The Art of Controversy
Victor S. Navasky
256 pages, $ 27.95

Available: 9 April 2013

Victor S. Navasky is a former editor of The New York Times and The Nation, and in his long career he has dealt with many cartoonists. Better yet, he is a fan of cartoons and caricatures, and understands (and appreciates) their power. The Art of Controversy is, as the author calls it, an 'unguided tour' of a number of great cartoonists (starting in the 18th century) and the controversy surrounding their work.

Before taking us on his tour, Navasky uses four chapters to talk us through three theories about why cartoons, and caricatures in particular, are so powerful: the Content Theory, the Image Theory, and the Neuroscience Theory. The Content theory focuses on what the cartoon is about, and the Image Theory on how the subject is portrayed, but the most interesting one is perhaps the Neuroscience Theory. Neuroscience has revealed (through experiments with birds) that, because of their simplification, the area of the brain involved in facial recognition reacts more quickly to caricatures than to photos of real faces. Although the implications of this theory for understanding how cartoons work are contested, it could expain why carticatures can be so powerful and upsetting to the ones portrayed. Caricatures are registered more clearly by the mind's eye, and therefore remembered longer and more strongly than photographs.

The book is not an academic attempt to methodically catalogue cartoon controversy through the centuries. Rather, Navasky describes himself as an aficionado who has 'long believed in satire as a particularly effective instrument of social criticism.' He also describes himself as a free-speech absolutist. The public sphere is, or should be, governed by what German philosopher Jürgen Habermas calls the power of the better argument. Satire, and thus cartoons and caricatures, are in as sense good or bad arguments competing with other arguments within the public sphere.

It is here that I divert somewhat from the review, and might even stir up some controversy myself, to pose what I (a free-speech absolutist myself) found to be a conundrum. Navasky shows that powerful cartoons can work as 'totems' that, once unleashed, can have an uncontrollable power, independent of the creator of the image. The book shows these images, the good ones (e.g. cartoons condemning corruption and power abuse), but also the very, very despicable ones. In the latter category, we find no better example than the work of German cartoonist Philipp Rupprecht (pen name Fips), a weekly contributor the Nazi weekly newspaper Der Stürmer.

Der Stürmer was an important propaganda tool for the Nazis, and the images by Fips are viciously anti-Semitic, employing every gruesome stereotype available. At the beginning of the chapter on the work of Fips, Navasky recounts that Julius Streicher, the editor of Der Stürmer, was hanged after the Nuremberg trials, but Fips only served six years for his contributions to the magazine. He goes on to suggest that justice might have been better served with a death sentence for the cartoonist as well.

Although, in light of Fips' work, I can certainly understand the sentiment, it struck me as an odd one in a book that in all the other chapters whole-heartedly defends the rights of cartoonists to draw as they please. There were, are, and probably always will be despicable opinions out there, spreading hate, discrimination, aggression and intolerance. But either we agree that opinions (whether they be written, spoken or drawn) are so powerful that we need to punish those we, as a society, consider sufficiently dangerous, or we cling on to our hope that in the end, the better argument will prevail.

Apart from this incongruity, the book is a pleasant read, with a tone reminiscent of an old man with a wealth of anecdotes to share. It is especially interesting to read about his own experiences (and opinions) as editor dealing with cartoons that gave rise to protest among the readers and staff of The Nation. The book is a testimony that shows the influence and impact of cartoons in world history in the last two-and-a-half centuries. The cartoonists featured, over 30 in total, are excellent. Some notable examples are British artist David Low (who landed himself on the Gestapo death list because he enraged Hitler with his cartoons), Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali (whose figure Handala lives on long after the artist was assasinated in London in 1987) and John Heartfield (probably the world's first Photohopper). If you are not familiar with one or more of these names, then this book is certainly recommended reading. Because the book is basically a collection of cartoons, the publisher would do well to make it available as an art edition, with all the cartoons printed large and (when applicable) in full color. The works published in The Art of Controversy certainly deserve it.

Tjeerd Royaards

Going on sale in April, The Art of Controversy by Victor S. Navasky is (according to the publisher) a 'lavishly illustrated, witty, and original look at the awesome power of the political cartoon throughout history to enrage, provoke, and amuse.' The following description is taken from the website of the publisher:

As a former editor of The New York Times Magazine and the longtime editor of The Nation, Victor S. Navasky knows just how transformative—and incendiary—cartoons can be. Here Navasky guides readers through some of the greatest cartoons ever created, including those by George Grosz, David Levine, Herblock, Honoré Daumier, and Ralph Steadman.  He recounts how cartoonists and caricaturists have been censored, threatened, incarcerated, and even murdered for their art, and asks what makes this art form, too often dismissed as trivial, so uniquely poised to affect our minds and our hearts.

Drawing on his own encounters with would-be censors, interviews with cartoonists, and historical archives from cartoon museums across the globe, Navasky examines the political cartoon as both art and polemic over the centuries. We see afresh images most celebrated for their artistic merit (Picasso's Guernica,Goya's "Duendecitos"), images that provoked outrage (the 2008 Barry Blitt New Yorker cover, which depicted the Obamas as a Muslim and a Black Power militant fist-bumping in the Oval Office), and those that have dictated public discourse (Herblock’s defining portraits of McCarthyism, the Nazi periodical Der Stürmer’s anti-Semitic caricatures). Navasky ties together these and other superlative genre examples to reveal how political cartoons have been not only capturing the zeitgeist throughout history but shaping it as well—and how the most powerful cartoons retain the ability to shock, gall, and inspire long after their creation.

A review of this title is coming soon on the Cartoon Movement blog.

Not surprisingly, at Cartoon Movement we often talk about the power of cartoons, and their important role in media as the visual watchdogs of those in power. In Political Cartoons and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Ilan Danjoux also talks about the power of cartoons, but his premise is different.

His line of reasoning starts with the assumption that political cartoons have long been safe havens for extreme opinion and unfounded accusation. Looking at how political cartoons demonised Jews in Nazi Germany or Tutsis in Rwanda in the early '90s, it is clear that sometimes cartoons become propaganda, and targets of ridicule become victims of violence. Building on the special role of cartoons in conflict areas, Ilan Danjoux sets out to explore if cartoons can actually predict violence. Focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and on the 2000 Al-Aqsa Intifada (uprising) in particular, Danjoux examines if there was a shift in the style, content and focus of Palestinian and Israeli political cartoons preceding the outbreak of violence.

In the introduction, he already provides an answer to this question. His research shows cartoons cannot predict violence; rather, they function as a kind of seismograph. The shift in content and focus of cartoons reflects the shift and focus in public opinion. So the obvious question is: why read a book in which the plot is given away on page 2? The answer is that you shouldn't read this book for its plot (the question if cartoons predict violence), unless you are a student of social research. If you're a cartoon aficionado or cartoonist (I happen to be both), you should read this book for the interesting insights it gives about political cartoons and how they work.

According to Danjoux, cartoons are special in a number of ways. They have an exceptional role within journalism, because they do not have to be evidence-based. Cartoonists play with the truth, mixing it up with fiction, myth, symbols and historical references. In his book, Danjoux identifies the main tools cartoonists use. Interestingly, exaggeration (a tool often employed in cartoons) is sometimes not needed; placing the main character in a cartoon at a table with Adolf Hitler will immediately convey meaning, although what meaning is dependent on the action depicted in the cartoon and the facial expressions of the characters in the cartoon.

Because cartoons are not bound by the truth, they are one of the best ways to gauge public opinion. Although opinion polls might give accurate figures, they might not reflect the entire truth, as people will often give answers that are socially acceptable, rather then saying what they think. The instruments employed by the cartoonist, such as exaggeration, symbols and metaphors, can convey the mood in a country better than polls. Another important point that Danjoux makes is that cartoons are incomplete narratives. Because they are often bound to current events, the outcome of the situation they depict is not certain yet. Several outcomes are possible, and it is left to the reader to interpret which outcome should be feared, and which should be desired.

This toolkit for analyzing cartoons is then applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and in particular the outbreak of violence in October 2000, after the Oslo Peace Process collapsed. What is probably most interesting, is how cartoons can be compared as reflections of the public mood, even though the media of Israel and Palestine are vastly different. Isreael has a commercial, competitive and free media, while the media in Palestine is heavily censored and largely government funded. These differences do not inhibit the role of political cartoons to chronicle the conflict.

Some definitions in the book are too restrictive. Danjoux's statement that the main defining aspect of political cartoons is that they are bound to current events and therefore have a limited context in which they can be understood is flawed. Although this definition applies to lots of cartoons, it foregoes the equally considerable group of cartoons that deal with the more or less timeless issues of human rights, war, or the environment. Danjoux also devotes a lot of attention on the difficulties of reading cartoons, because they often employ symbols, inside information and word puns that can only be understood within the cultural context they were published. Again, this is true for many cartoons. But cartoons can, and many do, also employ symbols that have universal appeal. Especially cartoons that do not have any text and rely entirely on visuals can be understood throughout the world.

Another problem of the book is the price. I doubt many people outside academic circles would spend more than 80 dollars on a book of barely 150 pages. For a wider appeal, Ilan Danjoux might consider publishing a non-academic paperback on how to read political cartoons.

In spite of the minor flaw of narrow definitions (which might be needed, given that the book is devoted to social research) and the bigger hurdle of the price, the book is definitely worth reading. It is an especially interesting read for cartoonists. At the beginning of this review, I mentioned how, at Cartoon Movement, we often talk about the positive aspects of political cartoons. This book shows how cartoons can be deconstructed, and how to analyse the different elements of cartoons, such as the tone of the cartoon, the symbols it uses and the focus. All these aspects say something about the meaning of the author, but, more importantly, also how the cartoon will be read by the audience. After reading, I found myself regarding my own and fellow cartoonists' work with a new set of eyes. If we cartoonists want to live up to our (mostly self-proclaimed) title as watchdogs keeping check on those in power, we are also responsible to keep check on our own work. At the one hand of the spectrum, there is the danger of self-censorship, and at the other end cartoons become unsubstantiated propaganda. To stay in the middle, a cartoonist needs to understand the tools he uses to make cartoons work (beyond pen, ink and Photoshop). And that is exactly where this book can help.

Tjeerd Royaards

Can cartoons predict violence? This enticing question is asked by Ilan Danjoux, a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The idea behind the question is that the tone and content of political cartoons change in the period leading up to the outbreak of a violent conflict; in this way cartoons can actually be harbingers of conflict.

Danjoux wrote a book on the subject, for which he examined over 1200 Israeli and Palestinian editorial cartoons to explore whether changes in their content anticipated the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada in October of 2000.

A review of this title is coming soon on the Cartoon Movement blog.

Guy DeLisle
Drawn and Quarterly
$24.95, 320 pages

by S.I. Rosenbaum

I started Guy DeLisle’s 300-plus-page Jerusalem with interest; I finished it in anger.

Some background: Delisle has made his career by going to unusual places. His best-known graphic memoir, 2004’s Pyongyang, covers two months spent in North Korea, where DeLisle is alienated, bored, and culture shocked. He is also alarmed at the spooky machinations of the totalitarian state. He has also written similar travel memoirs about Shenzen, China, and about Myanmar.

I wanted to start with this background because I think that Delisle’s experience in these places — all three of them in various levels of humanitarian crisis — shaped his expectations of himself as a nonfiction cartoonist. In North Korea, for example, Delisle was kept isolated on a single floor of one of the city’s huge empty hotels — which was intentionally staffed entirely by Chinese guest workers, to prevent even the chance conversation with a Korean maid or bellhop. The few Koreans he came into contact with are either government handlers or non-English speakers. Had he made an attempt to ask questions of locals, it would have endangered his informants and himself.

But Israel is not North Korea. Despite the injustices and human-rights abuses of the Israeli government, the country is open to foreigners, has a high percentage of English speakers, and most crucially, has a free press. (As a result it has been covered rather thoroughly in nonfiction and fiction comics — including Rutu Modan's Exit Wounds, Sarah Gidden's How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, and of course Joe Sacco's Palestine).

Nonetheless, Delisle arrives, along with his NGO-worker girlfriend and their two children, in a state of general ignorance. Despite his professions of atheism, his frame of reference is Christian: he marvels that he’s walking in the footsteps of the apostles. He insists on calling Shabbat “the Sabbath.” He is surprised to learn that Yom Kippur is a holiday; he thought it was the name of a war.

Most of the people he spends time with are either NGO workers, ex-pats, or Christians. His ignorance of Judaism borders on the offensive; during the entire year, he only once socializes with secular Jewish Israelis (who represent the vast majority of Jews in Israel), and he’s amazed to see them use light switches on the Sabbath, just like regular folks.

Yet, Delisle doesn’t feel the need to inquire further or help these women give voice to what sound like extraordinary experiences through comics. "I leave feeling a bit depressed,” he says, “not sure whether we should bother going back to do a workshop." Because they’ve never heard of Tintin? Because they aren’t enlightened secularists? Because their art skills are inferior? What reason could he have for being so uninterested in the people around him?
 
In Pyongyang, witnessing a terrifyingly cheerful concert of girl accordionists, Delisle imagines the grim trajectories of their lives; he writes that he feels like weeping. Here, no such compassion is evident, and its apparent lack — even when a Palestinian babysitter tearfully tells him that her house is to be bulldozed by the Israeli government — is conspicuous. In North Korea, as an observer, Delisle was blinkered by his government handlers. Here, he’s choosing to look away. Given a chance to witness the Israeli bombing of Gaza with some journalists, he feels squeamish ( a series of fumetti show him envisioning the experience being scary) and he decides to skip it.

Delisle has traveled to some extraordinary places, it’s true. But no matter where he goes, it always seems as though he’d really rather have just stayed home.

S.I. Rosenbaum is a journalist and cartoonist from Boston.

Artwork copyright Guy DeLisle

Will Bingley and Anthony Hope-Smith
Abrams ComicArts
$17.95, 180 pages

by Sarah Jaffe

The book is called Gonzo perhaps because that's what would sell, but it's not a story of the gonzo-myth Hunter S. Thompson. It's a darker story, of the things that drove him and pushed him to greatness--and to addictions and finally suicide.

And it's an incomplete story, like all biographies, but the tale it tells is, I think, an important one. It's the story of the man whose work matters to me and to so many other journalists who left the myth of objectivity in the dust, who can't help but let the anger and passion we feel show in our work. There's a number of us, who have taken from Thompson not his style or his habits but the feeling that rang in every line of his (best) prose. It's telling that the worst imitators always want to rewrite Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but the real legacy of Thompson the journalist is in stories of politics and intrigue, freedom and fairness, not in drug binges and outlandish metaphors.

I am not objective about Hunter Thompson—without Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 I would not have the career I have; I would not be the writer I am. Thompson carved out a space for us outsiders with a healthy skepticism of all authority, but he was at his best when he believed in things. He faded to caricature when he stopped finding things to believe in, and this book's stark last pages capture that perfectly.

Whenever I pick up a graphic biography or other work of graphic nonfiction to read, the first question I ask is, why does this story deserve to be a comic? Why should it be told in this format rather than others, or if it has been told in others (as Thompson's life story surely has) what does this one add?

In this case, the book is narrated in first person; I actually flipped to the back to find out if Thompson's letters or some long-lost journal were the sources. But no, it's just writer Will Bingley's stark, economical prose that echoes Thompson's voice well enough to be compelling even to a fangirl like me. Those words are laid over images just as stark at times, the iconic sunglasses-and-hat face of the writer, his shirt always unbuttoned a bit too far, his smirk, his occasional slack-jawed amazement (or exhaustion) rendered a thousand different ways in these pages.

There's shocking brutality in these pages more often than buffoonery; it starts and ends with a gunshot and the writer alone. Violence defines the Thompson shown here, whether he's hunting alone in Aspen, being driven half mad with rage over Vietnam and Cambodia, getting “stomped” by Hell's Angels or cops outside the Chicago Democratic Convention. It also captures the writer's frenetic motion—to believe this story, he took the infamous gig that sent him to Vegas because the Sports Illustrated expense account would “keep him mobile,” and his early moves from city to city are rendered in just a few panels each.

Of course the story has holes. The beauty of comics is that certain things can be implied in the art without having to be stated in text—the intimacy, rendered in simple lines, between Thompson and his wife Sandy in just a few scenes leaves us believing that he was shattered by the end of their marriage, but there's little warmth to the other friendships shown here. Oscar Acosta, the lawyer immortalized in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Ralph Steadman make appearances, as of course does Rolling Stone boss Jann Wenner, but there's little feeling of connection between them.

Missing, too, is the visceral hatred that seeps out of every sentence Thompson ever wrote about Richard Nixon. The Watergate debacle here is reduced to Nixon as a cartoon villain, climbing up the side of a building, with claws for hands and feet. But Thompson's hatred for Nixon started well before that, and though the bombs falling on Cambodia are an easy shorthand for everything wrong with the 70s, the replaying of Nixon's speeches as a sort of shorthand for what was wrong with the man and the country doesn't work as well—politician-speak is notoriously bland and full of platitudes, and simply bracketing it with comments about Nixon's “lies” doesn't tell the story well enough.

It's funny—Thompson was worried, with the film version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, that he'd be made into a cartoon, that his vision would be dulled by cartoons. (For the Thompson completist, I recommend the film Breakfast with Hunter for that full story.) Here, rendered as a comic, he's less of a cartoon than he was in his own prose before his death, at his own hand. And closing this book I felt once again the loss of a brilliant commentator; I wondered anew if he'd have been spurred into new life by the Obama administration, the rise of the Tea Party (which seems at times like something he'd have made up if he wrote more fiction).

Ultimately, I loved the book but it's not an entry point into Thompson. It provides two valuable services, though—a beautifully-drawn visual entry into a world most of its readers probably never saw, the late 60s and early 70s in America when we just realized that maybe the dream we'd been sold was rotten inside, and a reminder that inside the hard-drinking, hard-living “Gonzo” writer was a man with demons and grand loves and inspiration, a person who could perhaps have given us more if he'd slowed down or cleaned up but in the end, as his former editor Alan Rinzler wrote in the introduction here, “Who am I or anyone else to say what he should have done? That was him. His life.”

Sarah Jaffe edits the Labor and Media sections at AlterNet.org, and is a political reporter who tries to cultivate the rage of Hunter S. Thompson with about 1/100th the drug consumption. You can find her work here and follow her on Twitter.

Jeff Jensen and Jonathan Case
Dark Horse
$24.99, 240 pages

by S.I. Rosenbaum

There's nothing remarkable about Jeff Jensen's father. He's an ordinary guy. He has a wife and kids. He's into home improvement. As far as we know, there's no great tragedy or trauma in his life.

But he's a homicide cop in Seattle, in 1983, when the corpses of young women are starting to turn up along the banks of the Green River. Some of them are buried, some not. Some of them are naked, some are clothed. Some have been dumped haphazardly; others are carefully arranged.

Someone is killing young women in Seattle, and Detective Tom Jensen is drawn into a mystery that will consume his career.

The graphic memoir Jeff Jensen wrote about his father's quest for the Green River Killer - elegantly drawn by Jonathan Case - is subtitled A True Detective Story, but it's not a whodunnit. Not far into the book, we skip forward  to the surreal endgame of the case, as the cops install the serial murderer known as Gary Leon Ridgway in a makeshift safehouse inside their own headquarters.

Ridgway wants a plea bargain; the cops want a full confession and the bodies of victims who were never found. But as the narrative jumps back and forth in time, it becomes clear that for Tom Jensen - who spent decades as the sole investigator working the long-cold case - the object is something deeper and more elusive. He wants to know the truth at the dark heart of Ridgway, which even Ridgway doesn't seem to know.

As a kid, Jeff Jensen - now a journalist with Entertainment Weekly - wasn't privy to his father's professional life. He starts the book with a dedication: "For my father, with love, admiration, and deep gratitude," followed by the addendum, "This is what you get for teaching me how to read with Batman comics." The elder Jensen has the mustache and smoking habit of Batman's Commissioner Gordon, though if the resemblance ever occurred to young Jeff he doesn't say so. It was only in the early 2000s, when genetic sequencing broke the case open and Ridgway was finally convicted, that Jeff found out about his dad's work.

The book is written and drawn in a kind of uninflected deadpan.  Case's art recalls Mazzuchelli's Batman work: no greytones, strong lines, and a flatfooted realism in his draftsmanship. There's no narration until the epilogue, when Jeff Jensen briefly lets us in on  the story behind the story. Otherwise, events are presented without comment or sentiment. The effect is compelling. There are long wordless panels where we're left to decipher the expression on a character's face; the directness of the presentation preserves the ambiguities of real life.

I would have liked to see some kind of appendix, explaining how the story was reported and rendered into comics. This kind of thing has become popular at papers like the St. Petersburg Times, where I worked and experimented with comics journalism. On long-form, narrative stories, the paper often runs a "How the story was reported" box explaining briefly how the reporter knew all that stuff. It's a good way to maintain transparency without damaging the flow of the narrative.

So it seems that it would not be a bad idea to explain the reporting process - are the words in those speech bubbles approximations, or actual quotes? What visual references were used for all those supporting characters? Jeff Jensen offers only one comment, in the epilogue, saying that his father still doesn't like to speak about a certain part of the case - the part which forms the book's climax. "The details he gave me were few, and offered reluctantly."

It almost echoes the scenes in which the elder Jensen is interrogating his serial killer. So how did Jeff reconstruct that searingly dramatic scene? Alas, it's just another mystery.

S.I. Rosenbaum is a journalist and cartoonist from Boston.

Rick Veitch
Image Comics
$3.99, 28 pages

by Matt Bors

If you want to find your particular version of events surrounding 9/11 in comic format, you have a lot of options these days. The government's official line, The 9/11 Commission Report, was adapted into the graphic novel format all the kids are talking about. A recent 9/11 coloring book allows you bring to life an image of a SEAL operative shooting Bin Laden as he grabs his niqab-covered wife to catch the bullet--an early report proven to be false. "This is history. It is absolutely factual,"  says the publisher.

Rick Veitch adds his own version of facts to this growing pile with The Big Lie, a comic in the Truther mold. A longtime luminary in American comics, Veitch is responsible for acclaimed runs on Swamp Thing and scathing superhero satires like Brat Pack. Here, what he intends as an engaging way to address serious questions turns out to be unintentionally funny--if I didn't know better I'd be tempted to say it's a parody of moralizing, over-the-top Jack Chick comics.

The plot is as follows: A scientist travels back in time ten years to save her husband, who works in the towers and died on 9/11. Arriving on the morning of the attacks due to a miscalculation, and armed with her iPad ("your what?") full of data, she must convince her husband and his coworkers that a massive attack is about to destroy the buildings. No sweat, right? Well, her histrionic approach to explaining things doesn't win her any new friends.

If getting your loved one out of the building in 30 minutes flat is your only goal, it may be easier to concoct another plan rather than attempt to convince them you are from the future and a grand conspiracy is about to unfold. But these are comics, after all, and this is merely a set up to give the author a chance to expound on the many perceived holes in the 9/11 story.

Ten years out from the attacks, we aren't getting any closer to the truth.

Many Americans don't even remember the year 9/11 occurred. Around the world, polls show that in most countries bare majorities believe Al Qaeda carried out the attacks. In the Arab world the numbers hit rock bottom, while conspiracies about Israel's involvement soar. Veitch doesn't propose a single cohesive theory as to what happened, opting to throw out various suspicions--war games being played that day, the Neo-con agenda, possible foreknowledge had by Bush--to suggest that something was up.

The most popular theory, and one Veitch focuses on the most, is that the buildings were part of a controlled demolition. "This looks exactly like every controlled demolition I've ever witnessed," exclaims the doomed husband watching a video of Building Seven's collapse on the iPad from the future. Indeed, the building collapses do look like other building collapses in that they involve massive structures crumbling earthward.  How radically different an unplanned collapse should look to the untrained eye is unclear, given the limited number of comparative studies done with giant buildings brought down by airplanes.

Building demolition is a months-long process whereby large teams eviscerate buildings, knock out walls, saw steel beams, and string thousands of yards of cable to connect hundreds of charges. It tends to be loud. An explanation for how this took place in a building with thousands of employees is never  given by Truthers, but they don't have to. They are just asking questions, they say.

The demolition scenario is implausible, but Veitch helps it along by visually misrepresenting a key claim. Explosive chargers called "squibs" are said to have detonated down the side of the building. Veitch draws them to look far more precise and fiery than they were in real life. (They were compressed air and dust--this and other theories were most expertly put down by Popular Mechanics magazine.)

It's not much of a spoiler to tell you the planes hit after the scientist is dragged out by security.

In an awkward touch, a black woman emerges from the blast, deliriously singing "Amazing Grace" while readying herself for heaven, and they realize the time-traveler had been right all along as they look up at the exposed thermite bombs rigged to a support beam. Like the end of Jack Chick tracts, those who refused the Truth are swallowed in the fiery death they deserve.

Uncle Sam, who introduces and closes out the tale like the Crypt Keeper of EC Comics, addresses the reader: "Lies are like unwashed socks. They come in all sizes and stink to high heaven."

You might say the same thing about conspiracy theories.

Matt Bors is an editor at Cartoon Movement.

Chester Brown
Drawn And Quarterly
$24.95, 292 pages

by Melissa Gira Grant

We know by now that men don’t go to prostitutes only for sex. For those men who are there to buy the experience of acceptance, sex is just a narrative device, forming the perimeter of the act. This is how Chester Brown illustrates sex with prostitutes in his new graphic novel Paying For It. Once he has paid a woman for sex and he’s stripped naked, the individual women’s rooms fade to a storybook black entirely inconsistent with his unflinching eye for all sex’s detail, but – this allows him to halo their bodies in light, dividing their skin from the dark. Maybe it’s just one way of showing the isolated moment of orgasm in a comic strip. The light always comes back on, and all too human conversation follows. There’s nothing idyllic about these exchanges. It’s not his point. Paying For It is prostitution in all its boring, everyday splendor. Unlike most contemporary prostitution myths against which its positioned, there are no victims and there are no saviors.

Chester Brown writes with the career client’s understanding of the practicalities of commercial sex. His project here is not too different from the one taken up by regular clients of prostitutes around the world: that of cataloguing their experiences by partner, date, sex acts performed, cost, and how much they enjoyed it. In his search for new prostitutes to hire, Chester Brown writes that he comes across websites where clients post these stories in a review-format, but distances himself from the behavior – one he himself engages in with Paying For It. It’s not just for the sake of cold record-keeping that he documents his time with prostitutes. If that was all Chester Brown – and those other clients – needed in order to make sense of what prostitution means in their lives, they could just use a spreadsheet.

There were two types of regular clients I encountered as a prostitute. One sees prostitutes over and over because he accepts the interchangeability of sexual partners when one’s aim for sexual partnership is self-centered; that is, it’s not one of mutual partnership, but a quest for self-definition. There is nothing wrong with this. It’s precisely what one should pay a prostitute for. Another type of regular client seeks a transcendent experience he ascribes to the individual attributes and skills of the prostitute he is with in that moment. He is a more traditional lover sort. He believes that the potential of sex – and of uncovering his selfhood – is in the body of the prostitute. He is buying not one perfect sexual act that will reveal the self, but one perfect state of being that will yield perfect sex.

Paying For It introduces us to – or, Chester presents himself as – the first type of regular. He wants us to believe that he’s telling us his story not to boast, but so that he might understand himself. His prowess, as he experiences it, is as a truth-teller. His heart is no less in his pursuit of coming into comfort with himself, even if he’s not willing to share his emotional life with another human being. Chester Brown portrays a man capable of that kind of opening up: early in the book, he goes through an unconventional sort of breakup with his live-in girlfriend, who continues to live-in and take other lovers. (She’s Sook-Yin Lee, the actress who portrayed a woman on a similar quest in John Cameron Mitchell’s landmark sex movie Shortbus.) The rapid cycling through of Chester Brown’s sex partners – and that he pays them – may make him come off like a man in search of kicks, but he’s just gone looking for himself. And he shows up, in nearly every frame, as consumed with the ritual of finding paid sex as he is coming to terms with what his actions say about the kind of man he is, the kind of men all men are.

Mercifully he makes few pronouncements about the kind of people that sex workers are. He puts this right up front in his story: he doesn’t want to out the women he hires, so he doesn’t draw their faces or include any information that might identify them to a reader. While this can seem like a dehumanizing choice, especially given how often the media defaults to such blurring and cropping in its depictions of prostitutes, in Paying For It, it’s an ethical consideration. Chester Brown rightly limits his gaze to himself, and some friends who consented to appear and be quoted. (In the appendices, he even gives them space to respond to his portrayals.)

Where Paying For It falters is less a problem of Chester Brown’s scope as a storyteller, and more a matter of how a book like this lands in such a limited field. Every book about sex work bears far too much importance, when there are so few that resist universalizing prostitution out of one person’s experience. (One that does this very well is another graphic novel: Rent Girl, by Michelle Tea and Laurenn McCubbin, which has big and contradictory things to say about prostitution, and is still a deeply personal and particular story.) When Chester Brown winds up the book with two too-fast conclusions, one romantic and one political, he’s doing what feels like an about-face, a play at repositioning what came before as a moral tale of the kind he has opposed to this point. Then, once he drops the curtain on his story, he tacks on a call for the decriminalization of prostitution. It’s not that I disagree – but I went cold with his hasty proposal of a legal framework, as a coda to a story far more moving than any debate on prostitution. It would take nothing away from the rightness of his story, and how nakedly he tells it, to simply let it stand as his own.

Melissa Gira Grant is the co-editor of Coming & Crying, a collection of true stories about sex. She's written about prostitution, politics, and technology for Jezebel, Slate, and The Guardian (UK).

Brooke Gladstone and Josh Neufeld
W. W. Norton & Company
$23.95, 170 pages
Book trailer here

by Sarah Jaffe

The Influencing Machine is more than graphic nonfiction. It's a media studies course in itself, distilling a solid chunk of what I and thousands like me studied in journalism school into about 150 pages of art, a book that is itself a lecture.

Of course it took a person like Brooke Gladstone, who breaks down the myths and mistakes of the media every week on NPR's On The Media, to make this book happen. Working with Josh Neufeld, the artist behind the heartbreaking A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, Gladstone's media manifesto provides valuable background critical for understanding the problems and possibilities in this particular moment in journalism.

The use of Brooke's image throughout the book, as a guide through both history and theory, works visually the same way her familiar voice works on the radio; as a comforting presence that adds  personality and allows perspective on recent events, while making the distant past come alive. There's humor aplenty—even a vintage dirty joke or two.

  Particularly when it comes to complicated theory and research about media's effects, the comic format shines.  Susie Cagle's work with infographics has shown that comics are actually a great way to break down numbers, illustrate statistics, and generate interest in otherwise wonky subjects. That works here as well, particularly with the illustration of Daniel Hallin's “Spheres of Influence” using a donut.

But the comics format also allows Gladstone and Neufeld to insert the personalities of the theorists, putting a face to the largely thankless work of communications research and media criticism. It also, of course, allows them to pass subtle judgment, poking subtle fun at Jeff Jarvis's “full disclosure” on his blog by portraying him  in an X-Ray machine or putting Clay Shirky in the Lotus Position, the Buddha of the Internet.

Can illustration ever be “objective”? Well, Gladstone doesn't think objectivity is possible in the first place, and she tosses the very idea aside with this book, the very existence of which is a statement in favor of point of view and personality in reporting. And yet she makes a good case for the continuing need to verify facts, provide context, and not mislead news consumers—particularly with an illustration that adds perspective to the famous photos of Iraqis destroying a statue of Saddam Hussein. Many have probably heard the debunking of the myth behind that story, but the wide-angle view of the square provided here gives a more visceral feeling to that truth.

The tone of the book is largely upbeat, particularly on the ever-present question of whether new media technologies are changing our brains (constantly the subject of Op-Eds and speeches by people who make their money in older technology—like, er, books and comics, as well as radio).  But Gladstone and Neufeld do leave us with a few worries.  Particularly about the “photoshopification” of society, and the growing ease of faking photographs making photos themselves less trustworthy.

“The big threat of photoshopification is not that we will believe documents and photos that are fake,” says comic-Gladstone, standing on a literal soapbox. “It's that we'll find it easier to disbelieve documents and photos that are real. When it's convenient.”

The next panel is a small but jolting rendering of that famous Abu Ghraib photo, of a hooded prisoner standing on a box with wires clipped to his fingers.

The book works this way many times—using a simple cartoon to call up the visual memory of something striking, poignant, or horrifying.  Often these are small, unadorned panels, the last one on the page, forcing you to pause and consider what those images really mean.

The introduction explains what Gladstone means by The Influencing Machine. It's a psychological phenomenon, documented throughout history, of paranoid patients convinced they're being controlled by a machine.  It's a great metaphor for the press, of course the biggest “influencing machine” of all.  The problem with it is that it falls by the wayside as the book wades into its material, returning at the end for the discussion of new technologies. The “influencing machines” of social media, after all, are being blamed for lack of attention span, credited with fomenting revolution, and of course, are currently in the process of screwing up another Congressman's career.

If the point here is that, as Gladstone quotes comic-book hero Spider-Man, “With great power comes great responsibility,” then the book does a wonderful job preparing the reader for that responsibility. Unfortunately, it then seems to imply that all we can do about the media is shrug our shoulders and watch it change—and watch it change our lives. “We get the media we deserve,” says comic-Gladstone, but do we? Who deserves it? Did the people of Iraq deserve the media of the U.S.?

I called The Influencing Machine Gladstone's media manifesto above. But can it truly be a manifesto with a conclusion that leaves the reader—even a passionate media junkie like me—wondering what we can do about all of this, or if there's anything we should do?  Perhaps “primer” is a better word, since the book is the best single volume you can find for a deep background in history, theory, and a decent analysis of the current moment.

But I'm not content simply with analysis. I want to know how to fix things.

Sarah Jaffe is a freelance writer and comic book nerd. She has a master's in journalism from Temple University, and you can find her work here and follow her on Twitter.