Entries Tagged 'cartoons' ↓

Although I find reasons to criticize most of it, I’m a pop culture fan—and a fan of anything that gets people to understand our world a little better, regardless of the format—so it will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that I’m enthusiastic about this graphic adaptation of The 9/11 Report, which was published a couple of weeks ago to little fanfare but which apparently has been enjoying excellent sales.

The book boasted an initial print run of 60,000 copies, and has gone back for additional printings of 20,000. And like its original source material, which was published two years ago, the adaptation has made the New York Times bestseller list, debuting at No. 6 in the paperback nonfiction category.

Veteran children’s comic book writers Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón, who are both in their mid-seventies, are my new heroes. Having spent their 50-year career doing work-for-hire, they made a fascinating discovery (interestingly, one that has not been mentioned anywhere in the hysteria over ABC’s The Path to 9/11) and ran with it:

one of Jacobson’s biggest paydays is coming from a property that he had absolutely no hand in creating. As a work of the U.S. government, the 9/11 report falls in the public domain, a fact discovered by Colón when he read a news story about director Ron Howard’s effort to turn the report into a film. [emphasis added]

(Memo to Bill Clinton, Esq.: The Report is in the public domain, which means anyone has the right to publish it. And toy with it.)

Anyway, the writers took the 567-page report and, in 16 months, condensed it down to 131 comic-book pages:

As expected, the project has its critics:

[S]ome critics of the adaptation argue the medium is an inappropriate venue for such a sensitive topic.

In particular, they’ve taken umbrage with Colón’s use of “Blamm!” in big red letters in a panel showing American Airlines Flight 77 crashing into the Pentagon.

Indeed, I can see that this is not for all tastes:

But Commission co-chairs Hamilton and Kean both endorsed the project after noting that it was serious and faithful to the Report. And Hamilton noted the most important reason for endorsing it: graphic novels reach a different audience—one we especially need to reach.

“It also opens the report up to a whole new audience that doesn’t read much anymore.” [emphasis added]

Oh—and Stan Lee loves it too:

“Never before have I seen a non-fiction book as beautifully and compellingly written and illustrated as The 9/11 Report, A Graphic Adaptation. I cannot recommend it too highly. It will surely set the standard for all future works of contemporary history, graphic or otherwise, and should be required reading in every home, school and library.”

Next up for Colon and Jacobson: a graphic adaptation of the war on terror, based on news reports.

via the Sandmonkey

Recently, British Jews marked a milestone: 350 years of continuous coexistence with their gentile hosts and neighbors. (You can read a brief account of the Jews’ turbulent history in Britain here.)

Even after three and a half centuries, however, it is still an uneasy coexistence. Here’s a recent cartoon from the Guardian that portrays Jews bashing children in the face while they swat away pesky terrorist insects:

Oops! I guess cartoonist Martin Rowson meant that it’s Israelis who are bashing children.

“Yesterday’s cartoon [above] on page 29 (Comment) portrayed Israeli military action in Lebanon in the form of a mailed fist with Stars of David as knuckle-dusters. By failing to identify them in a specifically Israeli form - such as in the colours of the flag - the point the cartoon was making might have been interpreted as implicating Judaism rather than the Israeli government in the present conflict. That was not the intention, and we are sorry if anyone saw it that way.”

Dear Jewish readers: gird your loins for the Jew-baiting to come. Dark days ahead.

To broaden the appeal of the Superman remake to global audiences, the screenwriters have also remade the superhero’s image and motto. It is now:

“Truth, justice, and…all of that stuff.”
Jeanne Wolf spoke to Mike Dougherty and Dan Harris:

Mike: “When it comes to “the American way,” that’s tricky.”
Dan: “I don’t think ‘the American way’ means what it meant in 1945.”
Mike: “He’s not just for Metropolis, and not just for America.”
Dan: “He’s an alien, from Krypton; he has come to Earth to be kind of a savior for this world, not our country … And he has no papers.”
Mike: “What would happen with the immigration laws we have now?”
Dan: “I’d like to see someone kick him out!”

Not just in our name, Supe!

(via The World Newser)

That pop culture thing I was talking about has inherent dangers.

In Slate, Richard Morgan remarks on “a new wave of anti-American pop culture.” He focuses on one Turkish film, Valley of the Wolves: Iraq, “a military thriller about an elite Turkish intelligence officer who near-single-handedly smites a group of reckless U.S. soldiers who make Abu Ghraib look like a Sunday picnic.”

As the flick takes a sharp turn toward fiction, one of the 11 Turks in the 2003 debacle commits suicide to regain his warrior honor. His suicide note is sent to Polat Alemdar, the Turkish intelligence officer who stars in the Valley of the Wolves television show. Alemdar heads to Iraq to find U.S. Special Forces Cmdr. Sam William Marshall (played by Billy Zane), who, in his role as a self-described “peacekeeper of God,” is busy leading a massacre of machine-gun fire on unsuspecting civilians at an Iraqi wedding. Survivors are sent to a facility where a Jewish-American doctor (played by Gary Busey) pulls out human hearts with Mengelian apathy and sells them to aristocrats in London, New York, and Tel Aviv. When one of the American soldiers expresses concern that a truckful of Iraqi civilians are packed in too tight to breathe, a fellow soldier stops the car and bullet-soaks the trailer and its human cargo. “I was making sure they could breathe,” he quips, pointing to the holes in the truck.

Sounds like Rambo. Here’s how one of the screenwriters describes the context—it’s payback:

“For years, we, the people of this area, Turks, Arabs, Iranians, Russians, or people further away, such as Vietnamese and Chinese, were always characterized as bad in Hollywood movies,” Bahadir Ozdener, one of the writers for Valley of the Wolves: Iraq, told me. “We are accustomed to this, we do not show any social reactions to this, and we just watch them as movies and place them in our movie archives. We think that democratic societies should get accustomed to being shown as bad people because of what they have done.”

On the other hand, as Charles Paul Freund reminded us when a reality TV war broke out in the Middle East in the summer of 2003 (over the contestants on the show Superstar), the overall effect of pop culture is to lower the temperature under simmering conflicts.

as fan-based cultural identity grows in the region, it expresses itself in terms of the area’s traditional nationalist or sectarian divisions, engendering group enmity and suspicion. The effect of commercial culture, however, is to dissipate conflict by lowering the stakes. Modernist identities (drawing on such influences as fandom) are fluid and changeable; the resulting communities of interest are numerous and temporary.

It’s a third-rate documentary, which I went to see at the NYC Ethical Culture Society screening last week. I’ll let blogger Dean Esmay describe it:

Once upon a time, in faraway land called Afghanistan, the pious young prince bin Laden joined with the oily American hegemonic empire to fight Atheist-Red-Devil-Communism. Young prince bin Laden won the battle and saved us from communism! After this victory, he and his band of mujahideen became outlaws, had some bold adventures and battled their new archenemy, evil hegemonic America, now led by dark Lord George Bush. The decadent Americans, drunk on IPOs and rock music, were blind to the inevitable results of their sins. The 9/11 attacks were the wages of those sins. America demanded revenge and now the battle rages on, from the pixie dust Afghani pipeline to the dusty souks of occupied Iraq. This war will never stop until America admits the error of its oily-imperialist-colonialist ways. America must now repent - we must buy the hearts and minds of oppressed Arabs, Muslims and pious non-decadent folk around the world. Only then shall the world know peace.

I have to say: I don’t know how Christopher Hitchens does it. He is a trouper. He showed up (stone cold sober, for those who are interested) to debate Eric Margolis, who was infuriating.

I fled the auditorium during Margolis’s second rant, when he said that the Iraq war was about protecting Israel and about getting Iraq’s oil.

at the Daily Kos, where both the cartoonist whose work you see above and “Grand Moff Texan,” quoted below, know whom to blame for the fact that Yale decided not to hire Juan Cole for a position he was unqualified for**:

I have a problem with the fact that Yale decided not to hire someone because a bunch of Israel-first, rightwing flacks went and scared Yale’s Jewish donors, and they in turn scared administrators at Yale.

That’s three groups of people right there who need to reconsider what country they live in.

**from Hit and Run:

The thing is that Yale was probably looking for someone with more academic weight, and on that front Cole is as light as a baby’s conscience. His last book was published in 2002, on Iraq’s Shiites, and his output in the past three years has mainly been chapters in books and some articles, several on the rather marginal topic of the Bahai faith.

Cole did himself no favors by failing to see the dividing line between the two worlds–academia and the foul vale of Net disputation–in which he navigates.

The Post had 8 pages on the story of the day. If you can get your hands on the dead-tree version, do so. (If you have a sense of humor, that is.)

The paper was an orgy of comic-book bloodlust. They ran one photograph—a thumbnail of Zarqawi’s dead face, with the headline “Rest in Pieces“—in five different places. I can’t find it online and I’m in dial-up hell, so I won’t spend too much time looking.

Here are the headlines:

EVIL ZARQAWI BLOWN TO HELL

ZARQAWI, KA-POWEE: TERRORIST ON TOAST

ABU MUSAB AL-CORPSE

OSAMA IS SHAKING IN HIS BOOTS, SAYS BLAIR

US STOKED MYTH TO DIVIDE & CONQUER
FIEND’S FINAL SLEEP HELPING PUT HERO GI’S TORMENT TO REST

MIKE: IT’S A ‘MESSAGE’ TO ALL THUGS

OIL DROPS ON DEATH OF ZARQAWI

‘OUR HAPPIEST DAY’

LUST FOR POWER & BLOOD TURNED PETTY THUG INTO MASS-SLAYING JIHAD …
SECRETS OF THE DOOM RAIDERS
BOMB MASTER EYED AS NEXT TERROR BOSS

Unlike, say, the Brits, who revel in deflating the high and mighty,

(from the “Satirical London” exhibit at the Museum of London)

certain people in Lebanon don’t have a sense of humor.

Several thousand Hizbullah supporters took to the streets of Beirut’s southern suburbs late Thursday night, burning tires and blocking roads in protest against a television comedy show that impersonated the group’s leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. The trouble began shortly after the LBCI TV show “Bass Mat Watan” aired a skit in which an actor impersonated Nasrallah, wearing the trademark black turban and sporting a similar beard and spectacles.

Apparently, the TV show is like Saturday Night Live. Here, via Tim Cavanaugh, is an account of the skit in question:

In the scene that provoked the riot, a woman — played by a man in drag — asks Nasrallah whether Hizbullah would lay down its arms after Israel’s withdraws from the disputed border region of Shabaa.

Nasrallah replies that Hizbullah’s weapons will still be needed for “liberating the house of Abu Hassan in Detroit from his Jewish neighbor.”

Nasrallah is being mocked for his obsession with blaming Israel for everying. On Lebanese TV. Sweet.

Alan Riding, in writing up the “Satirical London” exhibit for the New York Times, noted that “religious hypocrisy, extremes of wealth and poverty, out-of-touch politicians, enslavement to fashion, obsession with gadgetry” have been the subjects of satire in England, and the targets were “lawyers, doctors, soldiers, clergymen, intellectuals, even shopkeepers. All apparently merited deflating for the power they wielded.”

As to the significance of satire in our own era:

In an atmosphere of growing religious intolerance and social conformity, sustained by fear, political correctness and electoral apathy, satire can probably aid democracy by stretching the limits of the acceptable. That this may offend is precisely its value. Satire should disturb as well as amuse.

It is not always possible. In dictatorships it can be positively foolish to mock rulers, although satire can sometimes be disguised as parody or allegory. And in many parts of the world there is no tradition of questioning authority through wit or caricature; in such countries two preferred targets, religious and political power, are usually taboo for satirists.

The trend of making (and using) movies (”documentaries”) to take down (or promote) politicians and/or their causes continues apace. I first wrote about this here, and then wrote about it here and here and here (and here, where the subject

is my least favorite potential candidate for 2008, who is using this tool to great effect: for publicity).

Here’s a new one about Tom DeLay, produced (it seems) by Robert Greenwald, creator of OutFoxed. Advance coverage here and here.

People will catch on to the trend sooner or later. It will be left to audiences to decide when the “documentarians” are lying to kick it.***

————-

***lie to kick it: When someone tells lies or stories to fit in with the crowd.

from the brilliant Bruce McCall, on the cover of the New Yorker

(May 8, 2006)

Gawker reports:

According to South Park’s website, the new episode for Wednesday will tackle Fake Writer James Frey’s historic appearance on Oprah

Back in February, when I began publishing this blog, my first post was about the Frey affair, and about Oprah’s public flaying of the sinner. (It was breathtaking television.) The South Park boys seem to be pulling out all the stops: the Muhammad cartoons, Tom Cruise, and now Saint Oprah. I’ll be watching.

Look for this comic book series to have a huge impact on the culture war–and the entire culture.

The New York Times wrote about this in February:

America’s current real-world political issues will wind themselves into the lives of the heroes of Marvel Comics in “Civil War,” a seven-issue limited monthly series set to begin in May. In the series, the beliefs of many well-known Marvel characters, including Captain America, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man and Spider-Man, will be challenged….

The story opens with a reckless fight between a novice group of heroes (filming a reality television show) and a cadre of villains. The battle becomes quite literally explosive, killing some of the superheroes and many innocent bystanders. That crystallizes a government movement to register all super-powered beings as living weapons of mass destruction. The subsequent Registration Act will divide the heroes into two camps, one led by Captain America, the other by Iron Man. Along the way, Marvel will unveil its version of Guantánamo Bay, enemy combatants, embedded reporters and more. The question at the heart of the series is a fundamental one: “Would you give up your civil liberties to feel safer in the world?”

I recently attended a public reading–the subject was politics and culture in the last, say, 50 years–at which the moderator asked a twenty-something panelist: “What are you willing to die for?”

His answer wasn’t memorable. Literally: I don’t remember it. The question did haunt me, however. As it haunted my twenty-something companions.

That is why I’m more optimistic than Wretchard. But I share his views on the importance of the information war.

Pop culture is a powerful weapon in our arsenal.

We all knew that Matt Parker and Trey Stone weren’t going to let things rest when they were muscled by Tom Cruise (who won the battle I wrote about here). Well, apparently they’ve come up with a way to connect the dots between the cartoon jihad and Viacom’s caving to pressure from Cruise:

From what I could gather from the cliffhanger ending, South Park creators Matt Parker and Trey Stone have forced Comedy Central to stand at the same crossroads that hundreds of newspapers and periodicals across America stood at not a month ago. Next week they will guest star Mohammed in all of his animated glory, and they have let Muslims know in advance that it’s a-coming.

(from the Officers’ Club, via Michelle Malkin)

Seeing that TV writers Parker and Stone dare to to go where news organizations fear to tread, I see the perfect segue into the best essay I’ve read in the last decade: “In Praise of Vulgarity,” by Charles Paul Freund.

Upshot: Freund argues that pop culture is not only not bad for us; it may be our salvation. I hope to write more about this soon.

Following the Golden Rule of Infotainment–stir up strong emotion–(I’ve never said I’m in favor of it over “straight news,” only that the Constant Infotainment Era is upon us and therefore that we need to get good at spotting agenda-laden infotainment, the better to counter it quickly and effectively when necessary and/or warranted**) one TV network is planning to do America a public service and expose its underside…by planting “Muslim-looking” men in Red America zones (NASCAR races, for example) to see what kind of prejudice they might stir up among the “locals.”

Michelle Malkin quotes an e-mailer who’s soliciting participants for a newsmagazine story:

Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 13:05:54 -0800 (PST)
From: Subject: Looking for Muslim Males to participate in NBC Dateline Segment
…

I have been talking with a producer of the NBC Dateline show and he is in the process of filming a piece on anti-Muslim and anti-Arab discrimination in the USA. They are looking for some Muslim male candidates for their show who would be willing to go to non-Muslim gatherings and see if they attract any
discriminatory comments or actions while being filmed.

They recently taped two turbaned Sikh men attending a football game in Arizona to see how people would treat them. They set them up with hidden microphones and cameras, etc.

They want to do the same thing 2 or 3 other times (in various parts of the USA) with one or two Muslim men in each setting. They are looking for men who actually “look Muslim”. They want a guy with no foreign accent whatsoever, a good thick beard, an outgoing personality, and someone willing to wear a kufi/skullcap during the filming.

They also want someone who is fairly well accomplished and has contributed to American society at large in some meaningful way.

This seems pugnacious–a little proactive on behalf of the Victim du Jour, I mean.
But if these are the new rules of the game, it’s better we be aware of them.

Just about a week before it started to go into rotation in the news cycle, a sharp-eyed Christopher Hitchens had this to say about the term “Islamophobia”:

my attachment to free speech is at least absolute and consistent. Those who incite murder and arson, or who silkily justify it, are incapable of rising above the childish glee that culminates in the assertion that two wrongs make a right.

The silky ones may be more of a problem in the long term than the flagrantly vicious and crazy ones. Within a short while—this is a warning—the shady term “Islamophobia” is going to be smuggled through our customs. Anyone accused of it will be politely but firmly instructed to shut up, and to forfeit the constitutional right to criticize religion. By definition, anyone accused in this way will also be implicitly guilty. Thus the “soft” censorship will triumph, not from any merit in its argument, but from its association with the “hard” censorship that we have seen being imposed over the past weeks. A report ($$) in the New York Times of Feb. 13 was as carefully neutral as could be but nonetheless conveyed the sense of menace. “American Muslim leaders,” we were told, are more canny. They have “managed to build effective organizations and achieve greater integration, acceptance and economic success than their brethren in Europe have. They portray the cartoons as a part of a wave of global Islamophobia and have encouraged Muslim groups in Europe to use the same term.” In other words, they are leveraging worldwide Islamic violence to drop a discreet message into the American discourse. [emphasis added]

Few are as eloquent, and as relentless, as Hitchens on the topic of political speech. Here, he’s alerting us to a brand-new narrative-in-the-making.
—–

** I’ve referred to this as Bernays 101. The “father of PR” said that the most effective way to fight (bad) PR is with more PR.

There are mixed reactions to the march for free expression that took place in London today. The organizers speak eloquently of their own hopes and feelings:

We have started the process of reclaiming this debate for the middle ground. We are replacing a standoff between deport-all-Muslims fascists and Islamofascists with a calm, reasoned dialogue and an insistance on the primacy of freedom of expression that does not produce an instictive allegation of Islamophobia. The people who are not at heart fascists but feel beseiged can move away from the BNP and the religious supremacists, into the middle ground.

It was a victory for tolerance, reason and freedom. If you want to know how badly this hurts the extremists, read some of the comments on this blog. This was just the beginning, but it was a very good beginning.

There is, of course, controversy in the comments section. Some posters estimate there were 600 protesters; other say only 200. A decision by demonstrators to uphold the law and refrain from showing foreign (Danish and American) flags is being hotly debated (as cowardice, and proof that there is no such thing as absolutely free expression) by some posters.

These are good points to discuss, if only because they inspire people to consider the freedoms they have, and don’t have.

One poster thinks the rally was a tactical and PR success:

Anonymous said…

Well done

-The Rally took place.
-Danish flags were allowed as *clothing” (the reason ho foreign flag can be displayed on this square means th UK defends its sovereignty!)
-at least one cartoon was displayed
-BBC reported on it
-there is a new word, toonophobia
-according to estimates about 2000 toonophobes grew a pimple on their back when they heard a cartoon was shown. (unconformed report though - the numbers might be higher.)

5:37 AM

The BBC reported the story and a new word was added to the lexicon. Those count as victories in the information war and in the culture war. “Islamophobia” as a smear is now one-upped by “toonophobia.”

Another poster notes:

Anonymous said…

Small turnout. It’s the beginning, not the end, of the movement for free expression!

4:50 AM

Hepzeeba says: Hear, hear!

The Israeli anti-Semitic Cartoons Contest has received 150 submissions, Art Spiegelman (Maus) is on board as a judge, and galleries around the world have expressed in mounting the exhibition. The show will open in Tel Aviv in a few weeks, according to its sponsors–two young Israelis.

It may be too early to call this a success–detournement is a treacherous business–but the boisterous Jew-baiting of Iranian president Ahmadinejad has met its match in the clever response of these two young Israelis.

This page is worth a read. (One of the sponsors responds to a comment from a 16-year-old girl who is confused and hurt by the contest.)

This comment by another poster gives me hope:

Hello, I´m Lars and I am from Germany.

As I first heard of this website I was a confused because, as you all know, the topic of antisemitism and Holocaust is part of the German history…. But when jews make fun of themselves it is a completely different case. I think it is a really intelligent and smart way to react to the religious fanatism of some muslims who burned flags and embassys all over the world because of a cartoon. And it forstalls the antisemetic Iranian cartoon-campaign and antisemetism in general in a great way.

Hear, hear.

I’m late to the party. I just started reading Democratiya.

Here , writing about the stakes in the Danish Mohammed cartoons “controversy” [!], Andre Glucksmann, anti-totalitarian, reminds us:

“Don’t look away.”

A totalitarian way of thinking loathes to be gainsaid. It affirms dogmatically, and waves the little red, or black, or green book. It is obscurantist, blending politics and religion. Anti-totalitarian thinking, by contrast, takes facts for what they are and acknowledges even the most hideous of them, those one would prefer to keep hidden out of fear or for the sake of utility….

Refusing to face the cruellest historical facts, on the other hand, heralds the return of cruelty….

What is at stake here is not only the freedom of the press, but also the permission to call a spade a spade and a gas chamber an abomination, regardless of our beliefs. What is at stake is the basis of all morality: here on earth the respect due to each individual starts with the recognition and rejection of the most flagrant examples of inhumanity.

Yes.

But people don’t want to know bad news. They would rather be distracted. Let’s not forget: denial works.