Well, I’ve gotten a grumpy email from an underground comix luminary. I’ve arrived!
My blog item about a recent anti-war cartoon in Reason magazine by legendary Hate author Peter Bagge was referenced in this Comics Journal messboard thread, which led Peter to defend his work both there and in a couple of email messages to me.
Taking issue with my comment that he appears to blame the woes of the world on WalMart shoppers, Peter pointed me to this cartoon, where he cops to being a mall shopper himself.
I stand corrected. But then on the message board thread about the strip, Peter said:
QUOTE: “I also don’t know how I can NOT portray average Americans as anything other than dunderheads when most of us believe that Saddam used chemical on our troops, that WMDs WERE found, and that Iraqis took part in 9/11, even though no one in the government or the mainstream media has even SUGGESTED any of the above!…We’ve become such a pathetic and horrible nation of people that it’s gone way BEYOND ‘funny.'”
I certainly share his confusion and disgust about those kinds of poll results (9/11? Huh??), but it just seems like a lapse of emotion over logic to leap from there into general misanthropy about “average Americans.” I may have gotten Peter’s motive for attacking them wrong–he likes WalMart, they like WalMart, it’s all water under the bridge–but I feel I accurately characterized his overall feelings about them.
In a subsequent email, Peter defended the character he depicted in the strip by saying:
QUOTE: “I don’t see how what I wrote applies to any specific economic class, or any specific group of Americans. That’s why I drew a wide variety of people, even if you and others still denigrated all of them as ‘stereotypes.’ I was targeting the majority of the American public who DO believe in all these aspects of the Iraq war that either aren’t true at all or that I find morally reprehensible.”
I definitely got that last part, but I still feel that Peter employed the different “types” he drew as representative of their peer groups. And hey, fine–there’s nothing wrong with stereotype (call it “caricature,” it’s a less loaded term) in satire. I just think it conveyed a sort of anti-middle class/Middle American bias that thwarted the political efficacy of the cartoon, regardless of whether this was the cartoonist’s intent. (While we’re on the subject of political cartooning, Tom Tomorrow” does a pretty good job of skewering the American attitudes he feels deserve skewering without using pictorial stereotypes, due to his effective use of clip-art style generic, uh, “peoploids.”)
Finally, Peter took issue with my rhetoric a bit, saying it was “high school” of me to say his own outlook was “tedious in high school.” To which I can only reply, I know you are, but what am I? In all seriousness, I wasn’t dissing him as immature (he’s obviously a sophisticated guy, but at any rate, what’s so bad about being like a high schooler anyway?), just saying I outgrew way back in the day the outlook he seemed to be espousing. But I think my big rhetorical mistake was saying “YOU can’t help but feel that” Peter was attacking Middle America, not “I can’t help but feel” that way. It’s me writing this thing, after all, and it’s presumptuous and dopey to speak for the general “you.” So I’ll take a hit on that one, no problem.
All that being said, what I take from this is that this Internet thing has its pros and cons. I think Peter thought I was being a much bigger jerk than I really was, but since he doesn’t know me, how could he judge? But on the plus side, I had a one-to-one debate with Peter Freaking Bagge. And I think (cheesy after school special music GO!) we both learned something about the effects of his comic strip. And he was such a cool guy about it that he let me post quotes from his emails on my freaking website. Three cheers for fighting about politics and comics on the World Wide Web!