these blackface minstrel shows — they’re just fun.” Why is that unacceptable and this is acceptable? Do you really believe that people are smarter and more sophisticated now than they were when blackface minstrel shows were all the rage. Or do you think that racism is no longer a problem, and therefore we can light-heartedly be “racist” without it meaning anything and without having to account for it?

    Racism isn’t an on/off thing. Society’s aren’t either racist or not. They can be more or less racist, and they can become more or less racist over time. One way of being racist is to treat other people as nonhuman toys for your own enjoyment. This book sure looks like it does that. That makes it racist…and a society that accepts that sort of nonsense is more racist than one that doesn’t, even if all of its members are incredibly sophisticated and smart.

26. Just to be clear, I don’t think SPIROU IN NEW YORK is intended as or constitutes a “critique” of racism at all. What I would say is that any humorous or ethically questionable depiction of a member of an ethnic group has its own built-in perils, and burlesquing the depictions into absurdity is a way of potentially defanging them. In other words, a version of this story involving members of these ethnic groups which DIDN’T feature such flamboyantly silly racial caricatures might actually have been a lot more insidiously racist. (And non-realistic European cartoonists are always hamstrung by a comedic drawing style that almost automatically turns any visual depiction of someone of another race into arguably a racist caricature.)

    Another touchstone: Ralph Bakshi’s COONSKIN.

27. Well, fair enough. I’ll stop belaboring the point. Thanks for stopping by, Kim; it’s always a pleasure to have you comment here.

28. A lot of people don’t get David Allan Coe, either.

29. Honestly, Noah, what you’re reading from my comments bears so little resemblance to what I’m actually saying that this is that this is pretty pointless. I mean, “If we’re all so sophisticated that what we read doesn’t affect us at all…”? You think I think racism is no longer a problem? You’re arguing with a fictional Idiot Kim Thompson and you’re right, he is an idiot, I can’t defend his views.

    I think your view completely disregards intent and effect and carries a dismayingly crude view of art and how we perceive it. The implicit binary choice of “The issue is whether the comic in question is racist [or not]” is less cultural critique than cultural demagoguery. The tone is strident, and carries the unmistakable, disheartening undercurrent of “If someone disagrees with me on this, he may be a bit racist himself.”

    I do agree that the nostalgic appreciation of cultural racist imagery can both feed into and conceal genuine residual racism (cf. BAMBOOZLED, yes). I’m not defending all (or even any!) old racist imagery, nor all modern ironic/cultural appreciation for racist imagery, nor all attempts to satirize it by burlesquing it, some of which can misfire badly. I’m trying (clearly unsuccessfully) to bring some nuance to the “racist drawings in funnybooks always bad, always harmful” argument.

30. I actually wrote that last response while Noah was posting his gracious “agree to disagree” wrapup, so it shouldn’t be misconstrued as additional “one-more-thing” raving. I’m done now!

31. “I’m trying (clearly unsuccessfully) to bring some nuance to the “racist drawings in funnybooks always bad, always harmful” argument.”

    Sorry; I’ll do the one more thing ranting (or at least additional commenting). I’m not entirely sure that that’s what Alex was trying to say. But, yes, I agree that these things should be judged on a case by case basis.

32. Actually, I lost a nuance there myself. I should’ve said “racist drawings in funnybooks WITHOUT EXPLICIT OBVIOUS SATIRICAL INTENT always bad, always harmful.” (I think most of us agree that racial imagery used satirically is not inherently bad, with the caveat that we can agree or disagree about whether individual ones are successful, be they Crumb, Yann/Conrad, or Johnny Ryan.) I’m saying that I think that within a mutually understood global context of their ridiculousness they can be used in a fairly benign manner. (The Black character in SPIROU dropping his R’s is, I’m pretty sure, a deliberate play on the Black pirate in ASTERIX who himself is a burlesque of a character in another strip.)

33. Whew.

    I was somewhat hoping/expecting Kim to show up here, as he’s eerily similar to me: half American/half European culturally,multilingual,and the same age as mine — therefore probably exposed to the same French/Belgian kids’ comics.

    (Another weird coincidence: we are both published translators of Leo Malet; my version of “Du Rebecca Rue des Rosiers”– “Mayhem in the Marais”– was printed in 1991, by Panther Books.I treasure my dedicated copy by Léo.)

    Kim, I’m sorry if I come across as “shrill” in my article. You know, when Noah sent out his solicitations for the so-called ‘hate’ articles, my initial reaction was: what’s to hate? I’ve felt indifference and contempt for hundreds of comics, but anger? Hate?

    And then I was hit by a hate-memory of ‘Spirou et Fantasio à New-York’.

    The only reason I’d read the album was that it was bundled on special offer with one of my Parisian dailies (I think ‘Le Parisien Libéré’) and I was curious to see what had been done with Spirou since I’d dropped the strip. (As I’d said, Kim, I dropped it after Franquin did; I think you can appreciate that.)

    Well, yes, I was outraged.

    Re-reading the strip only increased my anger; so, yes, Kim, I’ll cop to being “shrill”, and concede that I should’ve taken more time over the piece: the thoughtful digressions in the comments here demonstrate that all too thoroughly.

    But damn it, Kim, you avow yourself that you haven’t read the album. PLEASE READ IT.

    It’s being sold to small kids, Kim. It is genuinely toxic.It is worse than Hergé’s or Franquin’s excesses in albums such as ‘La Corne du Rhinocéros’.

    Finally, Kim, it’s ironically refreshing to be accused of “shrill” political correctness, as I’m more often castigated for my supposed fascism. Go figure.

    BTW, you’ve grown immensely as a translator since those first Tardi Nestor Burma tales: your translations no longer read as translations.

34. I’ve collected several of Kim’s comments in a post here.

35. I’ll check it out — I do actually think I have it sitting around somewhere. Maybe I’ll be so shocked I’ll come back here and rescind my defense… I don’t remember LA CORNE DU RHINOCEROS as being particularly bad; TEMBO TABOU seemed more problematic to me with its infantile natives.

    Thanks for the kind words on my translations. I happen to immodestly agree. I fully expect that when I go back and edit the first NESTOR BURMA for a new edition I’ll wince and cringe at my own original translation as much as I do looking over some of the old Catalan and Heavy Metal translations of Manara which I’ve been checking out. I guess I just had to shake off the last of my foolish ideas about having to remain literally faithful to the original (the translator’s downfall) to start hitting the sweet spot.

36. I should admit I haven’t read the thing either; maybe someday I’ll get to it and I can come back and argue the “it’s not racist” position and Kim can take the opposite side….

37. The internet in a nutshell: Two people arguing about a book they haven’t read.

38. I just read this by Ralph Ellison and thought it was maybe apropos..not least because I’m pretty sure Ellison didn’t read Spirou and Fantasio either.

    One of the most insidious crimes occurring in this democracy is that of designating another, poitically weaker, less socially acceptable, people as the receptacle for one’s own self-disgust, for one’s own infantile rebellion, for one’s own fears of, and retreats from, reality. It is the crime of reducing the humanity of others to that of a mere convenience, a counter in a banal game which involves no apparent risk to ourselves.

39. Nice quote. Where is it from?

40. Interesting post, Alex. It’s hard to imagine something like this being published in the US in ’87 (at least not by a major company).

41. Well,Richard, this is what I find weird, especially given that France and Belgium, overall, tend to be far, far more ‘politically correct’ than the States.

    As I said, for some odd reason children’s ‘bande dessinée’ get a free pass re:racism. This isn’t reflected in other media: the Tintin and Spirou animated cartoon TV series are scrupulously racism_free.

    An aside to Kim: you’re right, ‘La Corne du Rhinocéros’ really isn’t that bad. BTW, when will Fantagraphics launch a serious kid’s line, beyond the pricey collectors-oriented Shulz, Barks, Kelly and Gottfredson volumes (wonderful as they are)?

42. Suat, the Ellison quote is from his book of essays, “Shadow and Act”…I believe specifically from “The World and the Jug”, which is an amazing takedown of Irving Howe, and probably one of the best essays ever written in English. It’s fantastic.

43. The sort of racism/racial stereotyping in this strip is something you actually still see more often than you’d expect, where 1950ties racial cliches are used without irony. In this case, I think it has to do with Tome/Janry’s view of America through the lens of Hollywood cliches. It’s about as realistic a portrayal of the country as Tintin in America was, New York as outdated movie set.

44. I think that’s pretty exactly right, and I think the assumption is that readers are savvy enough to recognize this “Hollywood clichés” aspect, just as you could do a story set in Paris with beret-wearing, accordion-playing Frenchmen in striped shirts running around with baguettes and refusing to use deodorant and savvy American readers would… OK, Americans are idiots and would probably take it literally, so my analogy breaks down.

    I think there was more genuine naïveté at play in TINTIN IN AMERICA, though — although probably also an element of satire. To be briefly fair to TINTIN IN THE CONGO, there was probably an element of satire in that as well (TINTIN was always a comedic adventure series), although the underlying, deep, awful racism on that one is beyond dispute.

45. I mean…the question is, why is it better if it’s more savvy? Why is using racist tropes as a sort of winking, insidery gesture of sophistication better than using racist tropes because they are fun or funny (which is presumably the naive reason)? It’s still, it seems to me, using a weaker other as the site of your own “infantile rebellion”, as Ellison says. I don’t get why knowing your using a racist trope gets you a pass on using racist tropes. It seems like just another way to allow yourself to be racist.

46. ——————–
    Noah Berlatsky says:

    I just read this by Ralph Ellison and thought it was maybe apropos..not least because I’m pretty sure Ellison didn’t read Spirou and Fantasio either.

    One of the most insidious crimes occurring in this democracy is that of designating another, politically weaker, less socially acceptable, people as the receptacle for one’s own self-disgust, for one’s own infantile rebellion, for one’s own fears of, and retreats from, reality. It is the crime of reducing the humanity of others to that of a mere convenience, a counter in a banal game which involves no apparent risk to ourselves.
    ——————-

    Sure, but “in this democracy”? How about throughout the entire history of the human race, with women getting “the dirty end of the stick” since the Garden of Eden?

    By taking an atrocious universal of human behavior and targeting “this democracy,” Ellison makes it appear there’s something uniquely awful about America (or wherever he was living; Rome, perhaps), instead of routinely awful; par for the sorry-ass course.

    As to why women being victimized escaped his attention, I wonder if…ah!

    In “American Racism and the Legacy of Slavery: Ralph Ellison’s Struggle to ‘Tell It Like It Is’,” we read, starting in page 11:

    ———————
    Ellison always characterizes women in an overwhelmingly negative fashion…

    Ellison goes out of his way to characterize women as sexual predators or monsters…Ellison’s misogyny is even seen in the smallest details of the text. As Ellison moves through a crowd, he “became aware of the strangely sinister, high-frequency swishing of women’s skirts.” It is striking that he characterizes anything he associates with females as menacing, even a sound. In addition to Ellison’s commitment to portraying all females in a negative light, masculinity permeates every feature of the essay…

    Ellison’s portrayal of his mother continues this trend of disrespect towards women. Ellison only mentions his mother in one scene in the dream even though she raised him as a single mother. Even though his father was not there to help his mother, Ellison still credits his father for giving his mother all of her strength. Ellison does not speak to any extra personal struggles his mother had to endure while raising two young boys on her own after her husband died. Instead, he criticizes her for mishandling his father’s death.

    …Male figures and male relationships dominate all aspects of the essay; female figures are criticized, and female relationships are devalued. As discussed earlier, Ellison defines the black experience by equating it to his search for manhood. In doing so, he portrays the black experience as entirely masculine and entirely omits the experience of half of the African American population.

    Ironically, by marginalizing the female experience in his narrative of American race relations, Ellison accurately represents a historical truth about the magnitude of discrimination against black women. Black women even endured discrimination within the black community where they struggled for agency. Black women were routinely denied leadership roles within the black community; this even held true for political movements they contributed to like the Civil Rights Movement. The exclusion of women cannot be dismissed as a mistake or coincidence; there were competent female activists ready and willing to donate their efforts to the movement. Black female interests were routinely excluded from political discussions within the black community and the broader American polity.

    Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her spot on a bus and she was subsequently claimed as a representative of the civil rights cause. However, a recently discovered essay written by Rosa Parks brings to light that Parks was actually first and foremost an anti-rape activist, not an anti-segregation activist…
    ———————-
    http://tinyurl.com/d3bzvwp

    Funny how those who find racism such an outrageous wrong — make a career of it, in fact, as Ellison did — have no trouble with keeping women “in their place,” or worse…

    ————————
    Noah Berlatsky says:

    …I don’t get why knowing your using a racist trope gets you a pass on using racist tropes. It seems like just another way to allow yourself to be racist.
    ————————-

    Oh?

    http://www.impawards.com/2000/posters/bamboozled_ver2.jpg

    More on “Bamboozled”: http://nyfree.net/article/cn-discussion-on-race

    You’re just allowing yourself to be racist, Spike Lee!

    Oh, but it’s different when African-Americans do it? Howcum? Are they so morally elevated they can “escape the taint”?

    If “Bamboozled” had been by a white filmmaker, seeking to make the exact same points as Lee, would it then automatically be deserving of moral opprobrium? (The shit would most assuredly have flown!) And would that double standard not be…racist?

    BTW, in the downloadable PDF of “Spike Lee’s Phantasmagoric Fantasy and the Black Female,” we read:

    ————————–
    …a close friend of mine, who is an African American male filmmaker and a fan of Lee’s canon of work, insisted I rent She Hate Me. He did so with the promise that it was Lee’s best work to date, and that it would put to rest our many debates concerning Lee’s filmic misogyny.

    Therefore, I watched the entire 138 minutes of this so-called feminist corrective. Not to my surprise, She Hate Me is similar to Lee’s previous films, insofar as a main component of the film is to reveal the plight of a Black male protagonist and to present Black women as co-conspirators
    in Black male subjugation. In this film, he does not use “Black female humiliation as plot resolution,” as cultural and feminist critic Michele Wallace writes about many of his previous films. Instead, Lee has given us a new bag of misogynistic and phallocentric tricks: Black women in this film humiliate Black men sexually by using one particular Black man as a breeder for hordes of baby-obsessed Black lesbians, thereby ruining the infrastructure of the nuclear, Black family.
    ————————–

    Funny how those who find racism such an outrageous wrong…

47. Uh…but Spike Lee doesn’t wink knowingly about racist tropes. He deploys them precisely to investigate and criticize them. Bamboozled doesn’t think racism is fun or funny; it thinks it’s infuriating.

    I don’t actually like Bamboozled all that much, but Spike Lee isn’t an idiot.

48. I guess I tend to go back a step and ask, “Why are racist depictions bad?” (Stay with me here! I’m not implying I think they’re NOT bad, I’m asking why SPECIFICALLY are they bad.) I think they’re bad, they’re hurtful, because they risk distorting the reader’s perception of the world. (TINTIN IN THE CONGO was indisputably terrible because it genuinely was intended to, and actually likely did, promulgate a hair-raisingly patronizing and colonialist and racist view of Africans.) If we assume that the reader is now aware and sophisticated enough to recognize the racist imagery as parodic and utterly unmoored from any kind of reality, in fact by its absurdity implicitly challenging whatever residual racism might be rattling around in the reader’s skull (setting aside the degree to which this part is intentional on the author’s part)… is that a bad thing, a good thing, or just… a thing? In that context pushing the imagery as far as possible becomes arguably a benefit: LES INNOMABLES’ racist content and imagery is so crazy over the top that a theoretical version that’s pulled back would likely be MORE offensive/dangerous. Is THE SOPRANOS’ measured but controversial version of Italian-American criminals more or less toxic than SPIROU’s explicitly silly, parodic version? (That SPIROU is largely read by children adds another layer of concern, of course.) Etc…

    I agree that it’s a nettlesome set of questions, and this doesn’t even address minorities’ right to be simply OFFENDED by the depictions, regardless of whether they actually have any kind of effect on the audience (or you can argue that the effect is subterranean, cumulative, and immeasurable).

    I got no answers. And it turns out the run of Tome/Janry SPIROUs I have starts right AFTER this book, so I can’t read it. (After buying a few I realized I didn’t like them enough to keep collecting them. I did stick with the PETIT SPIROU spin-offs, though, which I think are funny.) I still suspect the authors had no malicious intent, assumed readers would all realize they were playing with absurd clichés, and be horrified to read that some people thought they were racists or had created a racist work. If you hate that aspect of the book I’d suggest it’s more likely a grievous taste misfire on the authors’ part than a symptom of their, or industry-wide, racism per se.

49. Right…I thought that was more or less where you were going.

    I think there are a couple of problems. First, you assume that there is some level of absurdity that makes it clear that the racism in question is not serious/could not possibly be real. The problem is that racism *is not based in reality*. You can see this with the various conspiracy theories around the President, right? No one in their right mind could think he’s some sort of Kenyan black panther anti-white conspirator…but racism isn’t about being in your right mind. It’s not a rational ideology. Therefore, attempting to overturn it through absurdity is simply ineffective. This is Crumb’s problem…and it looks like it’s the problem here too. To deal critically with racism, you need to actually think about it and how it works, not just exaggerate it…because exaggeration is not an effective counter to racism. Exaggerated racism is simply more racist. There is no point of exaggeration at which racism stops being racist, because racism is not moored to reason or reality. That’s not how it works.

    You also suggest that if the reader recognizes it as racism, then it’s not a problem. I would argue that people’s relationship to their own psyches are not quite so transparent (as you acknowledge in your comment. Specifically, the idea that it’s okay to use racist tropes because doing so entertains white people even though it offends black people…is itself racist. Are black people actually people, or are they fun tropes that exist to amuse white people? A large part of racism has been insisting that the second is more important or true than the first.

50. In my best SOUTH PARK entertainment-libertarian mode, I think everyone should be a fun trope to amuse everyone. If a Black cartoonist produced a comic that showed all Whites as drooling redneck rape-and-lynch monsters, that’d be fair too. Where it becomes a problem is obviously the balance of power, and the past history of institutionalized racism of which racist depictions were historically a part. By definition, Whites making fun of Blacks vs. Blacks making fun of Whites is thus a very, very different proposition, and I understand that. So I’m conflicted too.

    I think we can agree to disagree on whether this stuff is offensive per se (or whether its offensiveness serves a larger point that makes it valid). What bothers me is what seems to be the automatic leap-of-faith assumption that, if we grant that it is offensive, then the perpetrators themselves are racists and the work is motivated by racial animus. I think that’s a slippery slope that does nothing to advance the dialogue and forces artists into defensive positions that are not useful. The current political dialogue is to assume the VERY VERY WORST about your opponent and his mindset and motivations and double down on that to the best of your abilities.

51. Tome and Janry do come back to these characters in later books, especially to Vitto Fiasco, who returns as the villain in two more stories, the later of which is again set in New york, with the triads and mafia and all.

    There’s also the album “Le rayon noir” (The Black Ray) in which said ray turns the heroes Black, which leads to Spirou running around in quite literal blackface for much of the story….

    All of which does built somewhat of a case for Tome and Janry to be, not racist as such, as happy using racial and ethnical stereotypes for what are in essence young adult adventure stories. They themselves may know that these stereotypes are absurd, but tbhey do perpetuate them at the same time, for an audience that may lack that sophistication.

    Also, I’m not sure a Black or Chinese or Italian reader of these particular stories will be aware or impressed by the idea that Tome and Janry aren’t really racist, only playing with those stereotypes.

52. I think it’s likely true that some Black or Chinese or Italian readers would be offended and convinced that the work had racist intentions. Then again, lots of little people were offended by Randy Newman’s “Short People” and many, many people including numerous critics thought Paul Verhoeven’s STARSHIP TROOPERS was willfully and explicitly fascist. (Yes, I know, those were explicit satire from known satirists.)

    I’d agree that doing this in children’s literature is inherently far more problematic.

53. “What bothers me is what seems to be the automatic leap-of-faith assumption that, if we grant that it is offensive, then the perpetrators themselves are racists and the work is motivated by racial animus.”

    I’m in general in favor of seeing racism primarily as something that you do rather than as a description of your heart or soul. Lots of people who have no particular animus against black people per se do racist things — because there’s political advantage to be gained, or because there’s money to be made, or for whatever reason. By the same token, people who would refuse to vote for Obama because he’s black may be lovely people in other regards (I’ve got a particular relative of mine in mind.)

54. Well, hang on, I think you have to make a distinction between the cynical use of racism for political means (your Willie Horton ads, “food stamp president” dog whistles and the like) and the playful or satirical use of racist imagery in art. Intention has got to count for something.

55. I mean, it depends on what the use is in each case, I’d argue. In general, art has less direct effect than politics, so yeah, the moral culpability is always a bit less certain. On the other hand, political manipulation of images and aesthetic manipulation of images aren’t entirely divorced either. I think you could argue that they enable each other to some degree.

56. Okay, I got my copy of the book some weeks ago but only got around to reading it this weekend.

    (1) I’ve long been semi-unenthusiastic about the Tome/Janry SPIROU mostly because they cloned their work to an unseemly (to my mind) degree from late-Franquin, which I worship, but I’ve seen enough less successful attempts at cloning in the last decade, of Franquin and others, that with my newfound perspective I actually thought they did a decent job. (A decade of it-ain’t-Jacobs-but-it-ain’t bad BLAKE AND MORTIMER has worn down my resistance.) It ain’t Franquin, but what is? The story was certainly energetic and original. So points for that.

    (2) I don’t know that it’s changed my opinion on the whole racism thing much, if any. The stereotypes are so extreme and silly, and we’re after all talking about a subset of stereotyped movie-derived gangsters here, working within the framework of Franco-Belgian amped-up comedy-adventure with a thinking squirrel and a hero who runs around in a bright red bellboy’s uniform. I’m not even sure how you could, once you’d decided to plunk Spirou into the middle of an Italian-vs.-Asian-gang-wars plotline, do anything but what they did here: Just play it to the hilt. The French and Belgians seem more comfortable with silly stereotypes (cf. the admittedly more benign Asterix), and I really have to assume they figure that everyone, even kids, realizes it’s just playtime, and don’t even connect the bucktoothed, bespectacled, yellow-skinned, sword-wielding Asian gangster on the cover of the book with any genuine Asian person they have ever met, seen, or read about. The more you pile on the silliness, the less real-world impact it has.

    (3) Note that in using Italians and Asians, Tome and Janry picked on ethnicities that are not exactly in the firing line of genuine ethnic resentment any more, too. This is a far cry from if they’d taken a shot at North Africans, or if Americans had done the same with Blacks, or Mexicans, or Arabs. When the ethnic conflict is still tender or ongoing, it gets much dicier.

    (4) I also read THE BLACK RAY while I was at it, and the suggestive inflammatory “Spirou in blackface” description above notwithstanding, it was if anything a playful plea for racial tolerance. (All the characters who turn on Spirou because of his new skin color, created of course by an experiment gone wrong, are clearly assholes or idiots.) You could admittedly blanch — so to speak — at one or two small jokes (one of the Champignac residents who gets “blackified” suddenly feels the urge to pick up a trumpet — the French comics do use jazz as “code” for the Black experience, that and the dropping of the R’s) but Janry seem to be pretty careful to avoid the visual excesses of European cartoon ethnicities (and I liked Spirou’s quiff-turned-dynamic-afro; in the last page of the book, Champignac makes a great elderly Black gentleman).

    So… I remain un-outraged. Certainly there seems to have been no backlash in France; in fact, I got my SPIROU A NEW YORK super cheap because it was picked by the publisher as an “Essentials” book re-released for under six Euros, presumably as a stellar example of the SPIROU series. I think you can make a case for it being in poor taste; I think making a case for it as being in any way genuinely harmful would be far more of an uphill struggle.

    I don’t think we’ll see an English language version of this, or THE BLACK RAY, anytime soon, though. Then again, I don’t think we’ll see an English-language version of the great LES INNOMABLES or the great Reiser jungle strips, and more’s the pity.

    Anyway, I think offensiveness is in the eye of the beholder, and if you want to be offended by it you will be. I do proclaim Tome and Janry almost certainly absent of any malicious intent whatsoever, though, and if any French child closed the book and thought, even by the tiniest increment, “Ah, so THAT’S what Asians and Italians are really like,” I’d be amazed. And believe me, France has FAR more difficult racial/ethnic issues to cope with.

57. Alex here. That’s a reasonable approach, Kim, but I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree. Bear in mind just how much classic BD kids consume…and how much of it features racial stereotypes…I think you can make a case for an accretion of bad influence, even if it’s relatively benign (eg “Blacks are all big children”)

    Although I agree that in the context of modern France the greatest tension centres on North Africans, there is a rising resentment against the Franco-Chinese community.

58. I’d agree with Kim that aiming at groups that aren’t really discriminated against decreases the foul somewhat (though obviously which groups those are can be contested.)

    This seems problematic, though:

    “Anyway, I think offensiveness is in the eye of the beholder, and if you want to be offended by it you will be.”

    This is a pretty typical excuse for explaining all kinds of racism/sexism/whatever. But how does this not excuse something like Birth of a Nation? Or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Or, you know, spitting on minorities when you see them in the street? It’s not your fault that you’re being offensive, after all; they’ll only be offended if they want to be, so they’re just hypersensitive and why should you change your behavior to accommodate hypersensitive people?

    Racial stereotypes and ethnic slurs are a deliberate act of aggression. Saying, “well, they didn’t mean anything by it” just means that the folks in question are ignorant of basic social etiquette, and are perpetrating acts of aggression without understanding what they’re doing. I don’t see that as much of a defense myself.

    You do take steps to defend the work in itself, and as I said those are more convincing to me. But many of your arguments could easily be used to defend any expression of racism, no matter how virulent. The fact that you resort to these in order to excuse this particular book rather undercuts your points. You shouldn’t have to argue for never being offended by racist content…unless this particular book is actually racist and offensive.

59. Kind of reminds me of the old joke that you can wipe out racism by distributing earplugs to minorities…

60. Clearly BIRTH OF A NATION and THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION (and for that matter TINTIN IN THE CONGO) had a very specific, evil sociopolitical agenda and are indisputably offensive. The infamous Hergé panel of Jews gloating in the original SHOOTING STAR, in the social context of the times especially, if also unforgivable. I could go on. Don’t make me out to be excusing ALL racist or racial-caricaturing imagery by arguing that it’s all kinda the same, therefore if I excuse one kind I’m excusing it all and have to be held accountable for D.W. fucking Griffith. (You also lump together “racial stereotypes and ethnic slurs” pretty handily. Do we need to get our knickers in a knot every time a late-night comedian makes a joke about Asians being good at math?)

    Noted on the Franco-Chinese community tensions, but it’s hard to see how a burlesque depiction of American Chinese gangsters would feed into that, I guess. I agree the “depiction of Blacks as big children” aspect can be a problem — I’m uncomfortable with for instance Franquin’s pickaninny-laden TEMBO TABOU and would have to place that in the “not maliciously intended but somewhat offensive” category — but I genuinely don’t see any of that in the Tome/Janry SPIROU work. If anything, the Black guy on page 1 of NEW YORK works himself up from a servant to a big shot (and his former White boss as his servant), a wink at the legendary fluidity of social status in the United States.

61. Kim, the problem is that your arguments are the exact same arguments used to excuse the worst racial excesses. When you argue that people will be offended if they want to — that’s what people always say when they’re defending offensive racist work. It’s a bad argument, and resorting to it undermines some of the rest of what you’re saying.

    With that sort of thing gone, it comes down basically to the argument that it’s not intended to promote racial stereotypes. That’s at least solider ground — but intent is difficult to parse, I think, and “I didn’t mean anything by it” is again used to defend a lot of pretty unpleasant crap. Again, as I’ve said before (and as Ralph Ellison suggests above), the distinction between indulging in racial stereotypes because you despise people and indulging in them because you think they’re funny is not necessarily as cut and dried as it appears. In both cases, the humanity of the people in question is subordinated to the transient needs of the people who happen to be oppressing them. Whether you do that out of fear, self-disgust or, as Ellison pointedly says, in the interest of “infantile rebellion,” you’re still engaged in “the crime of reducing the humanity of others to that of a mere convenience, a counter in a banal game which involves no apparent risk to ourselves.”

62. An argument being used for nefarious purposes doesn’t invalidate all uses of that argument, Noah.

    There is a difference between the emotional response — being offended –and genuine societal harm, and there is a difference of intent and awareness in the artists. To conflate everything into one big lump of racist offensiveness with implicit shared motivation and effect is just sloppy and borderline demagogic. “If you think funny Chinese gang members are OK in SPIROU IN NEW YORK, why, you must be JUST FINE with BIRTH OF A NATION and PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION and TINTIN IN THE CONGO, no?” Well, no.

    And I think being aware of and laughing at and burlesquing racial stereotypes is a sign of healing and getting over racism, not a perpetuation of it. (Cf. minorities’ own contemporary playful use of them.)

    But reasonable people may disagree.

63. Just to be clear, I don’t for a moment think you’re fine with Birth of a Nation, at all, even a little bit. My point was just that your argument doesn’t seem to make the distinctions you’d need to in order to be in a place where you can reject Birth of a Nation — which is (to me) a sign that you should rethink your argument, not that you’re a racist.

    I think it’s really dicey to point to (for example) black use of blackface tropes in order to show that white use of blackface tropes are somehow now all good. Also, a lot of racial stereotypes *are intended as humorous burlesque in the first place*. They’re supposed to be comic; the problem is that the point of the joke is that the oppressed are stupid and inferior.

    There’s actually a really good book about black use of blackface which I recently reviewed here. It’s worth picking up if you have an interest. So is Ralph Ellison’s essay collection.

64. “I think it’s really dicey to point to (for example) black use of blackface tropes in order to show that white use of blackface tropes are somehow now all good.” Yes, it certainly would be dicey if I had said anything that stupid in the first place. And I like how you put an extra thumb on the scales with the discreet but potent addition of “all.”

    “Also, a lot of racial stereotypes *are intended as humorous burlesque in the first place*. They’re supposed to be comic; the problem is that the point of the joke is that the oppressed are stupid and inferior.” Sure. But some aren’t. There’s a sliding scale. TINTIN IN THE CONGO is evil, absolutely. And the benignly intended but still contemptuous infantilization of Ebony White, for instance, can only, and dubiously, be excused with a “those were the times” card. But are you willing to argue that the “point” the authors of SPIROU IN NEW YORK was that Italians and Chinese are “stupid and inferior,” or that a significant part of the audience will absorb this idea?

    The point is that there is a wide range of motivation, execution, contextual information, effect on the audience in the use of racial caricatures and while I can understand still objecting to the ones that are on what we can (I hope) agree is the relatively more benign/inoffensive end of the scale — even if I think NEW YORK was utterly benign in intent and of no ill effect, I’d certainly understand and sympathize with any Asian who took offense — the slippery-scale argumentation where I have to defend BIRTH OF A NATION anytime I say that a racial caricature presented by an artist with what is clearly the understanding that everyone realizes how ridiculous it is, is a little exhausting.

    I still say the original diatribe calling this book a “stew of racist bigotry” and “an evil little book” is way over the top.

65. I didn’t ask you to defend Birth of a Nation, man. I said that your argument didn’t differentiate between the two, and that you therefore might want to rethink it. I’m sorry if that’s exhausting, but back and forth is part of the internets — or any conversation about charged material, for that matter.

    ” are you willing to argue that the “point” the authors of SPIROU IN NEW YORK was that Italians and Chinese are “stupid and inferior,” or that a significant part of the audience will absorb this idea?””

    I still haven’t read it, and don’t have much desire to…but that is in fact what Alex argued, and I don’t know that you’ve done much to dent it, at least as far as I can tell. You agree that they’re using racist tropes; as far as I can tell your argument boils down to the assertion that those racist tropes really can’t be serious because they’re too exaggerated and silly and nobody is really racist now. To which, as I’ve said before, my reply would be, (a) racism is not based in reality, so exaggeration is not an effective form of deflation; there is no hyberbolic upper limit at which racism ceases to be racism, since the tropes are never grounded in truth in the first place, and (b) Europe has a continuing tradition of racism and nativism which is very much alive and has practical consequences.

    I mean, do you disagree with a or b? If so, on what grounds? What qualifies as “silly” racism for kids? What racist tropes are realistic? Why is blackface foolery not okay (if you think it’s not okay), but other comical farcical deployments of racism are all right?

    Again, your point that these prejudices aren’t often weaponized against Italians or Chinese seems like a reasonable point, and worth pointing out…though Alex’s caveat seems relevant too, as does the current northern Europe/southern European tensions around the Eurozone, which seem like they actually matter at the moment a fair bit.

66. I don’t think nobody is racist now, Noah and I’m fed up with this argument, to be honest. (Especially when half of it is pushing back against ridiculous assertions that have been attributed to me.) I’ll fall back on “see above.” (You may construe that as a victory on your end if you choose.)

    I think we live in a time where awareness of this sort of racially-charged caricature and its history, and awareness of what the real world is really like, is widespread enough (yes, even among kids) that one can (cautiously) play with those images without causing the kind of genuine social damage these things used to cause, among readers or viewers who absorbed them uncritically. (TINTIN IN THE CONGO was clearly, and effectively so, a force for evil.) I think the creators of SPIROU IN NEW YORK knew they are completely ridiculous and unmoored from any kind of reality except fourth-generation pop-culture silliness, and I think they think (and I tend to agree) that virtually all of their sentient readership share that same knowledge. So I think that in terms of actual social damage this work is pretty close to an absolute zero. That’s my thesis and I have no interest in having it plucked apart and having to defend it beyond that, so I won’t. Fair enough?

67. Sure; you can stop whenever you like, obviously!

    Again, I disagree with you’re argument there…but I’d just be repeating myself if I went further. Thanks for coming by! It’s always interesting to hear your take.

68. Dammit, driving home I figured something out. So I’m back anyway.

    The difference between genuinely toxic racial caricature and things like this is whether or not it feeds into and supports a contemporary denigratory narrative. TINTIN IN THE CONGO is evil because it purposefully shows Congo natives as childlike and ignorant and in need of colonial guidance (if you know your history, it was actually COMMISSIONED to achieve this, which makes it particularly evil; a later Hergé book with ooga-booga cannibals trying to eat Jo and Zette at least had the virtue of relative innocence). BIRTH OF A NATION pushes the “Blacks as ignorant savages that need to be kept down by the noble KKK” story or still-ongoing racial conflict. Any “classic” movie, TV show or comic strip that portrayed Blacks as stupid, naive, gullible, or lazy, was part of a vast overarching narrative of Blacks as inferior and not worthy of equal status in society, even as they were struggling to achieve it. Hand-wringing greedy, usurious Jews, fanged “Japs,” etc… All part, willfully or not, of a machine of suppression. Contemporary portrayals of Muslims and/or Arabs as insane terrorists (cf. the highly problematic TRUE LIES), or Mexicans as lazy, violent, illiterate illegal-alien moochers would have to face the same kind of scrutiny and disapproval. But if there is a current “narrative” of Italians as ridiculous spaghetti-slurping Mafiosi or Chinese as bucktoothed, sword-wielding gang members I’m not aware of it. Deracinated as they are, these fourth-generation cliché images have given up all their poison. So I think you can argue about whether their use is tasteful, but I think it’s a stretch to claim them to be in any way harmful.

    This is why I always found the tumult about BASIC INSTINCT so silly. (Unless the 1990s had a baseline narrative of lesbians as icepick-wielding killers that the movie furthered that I missed.)

    Of course, this all has to do with whether racial caricatures are actually HARMFUL. “Offensive” is a whole other can of worms, and by definition endlessly subjective. For instance, if I ever catch those Coen Brothers, I’ll give ’em an earful about their their affectless, emotionless, monosyllabic Scandinavian caricatures in FARGO. That pisses me off so much I’d come close to raising my voice.

69. That’s in general a better argument (basically an expansion on your best point, which is that the groups in question weren’t really oppressed, so it didn’t matter.)

    The problem is I think it can sometimes be too easy to assume that we’ve reached a point where these ideologies no longer matter. Or, to put it another way, it’s a lot easier to see historical problems (which are somebody else’s problems) than current ones. For example, homophobia is really not a dead issue, and neither is misogyny. The idea that lesbians are untrustworthy, unnatural, dangerous, sexualized creatures who secretly desire and desire to be men — this is not an ideology that has disappeared. Gay kids have high suicide rates; they often face relentless bullying and discrimination. Things have changed remarkably quickly; they’re much, much better now than they were twenty years ago in the 1990s, thank goodness, and were better in the 90s than in the 70s — and exponentially better than they were in the 50s. But the idea that in the 1990s there was no serious prejudice against gays, and the idea that Basic Instinct was completely divorced from stereotypes of lesbians — that’s simply crazy, Kim. It makes it sound like you have no idea what you’re talking about.

    So while I’d agree that narratives are really important (which is why reverse racism is in general an idiotic and duplicitous claim) I’m skeptical about your assertion that the narratives here have been completely defanged. Again, there’s a fair bit of evidence at the moment that north/south intra-European tensions are pretty active, and the book sounds like it plugs into the narrative around those tensions fairly directly. Similarly, buck-toothed Chinese are a trope of long standing, as certainly are ideas about untrustworthy Orientals. You’ve got a couple hundred years of imperialist stereotypes behind that. I think it’s wishful thinking to declare that such images no longer count when they’re deployed in an explicitly racist way in a place that had Asian colonies within the memory of many still living. I’d submit that you have a narrative here that has historically, and not all that long ago, been deployed to justify hatred, repression, and violence — and which (if Alex is correct) is still capable of justifying just that. That seems significantly different than the affectionate portrayals in Fargo of a group of people who have never been the target of systematic stereotyping or oppression in the US (or Europe for that matter) as far as I’m aware. The first doesn’t seem defanged to me; the second never had teeth to begin with.s

70. My point about FARGO is that some Minnesota Scandinavians WERE in fact offended by it, absent any history of discrimination: It was offense completely separate from any genuine oppression.

    Your rant about lesbians and gays is a lot of tedious, posturing boilerplate gabble that I agree with but is irrelevant; talk about utterly missing my point. Gays and lesbians are hated, demonized, and oppressed to this day, and have been the target of offensive, malicious depictions — of course! It would take someone with very poor reading skills to infer from my comment that I thought homophobia was gone in the 1990s (or now), for Christ’s sake. But that they are psychopathic serial killers is not a depiction that has been deployed or gained much traction so far as I know.

71. Actually, there are a lot of depictions of gays and lesbians and gender deviant people as dangerous and violent — it’s a completely standard trope. There’s Psycho and Silence of the Lambs, to name just two really major examples. Skyfall too. It’s more common to do it with gay men, of course, but violent lesbians show up all the time in women in prison films. And, of course, lots of lesbian vampires, whose sexuality is fairly explicitly linked to their violence. Perhaps the most famous screen lesbian, Pussy Galore, is in fact initially presented as willing to participate in mass murder, until Bond changes her sexuality and thereby rids her of murderousness. Oh, and the lesbian character in C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy is also violent, amoral, and extremely dangerous.

    The loose, aggressive sexuality portrayed in Basic Instinct is also very typical for gay characters. And Sharon Stone’s desire for the icepick/phallus is the old woman-who-wants-to-be-a-man cliche about lesbians. These are all standard ways of portraying gay people as simultaneously dangerous and exciting, and of deploying and fanning homophobia. I don’t know what else to say except to reiterate again that your apparent inability to recognize completely standard homophobic tropes doesn’t create much confidence in the rest of your analysis.

    But! Your point about the Scandinavians is well taken. I concede that every time someone takes offense there isn’t discrimination — white complaints of reverse discrimination being the most obvious example. But, as I said, the Chinese certainly have a long history of vicious ethnic caricature in Europe, as well as a long history of actual and real oppression. That seems very different from the Scandinavians; more a contrast than a continuum, it seems like to me.

    Here’s a question — would it be okay for a comic to portray similarly racialized caricatures of Jews in the US? Jews (as I well know!) face little discrimination in the US. And yet, I think most poeple would say that cheerfully racist depictions of Jews as greedy usurers, plugging into centuries of discrimination and violence, would be unacceptable. Do you think that in fact it would be okay to portray Jews in that way now in a children’s comic? How is that different from portraying Chinese in similarly racist ways? Referring to the Holocaust and European persecution of Jews doesn’t seem sufficient to make a distinction; after all, European colonial endeavors in Asia were pretty brutal.

    Again, I’d argue that the past is more present than you’re giving it credit for being, and that racist portrayals of Jews and Chinese remain sufficiently close, and sufficiently potent — they’re narratives sufficiently relevant — that those racist portrayals in fact remain racist, and worth condemning as such.

    Oh, and thanks for coming back! It’s a somewhat heated discussion, obviously, and no doubt frustrating on both sides, but I am learning things (who knew Scandinavians were offended by Fargo?) and am glad you were interested enough to keep up the back and forth.

72. I find your lack of confidence (in my analysis) disturbing.

    Fair enough on the male gay violent predators in movies issue: you’re right. I should’ve kept it narrowed down to lesbians. I still think examples of such lesbians were either outdated enough (Pussy Galore?) or silly niche exploitation (prison movies?) to not comprise, by the 1990s, a context of willful lesbian-bashing or fearmongering into which BASIC INSTINCT would feed further poison. But maybe enough people walked out of that movie thinking, “Jesus, those lesbians sure are terrifying.” (Frankly, I kinda walked out of there wishing I WAS a lesbian. Sharon Stone certainly had her shit together more than Michael Douglas.) Especially since Paul Verhoeven is by all accounts a thoroughly enlightened fellow, albeit with a sense of sarcasm that causes dullards to understand his movies exactly the opposite of how they were intended. (Cf. the Frank Miller-written ROBOCOP sequels. Or the outrage at STARSHIP TROOPERS’ “fascism” — still the most prescient 9/11 movie made.) There’s a big element of sarcastic provocation in BASIC INSTINCT, too (if I recall correctly, the far more Neanderthal Joe Eszterhas was cowed by the protests into wanting to “correctify” the script and Verhoeven said fuck that, we’re doing it to the hilt the way it was written, that’s the only way it’ll work).

    I don’t believe anything is sacred, but I’d be very, very, very careful about racialized caricatures of Jews. Having six million of yours killed a couple generations ago, an entire section of the world that still would like you all dead, and a country under constant threat of being blown up gives you a bit of a moral edge. Certainly we should condemn anti-Semitic works such as A SERIOUS MAN with its horrific portrayal of rabbis — or the great anti-Semitic/homophobic twofer of MILLER’S CROSSING. What modern-day Nazis wrote and directed that filth, anyway?

    I would agree that up to maybe the last 20 or 25 years, pretty much any racial/ethnic (or gay) caricature was either evilly intentioned or, if benignly intentioned, part and parcel of a pattern of discrimination and suppression. I (perhaps naively) think that since then the underlying hatreds and prejudices have mostly been, if not eliminated, at least forced into a defensive posture of being condemned by the majority, and an increasing postmodern awareness of the virtues of parody, sarcasm and burlesque has enabled readers and viewers to decode racially/ethnic offensive imagery as critiques of racially/ethnically offensive imagery and/or examinations of exactly why they’re offensive and whether, if everyone understands they’re offensive, that makes them harmless — or even useful. This gets complicated… far more complicated than getting your knickers in a knot every time some joker draws a Black character with big balloon lips or a buck-toothed Chinese person with a sword.

73. Kim, it’s just not clear to me that knee-jerk pomo ironic assertions of sophistication are *more* complicated than pointing out that racism is racism. But we can agree to disagree, I guess…especially if you’re open to the possibility that you are in fact being naive.

    Paul Verhoeven is a smart guy — steeped in exploitation cinema, which is where he gets those tropes that you don’t recognize, and which you are claiming are irrelevant to popular discourse. There’s an argument to be made that Basic Instinct is reappropriating those tropes as a kind of lesbian-power move (though, again, this requires you to acknowledge that the tropes are tropes in the first place.) I don’t really buy it. I love Starship Troopers, but Verhoeven often seems to me too clever by half. Again, pomo irony doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re not participating in the tropes you claim you’re just ironically enjoying, and getting off on murderous sexy pantyless lesbians looks a lot like getting off on murderous sexy pantyless lesbians even if you’re pointing to your giant ironic brain when doing it rather than pointing lower down.

    Most of the outrage re Starship Troopers was from fans of the book who were reacting to the fact that Verhoeven hated his source material, wasn’t it? At least, that’s most of what I’ve seen.

74. Alex here. As the writer of the review I guess it’s fitting that I disclose my own ethnic makeup. I’m a white 57-year-old middle class male, so I can’t plausibly draw on minority outrage, can I?

    My father was a Catholic Frenchman, my mother a Lutheran American; her parents immigrated from Sweden to Minnesota. Which goes to Kim’s remarks on Fargo: Noah, there has, in fact, been considerable bigotry against Scandinavians in that region. Read Sinclair Lewis’ ‘Main Street’ for an illustration.

    Swedes were stereotyped as hulking, goofy lunkheads, dangerous in their cups. To stay in comics, regard Olaf in ‘Blackhawk’.

    Kim, I don’t know whether you have children or not, but I do ask you: if you had kids, would you give them this album to read without a discussion?

    It’s the kid aspect that troubles me. I’m perfectly at home with racist tropes in Crumb, S.Clay Wilson, or the National Lampoon.

    Anyway, Kim, I have to salute you for taking the trouble to buy and read the book before weighing in at length.

75. Alex, I was wondering if there had been bigotry. Thanks for the further info.

76. Noah, quite a few critics hated ST because of its fascism. You still see that come up from time to time. Really, many of them didn’t get it. Most, I’d say.

77. (1) Charles is right, a substantial amount of critics took the “fascism” of STARSHIP TROOPERS at face value and criticized it on that level. When told that the movie was ironic they grumbled that Verhoeven had failed to communicate that aspect. Idiots. Verhoeven complains about it (hilariously) on the DVD commentary track. “Here I have Neil Patrick Harris showing up in a military uniform explicitly modeled after Nazi uniforms and they STILL didn’t get it!” I am pleased to be a fan of a movie director who is smarter than his critics.

    The indignation about the violation of the source material stayed pretty much within fan-nerd circles, as I recall. The “fascism” complaints were far more global.

    (2) Sure, ya, there was anti-Scandinavian bigotry (there’s been anti-everyone bigotry at some time) but the point is that by the time FARGO came out that was way in the past and it was not feeding into a general narrative of contempt or suppression or marginalization. And it was clearly affectionate — at least as affectionate as Garrison Keillor.

    (3) At the point at which my children (if they existed) could read SPIROU, I’d assume that they’d be sophisticated enough to recognize the silliness of the material and I wouldn’t have to “discuss” it any more than I’d have to sit them down and remind them that squirrels don’t think or talk.

    (4) I think “pointing out racism is racism,” full stop, is about as uncomplicated and un-nuanced as you can get.

78. I’d say the big watershed in the appropriation/satire of racial/ethnic stereotypes came with Ralph Bakshi’s COONSKIN, which of course ruined his career and sent him off in a hit-and-miss fantasy features and kids’ cartoons purgatory from which he never escaped. In an alternate universe populated by more Kim Thompsons and fewer Noah Berlatskys, COONSKIN was understood and embraced and celebrated and Bakshi kept on making movies in that vein (and that of its excellent predecessor, HEAVY TRAFFIC). We did get the 1980s MIGHTY MOUSE out of it, though.

79. I wouldn’t necessarily bet that I wouldn’t like the Bakshi feature if I saw it. Things are really case by case for me…so you never know!

80. I mean, even if I thought it was racist, I like plenty of racist art. (Kipling, Little Nemo, Burzum…the list goes on….)

81. Interesting discussion, sorry to only find it months after the fact!

    One thing I think is worth pointing out is that ‘Spirou in New York’ has actually already been published in English (despite Kim Thompson’s suggestion that it would never happen). Cinebook put it out in 2011.

    Personally (as a fan of the series, obviously) I’m more in line with the defenders. The gags are probably a little iffy, but I think it’s way over the top to call it “genuinely toxic” or “intelligent, malicious, bad-faith racism.”

    If you’ll pardon the plug, I wrote a response on this blog, giving some more examples and context: http://spiroureporter.net/2013/06/11/an-evil-little-book/

82. Hey, Reporter, Alex here. Thanks for your very reasonable comment, and I urge everyone interested to go read your most interesting and even-handed response on your blog.

83. Kim Thompson’s death has been reported today.Although I did not know him, I’m saddened by his passing.

    He and I were of the same generation, were offspring of European/American marriages, loved American and European comics equally — so I identified very much with him.

    His accomplishments were great, as a publisher, an editor, a translator and a journalist: comics will be the poorer for his absence…

    I’m writing about him here because he contributed, with vigor and incisiveness, to this thread.

    Goodbye, Kim Thompson, and thank you. My sincere condolences to his loved ones.

    — Alex Buchet

84. Whoa!
    Here’s my point of view.
    1) You sir are an idiot. Big time. No, I don’t need to argue. If I said : “Superman is dangerous! It makes little kids think that’s it possible to fly in the air, I think we should ban Superman!” What would you say? Because honestly, your argumentation is worst than that.
    2) You have a colonialist view of the world because you’re unable to understand different cultures.
    3 ) You promote the worst kind of censorship : readers are too stupid to make their own opinions should be given only what can influence them in the “good” way. (i.e. your own way).
    4) You’re highly prejudiced : “something it shares with far too wide a selection of European comics for children.” This kind of sentences is very offensive to european readers. By doing so you spread stereotypes and lies.
    5) Now let me develop a little on the last point. You seem to imply that european are be more racist than american. Since the internet entered in my life, I had the pleasure to know a little more about my over the pond fellows. On reddit, for instance, I’ve met numerous americans who call themselves “liberal” but have a strange way to insist about how the blacks (sorry “afro-americans) are all criminals beyond help. Have a look on the Trayvor Martin topics. All the comments in favor of Zimmerman are upvoted. Those in favor of the justice, downvoted. I also remember someone using the Katrina hurricane as an example of how black were irresponsible and unable to protect their goods and families. So please don’t start with your “enough! My stomach can’t take any more.”
    Maybe you should look at yourself in a mirror. Your strange obsession with stereotypes and your ability to see racism everywhere tells a lot. About you.

    ps : I want to thanks the commenters who made a better argumentation than mine, especially Ken Thompson.

85. First of all, “Marmac”, if you are going to be deliberately insulting you should avoid the cowardice of hiding behind a fake name.

    As it happens, I am a Frenchman writing from Paris, my home for the last forty years.

    And I make no apologia for racism in American cartoons. In fact, if you’d troubled to actually read the article, you’d have seen my condemnation of Eisner’s ‘The Spirit’s racist depiction of Ebony White — complete with illustration.

    “You have a colonialist view of the world because you’re unable to understand different cultures.” Which cultures are those? Of France and Belgium, in which I’ve been living for 58 years? Or perhaps of the Front National, whose racist viewpoints you seem to be vociferously endorsing?

    And I’ve been outspoken in this blog against colonialism. See my articles on ‘Tintin au Congo’.

    “You’re highly prejudiced : “something it shares with far too wide a selection of European comics for children.” This kind of sentences is very offensive to european readers. By doing so you spread stereotypes and lies.”

    You moron, I AM a European reader. And believe me, I’ve read hundreds of French, Belgian, Dutch and British comics for children produced over decades. My remark is 100% true — which, of course, makes you the liar.

    It’s an old right-wing extremist tactic to shout that the real racists are the anti-racists. A tactic you seem to have assimilated.

    Assez. Je n’ai plus ni le temps, ni la volonté de m’escrimer avec une petite racaille comme toi. Casse-toi, minable.
    –Alex Buchet

86. What we have here is not “racism” in any way or form, but merely a cultural misunderstanding and the purest lack of humour from the part of North Americans (and to a lesser degree, Brits), such as the North American (or Brit) who wrote the above article.

    Europeans in general, as well as their African neighbours tot he south and their Asian neighbours to the east, typically regard North America’s all-formal, all-politically correct, all-inflammatory attitude towards such things with laugher.

    Typical reactions from Europeans when faced with articles such as the above one:

    “Oh boy, after all this time, those North Americans STILL haven’t gotten themselves rid of their black inferiority complex+white guilt thing. Pitiful.”

    “Oh man, those North Americans really like to take themselves serious in all things. They should read more comic books, of the not censored variety that is, perhaps they’d loosen a bit and develop their sense of humour, along with their capacity to distinguish between important things and irrelevant or minor ones a bit further.”

    For a North American, Spirou is racism. So is saying “nigger”. So is producing a film without at least a minimum percentage of black actors on it (sigh). And so is anything that any white person does, speaks or thinks in their politically-correct-beyond-reason country. But for everyone else in the world, including the supposed “victims” of that “racism”, it’s simple and innocent humour.

    Conclusion: you’re still a young country, U.S.A., now it’s the time to leave all those puberty pains behind you, loosen up a bit and grow up. There are far more important things requiring the attention of adults out there in this still not-quite-civilized world, and far more nefarious things worthy getting angry about than some stereotype caricature in some comic book.

87. Good grief; did you read the previous comment? Alex is from Europe! He’s French!

    Moreover, I’m not sure why you feel qualified to speak for black people the world over as to what is and is not racism…but I’d suggest, in light of your comical failure to understand where this particular author is coming from, that you might reconsider your own qualifications as a source of insight into the psychology of others.

88. Also, kind of depressing to have you over here telling us how Europeans have solved all their problems with racism just as the National Front wins in France.

89. Being French and having read and enjoyed this cartoon as a kid in the 80s, I gotta tell you these stereotypes are not about Chinese, or Italian, or whatever. They’re about Italian-Americans, Chinese-Americans, well, they’re all about Americans really.
    No one in France or Belgium is racist towards Italian-Americans: nobody gives a shit about Italian-Americans, most people have never met one. We do have our own Italian immigrants,nobody thinks of them as mobsters.
    Same with Asians. Everybody grew up with Asian kids in their schools, nobody really believes they have magical powers like they do in Asian movies and animes.
    I mean, Americans believe the French wear berets, don’t wash and like Jerry Lewis. I think it’s bizarre but not offensive.

90. Oh and another thing (I hate people who do that, sorry)
    There really were some offensive material printed in Spirou Magazine, and I did get shocked by them as a kid, as I was shocked by “Tintin au Congo”: one of them was a cartoon named “Sammy”, they had one taking place in Chinatown called “Le Mandarin” that did cross the line.
    My memory of both comis is hazy, but I’m just saying that even at a young age, I was aware of a line and how it could get crossed.
    But I don’t see how the joke of an Asian selling horseshoes in the morning and guns in the afternoons is somehow a comment on “those cunning Asians”.

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