The Special Power of Comics to Stir Moral Horror

Some have called Art Spiegelman’s Maus — a harrowing telling of his father’s survival of the Holocaust — the greatest graphic novel ever published. Joe Sacco’s celebrated, unflinching books of graphic journalism include Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza. In February the two authors collaborated to publish a searing three-page “comic” about the Israel Defence Force’s ongoing genocide in Gaza after the murderous attacks by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023.

Their blended masterpiece of nightmare colour and imagery, which appeared in the Guardian and then in the New York Review of Books, placed their comic book avatars in the ruins and carnage of Gaza, and explored a conversation they had previously conducted about the tragedy.

Their avatars are mocking self-portraits — fretful neurotics, haplessly bearing witness to the unbearable and trying to make sense and art from the ruins and the graves. It is strong stuff, blending black-and-white realism with highly coloured and surreal nightmare imagery.

And then something strange happened — or rather didn’t happen.

It would have been no surprise if the publications led to a firestorm of debate. However, it didn’t seem to. Apart from some predictable and vulgar vitriol on Reddit, some commentary on specialist websites devoted to the graphic genre, and a thoughtful item in the progressive Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the public discussion I have been able to discover is pretty sparse.

Perhaps the fact the Sacco/Spiegelman work appeared in journals with rather pro-Palestinian editorial policies limited a dissenting response. Maybe not many people took seriously the graphic journalism genre as a political force. Or perhaps the two artists effectively muted response by how profoundly they conveyed their shared, humane horror.

From its earliest roots, the comic form was designed to reach — and provoke — broad audiences with immediate, visual punches. The whole purpose is to push past cerebral defences. At their worst they access the brain’s visual response mechanisms to incite crude, destructive emotions. At their best, they challenge moral complacency with unique clarity.

Works of mixed illustrations and text that became known as comics or graphic novels or graphic journalism have been controversial since they first appeared in 18th century Britain. That is when William Hogarth, James Gilray, Thomas Rowlandson and George Cruikshank turned out combinations of visual and verbal satires that would probably be banned in MAGA states today for their combinations of gritty social realism and often surreal irreverence.

The British innovations soon took root in North America, with U.S. political cartoonists like James Akin and Henry R. Robinson establishing a tradition of using satiric graphic and text elements to comment on current events.

Canadian graphic satire followed soon enough, as John H. Walker founded Canada’s first publication to regularly feature cartoons in 1849.

A prolific master of stirring popular reaction was Thomas Nast, a German immigrant who settled in the U.S. in the 19th century. He satirized New York’s Democratic political machine of Tammany Hall and its corrupt Boss Tweed, created the image of the elephant as a symbol of the Republican Party and gave us the modern images of Santa Claus and Uncle Sam.

Nast also crafted scathing images of the racist backlash to post-Civil War Reconstruction, like this one, which is similar in its emotional impact to Sacco and Spiegelman’s Gaza images:

Another 19th century American cartoonist who blasted American racism was Grant Hamilton, whose 1885 cartoon in Judge magazine portrayed the anti-Black Democrats of the resurgent South as literally diabolical.

Sometimes, of course, the satirical pen was wielded to support racism, not critique it, as in this unpleasant 1889 J.S. Pughe item for Puck magazine attacking immigrants:

The 1960s saw a flourishing of innovative underground comics, including San Francisco’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers by Gilbert Shelton, and Vancouver’s own Adventures of Harold Hedd by Rand Holmes, as well as a five-foot shelf of works like Zap Comics and Mr. Natural by the seminal figure R. Crumb. Characters tended to be playful anti-heroes ignoring conformist restraints around sex, drugs and other buttoned-down behaviour. In these funny papers, fools told truths that threatened, implicitly or explicitly, the “establishment.”

Cue the moral panic responses. In the 1940s, censors had staged public burnings of comic books in the U.S. When the counterculture comics of the ’60s arrived, bookstores in California and New York were busted for selling them. One American judge wrote, while making Zap Comics the first comic book to be convicted of obscenity, “It is material utterly unredeemed and unredeemable, save, perhaps, only by the quality of the paper upon which it is printed.”

Crumb has been a lifelong friend of and influence on Art Spiegelman, a relationship explored in a 2020 David Zwirner podcast. Spiegelman and Sacco are also friends, and their friendship led to the collaboration on Gaza which caps more than three centuries of cartooned commentary by offering surreal dread rather than savage, absurdist satire.

The two began by improvising images together and then turned their work into a strip that is short but not at all slight. Amidst the hellscape of bombed Gaza appear the cartoonists as characters portrayed in the charming, if anxious, self-deprecating tropes that both have established in their earlier work. Think Woody Allen with a better moral compass.

The result is sometimes funny, despite its dark subject manner. My favorite humorous moment comes when Sacco asks Spiegelman if he is a “self-hating Jew,” the epithet so often thrown at Jews who oppose Zionism or the war of revenge being waged in Gaza and the West Bank. “Naw,” says Spiegelman, “I’m a self-hating atheist.”

Another funny bit shows the classic Zionist expression, “A land without people for a people without a land,” satirically re-cast in ’50s style comic strip fashion as, “An apartment without people for people without an apartment,” in which an enthusiastic real estate agent shows an apartment to customers who ignore the many human figures that crowd the supposedly empty dwelling.

The work succeeds by mixing dark and funny elements while presenting believable characters struggling with moral complexity. Not that the artists hold back. One image shows Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu blood-stained and hip deep in a mountain of human eyeballs, an eye for an eye writ monstrous. This image is eerily reminiscent of Giotto’s Satan consuming the damned and defecating them down to hell in his frescos for the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua.

As I’ve mentioned, the work appeared in two venerable journalistic outlets. But is it journalism?

Those who value reporters who strive to present a neutral stance with little conscious bias will see both Sacco and Spiegelman as having deviated too far into expressing their own criticisms of Israel’s war policy and expansionism.

Those who see journalistic neutrality as an aspirational myth will value the narrative and moral force of the work and appreciate how openly the artist journalists reveal their own values and conflicted perceptions. They may join with the cartoonists in their last statements, in which Sacco says, “You know, Art, it may take bigger brains than ours to find a just solution,” and Spiegelman replies, “Yeah. A just solution would be way better than a final solution.” This wan exchange happens as the figures carry signs that read “Never Again. For Anyone” dwarfed beneath the hooves of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.