Book review: Hero Me Not: The Containment of the Most Powerful Black, Female Superhero

Chesya Burke. Hero Me Not: The Containment of the Most Powerful Black, Female Superhero. Rutgers University Press, 2023. 172 pps. https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/hero-me-not/9781978821057

Reviewed by Stephanie Burt

When I teach X-Men comics I teach the Dark Phoenix saga, Uncanny X-Men 129-137 (1979-1980), one of the story arcs that established Marvel’s mutants as A-list heroes. And when I teach these comics, to high school and college students, I have learned the hard way that they absolutely require a warning: not about the destruction of an entire species of sentient humanoids; not about suicidality, gaslighting, or mind control, though I warn about them too. At the cost of whole two hour class sessions, I have learned that I must warn students about the two panels in Uncanny X-Men 133 where Jean Grey, manipulated by the evil Mastermind into believing herself an eighteenth century lady, hallucinates that her teammate Storm is enslaved. Chris Claremont and John Byrne, the white men who fashioned this story, likely never expected that two frames of Ororo Monroe in a headscarf and choker would dominate modern students’ take on their work. And yet it can, and will: it’s a sign—as casual as such things often are—that white supremacy is everywhere, that you can’t dig very far into any story without finding some trace of the horrors and crimes on which the West was built.

Storm-- Ororo Munroe—is surely the most famous Black female superhero, and has been since the early 1980s. With her literally planet-shaping (see Planet-Sized X-Men [2021]) [https://www.polygon.com/comics/22537362/x-men-planet-size-marvel-comics-universe] weather control, her status as an Omega Level mutant, and her history as a local goddess and a Wakandan queen, she’s also been the most powerful Black woman in the Marvel  comics universe, both in political and in physical terms. Other characters admire and trust her, as a mother-figure, a best friend, or a romantic and sexual ideal. She is, as one podcast has it, “better than you and always will be.” [https://www.xplainthexmen.com/tag/this-might-be-jays-favorite-cold-open-to-date/] She also lives, most of the time, in mostly white spaces, and works with a mostly white team, written, when she’s in a starring role, mostly by white creators (Eric Jerome Dickey, Marjorie Liu and Greg Pak are the exceptions). Is she a role model? Can she be? Is that page from Uncanny X-Men 133 an outlier? Or does it illustrate her consistent failure to do what Black women need and demand?

Chesya Burke says she’s largely a failure. Her new study of Storm, in the comics and in the X-Men films, argues with consistency and clarity that Ororo Munroe has been, almost always, confined to stereotypes that keep Black people (real and fictional) subordinate: stories about Storm display her “containment.” Much of the book—the first fifty pages—does not cover Storm directly. Instead, citing such titans of African American studies as Hazel Carby and bell hooks, Burke introduces major concepts from the study of race and racism, showing how “those with power often use it to create harmful stereotypes against those without power.’ [34] Black women characters fit invidious tropes: the nurturing, asexual, older mammy; the sexually threatening jezebel; the magical Negro, there to inspire white characters; the strong Black woman, “taking care of the community” [24] without complaining. Citing Anna Saini, Burke lists three more “dominant stereotypes that Black women inhabit within comic books” (that is, company-owned superhero comics): “the quiet queen,” close to nature; “the dominant diva,” impulsive, perhaps revolutionary; and “the scandalous soujourner,” “often the center of a cautionary tale.” [47]

It’s easy to find, in the comics, panels or plots that match most of these roles.  Often Storm shows up as a strong, “magical” or maternal supporting character, what Burke calls “the spiritual Negro woman.” [28] Burke’s take on Storm supports the much broader critique provided by Allan Austin and Patrick Hamilton’s All New All Different? Race in American Superhero Comics (2019), which argues that company-owned cape comics, generally, have not done as they should.  Burke’s argument might also feed the persuasive take on Storm advanced by andre carrington in Speculative Blackness (2016). For carrington, “it becomes useful to interpret the story of Storm as a negation of the negations involved in constructing Black womanhood as a figment of the normative imagination.” [carrington 91] Certain moments and plots in comic books about Storm, written and drawn largely or wholly by white people, cannot present Black women’s lived experience, but those moments and plots (so carrington argues) can negate, complicate, or overwrite the harmful stereotypes that the comics also display.

Storm is, at first, in Len Wein and Dave Cockrum’s Giant Size X-Men 1 (1975), an “African” “magical Negro,” in touch with the land and governing “primitive” tribes: as Burke rightly says, this earliest appearance makes Storm “the ‘good’ Black woman who is wild and needs to be.. brought down from her own high ideas of herself,” by Charles Xavier, a white dude. [65] In 1980s stories written by Chris Claremont, however, Ororo “is auditioning for various performances of race, gender and power.” [carrington 107]   Within these comics Storm finds affinities with (and in fact flirts with) the Japanese anti-hero Yukio. She battles, and then befriends, a leader of underground outcast mutants, Calisto. She proves her courage, in the famous “Lifedeath” (Uncanny X-Men 186), after she loses her weather powers (which she would later regain). And in Uncanny X-Men 180 she tells the teenage white mutant Kitty Pryde, who’s shocked by Storm’s new punk rock appearance, “I am not—must not be—your mother… I must keep learning, striving to find my true self… I must live my life as I see fit.” As carrington says, Claremont’s Storm is not “a coherent vision of Black womanhood,” and cannot be—but she can grow and change. [110] Burke mentions neither Austin and Hamilton, nor carrington: of her five case studies—Giant-Size; Storm (1996); Ororo: Before the Storm (2005); Astonishing X-Men: Storm (2006); and Storm (2014)— none come from the seventeen-year Claremont run. (Burke promises to discuss “Lifedeath,” but never does). [60]

It is obviously not for me—a white woman-- to say that a Black woman should feel empowered when she does not, or see empowerment where she does not. As Burke says, Marvel should hire Black women to write Storm: it’s a shame and a scandal that the company has not done so already. Burke’s caustic take on the Fox X-Men-films includes delightful, and accurate, quips: “Jean Grey is the ultimate Karen.” [104] “Xavier is the villain.” [118] (Hero Me Not spells her name as Gray, and Mystique as “Mystic,” over and over: [103, 104, 105, 106, 108, 111] all authors make errors—this one’s on the editors.) I see no way and no reason to defend the treatment of Storm in these films, where she’s “simply irrelevant,” [90] comparatively “silent and seemingly less powerful” (to quote Burke) than in X-comics. [52]

That said, after re-reading carrington, and re-reading a stack of Storm-centric X-comics, I found myself wondering what Burke would make of comics she does not discuss.  For example, Burke opines: “Black woman superheroes, such as Storm, are not offered the sexual freedom that their white female counterparts are given.” [51] In X-Men comics, at least, I’m not sure that’s true: consider Storm’s thrilling courtship in all but name with Yukio; her troubled, soap-operatic romance with Forge; and her much-remarked tension with Callsto, recapitulated in a much later story by Claremont and Igor Kordy, X-Treme X-Men: Storm; The Arena, which ends with Ororo, Yukio and Calisto in a hot tub. She’s also been the sexual ideal, the unattainable perfect woman, for charismatic villains as diverse as Dr. Doom, Loki and Dracula, all of whom try, and fail, to make her their queen.

When Storm has a sex or romance problem in X-comics, it’s one also faced—alas-- by highly successful women in real life: few potential partners are her intellectual, social or physical equal. T’Challa, the Black Panther, is one of the few: Burke discusses their courtship (in Astonishing X-Men: Storm, written by Eric Jerome Dickey) but not their divorce. I also wonder how Burke’s view of Storm as a figure subordinated to mutant causes would hold up in “Lifedeath,” where Ororo has lost her powers, breaks up with Forge, calls him (in essence) a tool of Western industrial patriarchy, and walks away from the superhero life: “my feet may never leave the ground,” she resolves, “but someday I will fly again.”   If Storm does conform to a consistent stereotype about Black women, all the way through Claremont’s seventeen-year run, it’s the one where non-black fans expect Black omnicompetence: compare the real-life reverence, among non-black listeners, for another queen, Beyoncé.

Is it OK for a queen to be wrong? That’s the question writer Greg Pak and penciller Victor Ibañez ask in Storm (2014) no. 1, which Burke does discuss: here a mutant teen named Marisol wants to quit the X-Men’s school and go home to her family in Mexico. Storm tries to argue her out of it, fails, and creates an indoor rainstorm out of frustration. Burke finds that in encouraging loyalty to a science fictional group (mutants) over a real one, Ororo is “conforming to whiteness and invoking white supremacist ideas.” [83] But Ororo draws the same conclusion: Storm brings the girl back to Mexico and to her mother, and leaves without trying to get her to return.  Storm was wrong to recruit other people, especially people of color, into a project they may not share: that’s Pak’s point, and Ororo’s realization that she blew it drives the story.

Burke asks not only for figures of survival, for story arcs involving pathos and pain, but for figures of Black women’s power as such. Dickey’s Astonishing X-Men: Storm fails because “many images of Black women other than Storm in this series are negative.” [76] Pak and Ibañez’s Storm (2014) reveals “several positive aspects of the character”; she displays sexual agency and cares for children without becoming either a jezebel or a mammy. [84] Still, she chooses to care for mutants, and for the Earth, rather than attending to “her people.” [64] “Because Storm is Black, working with the X-Men is repressive because she is supporting the very status quo that is oppressing her as a Black woman.” [88] She should, she must, overthrow that status quo instead: anything less is containment, or complicity.

Here Burke makes not so much an argument against particular portrayals of Storm but an argument that Black characters, perhaps any nonwhite characters, or disabled characters, or even trans characters, should not be superheroes at all: protection against external, criminal, and science fictional threats (what superheroes normally provide) is at worst betrayal, at best inadequate. Storm “is not a threat to white America,” and she should be. [130] Fictional heroes with exceptional powers who belong to subaltern groups should either overthrow that status quo themselves, or work directly for its overthrow, or else work primarily within their group.  X-comics have heroes, and anti-heroes, and villains, who try to do so: Sunfire quits the X-Men (more than once) to protect Japan; Magneto wants to protect all, and only, mutants. But Storm wants to protect, where she can, her friends, her students, and then the whole world, including mutants and humans, Kenya and Mexico and Quebec and Detroit.  On the one hand, Burke writes,  “Storm is not ‘free’ and she likely never will be until she is re-envisioned by Black female creators,” as she should be. [127] On the other hand, “in the comics, Storm is given the space to find love, fight for her Black community, and make decisions… in a way that is almost unimaginable for the film version.” [114] That’s Burke’s verdict, too: maybe that has to be enough.

Stephanie Burt is a Professor of English at Harvard University

 

Meet the Quadrinhopédia, a Brazilian Comics Biographical Dictionary Database

 by Lucio Luiz

Quadrinhopédia is an independent database dedicated to publishing biographies of artists, writers, editors, journalists, researchers, comic shop owners, curators of events, and other professionals who are involved in Brazilian comics. Its name refers to the term “Quadrinhos,” which means comics in Brazilian Portuguese. Each entry is linked to a classification, or Terminologia, so one can search for all editors, for example.

The site debuted on May 10, 2023 with 850 entries, but with the intention of adding new bios and expanding existing ones. The main inspiration was the Dutch Lambiek Comiclopedia.However, I’ve chosen to order alphabetically by given name is because, culturally, in Brazil, it is more common for people to call each other, even famous people, this way (when someone will look for Mauricio de Sousa, for example, rarely will look for "Sousa, Mauricio de" unless it's an academic work). I know that the formally correct practice is to alphabetize using surname, but I pondered what would be easier for Brazilian readers in general and I took some other Brazilian cultural encyclopedias’ practices as a model. However, I’m planning an Anglophone page with a list by family name parallel to the main list as a cross-reference.

 

The site also features Brazilian artists who work with American comics, such as Mike Deodato (one of the first Brazilian to became famous in US in the 1990s, and whose father Deodato Borges was one of the great names in Brazilian comics), Ed Benes, Adriana Melo, Ivan Reis, Rafael Albuquerque, Rod Reis, Gabriel Bá, Fábio Moon, Cris Peter, and several others -- there are a lot of Brazilians working in North American comics.

And the opposite is also true, with the inclusion of artists who were born in other countries, but developed a large part of their career in Brazil, such as André LeBlanc (Haitian), Eugenio Colonnese (Italian), Rodolfo Zalla (Argentine), Jayme Cortez (Portuguese) and Malika Dahil (Moroccan), to name just a few.

 

The information comes from several sources: books, websites, newspapers, interviews and, in several cases, asking the artists directly. One thing about the Brazilian comics community is that, in general, there is great support and contact between artists, even between the "big" and "small" ones (for lack of a better expression).

I've been a Wikipedia editor since 2005 and have written more than a thousand articles related to Brazilian comics on the Portuguese Wikipedia (and a few also on the English and French Wikipedias). In Wikipedia, there is a (necessary) rigidity regarding the sources. However, many artists have sources that I know are reliable, but not according to Wikipedia's rules, so with Quadrinhopédia I have a little more "freedom" (but without giving up accuracy in research, which is something I take very seriously).

I'm the only person working on the site. The first 850 entries from the "debut," I have developed over the last four years in my spare time. But less than a week after the site launched, several people have already contacted me willing to collaborate. I was initially in doubt if it was worth publishing the site this way, but I realized that the chance of having collaborators would be greater if it already presented a "starting point."

This is not the first study of local creators of course. In Brazil, the first work that sought to compile biographies of comic artists was the book Enciclopédia dos Quadrinhos (Encyclopedia of Comics), written by journalist Goida and published by L&PM in 1990. The book had an updated edition in 2011 (this time with André Kleinert as co-author) with 536 pages and around 1,500 entries of comic artists from all over the world.

Between 1997 and 2004 there was a website, Gibindex, which had an encyclopedia of comic artists (from Brazil and abroad) with about 600 entries. It was created by historian Rubens AMSF, but today it can only be accessed through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine capture of it as it went offline in 2005. https://web.archive.org/web/20050211065132/http://www.gibindex.com/ *

More recently, in 2022, Noir published the book Grande Dicionário do Quadrinho Brasileiro (Great Dictionary of Brazilian Comics), by Gutemberg Cruz, focused on Brazilian comic book characters, with 416 pages and 1,035 entries.

On the internet, the main Brazilian database is Guia dos Quadrinhos (Guide of Comics) inaugurated in 2007 with information on all comic publications in Brazil, including data such as covers, authors, characters, original editions (in the case of Brazilian publications of international comics), etc. This site is collaborative and has more than a thousand users.

Quadrinhopédia, however, follows the Comiclopedia philosophy of not being open to wiki-style editing. Suggestions for correction or inclusion of new entries go through a team of researchers before being published.

The main objective of Quadrinhopédia is to help preserve and rescue the memory of Brazilian comics, in addition to promoting past and present artists in a completely democratic way.

 *Editor's note - this paragraph on Gibindex was added at the request of the author on May 23, 2023

 

Book Review: Drawling Liberalism: Herblock’s Political Cartoons in Postwar America

 Reviewed by Christina M. Knopf

Simon Appleford. Drawling Liberalism: Herblock’s Political Cartoons in Postwar America. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2023.  https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/5814/     

The political cartoons of Herbert Lawrence Block, professionally known as“Herblock,” influenced leaders, shaped political discourse, and had a lasting impact on public memory. Herblock’s career, Simon Appleford notes, “lasted seventy-two years and encompassed the presidencies of thirteen men, from Herbert Hoover to George W. Bush” (1-2). Born in 1909 in Chicago, Block worked there and then in Cleveland as an editorial cartoonist until joining the Army in World War II. Following his discharge, he worked for the Washington Post for an amazing 55 years until his death in 2001. Appleford claims in Drawing Liberalism that Herblock was a significant advocate for, and voice of, postwar liberalism – one that is largely neglected in scholarly attention to liberal intellectuals of the era. Drawing Liberalism thus focuses on “how Block’s cartoon’s [sic] reflected and shaped liberalism in the domestic sphere” (15).

The book is organized into six chapters, prefaced by a brief introduction, and followed by a short epilogue. Forty-three Herblock cartoons illustrate the chapters, assisting readers’ understanding of Herblock’s style. The introduction establishes the significance of political cartooning in history and public discourse, while providing a brief overview of some of their rhetorical features. However, comics studies and political communication scholars with keen interests in the visual and rhetorical devices employed by cartoonists will find uneven attention to those features in the rest of the book. Appleford is a historian whose focus is on Herblock’s articulation of, and contribution to, postwar liberal ideology, not an art historian.

The first chapter provides a brief biography, outlining Herblock’s journey to the Washington Post in 1946, highlighting the influences and experiences that shaped Herblock’s politics and artistry. Chapter 2 focuses on Herblock’s work throughout the Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s. Appleford introduces the chapter as one that “examines the visual devices that Block used to persuade his audience” that the fearmongering of anti-Communists was as much a threat to the country as Communist subversion. Some of the “visual devices” discussed include Herblock’s use of sports metaphors, allusions to Greek mythology, everyday scenarios with which readers could identify, and his development of the character of Mr. Atom – an anthropomorphic atom bomb. Appleford further identifies three categories of Herblock cartoons that represented threats to Americans’ civil liberties: cartoons that depicted the House Un-AmericanActivities Committee (HUAC) as vacuous and vindictive; cartoons that depicted HUAC members as overzealous and malicious; and, cartoons that depicted HUAC “in activities that struck against the very symbols of American democracy” (61). Indeed, as Appleford discusses in the chapter, Herblock is largely credited with coining the term “McCarthyism” after Senator Joe McCarthy, who he drew with a “thug-like, almost Neanderthal depiction [that] would become a recurring theme” (69) of Herblock’s characterization of opponents to civil liberties and civil rights.

In chapter 3, Appleford examines Herblock’s handling of segregation and racial violence, arguing that “Block identified the fight for African American rights as one of the most important social and political movements of the mid-twentieth century,” (16) – but one in which he was more concerned about white intolerance and bigotry than the Black experience. Appleford writes, “By privileging the actions of white elites […] at the expense of other participants – most notably of the African American community but also of women and children – Block gave his readers a significantly distorted picture” of events (87) – but he also brought the ideal of racial equality as fundamental to American values “to the attention of a much larger audience than might otherwise have been exposed to ideas of liberal intellectuals” (90). And the white Southerners drawn in Herblock’s cartoons took on the signature thug-like appearance that he used for depicting enemies of liberalism.

Chapter 4 argues that Herblock’s “cartoons serviced as proxies in the early stages of a national debate over the so-called culture wars that has characterized much of American political discourse for the past fifty years” (16). It begins with Herblock’s response to the Kennedy assassination and the hostility with which an anti-gun cartoon was received by many readers – which Appleford describes as a reflection of the early stages of the “culture wars.” The chapter then looks at Herblock’s cartoons during the Kennedy years, noting that the artist “drew inspiration from the self-styled rhetoric of the campaign” to depict Kennedy as “a courageous pioneer or clean-cut cowboy” (120). The reader is left to fill-in-the-blank, that such imagery reflected Kennedy’s use of the frontier metaphor. The chapter also examines Herblock’s disparagement of the right-wing John Birch Society and Daughters of the Revolution, where he again used his thuggish depictions to suggest the “presumed lack of education and propensity for violence” (127) of their members. Appleford connects such imagery to Herblock’s belief in an urban majority as more representative of American ideals than the rural minority, with which he connected a conservative ideology that was antithetical to American democracy,

Chapter 5 is concerned with Herblock’s lackluster response to the emergence of the New Left in the 1960s – one that “failed to give any legitimacy to protest movements” (16). Here, discussion turns again to Herblock’s handling of civil rights and his tendency to privilege the actions of, and impact on, whites. Appleford also discusses Herblock’s relative lack of attention to women’s rights issues as “a reflection of postwar liberalism’s own lack of interest in the questions [compared to] civil rights” (165). Appleford further notes Herblock’s reliance on the major tropes of “dangerous seductress, innocent victim, or as a symbol of American values” (167) – though such visual metaphors were infrequently related to women’s issues or civil rights, such as the Vietnam War caricatured and embodied as the mistress of the Lyndon Johnson administration. Overall, Appleford demonstrates in this chapter that Herblock’s lack of representation for women’s and other rights-based movements that emerged in the 1960s suggested an unwillingness to engage with critiques of “the patriarchal institutions and cultural practices of postwar liberalism” (169).

The final chapter focuses on the subject with which Herblock is most strongly connected in public memory – his portrayals of Richard Nixon. Appleford seeks to show how Herblock’s cartoons were pivotal in defining the public perception of Nixon, transforming him from a young congressman considered handsome and principled, “into an archetype of corruption, a chameleon whose position on the issues of the day changed based solely on political expediency, and whose features became synonymous with the abuse of power” (16). Throughout the chapter, Appleford frequently discusses the prominent “5 o'clock shadow” in Herblock’s caricature of Nixon – one that was a controversial point of contention for the president and his supporters. It is, however, almost by accident in passing that Appleford recognizes that the darkened face visually represents “the darker side of Nixon’s character” (206). Other common depictions of Nixon by Herblock as a vulture or undertaker and as a man who wore many masks. Perhaps the most insightful part of the chapter is Appleford’s exploration of Herblock’s cartoon coverage of Watergate, for which Herblock frequently used water imagery. Washington Post owner Katherine Graham noted that Herblock’s cartoons were well ahead of the news on understanding the significance of the Watergate break-in, and Herblock worked closely with reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in making sense of the investigation.

The book’s epilogue briefly examines some of Herblock’s post-Nixon work to underscore Herblock’s lifelong commitment to democracy by using his pen to pressure the people and the government to “do the right thing.”

Throughout the book’s 234 pages, Appleford considers the ways in which Herblock “was attempting to tread the fine line between caricature and stereotype” (41). He rarely depicted African Americans in his cartoons – and some of those depictions relied on minstrel Black face features and some only showed the characters from the back. He also typically depicted women in traditional gender roles, as faces in a crowd, as members of a family, or in gender-appropriate professions such as teacher or nurse. Appleford particularly notes Herblock’s use of literary and pop-cultural allusions: Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass. Snow White. The Wizard of Oz. Poltergeist. Harvard University’s alma mater “Fair Harvard" (although Block never finished college). Readers would be well-advised to look through the end notes for additional insights.

Appleford deftly weaves the work of Herblock into the larger political history of the United States. As such, the book may be a great resource to any scholar looking to better understand the zeitgeist of postwar America. One weakness for classroom or reference use, however, is that chapters do not use subheadings to help organize or clarify the different topics or themes encompassed in each.

In the book’s focus on Herblock as an intellectual of postwar liberalism, Appleford is very successful. He carefully situates and explains the arguments advanced by Herblock in relation to other liberal thinkers of the time. Some attention to other cartoonists of the era might have also been informative, especially when Appleford presents perspectives on Herblock’s engagement, or lack of, with particular topics and imagery, to offer readers a sense of whether Herblock’s handling of these was unique or not. Nonetheless, readers are sure to gain a new understanding of the current political milieu through Appleford’s history. His attention to not only Herblock’s arguments, but also to the controversy they generated provides historical perspective on present day partisanship within the culture wars.

 

Christina M. Knopf, PhD is a Professor & Presentation Skills Coordinator in the Communication and Media Studies Department of SUNY Cortland.

Book review: Asian Political Cartoons by John A. Lent

reviewed by Matt Wuerker

John. A. Lent. Asian Political Cartoons. University Press of Mississippi, 2023. https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/A/Asian-Political-Cartoons

At the risk of revealing my own shallow occidental ethnocentrism, I have to say that I was largely ignorant of the cartoon culture of Asia.  I have always had the general idea that cartooning was something that was particular to Europe, especially England and France, but also Spain, Germany and Italy.

It’s true that what we in the west think of as the political cartoon did come out of Europe.  But, like meat pies, macaroni, and beer, cartooning spread from there through colonial expansion to other parts of the world.  Some of those colonial territories were very fertile ground for this crude, yet very powerful and popular form of art, I think of South America in particular.  But I always suffered from the mistaken notion that Asia was largely not taken with the idea of political commentary in the form of exaggerated drawing combined with humorous word bubbles.  John Lent’s new book “Asian Political Cartoons” shows me how wrong that impression was.

In 300 mostly-color and beautifully-laid-out pages Lent takes us deep into the rich and culturally complicated history of the political cartoon in a part of the world that has seen staggering and tumultuous political change over the last century.

While all these cultures enjoyed unique traditions of their own in the visual arts, the arrival of the colonial powers introduced the novel and odd European concept that political dissent can be expressed in funny pictures and distributed in penny sheets and humor magazines.  In China for instance suddenly there were China Punch, Shanghai Charivari, and Shanghai Puck all imitating their Western antecedents.  The simple power of thumbing your nose at power and authority with arresting caricatures and graphic exaggeration has an innate appeal.  It spread quickly.

Ironically enough as Chinese nationalism and the struggle against colonial occupation started to build this same graphic form was turned against the imperialists, and not just those from the West.

Political cartoons don’t always use humor, but instead can express deadly serious outrage. In the war with the Japanese Chinese political cartoonists marshaled their craft to contribute to the war effort.  Lent shows how these cartoonists melded their classical Chinese ink drawing styles with more Western cartoon imagery to create devastating war propaganda posters.

The Philippine cartoonists also used a similar kind of jujitsu and turned this colonial art form against those that would colonize them.  First sharpening their pens on their nineteenth century Spanish occupiers, they then turned their fire on their twentieth century American occupiers.

Philippine nationalists used satirical magazines, often graced with cartoons on their front covers to lambast those who had colonized them as well lampoon their own compatriots who were going along with and embracing being colonized.

 Another country among the dozens Lent examines is Bangladesh, one that I had the pleasure of visiting myself about 10 years ago.  Despite attempts by the parliament to introduce blasphemy laws that would punish any images deemed unsuitable by the Islamic mullahs, the Bangladeshis enjoy a thriving and very industrious cartoon community. Beyond popular printed magazines like Unmad they’ve also built a home and a platform on social media that includes great animation work. When I visited back in 2013, I especially enjoyed getting to know many of the bright lights in Dhaka, especially Nasreen Sultana Mitu, Tanmoy, and Mehedi Haque.

 Lent also shines a light on the struggles that many Asian cartoonists face as those in power attempt to intimidate and censor them.  The fight for freedom of speech in Asia has been tough… and continues.  Authoritarians of all stripes really don’t appreciate political satire.  From Mao to Suharto, to the current leadership in China, Malaysia, and Singapore, as well as religious fundamentalist movements throughout the region, censorship, jail time, and threats of violence can be the cost of creating political cartoons. Over the years many brave cartoonists have taken great risks to stand up for the ”freedom to cartoon.”  In recent times and despite the best efforts of those in power to shut them up cartoonists like Wang Liming (Rebel Pepper) and Badiucao in China, Zunar and Fahmi Reza, Kanika Mishra in India, among many others, have kept up the fight.

As the book ranges all across Asia, it also highlights the five decades that Lent has dedicated to studying and chronicling the cartoon culture across the continent.  He’s met and personally knows many of the prominent practitioners, as well as many of the new generation.  It’s a grand tour through cartoon territory not very well known by many of us.  A journey well worth taking.

Wuerker is a practicing cartoonist for Politico, and has won the Pulitzer, Berryman and Herblock awards/prizes.

Book review: Blockheads, Beagles, and Sweet Babboos: New Perspectives on Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts

reviewed by Chris York

Michelle Ann Abate. Blockheads, Beagles, and Sweet Babboos: New Perspectives on Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts. University of Mississippi Press, 2023. https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/B/Blockheads-Beagles-and-Sweet-Babboos

 It is difficult to overstate impact of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, both on the American comic strip and, more broadly, on international popular culture. Regardless of the metric—critical acclaim, financial success, longevity, franchise recognition—Schulz is inarguably one of the greatest American comic strip creators. Michelle Ann Abate notes, however, that scholarship regarding Schulz has been relatively limited considering the magnitude of his contribution. Her new volume adds to this growing corpus and, in many ways, it is a welcome addition.

 Blockheads, Beagles, and Sweet Babboos approaches the core cast of Peanuts from unfamiliar perspectives in order to yield, in Abate’s words, “new critical insights about the composition as well as the aesthetics of Peanuts” (9). The first chapter is devoted to Schulz, himself, while each subsequent chapter focuses on a specific Peanuts character: Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, Franklin, Woodstock, and Linus (A complete list of chapter titles in provided below). Abate’s approaches vary from an exploration of Charles Schulz’s essential tremor to a correlation of Lucy Van Pelt with Lucille Ball, and from an analysis of Charlie Brown’s iconic shirt to some thoughts on the origin of Woodstock’s name.

 Despite these wide-ranging analyses, the book is most successful when it concentrates on the composition of Peanuts. The chapter “Franklin and Pig-Pen: The Aesthetics of Blackness and Dirt,” for example, compares Schulz’s rendering of Franklin, for a long time the strip’s only non-white character, with Pig-Pen, a character known for his inability to stay clean. The simplicity of his composition has always been a hallmark of Schulz’s greatness, but Abate points out the challenges such simplicity can pose when differentiating between characters. Discussions of Franklin have long centered around representation and whether the inclusion of Franklin (first introduced to the strip in 1968) was a positive step toward breaking down racial barriers or whether it was just another instance of tokenism. Abate gives attention to this debate, but the chapter’s real focus is the techniques Schulz used to identify Franklin as non-white. At times, she notes, the shading technique he employs is similar to the way he illustrates Pig-Pen’s dirty face. The visual similarities between the two characters, Abate argues, recalls a correlation between blackness and dirtiness that has long existed in American culture.

 Other instances when she focuses on Schulz’s composition are also compelling. Early representations of Lucy Van Pelt, Abate argues, bear a striking resemblance to Lucille Ball, whose sitcom “I Love Lucy” made her one of the most popular and recognizable celebrities of the 1950s, the decade in which Peanuts launched. Abate makes this comparison particularly compelling by focusing on Lucy Van Pelt’s eyes, which were initially drawn differently than every other Peanuts character, and seem to mimic the wide-eyed, startled look that was one of Lucille Ball’s signatures. Abate also analyzes Charlie Brown’s iconic shirt design as a triangle wave. Musical elements play a significant role in Peanuts, largely through the character of Schroeder, but Abate suggests that reading Charlie Brown’s shirt as a triangle wave engages him in the rich aural dimensions of Peanuts.

 The epilogue explores Schulz’s legacy by focusing on the echos of Peanuts in Alison Bechdel’s Dykes To Watch Out For. Although Abate notes that Bechdel never cited Schulz as a direct influence, the similarities between Schulz’s Linus Van Pelt and Bechdel’s Mo Testa, including clothing that is often horizontally striped, are compelling. The fact that Bechdel never consciously acknowledged Schulz as an influence only seems to reinforce how ubiquitous his impact has been on the American comic strip.

 At times, however, Abate’s explorations are less successful. She devotes her first chapter, for instance, to a discussion of Schulz’s essential tremor, which manifested in the early 1980s and led to his increasingly unsteady lines in Peanuts. His disability is, as she notes, a largely ignored element within Peanuts criticism. As such, Abate’s willingness to engage in this discussion is, in itself, valuable. For much of the chapter, though, she seems to be in search of something meaningful to say. She outlines, for example, the history of disability rights in the United States and notes that this history is largely concurrent with the fifty-year run of Peanuts. However, for Peanuts’ first thirty years, Schulz was not affected by essential tremor, and he never introduced disabled characters into his strip, so the concurrence Abate identifies leads her to no significant revelations. She does argue that viewing the strip through the lens of the disability “changes the way that we view, engage, and interpret it,” and while this is an intriguing claim, she rarely moves beyond generalization to draw more concrete conclusions about engagement and interpretation (30).

 Despite some inconsistencies, though, Blockheads, Beagles, and Sweet Babboos is a useful addition to the critical literature of Peanuts. Abate’s approaches yield some interesting insights and illustrate that there is still much to be said about one of the world’s most popular and critically acclaimed comic strips.

 

Table of Contents:

Introduction. Character Studies: The Peanuts Gang, Reconsidered.

Chapter 1: “Sometimes My Hand Shakes So Much I Have to Hold My Wrist to Draw:” Charles M. Schulz and Disability.

Chapter 2: What’s the Frequency, Charlie Brown? Sound Waves, Music, and the Zigzag Shirt.

Chapter 3: “Why Can’t I Have a Normal Dog Like Everyone Else?” Snoopy as Canine — and Feline.

Chapter 4: I Love Lucy: The Fussbudget and the First Lady of Sitcoms.

Chapter 5: Franklin and Pig-Pen: The aesthetics of Blackness and Dirt.

Chapter 6: Chirping ‘Bout My Generation: Woodstock, Youth Culture, and Innocence.

Epilogue: Peanuts to Watch Out For: Linus van Pelt, Alison Bechdel, and the Legacy of Charles M. Schulz.