Web hosting Custom Email SiteBuilder

Guidelines for Analyzing Political Comics

Human beings have a tendency to view as "intelligent" or as "wise" those things that confirm what we already believe. So, therefore, where comics attempt to dabble in political matters, we sometimes fail to distinguish the meaning of the message from the excellence (or weakness) of its delivery.

We can, however, cobble together a means of judging political comics that goes beyond asking "Do I agree with that?" That test by itself proves nothing, since it evokes a circular argument - "I call this true because I agree with it" in some form or another. Such a self-congratulatory test also misses that terrible stories can still have a message we agree with, and great ones can convey meanings we do not.

To me, the value of the answers depends on the quality of questions. We can get to the means of judging political comics when we pose the correct queries. Therefore, I propose the following series of questions as a framework for judging comics (or even political works outside of comics).

My seven basic questions for political comics follow.

Question 1: Does It Have a Point?

Some political content, particularly some humorous uses of politics, do not actually have much to say. For instance, in Amalgam Comics, during the sequence in a Spider-Boy story where Spider-Boy unmasked a Kang-like villain, the face under the mask strongly suggested the late Richard Nixon. The joke says little about Nixon or why anyone might object to him enough to cast him as a time traveling villain; the joke would have worked just as well with Jim Shooter, Stan Lee, or David Letterman behind the mask.

Satire and caricature can have meaning, though, depending on the truth of the caricature.

If a political comic makes claims about some philosophy or group of people without demonstrating this point, one can doubt the saliency of the story's purpose. Even with demonstration, since comics use fictional characters and situations to attempt to describe real world people and ideas, comics do not prove their point; having a point means something very different from proving a point.

If, however, attentive reading of a political work does not produce much insight into what the creators mean to say, we have good grounds for suspecting that the work lacks a point. Consider, for instance, a web comic where Gordon Liddy infiltrated the White House and found inside Hillary Clinton wanting to audition for his "Stacked and Packed" calendar. The gag centered around an unlikely turnaround; but it didn't really have anything to say about the principals used as characters there.

Question 2: Does It Inspire Thought?

One can consider this as equal in importance to the previous question. A political story that does not incline its readers to examination of the issues involved probably does not offer much more than preaching to the choir or name-calling.

A story that buttresses self-congratulation indulges, but does not edify readers. A story that undermines self-congratulation and inspires self-examination does do something for the reader.

In this sense, the Green Lantern / Green Arrow stories of Dennis O'Neil and Neal Adams stand as better pieces of the political comic, at least during their better moments. They attacked the complacency of readers, which generally stands as a good thing even where one can see flaws in the actual intended points of the stories.

Question 3: Does It Consider More Than One Viewpoint?

If you listen to people discussing politics, you might get the idea that most folks take to strong opinions devoid of a background in logic (including its fallacies), manners, or even the topics they choose to discuss. Comics, when entering the Public Square, frequently make such errors. Given the dualistic nature of traditional superhero comics - Good Hero versus Bad Villain - one would expect that complex issues would find themselves cast in the form of Good Guys Believe This and Bad Guys Believe That, ignoring that a serial killer might agree with the politics of a saint, and that a good man can still adhere to some bizarre political precepts.

Most political comics that I have read do not really get to the point of considering alternatives to the premise they propose. Furthermore, when they do, they often rig the debate by handicapping contrary hypotheses.

Frequently, artistic treatments of political questions resort to a kind of rigged debate that begins with assigning the contrary side a number of disadvantages. Take a character designed for loathesomeness independent of his politics, attach to him misrepresentations of your opponent's views (and dumb these down considerably just to make sure the point gets across), and have him argue these concepts inarticulately, and you have a mixture of the ad hominem fallacy and the dishonest straw man attack of rhetoric.

In a mild sense, we can see this in the mild political themes of O'Neil and Adams' run of Green Lantern / Green Arrow. Green Arrow spoke as the voice of the creators, always ready with a diatribe about something; Green Lantern himself frequently had no answer to Green Arrow, as if none existed, and his lack of a considered contrary viewpoint would give game, set, and match to Green Arrow in their conversations.

Question 4: Does It Engage in Special Pleading?

Where a political comic deals in some point, does the context suggest that the point only applies where it serves the author's purpose? For instance, imagine a story about rival political factions in a Third World country. If such a story noted the murderous tendencies of one faction while conspicuously ignoring those of the other where both have become part of the public record and goes on to condemn one side alone for its violence, you can suspect special pleading.

Special pleading by itself does not so much discredit a point as it does discredit the person who argues selectively. Where someone condemns a deed that faction A commits, but not the same deed his own faction (B) commits, we have excellent grounds to suspect that our speaker does not truly care about the crime itself, but only finds in it a handy bludgeon with which to condemn his political enemies.

Special pleading frequently conceals a bait-and-switch where the speaker conceals a difficult-to-support principle ("No one should ever disagree with me") behind a more broadly accepted one ("No one should murder.") For an example, imagine if a Nazi war criminal sought to defend his own deeds in concentration camps by saying he intended to protect his country from the incursion of Stalin-style communism because he disapproved of the gulag system. Rather than nods of assent, such a defendant would more likely elicit cat calls, boos, and howls of laughter.

Question 5: Does It Condescend?

In an age in which self-righteousness and lung power have mostly overtaken the environment in which debate and rumination belong, one forgets that the message "Everyone who disagrees with me is evil" or "Everyone who disagrees with me is stupid" does not mean much, does not say much, and does not contribute more than a recognition of the speaker's anger at those who dare to use their consciences without allowing the speaker veto power over them.

A political work that sneers at, curses, insults, derides, or impugns some target for having the audacity to maintain some kind of audacity of conscience remains more a study in self-righteousness than a vehicle for the propagation of ideas.

In either case, the work seeks less to convince the reader than to threaten him ("Agree with my point or I will denounce you with this political label") or bribe him ("Agree with me and I will flatter you with overblown claims of your own mental ability"). One should consider neither approach on the level - the truth test should verify a principle, not the notion that someone may disapprove of your own dissent from his claims.

Question 6: Does It Preach to the Choir?

It takes little courage to congratulate people for thinking exactly the way you do, though many people never make the logical leap to this point and do believe that repeating identical slogans to one another constitutes courageous political discourse.

However, a moment's thought will suggest that the entire polemical purpose depends upon reaching out to the unconvinced or even contrary souls who do not understand or believe a point. This elevates a political statement (from a meaning-free sound bite parroted by political robots incapable of understanding the ideas that they supposedly evoke via dumbed-down political one-liners) to something worth talking about.

In general, politics in comics does a lot of preaching to the choir. Partially this results from cultural similarities between producers and consumers; partially this results from a fear of alienating a dwindling reader base by subjecting it to annoying and hostile political messages; and partially this results from an arrested political culture in which people know how to shout each other down but not how to advance an idea to a doubtful audience.

Question 7: Does it Bear Reading?

Finally, this criterion must appear in an analysis of political art. If a work loads it on so thick that it becomes unreadable, it fails as art. As well, if a work has a valid point but delivers it so badly that no one can stand to read it, it has failed.

In an age of advocacy, in which even mathematics can serve as a polemical tool (consider claims that Newton's Principia represents a methodology of rape), dabblers in political art frequently ignore the art side of the equation. Drawing a picture of Bill Clinton with a fore lock and toothbrush moustache may satisfy his opponents in evoking a comparison which seems amusing to them, but as art it represents little more than a doodle - primitive, arrested, puerile art, even if one believes the hypothesis such a work presents.

If the artist abandons the artistic side to push the politics, the work will probably only endure among true believers who care little about aesthetics. Such works frequently offer as little politically as they do artistically, however; yesterday's propaganda grows stale and sometimes comes back as an embarrassment to those who once fed it.

Too Much to Think about at Once?

If this seems like a lot to keep in mind while judging a political comic, consider that you probably already make some of these judgments without thinking about them.

Even if you don't make some of these tests - and I propose these principles because they seem obvious to me and may elicit some seminal debate elsewhere on the subject - consider that they do provide an opportunity to appreciate works even when you don't necessarily agree with them.

Politics in comics, over time, do speak to different concepts. Different writers in different times have different concerns even when working on the same character (for instance, Captain America in the 1950s and Captain America in the early seventies). Furthermore, a reader does not do much to challenge himself if he only reads what he knows and agrees with.

I think a political work can deserve credit both as art and as rhetoric even if I disagree with the explicit or implicit principles it evokes.

A Final Disclaimer

I don't intend this column or the columns of this series as a vehicle to sell my own personal politics. If I cared about a life as a political missionary, I'd spend considerably less time reading comics or writing comics about them.

I do see in political comics a means of placing comics within a broader cultural context. And, even in a medium that should not try too hard to make people take it seriously, methods of analysis that suggest that more lies under the surface than its peculiar conventions can do much to make the medium credible to outsiders.