08: A Graphic Diary of the Campaign Trail
By Michael Crowley and Dan Goldman
Three Rivers Press

The non-fiction graphic novel has, by most accounts been largely neglected. Those well-received works that have ventured into that world—Maus, Palestine, Perselopis, et al.—have largely been content to bide by independent comics’ fiction with the first-person narrative. This fact takes nothing away from their staggering importance to the medium—all of the above bravely tackled difficult and important issues while bringing comics a new-found level of respect both among the literati and a mainstream readership.

Their fixation with the memoir does, however, point to a seemingly fundamental hang up with the style—illustrated by that troublesome label “graphic novel,” a term which, in its very essence, implies some form of fictionalization, or, at the very least, the sort of first-person storytelling that often designates prose books for the fiction shelves. In a sense, it also points to a problem with scope.

There are few sufficiently educated in the world of sequential art who would argue that the medium presents more limitations its prose counterparts.  But as is often the case, it takes an outsider to shake things up. Michael Crowley’s 08 is hardly the first book to prevent a news-styled piece of graphic non-fiction, but it certainly is a member of a far rarer breed than one might reasonably expect.

Of course Crowley’s position as an outsider has its pluses and minuses. The author, a seasoned reporter for mainstream news outlets like The New Republic and MSNBC, approaches the story of the 2008 presidential campaign trails less as a storyteller than as a news writer. As a result the book reads less like a piece of creative non-fiction than it does a rehashing of the events leading up to the election of Barack Obama. As such, the back cover comparison to Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 seems a bit stretched at best.

Rather the book’s text plays out more like a straight rehash of news cycles. The book, it becomes clear, after the first few pages, is meant to be something of a contemporary time capsule of sorts for those who lived through it. Or perhaps a scrapbook is a more apt comparison—pieces collected together as the events unfolded, a mad dash to both make sense of the events and cobble them together with all deliberate speed so that it might hit stands while the events remained fresh in readers’ minds. And while Crowley attempts to bring in two fictional reporters to lend an air of humanity to what is ostensibly a collection of political quotes and newsbytes, they ultimately get lost in the echo chamber.

The book’s scrapbook storytelling elements are echoed clearly in Dan Goldman’s artwork. Relying heavily on the use of lightboards, the author pulls real images of the book’s players, incorporating them into panels that stand on equal footing with 08’s large, thickly letter text. At the same time, however, Goldman’s also serves as the true centerpiece of the book, having sharpened considerabye since the book’s predecessor, Shooting War, a fact made all the clearer by the book constant black and white contrast.

Goldman’s characters are ultimately as disembodied as the text, rarely attached to any concrete setting. Rather than attempting to anchor Crowley’s floating text, the images highlight it, making clear the true nature of 08. The book, in a sense, might appropriately be seen as the first graphic novel of the age of cable news. Shooting War certainly played with the motif with its cutting media satire placing news tickers at the bottom of panels, but 08 is far more successful in getting at the pure essence of 24 hour news networks: talking heads and scrolling words.

In that sense, the book is something new and exciting, though like its television counterpart, the perceived lack of a cohesive whole can sometimes prove frustrating. However, when the book’s status as instant time capsule fades into something approaching an historical document, taken abstractly, it will also offer a more permanent glimpse of the naturally fleeting American media that begat it.

–Brian Heater

[Above: With furry fury, Cerebus rides.  Below: News is gleaned by Cross Hatch spies.]

• The Beat checks in with the comics glitterati for its annual year end survey, this time in three parts: Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3
• The former Blog@Newsarama crew, lead by J.K. Parkin, moves the party across town to their new CBR blog, Robot 6.
• Daily Cross Hatch maestro Brian Heater talks to Forbidden Planet about the best comics of 2008.
• Top Shelf’s Leigh Walton and Comic Foundry’s Laura Hudson launch the hubristic Cereblog, a dual critical analysis of Dave Sim’s Cerebus, issues 1-300.
• Relive the thrill of Obama’s win running up your leg again with a free 20-page excerpt from ’08, the campaign travelogue by Dan Goldman and New Republic editor Michael Crowley.

- Laura Hudson

In much the same way that that old stock faux-intellectual question of “what is art” played a major role in earlier installments of our conversation with Art Spiegelman, much of this fifth and final part of our interview delves into the concept of unintentional fictionalization.

It’s a key concept, to be sure, given the artist’s role at the forefront of the autobiography of movement in independent comics, a role best personified by books like Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers, and to a degree, in certain selections from his newly revamped anthology of early work, Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!.

Spiegelman argues, I think accurately, there’s essentially no such thing as complete non-fiction, especially in the incredibly subjective world of autobiography, a concept he illustrates using a powerful example from Maus.

In this final part, we also discuss what made Spiegelman leave The New Yorker, the birth of Raw, why he isn’t an “artist’s artist,” and what role, if any, he played in that now infamous Obama cover.

[Part One][Part Two][Part Three][Part Four][Heeb Feature]

When people mention your name, there’s generally one book that comes to mind. Do you feel that the re-release of Breakdowns will shed some light on work that hasn’t been as recognized as that title?

I don’t know. I think more people have read Garbage Pail Kids than will ever stumble onto Maus.

But this early work is that of an “artist’s artist,” as they say.

Well, artist’s artist generally draw better. I’m not sure that that’s my greatest skill. I don’t know. I feel very awkward as this book is coming out. Sometime earlier today, I was thinking about how it’s strange that this is the most personal work I’ve ever done. Not just the ’78 Breakdowns, but the new work that was added. It’s not just because it’s autobiographical. In that sense, Maus is insanely personal, dealing with my relationship with my father and my own Jewishness, and it is, but I never had to deal with the kind of feeling of vunerability that I have with the Breakdowns book.

Similiarly with the No Towers book, which would seem, I think, very personal. It’s about my freaking out about September 11th, and moving off onto all of the personal and political paranoias that came with a near-death experience and post-traumatic stress disorder. I was screaming about stuff that is now also normative—“these people are lying to you and they’re going to hurt you.” Those things weren’t sayable back in 2002, when I was working on these pages. By the time the book came out, it was okay to say them, and I didn’t feel as vulnerable. Here I don’t know what to say about the book. It’s the core of how I think, and it’s dealing with some fairly raw feelings, but those are not the problem, especially in the introductory strip, are presented.

You bring up the word “raw,” which has proven pretty important to your career, over the years. Was it you who hit upon the word?

It was my word. I just wanted a three-letter title like Mad, and Raw seemed like the opposite of cooked. I’m not interested in stuff that’s slickly presented.

When I think of slickness in comics, it tends to be a visual trait. Are you speaking primarily about the way things look on the page?

Well, Raw had both. It had stuff that was really polished like Gil Schwartz’s stuff, and it also had Gary Panter. That’s two different poles of how someone would present work, but both of them are “raw” in the sense that there’s a place where you can hang on to. With really slick, there’s nothing to hang on to. Really sick to me is Alex Ross. Slick on every level, but as result, has almost no tensile strength that you can hold onto. It’s about the surface.

You need a foothold, a place to start, to dig into,

To dig into, yeah. And hopefully there’s actually something there to dig in to. Raw includes a certain kind of vulnerability. When I was using it now, that’s what I meant.
Even in The New Yorker, I hate to make a submission. Even that phrase, the word “submission.” You stick your neck out, and someone’s allowed to chop it off. That’s what it means to bow before the king. I don’t do that really well, so I’ve tried to find places where I don’t work with editors, I work with enablers. That allows me to think things through. I’m a rather harsh editor of my own work.

That’s how you get to see so little of it, and I have a really good editor in Francoise. She’s been trained by the best—I showed her all of the stuff! But she’s really good at it. She’s really fast, she’s really sharp, and she works well with artists. So I have that kind of editing, and there’s occasions where I’m working with people who are great. There are ways of finding a better solution quicker than you can on your own. It may be ironic to talk about being weary of editors, considering that I’ve been one, so much of my life, but good editing doesn’t involve castrating stuff so it’s ready for public consumption. It involves making the work more itself.

I’ve seen conflicted accounts of why you left The New Yorker.

Yeah, well, it’s not true that I left in protest. I left in a wail of pain that I had to deal with that didn’t allow me to get interested in anything except what I was obsessed with. And it didn’t involve finding a more sophisticated way of showing what I needed to show. I think it was after that the editor ran this editorial about why he was a reluctant hawk. That really upset me, but I think it was after.

I read a quote from you somewhere that was something along the lines of, “I wish I was there so I could quit now.”

The thing was that someone called me from an Italian newspaper, and either because of a language barrier or the usual human thing of hearing what you want to hear—

Being a journalist…

Yeah. It just got turned into another version of the events, that I stormed off in protest of the events of the magazine. The magazine was quite good to me. I just couldn’t do what I needed to do at the magazine. I couldn’t parcel out part of my brain and let it be rented out for someone else’s needs. It sounds more heroic to walk off in protest.

Have you ever?

Oh, I used to quit the magazine once a month when I was working for Tina Brown. So I guess that was kind of like walking off in protest.

Was it for similar concepts of censorship?

Yeah, it was them not wanting—see, for me, in an introduction that no one will read, because versions only came out in French and Italian, it was an experiment in DNA grafting, to see what the underground sensibility and The New Yorker sensibility would be like, if they were intertwined. It was an interesting experiment, and it led to some things that even opened up what The New Yorker could do now with the Obama cover, but it wasn’t a natural fit. There was only a certain part of my brain that could act civilized, and the rest was moving onto something else. I kept trying to find the places where we could be more in contact, but it was getting to be more of a strain, ad after September 11th, that got to be impossible.

Is Francoise still in charge of the covers?

Yeah, she’s the art director of the magazine.

So she played a large role in the Obama cover?

Yes.

Did she come to you with it, before it went to press?

I saw it before it got printed.

But she didn’t consult you?

I’m trying to remember. There was a moment where—there discussions about what might happen to the cover. I kibitzed, which is my favorite role in the world, but it wasn’t my doing, except by earlier example, by opening that up as a territory for covers to go in.

In terms of both politics and autobiography, do you have definite lines that you won’t cross?

They’re not really definite, but there are probably things I wouldn’t—you know, I’m not really here to hurt anyone else. I can’t always be as kind to myself, but it’s not a place to settle scores. This is why it’s hard for me to make fiction. I’ve tried over and over again, but I haven’t been able to do it in a way that I can be comfortable with. On the other hand, once you try tell the truth, it’s easy to lie. It’s almost inevitable. Every time you try to tell something true, the simple act of telling it…

Turns it into fiction?

Well, it turns it into work. Remember I was talking about art giving something form? Well, when you’re giving something form, you’re lying, because life is much too unwieldy to hold onto these shapes that you have to get to do something—to flow narritively. Even when when a journalist quotes your words, they’re not going to leave all of the “uhs,” and tracing back and restarting a sentence five times.

Thank God, right?

Yeah, but you’re giving it a form, and once you’re giving it a form, it’s so much more fluid than that way thought works, and that’s lying.

So, creating art is fictionalizing?

No. I mean, I think of fictionalizing as yanking things specifically out of reality and making a beautiful lie.

So, fictionalizing is lying on purpose.

Maybe. Why should I put this scene in a hotel in Chicago, rather than a hotel in Orlando? For me, it becomes playing without a net. If I know where something took place, I might have to go back and find out that you weren’t really in Laramie, Wyoming, you were in Montana. I might have gotten it wrong, but I don’t feel the inevitability, so I try to locate myself somewhere specific.

A cabin on Mars.

Yeah, well, that was the right answer. But even in Maus, all of this stuff that gets put in the book, in order to indicate how I had to do that kind of shaping, in order to compensate for that kind of shape. This is coming up, because one of my new projects is Meta Maus. It’s about being able to do a definitive interview in a book that has lots of sketches and outtakes and alternative drafts and notebook entries and research photos. It’s about making one final lump out of it, before I can clear it out of the studio.

The parts that I was talking to the interviewer about, a couple of pages in Maus that talk about discussing the orchestra in Auschwitz. In that sequence, I ask my father about it, and he says, “I don’t remember any orchestra.” And I say, “no, no, no, this is very documented (and it certainly is). There was an orchestra in Auschwitz, did you ever hear it?” “No, I only heard shouting and screaming. I don’t know about any orchestra.” Now I could have either left that exchange out—although I forced the exchange in to show it exactly as it is. Or I could have shown that sequence as something where I don’t show an orchestra or I can have it take place in the present, where we’re just talking, but the way that those three panels take place is first you see a row of prisoners walking, with a row of prisoners behind them. Then my father says, “I don’t remember any orchestra.” “Oh no, it’s very well documented.” So then you see the picture again and they’re marching, and the orchestra doesn’t exists, which implies that I didn’t have to show the orchestra, but you see a cello standing up. And then you see the wall that they’re walking past is set up like a musical staff of horizontal lines.

Now, no one’s going to slow down and understand that one their first reading, which is why I prefer re-readers. But that whole thing was  about the kind of choices that had to be made, while making Maus, like, “so am I going to go with my father’s deposition, no matter what he’s telling me, and just present that as objectifying it as panels?” or, as a chose to do, will I synthesize what I understand with what he told me, to figure out what things look like and presumably were? What I ended up doing was, in places where the information was what he saw, I stuck with what I got from him, but in places where I was just trying to locate a situation that ultimately has a shared triangulated reality, from hundreds of witnesses and photographs, I’d go with that, in order to get the story told.

All of those decisions can be unpacked in those few panels, so it’s not like every time I would have to extrapolate something, I didn’t set up a flashing neon light in the background, saying, “warning, this isn’t exactly the phrase he used.” But those kinds of things got formed in the way that Maus got through to tell the necessary story that needed to be made.

–Brian Heater

For hundreds of years, editorial cartooning has played a role central to the political process, criticizing, lampooning, and generally bringing down a peg those who have chosen to place themselves on soapboxes. The medium has proven itself an ideal format for those subject matters we’ve otherwise had difficultly expressing by other means.

We’re two days away from what many on all sides of the political divide have deemed the most important election of their lifetime, and while we’re not quite at the finish line looking back, we’ve certainly experienced enough over the past ten months to give us a fitting picture of how the majority of the 2008 presidential election has played out. The time seemed opportune to speak with a veteran political cartoonist about the ways in which the race has played out on their end—a state of the union of sorts for editorial cartooning.

When I put the call out suggested interviewees (thanks, Twitter), the majority of responses turned to Tim Kreider. Kreider has been producing his weekly strip, The Pain—When Will it End, since 1997. About three years into the process, said pain turned external, and the artist’s work shifted its focus toward the political, a move which soon consumed his work, transforming him, for better or worse, into a full-fledged political cartoonist.

Kreider’s work has since been anthologized as two books by Fantagraphics: The Pain—When will it End and Why do They Kill Me? Recently, the artist announced plans to end the publication of  his weekly strip in its current form, early next year.

We spoke to Kreider about the state of editorial cartooning in 2008, the role of equal time, and what precisely his proposed retirement means.

You didn’t start off as a political cartoonist.

I don’t think I started doing political cartoons on a regular basis until we were well into the Bush years. Truthfully, I don’t remember whether I drew any cartoons about the Bush/Gore election. I think if I did, they were pretty metaphorical. I remember one called—actually it wasn’t called anything. It was one of those scenarios in hell, where a demon was tormenting this poor shivering person in front of doors that said “Bush” and “Gore.” He said, “choose carefully, everything depends on your position.” And they both led to the flames, which was only an indicator of what was, at the time, a fairly widespread political naivete [laughs]. Only one of them led to flames, and that is the one we all walked through. I think I really only covered the last election in the sense that you mean. By that point, I had become a political cartoonist, whether I liked it or not.

At what point was it clear that you were officially a political cartoonist?

It’s sort of like becoming an alcoholic. There’s not really one moment where you see it coming [laughs]. There’s one point where you realized, ‘this might be a problem.’ I don’t know. I was just ranting on my Website a week ago that I never wanted to be a political cartoonist any more, frankly, than I wanted to be a Web cartoonist. It just happened by default. I think that it’s true of most cartoonists that rage is the raw material for your work.

Or fear…

Yeah—it’s not usually joy or a sense of quiet contentment and accomplishment. For a long time, for years—maybe for a decade—the source of most of my fears were internal. The cartoons collected in my first book are the product of that time. I guess it’s some small, incremental improvement that the source of my anger became external, after a while. Around the same time, the whole rest of the world went insane.

I don’t think I would have become a political cartoonist under the first George Bush, who was just plain old centric evil. But I remember sensing, even when I was very young, that Reagan was a slick salesman and liar, and I never liked George I, but I don’t think I would have sacrificed my career to what’s probably going to be recognized as fairly ephemeral art, if policies hadn’t gone completely off the recognizable scale. They’re not just policies I disagree with, they’re—in one of the few literal instances of the term—anti-American. I don’t think I’m very unusual in having been reduced to a kind of sputtering outrage on a more or less daily basis, by the news, over the last several years.

Is there a point you reach with your work, where you feel like you should be creating something truly important—that simply creating art for art’s sake is not as virtuous a pursuit as, say, political cartooning?

It’s hard to say what’s important. It’s hard to say whether art is important in some sense at all. I think what I’ve done in the past eight years has been important, in some sense, to some people. I get letters all the time from people who tell me, in effect, that I’m a voice of sanity for them. I’m letting them know that they’re not crazy, the world is. I certainly don’t imagine that I’m changing many people’s minds. I would say that, when you’re at work of any kind, only two-percent of you is thinking about the possibility that people in 50 or 100 years might like it. It’s impossible to predict those things. So it would be insane to make art predicated on what people in the future might think about it. But you know, one of the reasons you do art at all, is to make something lasting.

Do you think that political cartooning always has a short shelf life? We still read stuff by people like Jules Feiffer, even though his older work isn’t necessarily still topical.

Yeah, but, I’m not sure how read his is, outside of the insular comics world, though I guess my perspective on that is rather skewed. I think that, in order for political cartoons and art in general to be a little more lasting, it has to be more universal than topical, like Ralph Steadman’s work. It has to use more metaphorical statements. I try not to get too caught up in whatever the issue of the current new cycle is. I didn’t want to do any cartoons about Sarah Palin, for example, because I just refuse to recognize her as important at all. But in the end I did because I came up with a funny, puerile idea for a comic with her.

When push comes to shove, a good joke is the key.

It often overrides my better judgment, yeah. But I still think I’m a little too mired in the topical. I don’t think there are a lot of people who read cartoons from 20 or 50 years ago anymore, and I do worry about the shelf-life of the work.

Sarah Glidden mentioned that you had plans to pack it in, after January.

Well, there’s been some talk about that lately, yeah. As I said, I was kind of burned out in 2004. I was ready to give this up, after that election, and, like many people, I falsely thought that I would be able to. You know, at that point I felt like I barely able to make it to what I thought was the finish line, and it turns out that, no, that’s the halfway mark. This time around, yeah, I think I’m ready to quit at least doing a weekly topical political cartoon.

When you say ‘the finish line,’ you mean that this outrage isn’t as needed?

Well, the next few years are not going to be good ones for the United States. It’s not like the election will magically solve all of our problems. We’re in an almost unprecedented mess. But I went to a party last night where someone was saying how nice it would be not to be ashamed to be an American again. And on a purely symbolic level, Obama’s election would change that at least in our own eyes, if not in the eyes of the world, or go a long ways toward that.  There will still be plenty of material for political cartoonists, but I’m not really interested in taking on every little political issue and scandal that comes up. I feel like this country lost its collective mind over the last decade. It’s just not a place I recognize or want to live in. I just don’t want to keep feeling ashamed, every minute of the day. I’d be very relieved to go on to something else.

As a political cartoonist, how does 2008 differ from 2004 or 2000?

I hesitate to even speak about this, for fear of jinxing us all, but it feels this time like we might actually win. That’s based a little more on empirical evidence this time around, and less on general feeling. The last election, I went with a friend and colleague of mind to Philadelphia, and we canvassed to get out the vote for John Kerry.  Being part of a campaign, even in that kind of a temporary, marginal way, you get falsely caught up in the enthusiasm and hope of it. So we thought we were gonna win. And then, of course, that night turned very grim. This time around, the polls look good. I, in fact, am drawing my cartoon, which has to be turned in the day before election day, but will be published the day after.

The Doonesbury syndrome–Garry Trudeau ran into the same thing, and has already called the election for Obama.

Yes, I know, I just read that last night. You know, I never consult with my colleagues who do political cartoons—I feel like we’re off on our own—but I feel really tempted to write to Rueben Bolling, who does Tom the Dancing Bug, to ask, ‘hey man, what are you doing?’ Not  exactly what he’s going to draw, but how he’s gonna do. Do you hedge your bets and do a multi-part cartoon, presenting all of the options, which is what I did four years ago? Or do you just do an Obama victory and risk looking like the Chicago Tribune that Harry Truman held up? This time around I decided to go ahead an decide that Obama’s gonna win, in which case I will look very foolish indeed, the day after, if he does not, although that will frankly be the least of my concerns.

I was not just rudely shocked by the fact that we did not win last time because I was caught up in the spirit of the campaign, but because it was hard for me to imagine anyone voting for a republican, after the previous four years. I mean, I guess the differences between then and now are Hurricane Katrina, because it was like Iraq, but here in the United States, where you couldn’t embed journalists and restrict their access. We saw their incompetence, live on TV, and they couldn’t control it. And I think that’s put Iraq into a new perspective for people. And also, of course, the economic collapse.

Do you think there’s too much importance placed on the concept of equal time, in terms of mocking everyone equally.

I was talking to a friend of mine recently about that. She is a very infrequent viewer of mainstream media, actually. And she was recently scandalized to see what was clearly editorial commentary presented as news by journalists, which most people have sadly gotten acclimated to—infotainment. I kept thinking of a quote by Hunter Thompson who said in the early-70s, that it was the rules of objective journalism that allowed someone like Richard Nixon to slither into office in the first place.

I recalled for her a clip I saw recently of some veteran political reporter—and this was an analysis—he showed an excerpt of that interview that Palin did with Katie Couric, where she gives one of her fumbling non-answers, and he just turns to the camera in speechless disgust and says, “I have never seen a more disgraceful performance, in all my years.” I think that’s the sort of thing that needs to be said plainly, when it’s true.

I feel like that the need to balance can do a real disservice to the truth sometimes, especially in the case of climate change. Whenever it comes up in the media, they always find a scientist who says we believe it’s real and some hack who works for a right wing think tank or the petro-chemical industry who says, “there’s not enough evidence,” lending the impression that it’s pretty much a 50/50 split. My sense  is that it’s probably more like 96 to four-percent in the legitimate scientific community. I’m picking those numbers out of thin air, but if anything, they’re probably conservative.

–Brian Heater

[Full strip here.]

For those with even a passing knowledge of sequential art’s long and colorful past, the concept of using comics to tackle complicated issues is hardly a recent occurrence.

From the early political cartoons of the 19^th century, to contemporary graphic novels like Maus, Fun Home, and Persepolis, comics have long proven an incredibly effective platform for channeling and confronting the fears and pain that we’ve oft struggled so hard which with to come to grips.

The events of recent years, however, we have also borne witness to the seemingly infinite amounts of vitriol they’re capable of producing, from the lampooning of the prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper to a New Yorker cover boiling down nearly every kooky fear of Barack Obama. For both better and worse, there’s something inherent in the relative simplicity of the medium that’s capable of encapsulating our deepest emotions with a few quick pen strokes.

Like images, words too are capable of taking on far more weight than their simple letters seem capable of holding. The idea that a single word can encapsulate hundreds of years of pain and oppression in two syllables is, on it’s surface, a seemingly absurd notion, but words, when saddled with enough baggage, can evoke a more visceral reaction than any simple combination of letters seemingly has any right.

Given the fact that Keith Knight managed to incorporate one of the most loaded words in the English language into a recent political strip not once, but twice, it perhaps shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that it manage to elicit a major outcry amongst students at Montclair State University, whose paper syndicates the artist’s weekly strip, The K Chronicles.

The strip in question, titled “Stories From the Campaign Trail,” is based on the real experience of one Obama canvasser. It’s funny and sad and even slightly—but just slightly—hopeful, all at once. It’s an important acknowledgement of something so deeply engrained in our collective American psyche, something that, try as we might to ignore or forget, will never go away if we continually refuse to address it.

Knight’s strip correctly points out the strange ways in which Obama historical campaign has brought these issues to the surface.

Surely most of us who read the strip don’t imagine Knight to be a defender of the word (Knight actually, cleverly never spells it out in his entirety, nor did he describe it as anything but “the ‘n’ word,” when speaking with me). The intense reaction on the part of some readers, at least to some degree, seems to be the product of a desire to keep these issues buried, where some believe they belong.

Or, perhaps some don’t feel that cartoons are the proper medium in which to address them. When Knight told me, “so many people expect their comic strip to be Garfield,” he meant it less as a shot at the oft-maligned strip than as an assertion that, even in a post-Maus age, where an artist like Kyle Baker can have a hit with a comic based on the life of Nat Turner, the concept of taking comics seriously is still an alien  to many people.

In the wake of the aforementioned strip, and the subsequent fallout, we sat down with Knight for a quick chat about race and the power of words and pictures.

Have you been getting a lot of interview requests today?

Oh yeah. It’s been pretty crazy, the way that this has blown up. I suppose it’s not surprising, but it’s interesting, because it’s one paper. Though I did hear from an editor from another paper that he’s gotten some phone calls, as well. It’s really interesting, because I’m getting e-mails from individual students who say that they’re shocked and offended by it, but when they thought about it and discussed it, they understood what I was trying to say with it. I think that that’s a normal reaction, because it is shocking, but what’s also interesting is the fact that I don’t print the whole word. It’s cut off. And yet it was really provocative.

I don’t know whether I’m just jaded at this point, but I read the story about the response on Heidi’s site, and then when I clicked through to the actual strip, my reaction was along the lines of: “that’s what’s upsetting all of these people?”

Well, yeah. I think that if you read the story and the stuff where people are really devastated and you haven’t seen the strip, once you see the strip, it’s kind of like, “huh?” But if you see the strip first and get that initial shock, and then read the stuff after, you may be surprised that people are that upset about it, but I think you get it more. I think it’s hard to get people’s disturbed reactions if you read about what they’re saying before you read the strip. It’s like that with a lot of things, when people say something like, “oh my god, this is the worst thing that’s ever happened.”

What’s nice though is that I’m seeing a lot of nice and insightful commentary on people’s blogs. I’ve started posting what I think are the best ones, positive or negative. I think maybe I’ll put some of the more outrageous ones on there, too.

I think that’s what people really want to read.

Yeah, yeah. But there were some really nice ones, too. There was a kid who wrote to me who was the sports editor of the paper, and he said that he wanted to quit when he first saw the strip. He was shocked. But there was a professor who brought up what he thought I was trying to say about it. There was this very uniquely American situation, where there are these folks who are so casual with their racism, but they’re still supporting this guy. The juxtaposition of that is weird and strange and only in America.

In terms of juxapositon, it’s weird to read the strip because it’s funny. It’s funny and yet you’re almost afraid to laugh at it, because it’s so sad at the same time.

Yeah, and that’s the thing. So many people expect their comic strip to be Garfield, and that seems to be an underlying theme in people’s problem with this, besides just the “n” word being used. Comics are supposed to be funny, and my point with the statement I put on my Website is that comics aren’t all supposed to be “ha-ha” funny. Sometimes they can be strange, and weird, and odd. And this is funny, but in a very peculiar way.

An editor put it to me in a different way: it’s a tiny bit hopeful, in a sliver of a way. The idea that you shouldn’t talk about it—that’s what drives me crazy more than anything else. And the thing it triggers in me is, when I was a college student, back in 1989, we had a copy of Do the Right Thing, and we were going to show it on campus, and I had to fight so much to get it to play on campus. One of my fellow students said, “if we just ignore it, it will go away.” That’s what she said about racism.

We’re in such a peculiar position in 2008. Most of us are ready to have a black president, but we still can’t talk about race.

Yeah, I know, it’s totally weird. And then you have people who think that once we have a black president, racism won’t exist anymore.

Clearly if one word or one comic can elicit this sort of reaction in people, there’s still something there.

Totally. It’s a real interesting thing, and I always think of this comment my wife made. She always has these interesting observations about Americans. She always says, “Americans are always so into their World War II films with the ugly Nazis, and yet America is so afraid of looking at their own racism in a frank way.”

We can’t make ourselves the villains of our own films.

Yeah, of course. And Spike Lee, when his documentary Four Little Girls was nominated, someone asked him, “do you think you’re gonna win,” and he said, “no, it’s up against a Holocaust documentary.”

When an event like this happens and there’s such a visceral reaction, does it make you more or less inclined to do another strip along these lines?

Honestly, it changes nothing. Unless I made an egregious mistake—if I felt I’d done something really wrong—it wouldn’t change anything.

–Brian Heater

[Above, what's that smell? Below, oh, just another Dispatch.]

• Toon Books has a couple of cool titles on the way. Eleanor Davis introduces Stinky and Dean Haspiel and Jay Lynch present Mo and Jo: Fighting Together Forever. The releases correspond to some events taking place around NYC. First off on Sept 5th, at Desert Island (Brooklyn, NY), Davis and Haspiel will be doing a reading, signing, and launch party. The following night the tandem will appear at McNally Jackson, NYC, with special guests Francoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman. (Note: Mr. Spiegelman will not be signing. You can breath again.) Then Monday, Sept 8th at Jim Hanley’s Universe, Davis and Haspiel will do one more reading and signing if you miss the others.
• The LA Times‘ Dave Strickler  has compiled an online database of every comic strip the paper has ever run. The database lists run dates and some details for every comic from August 21, 1904 to present.
• James Kochalka redraws page 17 of Fantastic Four #9.
• Barack Obama didn’t pick Savage Dragon as his vice-presidential running mate, but no love is lost from the ol’ green fin head. Savage Dragon, a former presidential candidate himself and no stranger to bad-guys taking pot shots at him, will give the Democratic nominee his full-endorsement on Sept 3, when Savage Dragon #137 hits newsstands.
• Everything’s going digital, so it’s not a wonder that publishers are looking at a variety of models for delivering what you love most, comics, digitally.
• Robot Dreams makes Oprah’s kids’ reading list.
• Always wanted to see your favorite comics in the backdrops of your favorite TV shows? Now’s your chance!

–Jason Owen

[Above, absence in book form. Below, filling in the Dispatch void.]

• Art Spiegelman talks about the controversial New Yorker cover depicting Barack Obama in Arab garb, an American flag burning in the Oval Office’s fireplace.
• Paws Inc. and Ballantine Books are scheduled to publish a book inspired by the webcomic Garfield Minus Garfield.  It will be released in conjunction with the Garfield 30th Anniversary book, due out in October.
• We missed the signing, but it’s not too late to catch up on all the buzz behind Comic Book Tattoo. This 480-page anthology features work by Pia Guerra and David Mack, just to name a couple.
• On Friday August 1st, Rocketship Comics in Brooklyn, NY hosted an opening reception for Cliff Chiang, Dash Shaw and Julia Wertz. Beer and wine were served to the packed crowd, to fend off the humidity. The artist’s work will be on display until September.
• Worst Comic strip, ever!

–Jason Owen