In the Wake of Charlie Hebdo, Free Speech Does Not Mean Freedom From Criticism

Posted on January 7, 2015 by CM

On Wednesday morning, the French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo was attacked by three masked gunmen, armed with kalashnikovs, who stormed the building and killed ten of its staff and two police officers. The gunmen are currently understood to be Muslim extremists. This attack came minutes after the paper tweeted this drawing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi.

(“Best wishes, by the way.” Baghdadi: “And especially good health!”)

An armed attack on a newspaper is shocking, but it is not even the first time Hebdo has been the subject of terrorist attacks. Gawker has a good summary of past controversies and attacks involving Hebdo. Most famously, the magazine’s offices were firebombed in 2011, after they printed an issue depicting the Prophet Muhammad on the cover.

In the face of such an obvious attack on free speech, voicing anything except grief-stricken support is seen by many as disrespectful. Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter, one of the first American comics sources to thoroughly cover the attack, quickly tweeted this:

When faced with a terrorist attack against a satirical newspaper, the appropriate response seems obvious. Don’t let the victims be silenced. Spread their work as far as it can possibly go. Laugh in the face of those savage murderers who don’t understand satire.

In this case, it is the wrong response.

Here’s what’s difficult to parse in the face of tragedy: yes, Charlie Hebdo is a French satirical newspaper. Its staff is white. (Update:Charlie Hebdo’s staff it not all white. See note below.) Its cartoons often represent a certain, virulently racist brand of French xenophobia. While they generously claim to ‘attack everyone equally,’ the cartoons they publish are intentionally anti-Islam, and frequently sexist and homophobic.

Here, for context, are some of the cartoons they recently published.

(Yes, that last one depicts Boko Haram sex slaves as welfare queens.)

These are, by even the most generous assessment, incredibly racist cartoons. Hebdo’s goal is to provoke, and these cartoons make it very clear who the white editorial staff was interested in provoking: France’s incredibly marginalized, often attacked, Muslim immigrant community.

Even in a fresh-off-the-press, glowing BBC profile of Charb, Hebdo’s murdered editor, he comes across as a racist asshole.

Charb had strongly defended Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons featuring the Prophet Muhammad.

“Muhammad isn’t sacred to me,” he told the Associated Press in 2012, after the magazine’s offices had been fire-bombed.

“I don’t blame Muslims for not laughing at our drawings. I live under French law. I don’t live under Koranic law.”

Now, I understand that calling someone a ‘racist asshole’ after their murder is a callous thing to do, and I don’t do it lightly. This isn’t ambiguous, though: the editorial staff of Hebdo consistently aimed to provoke Muslims. They ascribe to the same edgy-white-guy mentality that many American cartoonists do: nothing is sacred, sacred targets are funnier, lighten up, criticism is censorship. And just like American cartoonists, they and their supporters are wrong. White men punching down is not a recipe for good satire, and needs to be called out. People getting upset does not prove that the satire was good. And, this is the hardest part, the murder of the satirists in question does not prove that their satire was good. Their satire was bad, and remains bad. Their satire was racist, and remains racist.

The response to the attacks by hack cartoonists the world over has been swift. While many are able to keep pretty benign:

Several of the cartoons sweeping Twitter stooped to drawing hook-nosed Muslim caricatures, reminiscent of Hebdo’s house style.

Perhaps most offensively, this Shaw cartoon (incorrectly attributed to Robert Mankoff) from a few years back swept Twitter, paired with the hashtag #CharlieHebdo:

Political correctness did not kill twelve people at the Charlie Hebdo offices. To talk about the attack as an attack by “political correctness” is the most disgusting, self-serving martyr bullshit I can imagine. To invoke this (bad) Shaw cartoon in relation to the Hebdo murders is to assert that cartoons should never be criticized. To invoke this garbage cartoon is to assert that white, male cartoonists should never have to hear any complaints when they gleefully attack marginalized groups.

Changing your twitter avatar to a drawing of the Prophet Muhammad is a racist thing to do, even in the face of a terrorist attack. The attitude that Muslims need to be ‘punished’ is xenophobic and distressing. The statement, “JE SUIS CHARLIE” works to erase and ignore the magazine’s history of xenophobia, racism, and homophobia. For us to truly honor the victims of a terrorist attack on free speech, we must not spread hateful racism blithely, and we should not take pride in extreme attacks on oppressed and marginalized peoples.

A call “TO ARMS”

is gross and inappropriate. To simplify the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices as “Good, Valiant Westerners vs. Evil, Savage Muslims” is not only racist, it’s dangerously overstated. Cartoonists (especially political cartoonists) generally reinforce the status quo, and they tend to be white men. Calling fellow cartoonists TO ARMS is calling other white men to arms against already marginalized people. The inevitable backlash against Muslims has begun in earnest.

This is the worst.

The fact that twelve people are dead over cartoons is hateful, and I can only pray that their attackers are brought to justice. Free speech is an important part of our society, but, it should always go without saying, free speech does not mean freedom from criticism. Criticism IS speech – to honor “free speech martyrs” by shouting down any criticism of their work is both ironic and depressing.

In summary:

Nobody should have been killed over those cartoons.

Fuck those cartoons.
________

Update by Noah: Jacob initially stated that Charlie Hebdo’s “staff is white”. In fact, CH did have non-white staffers, including copy editor Mustapha Orrad, who was murdered by the terrorists, and journalist Zineb El Rhazoui. Jacob said that his point was that Charlie Hebdo’s chief editor was white, and that “The controversial cartoonists being mourned as free-speech martyrs are all white men.”
For all HU posts on Satire and Charlie Hebdo click here.

Leave Those Kids Alone: The Graphic Textbook, Reviewed. (UPDATED 3/14)

Posted on October 11, 2013 by CM

The index to the Indie Comics vs. Context roundtable is here.
____________
I was one of nine hundred and seventy-one backers of Reading With Pictures’ The Graphic Textbook Kickstarter campaign. I pledged $10, and the other backers collectively pledged $77,410. I think it’s safe to say that the other backers were, like I was, impressed with the advertised concept of “A comic that every teacher will actually want to use… and a textbook that every student will actually want to read!” It made me think of Larry Gonick’s comics, which I read devotedly as a kid and were a really useful supplement to my lessons about physics, math, and especially world history. If The Graphic Textbook brought that kind of academic rigor and energy to a new generation of elementary schoolers, it would certainly be worth my $10 donation.

The Graphic Textbook and its accompanying teachers’ guide are a project put together by the organization Reading With Pictures, founded by comic book writer Josh Elder in 2009. Its mission statement is to “revolutionize the role of comics in education,” and The Graphic Textbook is their latest major step towards achieving that goal. The Textbook boasts a diverse group of writers and artists, each assigned a general area of education (Language Arts, Social Studies, Math, and Science). Every section has three to four comics in it, each nominally meant to teach a standard lesson in an entertaining way. The teacher’s guide suggests that The Graphic Textbook is meant to supplement larger lesson plans, where a teacher might go over the basics on any given topic and then ask the class to read the associated story. The concept of a comic being used as a supplementary educational material is an intriguing one, and I was eager to see how Reading With Pictures chose to execute it.

Close to a year and a half after their Kickstarter surpassed its goal, Reading With Pictures finally sent backers near-complete previews of the textbook and teacher’s guide. I’ve had time to take a look at them over the past few days, and, frankly, I’ve been very frustrated with what I’ve read. Brief flashes of inventiveness are completely buried under ugly art, terrible pacing, confusing attempts at humor, walls of text, and unclear (sometimes actively incorrect) information. The question I found myself wondering most frequently as I was reading through the book was “why does this need to be a comic?” It’s a question the book struggles with, is deeply insecure about, and never manages to overcome.

I’ll start with the textbook itself. The first subject the book covers is language arts, and the first comic in that section is “The Power of Print,” by Katie Cook. The comic takes the form of a short essay on the history of print and the written word, arranged in a six panel grid with an illustration under each small block of text. The text itself makes many enormous generalizations, most likely because there is only space for a few words in each panel. More frustratingly, though, the illustrations do nothing to accurately convey the appearance of the artifacts being discussed. Cave drawings, hieroglyphs, and the Gutenberg Bible are depicted in a blurry, washy style that does not adequately communicate the subject matter. Ironically, the comic begins with the words,

A long time ago, there was no form of writing. Stories, information and more were all passed from generation to generation by word of mouth… this was terribly inefficient. Have you ever played the game “Telephone”? Things get lost and change as each person passes on the information.

Just as information is lost and changed when people retell stories without writing them down, information is lost and changed when crude drawings are created to substitute for actual pictures of the artifacts being discussed. As someone who not too long ago was reading textbooks, I know that this:

Is no substitute for this:

I’m assuming the artists/writers of these chapters had very little editorial oversight, because the narrative bounces around unforgivably for something that’s supposed to be a straightforward teaching tool*. From the chapter on print:

Where did that panel about checking sources come from? In a traditional textbook that information, if it were deemed important for the lesson, could be put in a ‘did you know’ type textbox on the side, not disrupting the main narrative. In this case, though, the (already shaky) narrative of the history of print is disrupted by a warning about checking sources, and then slingshots to “print is dead” because there isn’t any space for any real facts or examples. There is no good reason for this to be presented as a comic instead of a short prose section with illustrations.

The chapters immediately following the one on the history of print made me much more optimistic about the rest of the book. Tervor Mueller and Gabriel Bautista’s story about an alien learning about metaphors is cute and fairly informative, although quite generic. Mike and Janet Lee’s “Special Delivery to Shangri-La,” lettered by Jim McClain, is a very standard kids’ comics story about Jules Verne and his adventures in an orientalist fantasyland version of Tibet (two stories in the Textbook feature bizarrely orientalist appropriations of stereotypical “Asian” culture without much reason or explanation.) The goal of the “Special Delivery” story is to teach kids vocabulary using visual cues, and I guess it does that alright (“Unhand that parcel, you pilfering primate!”) but the ‘Tibet is inhabited by monkeys and sasquatches’ premise was distracting. It probably wouldn’t have bothered me as much if I hadn’t been reading it as part of a textbook, but in the context of a textbook, where several comics are nominally portraying concrete facts, the weird orientalism seems especially irresponsible.

Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey’s “George Washington: Action President!” is one of the best-executed comics in the book. Van Lente and Dunlavey take the Gonick approach, splitting a complicated biography of George Washington into manageable little chunks, illustrating each one with a gag. My only complaint about the story would be the very light touch it demonstrates when brushing on the topic of slavery, choosing to portray Washington and his valet, William Lee, as equals and friends rather than as owner and (relatively) privileged slave. The story also makes several references that are too clever for their own good – for instance, this is the final panel of the story:

It’s a clear homage to the classic “Spider-Man No More” panel from Amazing Spider-Man #50, but is it appropriate in this context? None of the students reading this book will understand the reference, making it potentially confusing, and it seems tonedeaf to compare a slave being freed from a lifetime of bondage to Spider-Man temporarily throwing away his costume. It’s a problem that crops up many times in the Textbook: coy, self-congratulatory references to the history of comics, especially superhero comics, that add nothing to the lesson and will be ignored at best and confusing at worst.

Chris Schweizer’s “The Black Brigade” is by far the best comic in the Textbook. Both it and “George Washington: Action President” fall in the social studies chapter, which makes a lot of sense – it’s much easier to tell a compelling comic-book story about real events that happened to real people than it is to try and spin abstract concepts into a comic. “The Black Brigade” is the only comic in the textbook that could stand on its own, and it reminds me a lot of the dense historical comics in Spirou collections I enjoyed as a child. It plays to the medium’s strengths by not trying to depict too broad a swath of history, instead focusing on a brief skirmish during the revolutionary war. The art is lovely, and the story is not burdened with too many superfluous characters like many other comics in the Textbook seem to be. It made me wish that Schweizer had been assigned more chapters, since his is without question the best in the book.

Unfortunately, the remainder of the stories in the Textbook are all actively bad (with one exception, which manages to only be mediocre.) The final comic in the social studies chapter, “Field Trip” by Russel Lissau and Marvin Mann, falls into the same trap as “The Power of Print.” The very under-developed plot (anthropomorphic animals look at armor and ancient weapons in a museum and imagine their uses) constantly makes reference to the interesting and intricate nature of the artifacts being discussed without ever showing a real picture or careful drawing of one. Given that the main character of the story, snobbish Caleb, considers all forms of art except weaponry “boring,” I think he would find this comic the most boring art of all, since it eschews actual pictures of the artifacts in question. This story falls especially flat for following directly after “The Black Brigade,” which manages to show an exciting battle scene without having anyone stand around wistfully talking about it first.

Although it might not seem like it, up to this point my dislike of the Textbook was only moderate. I believe that, despite the crushing mediocrity and odd choices made by some of the stories in the previous sections, elementary schoolers still have the potential to learn and retain some facts from these chapters (especially if led by a creative and adaptable teacher). It is with the math section that the Textbook stops being mediocre and begins being actively bad.

The first story in the math section is “Lumina: Celebrity Super-Heroine: Menace of the Mathemagician!” written by Josh Elder and drawn by Jen Brazas. It’s a shitshow. Keeping in mind that the teacher’s guide describes this as a story aimed at grades 3-6, I can not understand how Elder, the founder of Reading With Pictures, thought that a nonstop string of Twitter jokes, selfie jokes, and tired pop culture jokes (Gangnam Style? Really?) would be comprehensible, much less appropriate to the lesson. The art is very muddy, and the text almost unreadable. The story surrounding the lesson is laughably complicated; as an adult with a pretty good understanding of 3rd to 6th grade math, I could not easily parse out the math lessons contained in the piece (to be fair, there are several placeholder pages, so maybe a fantastic, clear math lesson is going to go in that empty space. Unlikely). Most of the math in the story is not real, but rather an idiotic series of plot devices (“For my first feat of prestidigitation, I multiplied Alpha Male’s 1 percent body fat by a factor of 70, thereby proving that bigger isn’t always better”).

(This is somehow an entire page of a comic that’s supposed to be teaching fractions.)

“Lumina” is followed by another miserably poor attempt at an educational comic, “Finding Ivy” by Michael Bramley. Bramley’s story is bizarrely high-concept, to a point that seriously undermines its simple lesson. The goal of the story, as far as I can tell, is to teach students how to read an analog clock, solve simple, time-related math problems, and recognize roman numerals. Maybe Bramley thought this would be too easy for 3rd through 6th graders, because the story he ended up writing is nearly incomprehensible. In “Finding Ivy,” time is represented as twelve different “zones,” each of them numbered. Each zone is arbitrarily inhabited by some magical character (and I do mean arbitrarily – zone one is inhabited by Humpty Dumpty, whereas zone ten is always Halloween because October is the tenth month). Three trains race from zone to zone, each representing a different hand on a clock. The zones are a big metaphor for a clock! Oops, I should have said ‘spoiler alert,’ because I just gave away the big reveal.

What I just summarized is only the framework for the story. The actual story itself is about a lost little girl named “Thyme,” who is assisted by a young man named Jung. Jung helps her escape from the station guard, who is a monster of some kind. They ride the trains around until Thyme is reunited with her family, and Jung gives her a pocket watch, which doubles as a map in Bramley’s needlessly complicated Neil Gaiman-nightmare of a universe.

Continuing the math section’s streak of embarrassing failure is Geoffrey Golden and Nathan Pride’s “Probamon,” a Pokémon parody that would have been horrible in 1998, and is no better now. “Math Addem” (GET IT?) is a Probamon trainer who doesn’t understand probability, causing him to lose all his Probamon to Team Random (referred to as Team Rocket in one panel, oops). Of the four stories in the math section, this one comes closest to actually teaching math, but buries its only useful diagram repeatedly underneath dated pop culture references and Pikachu jokes. It reads like the worst ripoff Mad Magazine parody of Pokemon possible, and emphasizes everything it possibly can over the math parts, which it seems to consider boring.

The final math comic, Jim McClain’s “Solution Squad,” is bad to the point of making me not even wanting to write about it. The story itself is constituted of unreadable walls of boring text, and does not contain any useful math concepts. Oh, and the only black member of the eponymous Solution Squad is named “Equality.” The story is so devoid of anything actually relating to math that the teacher’s guide suggests having the students calculate the number of handshakes that would take place if every member of solution squad shook every other member’s hand, an exercise that would work just as well if the students were shown a picture of any six people in the world**. It’s a completely worthless addition to the book, and, if the teacher’s guide is followed as written, a waste of a math period.

The final section in the book covers physics, and while it isn’t quite as bad as the math section, it’s not for lack of trying. It opens with Roger Langridge’s “The Adventures of Doctor Sputnik: Man of Science!” a story nominally meant to teach the basics of Newtonian physics. The problem is, Langridge does a terrible job of illustrating the principles he’s trying to teach, to the point that some panels would give a student learning these principles the completely wrong idea. For instance, in demonstrating the law of inertia, Langridge uses this panel:

The problem is, the law of inertia states that an object at rest will stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. By drawing the professor yanking on Spud’s arm, Langridge is representing a strong outside force being placed on Spud, who is resisting it, thereby completely misrepresenting the law.

Langridge then makes the baffling decision to jump straight from Newton’s first law to trying to explain how friction works, something well beyond the scope of this lesson. What’s worse, not only does he bite off more than he can chew, he makes another fundamental error in his illustration of air resistance:

Langridge’s illustration suggests that it is easier to move Spud because the force moving him is flying through the air, which is again painfully wrong. Spud’s mass and friction against the ground haven’t changed, meaning that the forces acting on him have nothing to do with friction, and everything to do with the mass and velocity of the object exerting force. To a first time reader, though, this sequence clearly shows that it’s easier to move things if the acting force is moving through the air. (All of this, by the way, comes before Langridge even gets to Newton’s second law of motion.) It’s a mess, and could actively harm students’ understandings of basic science, which is inexcusable.

The second to last comic in the Textbook is the exceptionally bland “Like Galileo,” by James Peaty and Tintin Pantoja. It’s a very straightforward biography of Galileo, illustrated without humor or nuance. There’s really no reason for it to be a comic, since the drawings are all very static images that could be swapped out for more useful images such as a photograph, a detailed drawing of a telescope, or a portrait of Galileo. This is about as bland and traditional as educational comics get.

The final comic in the book is also one of its worst. Written once again by Josh Elder and illustrated by Tim Smith III, “Genghis Kong and the Silverback Horde” is a long, violent mess of a story containing only one scientific concept and a host of orientalist tropes. The story doesn’t have much body to it, just a giant gorilla dressed in his D.W. Griffith best and a lot of idiotic ninja fighting. The one scientific principle in the story is the square-cube law (which determines how large an object/creature can plausibly get), which I cannot remember ever appearing on any elementary science curriculum (and if it did, certainly not on its own). The teacher’s guide recommends spending 2-3 class periods on this garbage comic, a sample of which is below:

Given the quality of Josh Elder’s contributions to his own project, I begin to see why the rest of the book is riddled with so many terrible decisions. There appears to be no unifying editorial oversight, and the focus seems to be on drawing comics first, and then retconning them into being somehow educational second. Unfortunately, that’s not at all how textbook-writing works.

There is one more document to look at before I pass a final judgment, and that’s the teacher’s guide, specifically, the comics included with it. Upon opening the Teacher’s Guide, the first thing a reader sees are a couple pages about how to read comics. That’s useful information (although I would think it better suited in the textbook itself, for the students). What follows, though, blasts past the line between “useful” and “self-congratulatory” and gets well into “masturbatory” territory: an eight page comic about the maligned wonders of comics. Created by Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey, “Comics and the Classroom: A Match Made in History” is a crudely drawn mess. It presents a history of the American comic book, starting with Gaines and E.C., and moves clumsily through stories of various other heroic white men, contrasted against uninteresting, prudish, “others.” It’s just so totally unnecessary as a forward for this teacher’s guide, and it reads like a crash course on a very specific type of comics culture, one that a teacher should not have to be a part of to use The Graphic Textbook. Most jarringly, Van Lente and Dunlavey include this panel:

Again, this is an instance where a scan of a Milton Caniff original would have been fine. It frankly disgusts me that they took the time to re-draw this kind of racist trash, and that they seem to think it’s all a big joke. There’s no condemnation of this image other than as ‘propaganda,’ I mean, they could have saved 8 pages of terribly drawn comics history and just said, “COMICS ARE WRITTEN BY AND FOR WHITE MEN.”

The other comics in the teacher’s guide are both boring and unimportant (one is a two page comic that reads, in its entirety, “Everyone has heroes. Some real, some fantastical. But did you ever wonder… who they consider heroes?” HINT: THE ANSWER IS A TEACHER LIKE YOU! THANX FOR BUYING THIS BOOK!) The final comic drops all pretensions and apes Larry Gonick outright, presenting the reader with a nerdy professor/narrator who takes the reader through time, showing examples of comics through the ages. It’s unfunny and awful, and it made me wish for the hundredth time that I was just reading real Larry Gonick comics instead of poorly planned, unedited junk.

In keeping with the educational theme, I would give The Graphic Textbook a D-. As a teaching tool it’s largely a gimmick, far too few of the comics inside even topping mediocrity. Notable exceptions like “The Black Brigade” are drowned out by the sheer terribleness of entire other sections. For this project to have worked, it would have required an editor ensuring a consistent level of clarity and accuracy, this seems to have had neither. It pales in comparison to Larry Gonick’s similar books, and frequently does not justify its own existence. If this is comics’ ambassador to the elementary classroom, it might be better if comics keep out.

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* “Comics are effective teaching tools because they require readers to not only passively receive information, but to interact with the text and images to construct meaning, and that is the key to the magic,” boasts the teacher’s guide.

**The exercise would actually be improved, because no students would have had to read “Solution Squad.”

—————————————

Update 3/14:

Since writing this review, Kickstarter backers received complete PDF files of the finished textbook and teacher’s guide. Some things have changed dramatically, and I wanted to address them.

An introductory section has been added to the textbook, containing a one page comic by Gene Luen Yang (summary: Comics! They’re great! I’M great!) and a prose introduction by Josh Elder. Elder’s introduction contains the same kind of bombast as the Reading with Pictures site (this is only a small sample):

…The Graphic Textbook uses the comics format to make traditional educational content more engaging (especially to struggling readers), more efficient (for more advanced readers) and more effective (for all readers).

(This infuriates me about as much as you would expect given the actual quality of the textbook.)

Except for their order, the majority of the stories in the textbook are completely unchanged from the pre-publication copy I reviewed. I was disappointed to see that nobody had changed the obvious typo I pointed out in the “Probamon” story (doesn’t anyone read my scathing reviews? Anyone???) but I guess it’s stupid of me to expect any level of editing in this book.

(oops)

Two stories have changed majorly since my initial review. Those are “Solution Squad: “Primer,”” written by Jim McClain and illustrated by Rose McClain, and “Lumina: Celebrity Superheroine in “Menace of the Mathemagician,”” written by Josh Elder and illustrated by Jen Brazas. I’ll write a little about each, since I would feel unfair if I left this review as-is, given that the stories differ significantly from their pre-publication equivalents.

Jim and Rose McClain’s Solution Squad has undergone the most dramatic transformation between the pre-publication and final copies of the textbook. Instead of the highly truncated story in the pre-publication copy, McClain republished the entire first issue of his independently published Solution Squad (minus some supplementary character background information). The infamous “handshake problem” is no longer the focus of the lesson – it’s been replaced with a fairly thorough explanation of how to find prime numbers using the sieve method. So do I like it better?

Unfortunately, the answer is still a solid no. The Solution Squad story is now twenty-four pages long. Twenty-four pages! The first twelve pages are completely (and I mean completely) unnecessary. They contain zero math concepts, instead focusing on the day-to-day minutiae and incredibly complex backgrounds of the members of Solution Squad. Six full pages are devoted to the workings of a prime number sieve (a standard textbook could explain this simple tool using one or two small illustrations and a short text explanation), and the remaining six pages are, again, unnecessary exposition.

Now, I know I’m purposefully missing the point here – Josh Elder might say, “yes, the comics are decompressed, but it helps kids understand these concepts better when sympathetic characters are acting them out and taking the time to explain them!” I can respect that, but I’m sorry to say that it’s not what I’m seeing in this case. If the comic was limited to the six pages that explained the sieve, I might be more sympathetic, although the art is fairly confusing. At its core though, this is a fine lesson: here’s how to find prime numbers, and now let’s use that to decode a message. Very good. What I can’t tolerate is that seventy-five percent of a twenty-four page math lesson is completely devoid of math. The story reads like Jim McClain wanted to write a cool superhero story and the math was an afterthought. None of the complicated character dynamics, arcane backstories, elaborate seatbelts or pneumatic tubes Solution Squad moves through are important when it comes to the only relevant part of the story: those six pages that explain, step by step, how to make a prime number sieve. If anything, those six pages frustrate me more than anything else in Solution Squad, because they indicate a potential for actual educational value that much of the textbook lacks. If a good editor had made McClain focus more on the teaching parts (he’s a math teacher with twenty-seven years of experience! He knows his stuff!) and less on the “wow, I get to write a really complicated superhero comic!” parts, it could have actually been good (or at least, you know, educational), instead of the confusing space-filler it is now.

Josh Elder’s Lumina story has also been lengthened by several pages in the final version of the textbook. Unfortunately, that added length does not bring any added quality; the new pages are entirely consistent with the pages I’d seen previously. Josh Elder, despite his boisterous claims about the quality of his educational comics, does not seem interested in teaching anything. Math is treated in this comic like Star Wars is treated in The Big Bang Theory.

Pages and pages of Twitter jokes (outdated even now, since the site has gone through one if not several redesigns since this comic was drawn) crowd out the fleeting references to actual math. When I originally reviewed this section, I worried that I wasn’t being fair and that the placeholder pages indicated that something much more substantial was coming. I was being much too generous. This story teaches literally nothing about math. Math is referenced only tangentially (“Rabbits, you see, just love to multiply”), and treated as boring. Yes, there are panels like this:

but I refuse to acknowledge these as actually teaching math. Math isn’t taught in throwaway panels, and you can’t teach math through brief, winking references. Elder’s story fills ten full pages of this so-called “textbook.” One and a half pages are devoted to shitty Twitter jokes. The rest aren’t any better (“Flight achieved by subtracting 90% of his personal gravity– like a boss!”). This is pathetic. And I’m not even able to say, “at least it’s a fun comic!” The story is terrible, the art is uninteresting, and the math is missing. Hardly “more efficient” and “more effective.”

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that an entirely new page was added to the math section since my initial review. Written by Jason Allen and drawn by Heidi Arnhold,“Squirrels vs. Birds “Prime-Composite Showdown!”” is a one-page word problem that simultaneously undermines the concept of the book and yet manages not to rise above Lumina’s standard of quality. Here’s the page in question:

Seeing this page immediately after Lumina is jarring. Given that it’s only a page long and it has more math in it than Lumina did (not that it explains anything – what are prime and composite numbers?), it’s hard not to read it as an argument in favor of traditional textbooks. This is, essentially, a basic word problem with a pulpy illustration. It’s clearly a better use of space – you don’t need ten pages of bad Twitter and Gangam Style jokes to teach a basic math concept. Unfortunately, the problem doesn’t make any sense. In keeping with Graphic Textbook tradition, no editor seems to have looked at this page. In fact, this page would work significantly better without any illustration, because the words and images work together to make this question incredibly confusing. The robots have prime and composite numbers painted onto them, and the word problem draws no connection between the number (or strength) of either side and their respective number sets. So, when the question asks, “Who do you think will win? Why?” there’s no good answer. Will the robot with bigger numbers painted on it win? Will the robot whose set gets larger more quickly win? It’s totally unclear. What is clear is that Allen and Arnhold wanted to draw some robots. Contextually I take it the squirrels are supposed to win, since the birds’ robot is described as a “monstrosity.” This page isn’t referenced in the teacher’s guide, though, so the “correct” answer remains a mystery.

Despite the differences between the pre-publication and final versions of the Graphic Textbook, my review score remains an emphatic D-. Reading through it again to write this update has rekindled my frustration with the book, especially since Reading With Pictures recently announced that the textbook will be distributed by Andrews McMeel Publishing. The thought of kids having to read this book depresses me. Hell, the thought of the earnest, well-meaning people who made this book depresses me. Despite all the good intentions in the world, The Graphic Textbook is a waste of money and time. With only a couple exceptions, none of the comics in this book are worth reading for any reason, much less educational ones. This textbook is amateurish and bloated, and accomplishes exactly zero of its stated goals. It’s bitterly ironic that a book so invested in the idea of comics getting respect deserves so little. Without question, there are opportunities for comics to be used constructively in the classroom. But educational materials require an understanding of their audience that this cudgel of a book does not have. This book fundamentally underestimates kids – it underestimates their attention spans, their sense of humor, and their ability to learn. If any good comes of this book, it will come in the form of rebellion against projects like this. Kids demand higher standards than The Graphic Textbook can dream of.

Subversion, Satire, and Shut the Fuck Up: Deflection and Lazy Thinking in Comics Criticism

Posted on October 23, 2012 by CM

This is an essay about the criticism surrounding contemporary “subversive” and/or “satirical” comics, particularly those of Johnny Ryan and Benjamin Marra. Before I get into any of that stuff, though, I want to talk about a movie that I consider to be one of the greatest satires ever committed to film. That film, of course, is RoboCop (1987).

On its surface, RoboCop is pure machismo – a power-fantasy in which an everyman protagonist is transformed into the unstoppable, deadly RoboCop by the ominously named Omni Consumer Products. In short, he loses everything, becomes invincible, kills the bad guys, and regains his humanity. Pure pulp trash: enjoyable, violent, and light. What lies below the surface, however, is a remarkably tragic story of an individual’s loss of humanity. The care with which director Paul Verhoeven depicts the sadness of RoboCop’s circumstances, and the insane, simplistic, cold war environment he lives in, is truly subversive. Couched in the brutal excesses of a violent genre movie, Verhoeven hides an unresolved and surprisingly harsh story about the loss of individual humanity.

One of my favorite elements of the film, and I know that I’m not alone in this, is a television show which the citizens of future Detroit watch devotedly. The show comes across as a Bizarro Benny Hill, in which an unattractive protagonist named Bixby Snyder revels in sight gags and sexual scenarios, gutturally shouting his ubiquitous punchline, “I’d buy that for a dollar!” Several times throughout the movie, characters are shown watching this program, and laughing as hard as they possibly could at its non-humor. It’s uncomfortable, and represents a different dimension of excess than does the obvious violence so present in the rest of the film.

Critics have suggested that RoboCop is a commentary on America’s declining industry, and Verhoeven himself has stated that he intended RoboCop specifically as a Christ metaphor. Critics have also called it a fascist movie, and some have suggested that it is highly dismissive of female characters. There is clearly complexity in the film, more than a brief plot synopsis could provide, and more than a macho recommendation could imply. It would not be difficult to recommend RoboCop with simplistic criticism – “A movie where a man’s limbs are shot off and he’s turned into a deadly revenge-robot can’t be bad!” or “Any movie where a man is hideously mutated by toxic waste as revenge for trying to kill a robot policeman can’t be boring!” Such criticisms fundamentally miss the point, though – they’re not wrong, per se, but they would be rightly criticized as shallow for not investigating the material more deeply.

This brings me to the problems I have with the criticism surrounding contemporary alt comics artists like Johnny Ryan and Benjamin Marra. It is my opinion that there is dishonesty present in the criticism and promotion of “controversial” alt-comix, a dishonesty which not only damages the credibility of comics criticism as a whole, but leads to a hyper-defensive maintenance of the status-quo. While I single out a few critics by name in this article, it is a trend I have noticed frequently in comics criticism circles I respect. Much of my focus in this article is on criticism I have noticed in The Comics Journal, which I don’t think I’m alone in considering one of the most highly respected institutions of comics criticism today.

Jesse Pearson begins the Johnny Ryan Interview for The Comics Journal with a phrase that epitomizes the kind of criticism surrounding “subversive” cartoonists:

Ryan, over the course of his career, has acquired a significant amount of skeeved-out detractors along with an army of hardcore fans. And that’s fine. Squares wouldn’t be squares if they weren’t freaked out by what Johnny does.

This immediately established dichotomy between “fans” and “squares” is reinforced throughout the interview. In the following paragraph, Pearson suggests,

[Johnny Ryan’s comics can serve] as an acid test to see if someone is one of us or one of them. Find out where any of his fellow artists stand on Johnny’s work, and you might be able to see that artist’s own insecurities reflecting back at him or her.

In these first sentences of what is supposed to be an in-depth look at one of the more controversial cartoonists working today, the reader has learned two things. First, if you don’t like Johnny Ryan’s comics, you’re a hypersensitive square. Second, maybe the things you don’t like about Johnny Ryan’s comics are actually things you don’t like about… YOURSELF. Before the interview has even begun, Pearson is covering all of his bases. “If you disagree with anything I write from this point on,” he seems to be saying, “you are a reactionary idiot who wants to mindlessly censor anything that challenges the norm. If you agree with me, though, you’re a pretty cool guy.”

After establishing this “one of us” and “one of them” dichotomy, Pearson proposes his theory about Johnny Ryan’s satirical nature. I think it’s better for me to present the whole block of text unedited, and then deconstruct it afterwards.

Pearson writes,

I also believe that Johnny is the only true satirist at work in comics today. There is other satire—fine satire—out there. But it’s safe. Johnny is the one artist who continues to push satire into increasingly dangerous places, and that makes him a true satirist because to satirize is to tell a truth, and to tell a truth is to take a risk. Conscience and satire seem to me to be linked. Do I want to take the space to go into that much more here? Probably not. But consider that conscience is the inner voice that tells us our subjective rights and wrongs, and then consider that satire is one way to put conscience into action. Then look at Johnny’s Comic Book Holocaust series of strips and zines, in which he lampoons everything from indie heroes to classic funny-papers staples. The satire in these stories is so utterly disgusting and base, the drawings so ham-fisted and ugly, that it’s almost a satire of satire. Johnny, you see, is smarter than he’d like people to think.

When I first read Pearson’s interview with Johnny Ryan I had not read much of Johnny Ryan’s work. As a result, Pearson’s assertion that the bulk, if not all, of Ryan’s work is “satire” seemed plausible to me – the things I’d read were the parts that weren’t obviously satire, then. As such, the assertions about risk-taking and truth-telling were reasonable to me. What slowly dawned on me as I read the rest of the interview, though, was that the assertion of “truth telling” was never backed up; the context of the satire was never particularly examined The only contextualization of Ryan’s satire that Pearson offers is that it’s not “safe” – again letting the reader know that if he/she doesn’t like Ryan’s work then he/she is a wimp.

The part of that paragraph that infuriates me the most has to be the smug phrase “…it’s almost a satire of satire.” This is presumably the point at which the people who “get it” all implicitly understand exactly what Pearson means, and the squares all shit themselves in fear and disgust. It is unthinkable to me that Pearson so casually suggested that Johnny Ryan’s art is a “satire of satire” and then absolutely failed to back up that statement in any way, because the implications of that statement are staggering. Johnny Ryan comic you like? Satire. Johnny Ryan comic you don’t like as much, due to its disgusting art and content? JOKE’S ON YOU, ASSHOLE! IT’S A SATIRE OF SATIRE!

Joking aside, here’s my problem with the idea of Ryan’s work being called a “satire of satire,” or even being called “satire.” I’ll start by assuming we’re all using the conventional definition of satire here (satire is when “vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement.”) That definition seems to hold up to Pearson’s ideas about conscience and truth telling being related. So given that definition, how is Ryan’s infamous “69-11” drawing satire?

What shortcoming is being mocked by this drawing? If the figures were of George Bush and Rudy Giuliani engaged in furious 69ing I would buy the satire (their cyclical, masturbatory exploitation of national tragedy for their own ends) but as the drawing stands, I cannot see satire in it, really. And before someone says, “he’s mocking our society’s sensitivity, man!” I have to ask, is he? I get that he drew this specifically to make people mad, but if the sole end of the drawing is to make people mad, that’s not really satire, is it? Nobody’s shortcomings are being held up here, really. This is just trolling and potty humor, as far as I can tell.

But maybe that was the wrong drawing to consider. Here’s a more straightforward Ryan “satire”:

Alright, I can buy that there’s satire here. The problem that I have with it, like with many other Ryan cartoons, is that I don’t think it’s particularly good or interesting. Remove the shit and blood from the detainee in the chair, and you have a standard Johnny Hart or New Yorker type cartoon. With the blood and shit, though, what’s added to this drawing? The viewer isn’t confronted with the horror of a torture chamber, particularly – Ryan clearly gets off on drawing the gore, and everything is abstracted past the point of losing its impact. Pearson talks about the anger behind the drawing, but honestly that doesn’t come through to me either. Ryan’s style is terminally cold, and his figures so generic and disposable that the reader is hardly motivated to care about them.

Given my feelings about this drawing’s failure as satire, it’s worth considering whether it is “satire of satire.” Is this a parody of Hart or the New Yorker cartoonist who would draw a clean, sanitized torture scene, and attach a stupid punchline without considering the humanity of real torture victims? It’s a valid question, and I am going to again say, no. What this drawing lacks, that a good “satire of satire” would have, is context. If Ryan was engaging in a Colbert-type mock identity, like The Onion’s cartoonist does, that would be context. If a character in one of Ryan’s comics misguidedly produced this cartoon, that would be context. What does context add to satire? Simply, context adds the target of derision necessary for satire. “Too Much Information” in the context of The Onion becomes a critique specifically of hack cartoonists. I could actually see The Onion publishing 69-11 (it’s not like they don’t publish intentionally controversial artwork), but they might publish it under an “alternative cartoonist” alter ego, which would provide context. Effective satires, like Black Doctor or Colbert or All in the Family or California Uber Alles or I’d Buy That for a Dollar! are effective due to their contexts.

Johnny Ryan’s saitre, if you can call it that, seems to be generally proving a single point: “Our values and beliefs about the world are constructions!” So, for example, offense about 9-11? It’s constructed, man! Political correctness? Where’d that come from? And why does everyone get so offended when I mock rape victims? Johnny Ryan says,

If I come up with an idea that makes me think, “This is going to fucking piss people off,” it excites me. I don’t know what it is, but irritating people is fun. [laughs] It’s fun to hit those targets that are sacred or that are so innocent. People are like, “Why are you picking on this person?” … There are certain people that I feel like they get it, and mostly it’s guys that get it. But there are exceptions. There are women that get it. I find it surprising that some people are so sensitive.

If that’s the satire everyone is so crazy about, I again have to say that it’s not good or effective satire. The point of satire is not pissing people off solely to piss them off, it’s to do it to prove a larger point, and there really doesn’t seem to be one beyond “our society is too sensitive!”

Without the context necessary for me to call Johnny Ryan’s cartoons “satire,” what are they? You’re left with lowbrow humor and throwaway plots, which aren’t necessarily a bad thing. It reads like The Beano, but with poop jokes! Why do people constantly insist on calling it “satire” anyway?

Oh, right. Because without “satire,” Johnny Ryan’s cartoons come across as disgustingly racist,

Misogynistic and violent against women,

And a whole lot in-between.

“Satire,” it turns out, has been adopted as the perfect defense against people who take issue with the content of Ryan’s comics. Of course, it could be a legitimate defense if it were backed up in any way. I have respect for well-composed arguments that make a legitimate effort to show the satire in something. Here’s what I don’t have respect for: “People need to chill out, it’s satire and it’s just too much fun to really take offense!”

I’m not asking for anything more than a better defense of the word “satire” when used to describe Ryan’s comics, and an openness to actual critical discussion about them. Right now, it seems mostly like people work backwards when reviewing his comics. “Here’s a Johnny Ryan cartoon I think is funny, but it’s racist. Johnny Ryan cartoons aren’t racist, so it must be satire!” “Here’s a Johnny Ryan cartoon that I don’t understand. It’s not really satire, but Johnny Ryan isn’t a bad cartoonist, so it must be a satire of satire!” Instead of always needing to be part of the ‘cool crowd’ who ‘gets it,’ it should be ok to ask critical questions. And when interviewing Johnny Ryan, maybe it would be better to be a bit critical then to have this infuriating exchange:

When is it ok to start making jokes about something atrocious like 9-11?
Well if it didn’t happen to me, then we can do it right away. [laughs]
I think I agree.

“I think I agree.” Wonderful. Way to “get it.”

Now, I’m not getting upset over this in a vacuum, and I don’t want to direct all of my frustration towards poor Jesse Pearson. Look at almost any review of Ryan’s books, and you’ll find someone calling his satire a triumph, and his comics hilarious. Hilarious is a matter of personal taste – just because I find Ryan’s comics excruciatingly boring doesn’t mean everyone should, and I can’t begrudge people for enjoying things I don’t. What I don’t care for is the aggressive assertion that I should find Ryan’s cartoons hilarious or fuck right off. And I especially don’t care for it when, rather than being told to fuck off by anonymous google reviews, I’m told to fuck off by The Comics Journal and other cartoonists who should know better.

“It’s hilarious, fuck you” isn’t a sentiment limited to Johnny Ryan’s comics. Matt Seneca’s interview with Benjamin Marra for The Comics Journal and the subsequent commentary that arose from it again fall into this trap of assertion. Throughout his review Seneca blends assertions of satire and hilarity with the other overwhelmingly common trend in alt-comix criticism, which centers around a type of hyper-congratulatory mock masculinity. From Seneca’s opening paragraph:

Once you meet the artist behind the gloriously pulpy action-crime pamphlets published by Traditional Comics, you wonder how you ever felt you understood his work before. Benjamin Marra’s gregarious, genuine, and permanently enthusiastic personality has become inextricable from his art for me. In an alternative-comics milieu which prizes creations that foreground their creators’ deepest neuroses, comics like Night Business, Gangsta Rap Posse, and Lincoln Washington are the antidote we never realized we needed: brash expressions of unfettered Americana and masculinity, an earlier breed of comic-book storytelling reincarnated to take advantage of the modern medium’s disdain for content restrictions. Ben’s comics are explosive orgies of blood and sex and fire, but the hand behind them is probably the surest in the game at the moment, the product of a rigorous art-school education that pulls inspiration from the chapels of pre-Renaissance painting and highbrow modern art as well as the trash bins of comics history.

Seneca’s first sentence comes across as wildly defensive to me. “You think Marra makes racist comics?” it asks, “well your opinions are invalid because I’ve met him, and wow, he’s such a good guy.” What happened to the death of the author? This problem exists in the Johnny Ryan interview as well (and any time any cartoonist is criticized harshly, it seems like) – “Come on, guys! Cartoonist X is so nice, why do you have to attack him/her?” I’ll put my feelings towards it this way: if a reader has to know your life story, your intent, and how nice a person you are in order not to dislike or “misinterpret” your story, you have failed as a storyteller.

Back to the opening paragraph! Seneca goes on to hit the usual target – the universally hated, whiny, autobio comic – and informs us that Marra’s comics are the antidote we never knew we needed, a callback to pre-comics code pulp and violence! OK! Great! And what do these comics look like?

Well, it looks to me like gratuitous, almost fetishistic violence against women, and some horrible racial stereotyping! Marra says,

Comics should embrace the idea of being exploitation. Low level, gutter-trash entertainment. That’s what I was trying to make with Night Business. If you’re trying to make a gritty comic, have fun making it as gritty as possible. As nasty and gory and sexy and filled with the most base human emotions as possible. Don’t try and make it reflect come (sic) kind of reality, like they do in these superhero books.

Alright, so Marra, by his own stated purpose, is just trying to make comics that will be fun and fucked up. No sign of satire, really, especially when he says, “Night Business was all about power, all about revenge. The main characters don’t have any kind of doubt … I want [to be the fantasy of what I could possibly be in my dreams, you know?” That’s fine, and attaches a kind of earnest sincerity I appreciate.

That said, it does open Marra up to some obvious criticisms. Why do you consider violence against women “fun?” Why do you think comics are a solely exploitative medium? Why do you defend your racially charged comics as ironic, but stand behind your hyper-macho white-people comics as sincere?

Instead we get this question:

SENECA: All right, so then you came out with the first issue of Gangsta Rap Posse. Did you conceive of that, and your Lincoln Washington comic too, as highly racialized comics from the beginning, or did you just want to do fun riffs on black culture and N.W.A.?

Alright, Seneca. That’s trying too fucking hard to be forgiving. What, may I ask, is the difference between a “highly racialized comic” and “fun riffs on black culture” when we’re talking about Benjamin “low level, gutter-trash entertainment” Marra?

Marra’s answer is almost as infuriating as the question itself. He attributes his wanting “to do an N.W.A. fun thing,” to a VH1 Behind the music documentary he and his friends watched, which is possibly the least personal reason to do anything. The really irritating part comes when Marra sets the tone for the rest of the interview by preemptively making excuses for why he’s allowed to be racially problematic.

I don’t think you can really do [comics about gangster rap] without it being really racial, because that (sic) what it’s about. And I knew if I was gonna do it — it’s the same lesson I learned as a developing artist, you just can’t censor yourself in any way, especially when it comes to that kind of material. I just knew I had to do it as honestly and as… it’s weird to say respectful of the material, but that content demands that kind of outrageousness. I felt like if I had done anything different it would have been weak and dishonest and insincere. … Also, if I have these story ideas, I can’t censor myself or else I won’t do them, because I won’t think that it serves the artwork in the end if I try to water it down based on this illusion of how I think people will react. That’s not a viable gauge to base decisions on, because it’s not real. It’s only real after. I can’t imagine what people are going to say, I just have to do it and see what happens. To me it’s about serving the work, and gangsta rap is gangsta rap. There’s nothing that’s in the comics, I think, that isn’t so outrageous that it’s not already in the lyrics.

The concept that Marra can believe a work of art is racist (or at least racially problematic) but that his “respectful” riffs are somehow absolved of all responsibility or criticism is gross. The idea that he can’t censor “in any way” is bullshit – as Nate Atkinson pointed out in his earlier HU piece, it’s intellectually lazy to claim no responsibility for one’s actions while simultaneously thinking critically about how to lay out a story. What, a reader might wonder, is his goal with these stories? Why does he make such intentionally inflammatory comics?

It goes back to how I think about comics and what I think they should to. I was on a panel recently with Johnny Ryan and we were talking about controversial comics, horrific things in comics. Someone asked what he thinks about comics these days, don’t you think they go too far… I can’t remember exactly, but his response was really great, he said he didn’t think comics go far enough. Because nobody pays attention to us anyway! The only way that anybody would pay attention to comics is if they actually had a story that people wanted to talk about. But they don’t! I mean, people in the comics community wanna talk about them, but it’s very rare that anyone else does. At least, that’s my perspective.

The lack of logic on display here is horrifying to me. Let me get this straight, Marra and Ryan don’t think comics get enough attention. They’re marginalized. So, their plan to get people to pay attention to comics is to make the most alienating niche comics possible? How does that make any sense? Even if their goal was accomplished, and Ryan or Marra’s comics achieved Piss Christ-level notoriety, don’t they think that would hurt alt-comix in the long run?

It’s not a question we’ll ever get an answer to, because Seneca doesn’t want to be a buzzkill. Instead we are treated to increasingly desperate rationalization from Marra, increasingly dubious claims that he’s really not responsible for anything he says or does. Marra says,

Gangsta Rap Posse is underground comics, it’s not on a lot of people’s radar, but the things is, I’ve never gotten anything but a positive reaction to it. I’m sure if it was distributed to a much wider audience it would get a really negative response, if people took it seriously — not as satire, not as a comment on myself as a white suburban artist making a comment on black urban culture from a specific time period. I think people might react negatively.

Ah! So there is our satire. Gangsta Rap Posse is a comment on Marra as a white, suburban artist making a comic on black urban culture from a specific time period. It’s satire of satire! It’s satire of satire of satire! As long as I’m not a racist, ok? When I make comics about white people, they’re earnest and cool power fantasies, and when I make comics about black people that read almost the same, but have the N-word a lot, those are satires. It’s OBVIOUS.

Sorry, do I sound bitter? Maybe it’s because after Marra said that, Seneca didn’t call him out. Seneca, in fact, asserted that Marra is “doing it from a positive place,” as if that means anything. Maybe it’s because Darryl Ayo wrote maybe the mildest condemnation of Marra I could imagine, and was dismissively mocked on The Comics Journal’s site in response. Maybe it’s because pretty much every criticism of Marra and Ryan has been met with the statement that people need to learn to take a joke.

What do I want? I want Benjamin Marra to own up to the fact that he has created comics that could be viewed as racially problematic. Just own it. And I want Johnny Ryan fans, and Benjamin Marra fans to own it, too. They don’t have to stop reading Johnny Ryan, they don’t have to stop reading Benjamin Marra, they don’t have to stop consuming media that I consider racist or misogynistic or homophobic. They just have to own it. “Yes, I like comics that I’m able to enjoy from a position of privilege.” “Yes, I think these comics centered around extreme violence against women and children are hilarious.” Don’t bullshit me with your claims of satire until you’re able to back them up, because satire isn’t a magic word that makes critical thinking disappear.

Ultimately, I think criticism along these lines hurts comics. It makes comics critics look like macho assholes, and it gives lazy artists an excuse to make “shocking” comics that are as intentionally hurtful as possible without any critical thinking. I bought both issues of Suspect Device, recently, after reading KC Green’s submission, and I was thoroughly disappointed. Those slim volumes contained simultaneously some of the most revolting and boring comics I’ve ever read. And it’s our fault, everyone’s fault, for continuously reinforcing the idea that political correctness must be not only avoided, but willfully destroyed, that the uglier and grosser and more shocking you can make something the more brilliant it is. Ultimately, we’re going to end up with a lot of really boring comics. Look, it’s ok to get excited that Al Jaffee likes Johnny Ryan’s comics, but think about it – Ryan’s comics are pretty much Al Jaffee comics with a little shit and semen sprinkled in. I’d rather see something new.

It’s important to reiterate that I don’t think Johnny Ryan, Benjamin Marra, or any other artists should stop making controversial or “edgy” comics. I believe they have every right to make comics, and don’t think their comics should be banned or censored. I also believe, however, that any reader of their comics is entitled to a response. In my introductory paragraphs I made a lot of assertions about RoboCop, and it would be entirely within another reader or critic’s rights to call me out on any of them. And hell, I’ve written sloppily and told stupid jokes in my time, and it is anyone’s right to call me on that. That’s how good criticism functions – when it’s part of a larger conversation, when readers don’t simply accept sweeping statements bluntly presented as capital F “Facts,” and authors are open to the possibility that they aren’t as clever as they think they are.

When Marra treats black culture as a playground he can detachedly plunder at will, or when Johnny Ryan jokes about ice cream being referred to by martians as “nigger shit,” it doesn’t take a critic to point out that it could be problematic. When Johnny ryan’s punchlines revolve around women being violently raped, and Marra devotes an entire page to lush and detailed drawings of a woman being slashed by an attacker with a knife, it doesn’t take a “hyper-sensitive” reader to want to delve deeper into the narrative and/or contextual motivations of the author. What happens, though, is that a reader or critic raises the question, “is it actually funny?” or “why is this satire?” and is shut down quickly and brutally by the greater comics community. This needs to stop. We’re better than this, and I thought we were smarter than this. If we’re going to be taken seriously, we need to take comics seriously and stop excusing lazy and hurtful thinking.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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Subversion, Satire, and Shut the Fuck Up: Deflection and Lazy Thinking in Comics Criticism