A Year in the Merde

Posted on January 17, 2015 by Josselin Moneyron

Well, it’s been a long week. The hagiography has come and gone, the backlash has come and gone, balanced views have been proposed and interest is fading. What remains are protests in the Middle East against the caricature of the Prophet in Wednesday’s issue, and islamophobic violence in France (with one minor but heart-warming exception). One complicated answer that seems to remain, though, is “can an openly anti-racist magazine be racist at times, through carelessness and insensitivity ?” I am probably not in a position to say, but here is a look at one year of Charlie Hebdo covers.

52 pictures, then. From January 8th to december 31st 2014, Charlie Hebdo covered the news, with their now-(in)famous brand of vulgarity and cynicism. The hope is that, with a segment this size, we can investigate the techniques used to represent racial minorities, and especially the Muslim community. After all, they have been constantly under attack, haven’t they ?

Well, not really. Out of these 52 covers, none is directly about Islam or the French Muslim community. In fact only one is about religion, it dates back to December and makes a joke about the far right trying to push Nativity Scenes in public buildings for Christmas. Eight, however, reference djihadism, but more on that later.

So what ARE the covers about, if they’re not about religion? Well top of the list, with eleven covers, is the Le Pen family, head of the far right party Front National. Clearly, they have been Charlie Hebdo’s most consistent targets over the years. The magazine has never stopped shedding light on their hypocrisy, racism and what they see as the self-hurting stupidity of their electorate (many of whom are very poor people who would suffer from the FN’s anti-welfare program). Second is president François Hollande who is also pictured eleven times, though often not as the main subject of the image. Then comes Prime Minister Manuel Valls and other members of his government, who total 8 covers. Former president Nicolas Sarkozy closes the top with seven covers. The rest are about current events, from plane crashes and ebola to Gerard Depardieu’s tax evasion and school reform. So what are we left with to assess the racism of Charlie Hebdo ? Mainly three groups: political figures who are not white, racial minorities among background characters, and the treatment of djihadism.

Political figures

Left: Government reshuffle : they drop it all !
Right: Gender theory : should we cut Najat Belkacem’s balls ?

Only two non-white political figures appeared on the cover of Charlie Hebdo in 2014. Najat Belkacem and Christiane Taubira. Both are simple caricatures, without any racial stereotypes involved. But is the fact that only two non-white politicians are represented a sign of racism in itself? Since members of the government other than Prime Minister Valls only appear on three pictures, two is actually not that bad. And since their newsworthiness derives from being favorite targets of the right, their both being women and non-white says more about the French right than about Charlie Hebdo. Christiane Taubira, however, was the subject of a highly controversial cover back in 2013, so it’s probably worth looking into it.

Taubira, a radical leftist and former independentist from Guyana, is Hollande’s Justice Minister. As such, she was in charge, in 2013, of the bill that would open marriage rights to gay couples, which has made her the archenemy of the religious right. It doesn’t take long for the attacks to take on a racist “undertone”, culminating in a nauseating joke posted by a member of the Front National (FN) on her facebook page, showing two photos, one of a baby ape in a pink dress and one of Taubira, with the legend “At 18 months. Now.”

For years, Marine Le Pen, daughter of the infamous creator of the FN, has been working on her party’s image, superficially cutting ties with the most violent branches, and recentering her message on fighting the so-called islamification of France in the name of French secularism. At the heart of the rebranding is the use, on most of the communication, of the expression “Rassemblement Bleu Marine” (“Navy Blue Union” or “Navy Blue Gathering”), instead of the FN name.

When the scandal of the monkey joke broke, Charlie Hebdo immediately used it to point out that, despite all its rebranding efforts, the National Front was still at heart a violently racist movement, as they’d never stopped saying. Above the image of Taubira as an ape, they renamed the super-party “Racist Blue Gathering”. On the left, the red-white-blue flame of the FN served as a reminder that the ties with the movement’s past were far from cut.

Was the racist representation of the minister still a mistake, though ? Some time later, the far right magazine Minute created its own cover on Taubira. “Clever as a monkey, Taubira gets her banana back.” (“having the banana” or however one can translate it, is a French expression that means “to look happy”). When Minute was brought to justice for racial insult, and cited the Charlie Hebdo cover as a precedent, Charlie chief editor (and author of the cover) Charb responded : “[the difference is that] by repeatedly associating Ms. Taubira’s name with the words “banana” and “monkey”, the far right hopes to pass a racist slogan, a colonialist insult off as a popular joke.” It’s been pointed out that in a way, Charlie Hebdo’s image participates in the “repeated association”, and Charb’s explanation of the problem might be a sort of admittance of this. After all, as Charlie cartoonist Luz explained in this interview, in order to be able to push the envelope, the Charlie Hebdo staff has always allowed itself to make mistakes. There are laws in France against racial insult and pushing racial hatred. Unlike right-wing pundits who constantly turn their trials into publicity stunts and themselves into victims of political correctness, Charlie Hebdo has always accepted trials for racism as justice doing its work of sorting out whether they had gone too far this time or not. Which they were found to have, in a very few, but existing, cases.

Background characters

Left: French Suicide: they apply Zemmour’s book’s program
Middle:What do 25% of French voters want? A Joan of Ark who sends others to the fire
Right: Gestational surrogacy: it’s 2 parents. ‘And one slave…’”

Again, only three instances, but they do provide some controversial material. The most benign, by Cabu, shows Nicolas Sarkozy and Marine Le Pen drilling holes in a small boat full of refugees. The people on the boat represent various origins, with some cultural and racial shorthand, but the general tone is one of empathy for the refugees. In the second one, interestingly also by Cabu, the “foreigner” (as his sign says) is represented in a manner much more reminiscent of openly racist caricature. The contrast with the previous image illustrates how Cabu uses racist imagery specifically to illustrate the racist nature of Le Pen’s program. “What do 25% of voters want?”, the legend asks. “A Joan of Ark who sends others to the fire.” The final image, by chief editor Charb, is by far the most shocking. The text explains the image, but doesn’t make it any easier to watch : “Gestational surrogacy : It’s 2 parents, 1 slave”. The subject is clear : is people renting other people’s bodies an ethical hazard? Still, the shock value of the image is unrivaled in 2014, even by the “Boko Haram sex slaves” cover. The reason it is so shocking, however, even to the casual Charlie reader, is because there’s only one like it.

In one of his twitter essays, Jeet Heer defined the risk of using racist imagery as satire. “I think what is true of Crumb is also true of Charlie Hebdo: the anti-racist intent of shocking images blunted & reversed by repetition.” The thing is, contrary to the impression given by small selections of the most offensive cartoons, such shocking images as the “2 parents, 1 slave” are not repeated at all. There is just a handful of really offensive material in a given year, and it’s not the same subject each time. They may value their irresponsibility, but they also know how to manage shock value.

Djihad : the great big joke

Here we are, then. The section where attacking extremists means attacking Islam, which means attacking Muslims, which means bullying minorities. First, let’s get rid of the ones that only mention djihadism to make jokes about Prime Minister Valls. That’s two.

Left: Government reshuffle : Should we show these images?
Right:French hostages : ‘I want a €50bn ransom’

Dominique Strauss Kahn holding a #BringBackOurGirls sign with a lecherous look, or the return of Nicolas Sarkozy compared to the threat posed by ISIS are also only incidentally about djihadism.

Left: Boko Haram : DSK expresses solidarity”
Right:The threat to France! Islamic State / Sarkozyk State”

A strange one is the Titeuf cover. School reforms have inspired to Luz a weird joke where the iconic haircut of the famous (in France) children’s comics character is used as an Islamist’s beard. It may reference child soldiers in war zones, or religion at school, but it’s most probably a purely visual, message-free joke. The second one also blends a favourite newspaper headline with terrorist imagery for a rather benign result.

Left: School reform : ‘Tomorrow, I have Djihad!’ ‘You’re lucky, I have maths!’”
Right: Those French chefs who find fame abroad”

And finally, there are the two covers of 2014 that have been featured in selections of racist Charlie covers. The first one is fairly straight-forward, and is only offensive as it features Mohammad. The joke itself is about how the djihadists have deformed His message so much they wouldn’t even recognize him if he came back today. Which seems far from islamophobic.

Left:If Mohammad came back: ‘I’m the Prophet, you moron!’ ‘Shut up, infidel!’
Right:Boko Haram’s sex slaves are angry: ‘don’t you touch our welfare!’

The second one is the hardest to explain to a foreign audience, because it features two specificities of the Charlie Hebdo humour that here blend awkwardly. The first is the conflagration of two pieces of news : the crimes of Boko Haram in Nigeria, and the attacks on the welfare system in France. The second one is the use of racist imagery in pictures that denounce racism (as seen above with Cabu’s Joan of Ark cover). The French right (and the European right in general) often point the finger at immigrants to explain why the welfare system costs too much. It’s an easy rhetoric because everybody agrees that we spend too much on welfare, but nobody wants cuts to the help they themselves receive, so blaming the usual suspects is a popular choice. Therefore, as Terry Drinkwater summarized on Quora : “Fairly straightforward, innit? The absurdity of raped and pregnant Boko Haram sex slaves acting out the welfare queen stereotype parodies the absurdity of the welfare queen stereotype.” What obviously didn’t help the cartoon to be understood as anything but racist is Riss’s rough and dirty style, which owes more to Reiser than to Cabu and Wollinsky. Little can be said about that, as it seems very much a matter of cultural taste. It does increase the insensitivity of the joke, though, admittedly.

Racism and Charlie Hebdo’s attacks on political Islam
A name that has been missing from most discussions is Zineb El Rhazoui. She certainly isn’t the only immigrant who has worked at Charlie Hebdo, from star cartoonist Riad Sattouf to their Kabyle copy editor Mustapha Ourrad, who was killed during the attack. She is however the magazine’s most virulent voice against political Islam. Looking again at the covers, here is a list of articles penned by El Rhazoui : “Tunisia, on the way to an atheist exodus”, “Morocco : the Islamists make the laws”, “Tunisia : quiet, the police is raping”, “Porn in Morocco : democratic transition through sex”, “When Muslims laugh at Islam”, “Mohammad, soon to be caricatured in Muslim countries?”…

Again, these are just a handful of articles among many that cover America, North Korea, Antisemitism in France, Islamophobia in Germany, etc. This list shouldn’t give the impression that Islam is the magazine’s favourite subject. As Luz, author of the “Charia Hebdo” and “All is forgiven” covers, explained a while back, “As atheists, it’s obvious that living in a traditionally catholic country, we’re going to attack Catholics more than Muslims, and the clergy more than God.” Similarly, Jul said : “It’s much easier to create violent cartoons about Christians, probably because we live in a Christian country. You can’t make fun of a minority religion the way you make fun of the majority one.”

Left: Private school : ‘If you’re nice to me… I’ll take you to the anti-gay protest!’
Right: God out of school : ‘So sick of parent-teacher meetings!’

As a leftist magazine, however, promoting the secularist fights for civil rights in the Muslim world is very much part of Charlie Hebdo’s mission. First, because they feel a connection to the minorities who fight theocratic tendencies in their countries. Unlike in the US, where civil rights were fought for by religious figures such as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, in France they have always been fought for by secularists against the religious right. Just last year, the Catholic sphere organized an incredibly violent opposition to gay marriage, which inspired a flurry of Charlie Hebdo covers on Christianity and homosexuality (see the first image above). The second reason why secularists’ struggles in Muslim countries is an important subject is because it counters the “clash of civilization” narrative that the racist right is trying to impose in France. It is a way of showing that the real struggle does not oppose Christian and Muslim societies but rather civil liberties against theocratic instincts, in every society.

Zineb herself has explained as much in a long response to a Swiss newspaper which had accused Charlie Hebdo of racism back in 2011 (quoting articles she had written while not referencing her anywhere). What is racist, she proclaimed, is to consider that people in Muslim countries are somehow impervious to enlightenment. That holding Muslims to the same level of expectations as Western countries in terms of democracy is asking too much. Herself a civil rights activist who spent most of her life fighting the oligarchic and theocratic nature of the Moroccan monarchy, she certainly feels that the ostracized minority that fights for democratization in Arab and Middle-Eastern countries deserves more support than those who would try to have religion gain the same level of untouchability in France as it enjoys in more pious societies.

Zineb’s response is apparently only available in French, but Olivier Tonneau wrote a “Letter to my British Friends” that explains in length the French radical left’s position on Islam. Charb also wrote on the absurdity of giving religion too big a part in identifying members of French society: “I can’t stand people asking ‘moderate Muslims’ to express their disapproval of terrorism. There’s no such thing as ‘a moderate Muslim’, just citizens with a Muslim heritage, who fast during Ramadan like I celebrate Christmas. They do act: as citizens. They protest with us, vote against rightist idiots… It would be like asking me to respond ‘as a moderate catholic’ just because I was baptized. I’m not a moderate catholic. I’m not a catholic at all”. A statement in which a lot of religious people probably wouldn’t recognize themselves, but one that does explain a lot of Charlie Hebdo’s perceived insensitivity.

So… That’s it. Race – and religion – in Charlie Hebdo’s 2014 covers. It feels a little anti-climatic. Where are all the most offensive jokes? Naked Mohammad? The “Untouchables 2”? Well, they date back to 2013, 2012, and hide disseminated among hundreds of other pictures about DSK’s arrest in New York, Israel bombing Gaza and anti-semites reaping the benefits in France… More airplane crashes, more attacks on the Le Pens, a whole lot of penises and a whole lot of good and bad jokes. You can find them all here. And if you have a hard time finding the worst ones, well the truth is, they were also hard to find at the time. Because Charlie Hebdo, “a glorified zine” as Luz himself calls it, never had a large readership. And it’s perhaps the biggest misunderstanding about France and these cartoons : nobody ever gave a damn about them, unless they saw some political gain in having an opinion.

Lost in Translation

Posted on January 16, 2015 by Janell Hobson

We are halfway into the month of January, and already the year 2015 has unleashed unspeakable violence – whether we look to the horrific massacre of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, police officers, and Jewish hostages in Paris, France or to the unimaginable carnage that left 2,000 villagers dead in the northeastern region of Nigeria. Both attacks were fueled by radical Islamists, including the infamous Boko Haram, who kidnapped over 200 schoolgirls last year, an act that helped launch the widely popular #BringBackOurGirls hashtag on Twitter. Yet, international outrage has galvanized massive support for the Charlie Hebdo victims with a #JeSuisCharlie movement rising to protect freedom of speech and other beloved Western principles, while a lesser movement is struggling valiantly to promote #AfricanLivesMatter, politically connecting this sentiment to another popular hashtag: #BlackLivesMatter.

While some may wish to de-racialize these narratives with the so-called colorblind #AllLivesMatter, the unequal attention to these world events simply reinforce that not all lives matter, least of all those who are not afforded the white privilege of the French journalists who were unjustly murdered – no matter what one may have thought about their questionable cartoons that seemed to racialize its French minority population of Muslims and people of color. Nonetheless, the memorialization of Charlie Hebdo reinforces how much more white lives are valued. That some took to Twitter to create #JeSuisAhmed, in memory of the Muslim police officer also killed in the attacks, is a gesture reminding us that the value of marginalized peoples is never taken for granted. As Noah Berlatsky noted, “Who is remembered and who is memorialized has everything to do with race, with class, with where you lived and who, in life, you were.”

Of course, we can rationalize inequalities in media coverage – why the “world” seems to care about France over Nigeria, or why English speakers are questioning whether or not the Charlie Hebdo cartoons are “racist” or not, or even if we should criticize murdered victims who can no longer speak for themselves. Perhaps the violence in Africa seems more “routine,” in comparison to what takes place in Europe, hence more focus on Paris. And perhaps English speakers are “misinterpreting” Charlie Hebdo cartoons as “racist” and “Islamaphobic” since we are not translating the French correctly. Yet, such reasons given seem to suggest an unequal flow of information, as if “African violence” and “Muslim irrationality” are the only acceptable explanations for why violence happens (and why we should care more about France than about Nigeria).

However, it is to these points that I want to take note of a particular cartoon featured in Charlie Hebdo, one that has drawn the most criticism for the publication’s racial politics. Here I refer to the cartoon depicting Boko Haram’s kidnapped girls in Nigeria.

As French-speaking translators have informed us, the text reads: “Boko Haram’s sex slaves are angry,” while the visual depicts head-covered girls yelling “Don’t touch our welfare!” And as Max Fisher suggests, the cartoon functions on two layers: “What this cover actually says … is that the French political right is so monstrous when it comes to welfare for immigrants, that they want you [to] believe that even Nigerian migrants escaping Boko Haram sexual slavery are just here to steal welfare. Charlie Hebdo is actually lampooning the idea that Boko Haram sex slaves are welfare queens, not endorsing it.”

Such explanations may provide us with contexts and subtexts, but they are nonetheless steeped in apologia, conveniently overlooking the visually demeaning drawing of the girls or the racialized subtexts associated with African or Orientalist sexual savagery, coupled with a transnational narrative of black and immigrant women unfairly using the state’s resources (how interesting that conservatives here and abroad tend to speak the same racial language). Regardless of Charlie Hebdo’s own politics, the visual narrative recycles stereotypes and could easily be appropriated for white supremacist narratives.

Fisher juxtaposed this satire alongside another parody – the New Yorker’s satirical takedown of Republican fears of the Obamas’ “secret black nationalist Muslim” plans during the 2008 presidential campaign.

Fisher then argued that “most Americans immediately recognized that the New Yorker was in fact satirizing Republican portrayals of the Obamas, and that the cover was lampooning rather than endorsing that portrayal.” This really highlights the problem of unspoken white privilege and power, as Fisher conveniently forgets that the New Yorker too came under attack – especially from communities of color who saw in the satire a failed use of racial imagery to poke fun at racism.

Why is it that the black or brown body becomes the vehicle for racial humor when the objects of ridicule – the white people presumably targeted for their racial bigotry – remain invisible in these satirical narratives? When recycling racial stereotypes – which both The New Yorker and Charlie Hebdo have done – do linguistic texts and subtexts hold the same equal power as the visual text, which holds heavier historical weight? Not all members of society (specifically communities of color who continue to feel their marginality in various social institutions) read these visual narratives in the same way. After all, if even in the U.S. certain Americans didn’t find the New Yorker cover funny – though we speak the same language and have access to the same cultural and political frames of reference – then what gets “lost in translation” when exposed to other local texts, contexts, and subtexts? Whose voices remain silent?

I specifically think of this when considering the actual creation of the Charlie Hebdo Boko Haram cartoon. I have a difficult time imagining a black woman cartoonist of any nationality – French, British, American, Nigerian – creating such a cartoon in jest. I also have a hard time seeing such a woman hired by the staff at Charlie Hebdo, and even if she were and found the courage – as the sole “token” black woman at the paper – to speak up to her colleagues and say, “Hey guys, this cartoon isn’t funny, and here’s why,” would her white male colleagues let her speak? Would they hear what she had to say? Would they drown her out with their insistence on “free speech” and “the right to offend,” or would they sincerely listen to suggestions on how their takedown of French political right racism could be, you know, clever (as racial stereotypes never are) and how the offense could be more effective in a “punch up” or “punch across” rather than “punch down” kind of way?

And therein lies the problem: the unequal flow of perspectives and unequal participation. Whether we point to white conservativism or white liberalism, these narratives hold cultural weight, even those that insist – because they may be on the “right” side of antiracism politics – that they could never get their racial politics wrong, even when they don’t interrogate the ways that they may hold or perpetuate racial privilege and power. The views of others remain in the margins, including our pain and suffering.

Charlie Hebdo’s latest cover features the Prophet Muhammad holding a “Je Suis Charlie” sign with a single tear rolling down his cheek as the text reads “All if forgiven”; the satire is quite apt and heartfelt and, most importantly, captures a kernel of truth in the moment.

On the other hand, the Arab stereotyping of the prophet distorts truth and has reconstituted him as a French creation of the cartoonists’ own making, no longer connected to the religion or culture that prompted their satire in the first place. That is the nature of stereotypes, which have the effect of erasing altogether the very peoples and cultures they were intended to represent.

In closing I want to return to the scene of Nigeria, in particular Boko Haram’s alleged use of a ten-year-old girl to carry out a suicide-bombing attack. I can’t help but think this is the most cynical ploy and a deadly play on satire. What else is Boko Haram expressing but their utter contempt for and mockery of the West’s “Bring Back Our Girls” movement? They implicitly know that our rhetorics are empty and our raced and gendered messages constantly show our disregard for women and girls of color. They know that black girls’ bodies will only serve as mere objects of parodic visuals or Twitter hashtags without any real actions demonstrating that their lives matter. Somehow, these global understandings of whose lives matter don’t get lost in translation.
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For all HU posts on Satire and Charlie Hebdo click here.

Not Just Charlie Hebdo

Posted on January 12, 2015 by Marguerite Dabaie

Let’s talk about Ali Ferzat.

Ali Ferzat is a Syrian political cartoonist. A scathing one. He gets right to the point in his drawings and isn’t known to shy away from what he sees as dirty politics. This was no exception when Bashar al-Assad came into power in Syria. In August 2011, Ferzat was seized by a militia group loyal to Assad and beaten—his assailants made extra sure to break the bones in his hands. While Ferzat survived the attack, he is now living in exile in Kuwait.

Political comics reign supreme in the Middle East, a place where politics and religion are The (capital T) biggest games in town. Humor is a universal tool, after all, and humor always makes such heavy topics easier to digest. The same can be said of political comics in the United States, but, I’m sorry, in the Middle East? It’s an old-fashioned throwdown. Their humor is scathing and raw and it sometimes causes revolutions. The people in charge know this. The press—including the comics printed in the papers—is tightly regulated, and cartooning is a heavy form of activism. I want to talk about the Arabs in the Middle East whose tools of dissent are also pens and brushes, who are in the line of fire—not just from terrorist groups, but sometimes their own governments. And, guess what, they’ve also had some opinions about the Charlie Hebdo attack.

Translation: This is how we get revenge on the cartoonists’ killer. By Lebanon’s An Nahar.

The first comics I ever had access to were the comics of Naji al-Ali. Though political comics existed in the Middle East before he started creating work, this guy worked his mojo. I think it’s safe to say that he’s still the most famous Arab cartoonist to date. His iconic character, Handala, is still referenced in comics drawn today. He was a Palestinian refugee, and his work very much reflects this. He felt for the Palestinian everyman and was scathing toward the ineffectiveness of Arab countries, the ambivalence of the West, and the cruelty of Israel. No one was safe in his comics, and he made so many enemies that he was exiled from most Middle-Eastern country and settled in London, where he was murdered in 1987. They never caught the perp.

I remember seeing his comics for the first time and thinking how terrifying they were.

I won’t even address the blatant racists/religionophobes who claim Muslims/Arabs are the source of all evil, because I don’t talk with those people and they aren’t worth the kilobytes. I’m talking about microaggressions. I’m talking about absolute silence and the feeling of speaking to walls. Unless Whites end up being the ones in the crosshairs. (An officer was also killed at Charlie Hebdo, but—let’s be real—most of those outside of the Muslim/Arab community are not paying much attention to Ahmed.) (And then there were the four Jewish hostages killed—targets only because of their freedom. I unfortunately can’t say that I heard much noise made about them, either. Is there something about exercising one’s rights passively, instead of aggressively, that’s less newsworthy? Is it the same turning wheel that blocks out Ahmed? My gut tells me it’s both of these things.)

Suddenly the cartoonist’s ideal is under attack and our free speech is thwarted—except it always has been, in plain sight. Just read the top BBC News stories every morning. There’s no shortage of misery. We never talk about those lives since they aren’t “here,” even though to the American psyche (and I can only speak of the American psyche), France is a part of “here,” while half of the world is not. The problem is that we’re all connected, whether we like it or not. We inhabit the same universe. I just read about Boko Haram terrorizing Nigeria. These are people who are slaughtered—who are fleeing in droves—because they are moderates being overtaken by radicals. How do we care so much about some types of terror, but not others?

I’m going to talk about myself, because I want to explain that sick feeling I’ve had in the pit of my stomach for the past few days.

I call The Hookah Girl my “heartbreak book.” The comic is about Palestinians being human. No publisher would touch it, though one had the grace to tell me they feared being firebombed (they didn’t specify by whom—hipsters wanting their money back?). A Jewish man who told me I should be ashamed of myself for the comic brought me to tears on the Javits Center floor. I co-created a comic strip that was actually picked up by a certain syndication company. The comic was also about Arabs being human. The marketing team didn’t sell the strip to a single paper. Did they try? No idea. I just know that I learned a lot about the media from that experience. I wrote a scholarly paper about women in Middle-Eastern comics that highlighted the portrayal of women in these comics as well as the flesh-and-blood female cartoonists who are actually creating them. Palestinian society and politics are something I keep a close eye on because, well, I’m half Palestinian, I’m sort of interested in that kind of thing. I talk about it. I’ve had people take me aside and tell me I’m doing something positive but they themselves could never “publicly” say such things. I’ve lost friends because of it, too. I had to jump through some extra-special hoops to get my passport and one time the FBI came into our apartment while we weren’t there to search it (I hope they enjoyed the pile of dirty dishes in our sink).

This has been the loneliest, most Sisyphean road. And I’m tired. I’m really tired.

I understand the need to do something constructive with the outrage. I would never take that from anyone. But take this opportunity to remember that the world is in a fight against radicalism and all its members need solidarity. Think of the activists who are still alive—you don’t have to be dead to be a hero.

Je ne suis pas Charlie; je suis tout le monde.
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For all HU posts on Satire and Charlie Hebdo click here.

My NYT Nightmare

Posted on January 11, 2015 by Michael Kupperman

Just under a year ago, I started a new gig that I was cautiously excited about: creating editorial comics for the Week in Review section of The New York Times. David Rees was going to write them and I was going to draw them. This seemed like an ideal partnership; David (creator of the satiric comic Get Your War On) has a great skill for walking the fine line between irony and sincerity, and is extremely funny as well. We both wanted to try to do new things with the political strip format, and bring metahumor to the Times.

Already, though, things were not as we’d been promised. The Times had approached David and then myself in April of 2013. After approving us, they told us their master plan: Brian McFadden, the resident comic artist, would be replaced by myself and David alternating with Lisa Hanawalt. This would be a part of the exciting revitalization of the Week in Review section. To that end, they told us to wait while their redesign proceeded.

By September, the redesign seemed to be finished; but the editor in charge decided that something as exciting as this new comic rotation couldn’t be unveiled in a dull month like September. Better to wait until… January! when it could be announced to the world with the appropriate fanfare and excitement.

So we waited seven months in all. And on January 20th, David & I created our first strip for the Times… which was printed with no fanfare or announcement or anything; we were simply dumped into an alternating slot with McFadden, because by then Lisa was simply too busy (drawing Bojack Horseman). The brilliant strategy of waiting all that time had backfired, because in fact it was pointlessly stupid.

Then there was the money. The New York Times– get this- refused to come up from the fee for one artist, which we were to split. We finally got them to come up a little, but only a little. These strips are done in a very short time period- basically between Wednesday night and Friday morning, and I stayed up all night for a couple fo them. We were going to be making very little money, but still, it was an opportunity to do good work, maybe make some statements on serious issues and have them be seen by people. And the Times still stands for something in peoples’s minds, some kind of editorial quality.

Of course, it didn’t work out at all; their nitpicking, antiquated style of editing got more oppressive until they were killing entire strips. And it’s quite clear they were refusing to print them because they didn’t understand them. It was like being edited by hobbits.

The first few went through fairly smoothly; David pays close attention to the news, and the art director mentioned approvingly that she was glad he was tackling issues that the paper wasn’t covering otherwise. The one thing that bothered me was: we would present the script, the editors would make corrections, I’d create a finish. Then, after I’d handed it in, I’d get back a complete different set of corrections, mostly concerned with their antiquated style guide. The Times puts periods in “IRS,” for instance, even though the IRS themselves do not. They also changed the wording of Donald Rumsfeld’s letter to the IRS when we quoted it directly; that seemed wrong to me. And that they couldn’t do all the corrections at once, before I’d done the work, felt to me like laziness and a lack of coordination which ended with me doing unnecessary work at the last minute.

They did start reading the script more closely, though, after our fifth strip. The script mentioned the cartoon character Garfield and tribesmen in native costume in Botswana, so I was less than sympathetic when they were surprised when the art was turned in. “We have to check with our lawyers if we can use Garfield,” the AD said, and “the tribesmen in Botswana are making people uncomfortable.” Soon came the word that the lawyer had said Garfield was okay (luckily they had asked one who understood the first amendment). I hope they would also drop the tribesmen issue, but no. They insisted I make it a different country, and have them fully clothed. I thought about it for maybe five seconds, and then I said something I’d learned to say after a lot of bad experiences with illustrations and comics that turned out mediocre because of meddling editors who thought they were smarter at what I do then I am. I said “I’m not comfortable with that.” And they… backed down. Okay, we’ll print it the way it is.

I thought we’d won a small, but important victory. Of course, I was kidding myself. Two strips went by and then it was Easter; David wrote a script parodying floral bouquet ads. It showed several extravagant bouquets before showing a basket with twigs in it, suggesting that maybe the real spirit of Jesus would be served by saving the money spent on bouquets and giving it to a homeless shelter. It was David at his best: sharp, moral, funny & brilliant. (I’ve done a rough of it to show you here).

They hated it. “The editor is asking why are we making fun of religion” came the reply. I couldn’t believe this, and still can’t; it’s the response of someone who can’t read. David was doing the opposite of making fun of religion; he was in fact underlining one of its central tenets, the concept of charity. He felt really strongly about it, and even managed to talk with one fo the editors to make his case. But no amount of arguing would dissuade them. We had to come up with another strip in a hurry.

A sketched-out version of the unpublished strip.

The next strip went through with no difficulty, and then David wrote a strip about male bullying online. That week, the hashtag #yesallwomen had taken over Twitter, following a misogynist’s killing spree in California. The reaction to this was a torrent of abuse from men and boys towards women- and this was before Gamergate, which really took it to another level. As always, David’s strip on the subject was right on. His script had a pair of baby-men (wearing diapers) talking about trolling and threatening women online. I was excited, because I knew this was one that would attract attention, and make a point that deserved to be made. Incredibly, the Times wouldn’t touch it. “So I floated this by the editors, and they all feel that this news story is just too sensitive to be prodded at in a humorous way,” was the way the substitute AD put it.

This was when I had had enough. Too sensitive to be prodded at in a humorous way? Why had they hired us? What did they think we were supposed to be doing? David was busy at that point doing his TV series for National Geographic, so I told the AD that I was not happy with the Times‘s behavior, that we would not be giving them a substitute strip for that week, and then I created a rough version of the strip from David’s script and put it online, with a full explanation of how the Times wouldn’t print it. It got more attention than anything else we’d done for them.

A sketched-out version of the unpublished strip.

We did one more strip after that and then, big surprise, they fired us. But once the Times had made it clear that we were not allowed to offend anyone, or handle any but the safest material, it was all over for us anyway. For me, as a cartoonist, it was another depressing reminder of how bad things have gotten in the print world for people who do what I do. David had a TV show. Lisa had a TV show. I was working in print and I felt like a real loser for it.

I couldn’t help but think of all this again this week as the images from Paris appeared online. Cartoonists had given their lives for the freedom of speech their work represented. It still means something over there.
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For all HU posts on Posted in Blog, Featured, Satire and Charlie Hebdo Roundtable, Top Featured | Tagged censorship, David Rees, editorial cartoons, Get Your War On, Michael Kupperman, New York Times, NYT, Satire and Charlie Hebdo Roundtable

Dystopia is a Jacuzzi You Never Want to Leave

Posted on January 8, 2015 by Isaac Butler

Here’s my pitch for a dystopian novel. It takes place in Wealthy Powerful Nation (WPN), a country that is secretly spying on its citizens. In fact, those citizens life in a state of near-total surveillance and don’t realize it. Or, at least, won’t admit it to themselves.

You see, that’s the weird thing about Wealthy Powerful Nation, it’s a dystopia that doesn’t look like one, because it has a number of mechanisms in place that help hide how dystopic it really is. The citizens know on some level that the world is a terrible place, but they’re also living through a time of abundant good-to-great art and entertainment available at little-to-no cost. The people live in perpetual debt to make it seem like they have a stable, middle-class life. The country supposedly has freedom of speech, but corporations own most of the venues for that speech. Freedom of assembly is guaranteed, but the government can track its citizen’s locations at all times, can turn on the cameras on their electronic devices without them knowing it and record them, and can use very powerful computers to sift through the patterns of their actions to determine what they’ll do next. There’s very little oversight for the Government of WPN, and this system of surveillance has completely coopted industry and banking. Meanwhile, WPN is able to kill pretty much anyone in the world any time it wants, using an army of flying robots.

One man, let’s call him Ed, works for the surveillance state, but he has doubts. He believes that total surveillance impacts freedom, and so he steals a vast archive of information about the system of domestic espionage that WPN employs. He flies halfway around the world to reveal this information to a team of journalists and then skips town.

When the information is finally revealed, the world responds by mocking Ed on twitter for weeks for some stupid things he says about Vladimir Putin. Gradually, opinion polls come to agree with Ed, but nothing of any consequence changes.

Not a great story, is it? Not likely to be turned into a four part movie franchise starring Chris Hemsworth. There’s a couple of reasons why it’s a lousy story. The first is that, well, there’s not a lot of hope in it, and if there’s one thing that sets apart modern day dystopian narratives from their spiritual grandfather 1984, it’s the presence of hope. Hope that the State can be defeated, hope in the future, hope in progress, and, perhaps most important of all, hope in your fellow humans.

Looking at the United States today, it’s hard to see a lot of reasons for hope, largely because there’s been so little change, despite our current President’s use of both of those words for his election campaign. For you see, unlike the characters in most dystopias, we are not exactly victims. We have chosen our leadership, whose prosecution of a global war on terror remains largely popular, except for when it can be demonstrated to harm us directly.

Lucky for us, we outsource our harm as much as possible. The people we kill live half a world away, destroyed by flying robots piloted by children in a dark room nowhere near their quarry. Our all-volunteer army pulls so heavily from specific demographic groups that many of us can go about our lives without seeing any consequence of our war if we don’t want to.

And we don’t want to, do we? Looking the demon jackal that we have summoned with our war on terror dead in the eyes would be unbearable, paralyzing. Certainly, the torture report’s breaching of my own person walls of denial was for me, even though I already knew what was in it. So we ignore the demon jackal even while feeding it ever more of our humanity, willfully joining the only conspiracy that really matters, the one of ignorance and complicity.

These are desperate, hopeless times. Desperate, hopeless times call for desperate, hopeless art forms. Perhaps this is why Joe Sacco, who has made a name for himself as a comic book journalist specializing in war reportage has turned to satire, that most desperate and hopeless of art forms, in Bumf #1, his response to America in the age of perpetual war.

Satire has lost a lot of its luster now that it’s regularly used by racists to excuse impolitic things they’ve said on twitter, but satire has performed a unique and important function since the ancient Greeks. No other genre can get as close to unspeakable truths, because satire rides there on the wings of excessive bad taste—seriously, you have no idea how cleaned up most translations of Lysistrata are— exaggeration, humor and irony.

Enough preamble. Joe Sacco’s Bumf #1, his first fictional work in what feels like forever, is the most necessary comic of 2014. A nightmare that pulls from his roots in underground comix and the work of contemporaries like Michael DeForge and Jim Woodring, Bumf #1 is grappling with American hegemony in a way that serves as a stark reminder of the freedom and possibility that comics allows.

It’s also, to put it mildly, unsubtle. The first two-page spread in the book features Bumf’s narrator telling us that after the Garden of Eden, “There’s been a serious fuck-up,” while surrounded by prostitutes, a woman smacking her child, a man having his brains blown out, a homeless man sitting in front of a garbage can with a human leg sticking out of it, a man hanging himself and the twin towers being hit by planes. Then we’re off to World War II to firebomb some Jerrys and WWI to stroll naked through the trenches while millions of young men die, before seguing into a present day White House where President Barack Obama (drawn as Richard Nixon) attends a meeting in a situation room like something out of Hieronymous Bosch:

Fiction, then, isn’t Bumf’s only departure from Sacco’s previous major works (the brilliant Footntoes in Gaza, Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde). In leaving the world of comics journalism, he’s also left behind realism entirely. Bumf #1 is a nightmare peopled by a set of symbolic characters pulled from the collective unconscious. First, there’s our narrator, a scummy, chain-smoking, foul-mouthed, bestubbled human face on the body of tweety-bird. Then there’s Colonel Singo-Jingo, fat, British, and monocled, standing up for the old-fashioned values that the 37 million deaths in World War I couldn’t shake. There’s our eventual protagonist, Nixon/Obama. General Custer makes a cameo appearance. Finally, there’s Joe Sacco himself, hired to be the official propagandist of American Empire, composing a story that’s “boy meets girl meets the State.”

These various threads cohere as the United States opens a new “black site” in the form of a portal to a planet in the Andromeda Galaxy, where neither the rules of physics, the ten commandments, nor the Geneva conventions apply:

Once in Andromeda, everyone dons hoods, water-boards a few detainees, gets their kicks through drone warfare, and falls in some form of love. The nightmare becomes inescapable, the “black site” an infinite hellscape filled with demon jackals, unsuitable for human life. It is what the novelist and critic Charles Baxter has called a “wonderland,” a place where the character’s fugitive subjectivity has been made manifest in the world surrounding them. Or, as Baxter describes the wonderlands of HP Lovecraft, the environments become “inhospitable interiors, either simple or elaborate, [that] feel like private prisons disturbed by lunatic geometry. Their spaces present vistas of grief-stricken vastness, combined with a steadfast inanimate hostility to any human endeavor. They cannot be a home to anybody. Any effort at domesticity within them would be laughable. No one would want to be there.”

Yet, Sacco points out again and again, we do want to be there. He’s first recruited to join the war effort on the edges of a giant Jacuzzi. Gazing upon it, he remarks, “Wow. The press room sure has changed since I was last here. … this Jacuzzi of yours is serious business.”

“It’s not my Jacuzzi,” the chain-smoking tweety bird replies. “Think of it as the people’s Jacuzzi. Getting in?”

Complicity, in other words, is part of what Sacco’s after here. Bumf #1 essays our collective loss of humanity through the prosecution of an endless war against a series of ever-changing Kaisers stretching back to WWI. In one panel, Sacco recreates the infamous “Saigon Execution” photo, adding a WWI-era German helmet to Nguyen Van Lem’s head. “Killing the enemy is never enough,” Colonel Singo-Jingo intones, “We’d been killing them for years.” (His solution to this problem is rape, by the way, which is never quite shown in Bumf’s one act of tasteful restraint).

This complicity is vast and all encompassing in Bumf. Religion, art, the legal system, love, all are powerless to resist the temptation of power and obedience. What sets Bumf #1 apart from other dystopian nightmares that the characters all want to be there. Whereas other dystopian narratives often revolve around either an epiphanic moment (Brazil) or an already existing discontent that finally finds a venue (The Hunger Games), in Bumf #1, the various characters discover an acceptance of their dehumanized, alien world. A torture victim falls in love with her torturer after he enrolls her in a sensible mobile plan. Sacco comes to enjoy the power and prestige of being the official State Graphic Novelist. Nixon/Obama realizes he’s the Messiah. Gradually, torturer and tortured alike don hoods and lose their clothes. By the final few panels, they are an anonymous collective mass of victor and victim, Sacco’s glasses the only distinguishing feature amidst the hairy bellies and sagging breasts. There’s no hope for us at any point in Bumf #1, which is part of why its humor is so savage, and, while it often adopts the structure of the short gag comic, the jokes are likely to stick in your throat. There’s no escape from the bed we’ve made. All that remains is to lie in it. Getting in?

Subtitled Love Affairs: Why Millions of Americans Prefer Korean Television

Posted on December 30, 2014 by Odessa Jones

American television doesn’t want me anymore.

I realized this a couple years ago when I downloaded the first season of “Breaking Bad” for distraction on a plane flight. Although I admired the clever structure of the pilot, I discovered I wasn’t curious about what would happen next. Even though I’ve worked as a high school teacher and I carry debt for hospital bills, I couldn’t relate to Walter White. And perhaps because I’m a female writer in my late thirties, I thought Walter’s late-thirties writer wife Skylar was an unrecognizable stock character. I lost interest without finishing the short first season, and it’s still sitting on my hard drive whispering that I must be lacking in good taste.

The idea among television critics that we’re living in a “golden age” for American television overlooks the fact that some of us find critically-acclaimed American television boring. The shows that get the most buzz are smart, it’s true. But they aren’t necessarily entertaining. This isn’t a golden age of television for all Americans. It’s a golden age for people who prefer intricate plots over empathy. Who can enjoy a show even if they don’t like the characters.

Television can still move me deeply. But in the past year, the television producers who make it with me aren’t the guys in Hollywood or New York. It’s the guys in Seoul, South Korea.

I was surprised by my out-of-the-blue interest in Korea, which began while I watched the first episode of my first subtitled show. Internet video-streaming sites (including Netflix and Hulu) offer large libraries of these “K-dramas,” as English-speaking fans call them. And several million Americans are watching with me, though it’s hard to quantify the online viewership. One of the largest sites, New York-based Drama Fever, serves about six to seven million US viewers a month, of whom roughly 80% are native English speakers. That’s roughly the number of people who watched the penultimate episode of “Breaking Bad” in 2013. (Independent research firm comScore confirms the site’s audience is growing, but estimate the audience at a somewhat lower 3.4 million. For comparison, that’s roughly the average audience size for the first two seasons of Game of Thrones.) Most viewers are women, according to Drama Fever—and that’s about all we have in common. The audience includes all races and a variety of tastes.

The Wall Street Journal reported on the rise of subtitled Asian shows this summer with a touch of horror, but there’s no reason to look down on Korean television. After years of government investment in the industry, their production values are excellent. Their aesthetic is different from ours, which can be jarring in mediocre shows, and they can be as corny as a Frank Capra film bathed in the collected tears of Steven Spielberg. But when the cream rises to the top, the best shows are suspenseful, funny and heartfelt. And even though I don’t speak Korean and I’ve never visited Asia, the cultural differences are minor next to the fact that I can relate to the characters in a way I haven’t related to anyone on American television since Dana Scully and Buffy Summers left the air.

One reason to watch Korean series is for three-dimensional female characters. K-dramas have their fair share of stock characters, Korean versions of season one Skylar, but they also have a good record of developing great roles for women. The characters popular with fans in recent years include an ambitious pastry chef, a tough cross-dressing tomboy, a scatter-brained spirit medium and a cynical defense attorney.

Another thing drawing some women may be that popular Korean series have a much lower body count than popular American shows—roughly one-eighth corpse per episode (my unofficial estimate), versus the US rate of nearly five corpses per episode (three if you omit cable). Korean characters tend to die of illness or in car crashes, while most fictional American corpses are the result of murder or zombie apocalypse. The numbers themselves are less important than the narrative style they suggest. American television producers have faith in stories about crime, politics and violence—and they do a good job with these subjects. But it’s increasingly hard to imagine an American drama that doesn’t have crime, politics or violence. In contrast, South Korea makes prime-time one-hour shows about families, growing up, romance, friendship—the good stuff in life. Some series are comedies, some are weepy melodramas, but most of them touch in some way on the human capacity for mixed emotions. Here in the U.S., shows about families and romance tend to be placed in the 22 minute format time-slot, which officially makes them “comedies” by Emmy standards, even when a show like “Nurse Jackie” challenges the drama-comedy distinction.

It’s tempting to attribute Korea’s growing appeal to the declining number of female writers in American television. After all, 75% of American television pilots are developed by writing teams made up entirely of men, while the vast majority of writers for prime-time Korean series are female. Superstar writers like the Hong Sisters even become household names à la Aaron Sorkin. The worldwide hit romantic comedy “Coffee Prince” had a female director as well as writer. But this fact doesn’t explain much on its own. After all, it was male writer Joss Whedon who created a few of my favorite female television characters.

What distinguishes K-dramas isn’t their subject matter or the gender of their writers, but their tone—and it’s hard to ascribe a gender to tone. Korean series are less cynical. The heroes are idealists underneath their flaws. The anti-heroes aren’t quite as despicable. The loners aren’t quite as alone. These are all aspects of the central fact about K-dramas: they need to entertain a wide swath of the population to make money. The successful K-drama provides pleasure to as many people as possible—like American television did twenty years ago before DVRs and Netflix.

Korean television shows aren’t “gritty,” and this makes even their action thrillers very different from ours. The big 2011 hit “City Hunter”—based in name only on Tsukasa Hojo’s 1985-91 manga—looks pretty dark on paper. It follows a mysterious vigilante looking for justice against the men who caused his father’s death. Dozens of people die in the first ten minutes of the first episode. The first episode also features a terrorist bombing, a kidnapping of a baby, a bunch of commandos slitting throats, a noisy shootout at a Thai drug plantation, and a leg severed by a land-mine. Though the following episodes contain less killing, the plot still revolves around betrayal, manipulation and corruption. There are knife-fights, gunfights and a really cool walking cane with a sword concealed inside. In episode seven, we watch the hero dig a bullet out of his own shoulder.

But despite the violence—which is presented mildly enough for Korean network television—the show interrogates violence from an idealistic point of view we haven’t seen on American television since before Sept. 11. The hero, Yoon-Sung, is the adopted son of a ruthless drug kingpin who raised and educated him to be a professional revenge-seeker. But in the first episode he’s already questioning his father’s quickness to shoot first, ask questions later. The guy’s got great moves in combat, but he prefers to tie his enemies up, put them in a refrigerator box, and drop them off at the district attorney’s office along with conclusive evidence of their crimes. Take that! The emotional and moral heart of the 20-episode series quickly becomes the conflict between Yoon-Sung and his father over whether to achieve their goals through killing or MacGyver-esque stunts. And the MacGyver-esque stunts are way more fun to watch.

The style of humor in “City Hunter” also steers away from cynicism. Instead of relying on snarky one-liners, the show finds humor in the characters’ internal contradictions. It’s funny that Yoon-Sung’s earnest middle-aged sidekick is addicted to the home shopping channel. It’s funny that Yoon-Sung preserves his secret identity by pretending to be feeble in front of his judo-chopping girlfriend. Leading man Lee Min-Ho has great comic timing—he’s starred in more than one popular romantic comedy—making him an action hero more in the mold of a young Cary Grant than Vin Diesel.

And like Cary Grant in a Hitchcock movie, the hero often finds himself at the mercy of the women in his life. More than once the hero’s survival depends on his crush Kim Na-Na, a fifth-level black belt who works for the Korean equivalent of the Secret Service. She occasionally needs rescuing herself—she’s not quite Buffy—but she sometimes rescues the hero in turn. A second woman, a divorced veterinarian, provides crucial help (no spoilers here). And an important secondary narrative follows Yoon-Sung’s birth mother, whose life we learn about in flashbacks. These women aren’t accessories to the hero, but the people who make his success possible.

None of these elements—the idealism, the humor, the women with original personalities—are particularly “Korean” or calculated to appeal to women. We once found these things in abundance on American television. The idealism is particularly familiar. Our film and television spent the forties and fifties plumbing idealistic questions about the moral use of violence much like the ones in “City Hunter”—they’re at the heart of the classic Westerns by John Ford, Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher. But today, these elements make for a thriller that feels unlike anything on American television right now. It’s a story about characters I want to root for.

Plenty of people enjoy America’s gritty shows. But a few million of us are bored by the joylessness on television. Before another long work week starts, we want someone to tell us a good story. If it’s a story that makes us feel like we’re living in a golden age of television, that’s even better. But first, tell us a story with characters we care for, with stakes that matter.

We didn’t leave American television. American television left us.

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Odessa Jones has a lot of degrees in a lot of subjects and she puts it all to good use in her commentary on subtitled Korean romances, including “City Hunter,” at K-Drama Today.

“A woman who falls from grace is seen as fair game”: An Interview with Marguerite Van Cook and James Romberger

Posted on December 29, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

As longtime blog readers know, both Marguerite Van Cook and James Romberger have been regular writers for HU over the years. They’re also both comics creators, together and separately, perhaps best known for their collaboration with David Wojnarowicz on the graphic novel Seven Miles a Second. Their most recent project is The Late Child and Other Animals, a graphic memoir written and colored by Marguerite and drawn by James. I interviewed them by email about their book and their work.
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Noah:Marguerite, my understanding is that you’ve worked on comics projects as a colorist and artist, but haven’t done much writing. Is that right?

Marguerite: In fact, I’ve been writing all my life. Early on I worked for the now defunct Sounds Magazine reviewing bands. One of the first things James and I did together was a comic that I wrote and co-conceptualized with him called Ground Zero. It was a semi- autobiographical sci-fi piece that ran between 1984 until, much less frequently, now.

Axel Alonzo actually included a piece in the vertigo/DC anthology title Heartthrobs, which was a poem I wrote, James did the pencils and inks and I colored it.

James: Marguerite has written prose, poetry, stage plays, screenplays, memoirs, essays, articles, reviews and interviews. She has won a major prize for her poetry. Before I met her, she wrote critically for the East Village Eye even before we began the Ground Zero strips together in that paper. The strip was also deliberately placed in many different sorts of publications as possible: tabloid newspapers, slick magazines, literary and comics zines, art publications, trade paperback anthologies and websites. Eventually all of the Ground Zero strips will be collected into a book which must have quite an unusual format, to accommodate the different methods of printing in black and white and color and varying page sizes that they are originally done for. We already have more than enough of them for a collection, we just need to fill in some parts of the narrative to make it all flow.

Noah: Does working on art help prepare you for writing? And I guess I’m curious as to how writing a comic is different? Are they completely separate skills?

Marguerite: I can’t really answer that since I have always done both simultaneously. I think one needs to have something one wants to convey, even if one is not sure what that is when one begins. The creative impulse has no definable source as far a I can tell. I do get pleasure from the physicality of writing, a pen on paper, the calligraphic marks on the page; I enjoy the private experience of putting paint on a surface, the feel of it. Those are personal moments, but art, or writing, needs a viewer, or a reader to participate in the work. The arts are mediums of exchange, even if only in the dream of the ideal reader, in the fantasy of someone who will take the work in, who read thinking of the intimacy of their engagement with the writer/ artist. The exchange is very highly charged, I can say for example that I love so and so’s work. I feel that he or she understood me, their invisible reader, although we’ve never met, nor ever will.

Noah: I know you two have worked together on other projects over the years. What are the positive aspects to collaborating with your spouse? Are there downsides? And how does the collaboration work in practice…do you critique each other’s work as you go? Are you both involved every step, or is it more separated?

Marguerite: Our working method depends on the project. We each do our jobs. I wrote The Late Child and Other Animals as a memoir in the first place. James asked to adapt it, which he did. Since he knew that I would color it, he left space for me in certain passages, in other passages where a noir genre approach seemed right, he inked more heavily. We try not to disturb each other’s process. On the other hand, Ground Zero was produced very collaboratively; because we were interested in producing a comic that was self-referential, structurally challenging and set out to break or manipulate as many of the existing codes as possible, we worked together closely. Incidentally, your use of the term “spouse” made me laugh. It sounds like something you might shoot and serve up on a hunting weekend—okay, rhymes with “grouse”–which means also to complain. I think we are quite resistant to classification; my life has been negatively affected by social constructions, which James gets.

James: I read the stories that make up The Late Child and Other Animals when Marguerite first wrote them while we were at Columbia, and she was privy to every step of my working, first on the thumbnailed adaptation and then drawing the actual black and white pages—and I saw every page as she colored it. I knew Marguerite’s mother and I have spent enough time in Portsmouth and France that I was able to draw her and those places with some assurance—and then, I did purposefully draw the book to allow for color. I knew Marguerite would add back in a high degree of intimacy and knowledge of place and time and emotional resonance with her color, and that she certainly did.

I prefer to work closely with whoever I am collaborating with. I worked closely with David Wojnarowicz and Marguerite on 7 Miles a Second, with Crosby and Tom Kaczynski on Post York, with Josh Simmons on our Oily Comics minicomic “Daddy.” The only place I wasn’t able to collaborate properly with my partners was when I worked for DC Comics, because their policy is to keep the writers and artists separated by the editors. Their end product reflects that distance. But yes, Marguerite and I have a long history of working together. We’ve done paintings, drawings, prints and installations together. We’ve played in bands together and we’ve written songs together. We’ve made films together.

Noah: I was wondering particularly I guess about the section where the hearing committee turns into birds, and you actually see them turn into birds in the comic. Was that something in the original script? Was that James’ idea? Did you arrive at it together? It just seems like a really lovely use of comics to move back and forth between reality and metaphor or fantasy.

Marguerite: It was in the It was in the prose that I wrote. My mother told me she thought she was walking sideways at times and she spoke about how close she came to losing her faculties because of the stress. I imagined how that would actually appear and tried to convey her difficulty in the text. As for writing about something as monstrous as the tribunal, to me these men were the embodiment of the inhuman, though I didn’t want to make them monsters and give them that much power. Of course, the English Crown owns the huge ravens at the Tower of London, which have been present for many executions over the centuries, but crows might be representative of a lesser type of civil servant. On the other hand, I wanted to introduce something visual that would express my mother’s inner state in an interesting way.

James: The surreal “bird court” certainly lent itself to comics handling. And Marguerite had written the stories in the first place with an eye towards a certain type of expansive, I’d even say cinematic visual scale.

Noah:The book is a memoir in a lot of ways, but there are also some moments that diverge from first person memoir — most notably in the early sections, about Marguerite’s mother, and in the section about the attempted sexual assault, where you shift into the mind of the assailant, and it becomes almost a suspense genre piece for a couple of pages. Why did you decide to do that, or why did you feel it was important for the story to do that?

Marguerite: My mother had a life that was both ordinary and extraordinary. I felt it was impossible to talk about my story without revealing all the secrets I’d been forced to keep of our mutual history. I think the problem of social stigma is still ongoing. One still sees plot lines in films and TV, in novels, certainly in talk shows that revolve around the shame of a child born out of wedlock. Women’s sexual practices are constantly under scrutiny and judgments pronounced. The English canon is loaded with these kinds of stories. A woman who falls from grace is seen as fair game, I was the progeny of such a union and as such stigmatized. I’ll probably write more about it at some point, but for now it was tremendously hard to revisit those traumas. I know my mother’s experiences as, because when I was a child her trauma would come back to her on a daily basis and she would repeat it to me. I think it would be safe to say she did not have PSTD, because it never stopped. The torment was ongoing. I had to lie to protect us.

As a child in this position, I was forced to jump into others’ minds. It seemed natural to do it here. Besides, everything I have the man say, he said to me. I suppose I did a sort of profiling job on him, based on his clothes, his accent and demeanor. I wanted to expose the reader to him for longer than the brief time he was actually trying to abduct me. As for it being noir, the place and the time fit that genre. Those were the films that were playing on TV in the sixties, those and spy stories. Even as a child, I was particularly interested in spy stories, because the spies lied in the service of the greater good and had to resist torture to keep their secrets. I identified with the secret keeping. It cost me dearly. In the end, I was telling a story that wasn’t boring when it was happening and I tried to convey that terror.

For a while, I thought that I would lose something of myself when I put things on paper, but I haven’t. Sometimes the remembered sensation of pain is the only thing that connects us to people we cared about. That is certainly the case with my mother.

Noah: The book is a coming-of-age story in a lot of ways, which these days positions it at least somewhat in relation to YA stories. I wondered in that sense who you saw as the audience for this? Is it mostly adults looking back at childhood experiences? Or do you think kids might read and enjoy this as well?

James: I think that the “coming of age” label is an oversimplification; the passages dealing with the experiences of Marguerite’s mother are as significant as the ones dealing with Marguerite’s childhood. And just because a book deals with children does not automatically make it a young adult book. I feel certain that the explicit nature of the pedophile’s thoughts and behavior in “Nature Lessons” makes it so that the book is clearly directed to adults.

Marguerite: If one thinks of Nights of Cabiria as a coming of age story, then my story of betrayals is a sort coming of age story. I’m glad to be alive, at times I wasn’t. These stories happen to end in my teens, but that is purely happenstance. I don’t really think of this as being for kids. I hope this will draw attention to the ongoing stigma attached to unmarried mothers. I hope the quality of the book makes it accessible to everybody. I hope that someone who is feeling alone and unseen, can connect with themselves through connecting with the book and know that I am writing to them as I write to myself. Perhaps, it might speak to some young person.

Finally, just to say that I love the way James handled my text. Everything looks right, the places, the people, things that I had in my head, all of it. He has a unique ability to see through another’s eyes. I think his work is accessible to almost anyone.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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