My friend
A. David Lewis posed the following question the other day: "how political should comic books be?" He was asking in earnest, and I liked my reply so I thought I'd repost it here...
I set this aside this morning to give myself time to collect some thoughts about the subject, but it wasn't long after that a news item presented itself that spoke to the topic even better.
A cargo ship with pallets of (among other things) books from Fantagraphics was struck by a missile as it was just trying to deliver some comics from one side of the planet to the other. I haven't found any word about the status of the crew as of this writing; hopefully everyone survived.
These are people who had no political agenda. They were just trying to deliver some comics. The people who were ultimately going to read those comics had no political agenda; they just wanted to read weird monster stories from the 1950s. And yet, everyone involved was impacted by the politics playing out on the world stage. Because one leader wanted to bomb another leader, and didn't care what kind of real-world fallout might result.
All life is politics. We often think of it in terms of a small group of ultra-wealthy men making laws about abortion or health care insurance or who can marry whom or whatever. But it's taxes. It's being taught how to read at school. It's having the trash picked up every week. It's running water and smooth roads and bridges that don't collapse and every other piece of societal infrastructure. It's shipping ports that stay open and cargo containers that can safely make it from Point A to Point B.
All life is politics. And since art -- of which comics is a subset -- is just a reflection of life, how can anything that is considered art being anything but political? Even when they're not trying to be political, they are. As just proven by a boat carrying a shipment of Fantagraphics material. How political should comic books be? However political they are is exactly how political they should be.
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