Political Protest

After a long period of sociopolitical quiescence—born of newspapers' fears of offending subscribers and advertisers—the comic strip resumed some of its original satiric purpose, which it had shown in the nineteenth century. Walt Kelly's Pogo in its innocent-looking, Disneyish, animal-fabulous garb, indicted Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s. The traditional taboo of the "controversial" was finally broken with Jules Feiffer, whose work was nevertheless confined to the progressive weekly magazine, unlike Garry Trudeau's syndicated Doonesbury (commencing in 1970, in the early 2000s the strip appears in four hundred newspapers worldwide). Highly topical and scathing of government lies and deceptions (the Watergate scandal was for Trudeau what McCarthy was for Kelly), and sympathetic to new social movements such as feminism, Trudeau has been called the most influential (and is probably the most regularly censored) cartoonist in the world; he won a Pulitzer Prize for cartooning in 1975. The drawing is stiff, but the dialogue perfectly tuned. His nearest British equivalent is Steve Bell, a principled, caustic, socialist critic of capitalist antics, whose daily "If" has appeared in the Guardian newspaper since 1981. His crude, chaotic linear style and composition derive from his background in children's comics. The child-like style, verging on bizarre abstractions, is best exemplified in the poster work of Berkeley artist Doug Minkler.

All kinds of long-established taboos, mainly in the social and sexual realm, were broken by the so-called Underground Comics (or comix) starting in the mid 1960s, led by Robert Crumb. These works heralded the sexual revolution that was also visualized by posters, and celebrated illegal drugs and the hippie lifestyle in a manner that is both hilarious and philosophical. Approaching the pornographic, such work endured brushes with law, and for a time it was easier to find these comics in Amsterdam than in their place of origin, the San Francisco Bay area.

The graphic novel emerged in the 1980s from the old comic book, which was typically a collection of short graphic sequences, related to and often reproducing newspaper strips. It has now become a major vehicle of social and political protest, gaining status from Art Spiegelman's autobiographical Holocaust account Maus, which won many prizes and is sold in mainstream bookstores. The genre has lent itself to autobiography laced with radical social critique, as in the feminist advocacy of Marisa Acocella's Just Who the Hell Is SHE Anyway? (1993). The comic strip and comic book format, much used everywhere for educational and didactic purposes, found essentially local critical forms in Latin America: the much-censored Rius (Eduardo del Rio) in Mexico, with his Agachados (The Downtrodden) and Supermachos (The Supermales), cutting a wide swath through the Mexican polis; Roberto Fontanarrosa, with his Boogie el Aceitoso (Boogie [from Humphrey Bogart] the Slippery), a crapulous, sadistic C.I.A. thug and U.S.-hired mercenary, whose laconic wit is his only virtue. Another Argentine, Hector Oesterheld, wrote for artist Alberto Breccia and his son Enrique a tragic life of Che Guevara (Che, 1968), which was burned and suppressed by the government, and Osterheld was "disappeared" (murdered).

An example of socialist political comic, which has remained unique, emerged in Salvadore Allende's Chile (1970–1973), an exciting experiment that was aborted by the military coup of Augusto Pinochet, which banned and burned it. Under the generic title La Firme (Steadfast) the series told amusing Chilean-dialectal and dialectical tales in quintessential Chilean working places and locales, serving to explain the need for the socialist transformation that was then in process and under threat. This was undertaken in tandem with the first radical, and enduring, critique of the Disney comic, which was especially hegemomic in Latin America: How to Read Donald Duck (1971), by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, which was translated into a dozen foreign languages (the English edition, 1975, carried the subtitle Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic). After Chile's bloody counterrevolution of September 11, 1973, José Palomo, one of the La Firme artists, fled to Mexico where he created a tiny, Wizard-of-Id-like dictator, not at all innocuous like his Brant-Parker prototype, under the title El Cuarto Reich, published in Uno mas Uno. Contemptuous and exploitative of the poverty and sufferings of his people, and backed by U.S.-trained thugs and death squads, he typifies the Third World dictator, especially in U.S.-dominated Latin America. This gag strip, hilarious as well as mordant, was little exported. Yet it is perhaps the only comic strip in the world about the life of truly immiserated majorities, although in the U.S. Aaron McGruder's Boondocks does deal with the impoverished and unemployed black youth, as well as issues of war and peace.