Brian Cowen Caricature

Brian Cowen, Taoiseach of Ireland - sort of like our village head man - does not require a great deal of caricaturing. He is the very embodiment of our grotesque culture, a man who's chief claim to fame is a vulgar nickname.

When an artist snuck a nude portrait of Cowen into the Royal Hibernian Academy - a la Banksy and lots of other artists - RTE, the national broadcaster, reported it on the main evening news. The Taoiseach made his displeasure known, causing RTE news and its Director General to issue grovelling apologies to Cowen the following evening and withdraw any instances of the image.

'The powers that be' naturally sent the police to intimidate radio talk show host, Ray Darcy, and threatened prosecution against the artist, Conor Caspy, for criminal damages of the Royal Hibernian Academy.




The fact that our national broadcaster cravenly apologised for offending Cowen's sensibilities is of near insignificance compared to the institutional corruption that exists in Irish political and economic life. Pathetic.

(via Damien Mulley and Irish Election)

Review: Give Me Liberty

A young woman survives deprivation, war and political machinations in this bleak and charmless work.

‘Black humour’ must be among the most over-used, mis-represented descriptions of creative failure; usually it is heavy on the blackness and low on humour. ‘Political satire’ falls into the same category and few works have the political insight to justify the claim.

The comics industry owes Frank Miller a debt of gratitude. Miller's noir stamp on Daredevil and then Batman, in the 1980s, breathed fresh air into stale franchises and ushered in a new ‘gritty’ era of comics.

DC published Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns in 1986, the same year as Watchmen. Liberating and fresh, these works seemed to demonstrate the potential of the comics medium to express adult ideas and stories. Unfortunately, the industry's vogue for ‘dark’ and ‘mature’ themes led them to fill their comics with gratuitous violence, cynicism and exploitative misogyny.

These qualities, always nascent in Miller's stories, came to dominate them. Miller's work never again hit the heights of Dark Knight and has increasingly come to parody itself.

Set in a dystopian near future, Give Me Liberty follows the adventures of Martha Washington, a black girl from a violent Chicago slum, who joins the US army and becomes a war hero. Martha's story provides a through-line for the degeneration of the US government and the internal political struggles.

Give Me Liberty is replete with gags. For example, Martha takes her name (presumably) from George Washington's wife. The US Army is renamed PAX - latin for 'peace' - ironically recalling the Pax Romana, the 'Roman Peace', a period of relative tranquility during the time of the Roman Empire.

There is no shortage of ideas - the title comes from Patrick Henry's famous insurrectionary quote 'Give me liberty or give me Death!' - but quite what Miller wants us to take from them, beyond the obvious 'irony' is unclear.

And if Miller’s work is not particularly nuanced or insightful of politics, at times it is very funny. The space-station occupied by ‘Aryan Thrust’ - a group of militant extremists, who assert that ‘the future is white, fascist and gay’ - takes the form of a gigantic phallus. Miller seems to want to say something about men, but what?

Indeed, apart from Martha there are almost no women in Give Me Liberty. With the exception of Elektra, Miller often conforms to the comic industry’s exploitative portrayal of women. Martha is no sex object, but nor is she much of a woman; her value lies in her malleability to the ends of power and her effective use of force.

The world of Give Me Liberty is not quite a Hobbesian war of all against all, but force is the idiom of society, power its highest value. Miller wants to say something about men, but he presents again an assemblage of ideas, without a strong organising principle.

Martha Washington herself is kept in a kind of developmental stasis. We learn little about her, or her motivations, other than her facility for killing and surviving. Martha is the still point, around which the chaos of the story revolves. It is tempting to see this as a kind of Forrest Gump move on Miller’s part; while Moretti, the ambitious military man, manoeuvres himself into power Martha fights and survives his wars.

It seems that Miller wants to have his cake and eat it. Power is shown to cruelly brutalise and instrumentalise, but Miller relishes in the violence which is Martha's sole purpose in life.

On the plus side, the storytelling in Give Me Liberty is expert, in particular the pacing, which moves along slickly. And Dave Gibbon's charismatic artwork evokes Watchmen. If only we could remember the brilliant visual style and storytelling Miller introduced to comics and forget what he has to say.

Hope in our time

It’s hard to say something fresh about Barack Obama, his election, last November and his inauguration yesterday.

Watching his address last night, with my family, it was hard not to feel overwhelmed with emotion. I remember, on the day of Obama’s nomination as Democratic candidate, my mom, who remembers the civil rights movement and desegregation, bursting into tears. It meant so much to her. How much more to African-Americans of her generation, their children and grandchildren?

But Obama’s nomination, election and inauguration reach far beyond ethnicity, race or nationality. We live in an era of politics proliferating in management. Our politicians ‘manage’ (or indeed mismanage) The Economy, public services, foreign affairs; they order reports and launch initiatives. Things get a little worse, a little better; life goes on.

Here though, is a man who is willing to lead. Indeed Barack Obama has already led countless, black people, young people and tired people all over America to vote, to restore a measure of dignity to a process from which they felt divorced, to make representation mean something again, to dare to hope.

If Martin Luther King had a dream, Obama has vision. His presence on the podium yesterday invitates us to share it. And vision is what we need. Look what his vision has already achieved! Look how little can be achieved without it (and even what carnage can be wrought because of its lack).

Our current global systemic collapse is the result of just a lack of foresight and imagination, of vision. Expectations of this man, in the world of percentage increases and decreases, of time-frames and deadlines, are high. That, I think, is the limited perspective from which we have just departed.

As he said himself, Barack Obama cannot fly in like Superman and solve the problems we have created, change the world we have made in our own image. Rather, President Obama represents our collective ability to imagine the world as we wish to inhabit it - as ready participants, useful contributors and generous creators - to hope for better from ourselves and to see that better nature take form and take flight.

And that’s what I feel. Hope for the future. Hope for us.

Proud to be American. At last.

Graphic politics

For anybody wondering about the relevance of my last post to comics, please note that IDW has just published its Presidential Material graphic novels, examining the candidacies of Barack Obama and John McCain.

Of course Joe Sacco’s graphic journalism and Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir, Persepolis, are pretty well admired, but while browsing in a bookshop on the weekend, I saw that Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of American Empire has been produced as a graphic novel. Graphic non-fiction! Yes! See, there's always a connection. I'll either find one or make one up.

The weight of the world

This morning I posted my electoral ballot for the upcoming Presidential election. Although I am Irish and live in Dublin, I am also an American citizen. But though I vote at the drop of a hat at home - it helps that my local polling office is all but next door - I’ve never voted in an American election.

People on both sides of the Atlantic have been excited by the drama of this election; a young, inspirational candidate facing an experienced and respected veteran.And all played out against the murky backdrop of race and faith politics.

In all honesty, I’ve never voted in an American election before because of the hassle. To vote in this election I had to send in a voter registration form, wait for my county registrar in the States to send back a ballot, and then fill it out and post it back. As I write, I have still not received my ballot and so I have returned a federal write-in ballot (like an emergency ballot for US citizens overseas).

So why bother now, when I haven’t before? Is this election more important than the previous two, which have produced such disastrous results in world affairs over the past eight years? Will my single vote make a difference?

It is hard to answer these questions. I’m not even sure I vote for change; our political and elector systems are deeply flawed and I’m not sure change (in a direct, straightforward sense) is possible. I vote because it is my right as a citizen, a right I might not enjoy in another country or political system.

I vote because, flawed as our politics is, voting sends a simple message that people out there (out here!) care about what politicians do, what countries do. I vote in this election in particular because its outcome will effect global politics (and global everything else) and if there’s any chance I can influence that with my vote I must try.