Red Lines: Political Cartoons and the Struggle against Censorship by Cherian George and Sonny Liew (review)

Abstract

100 More broadly, when politics and pop culture or entertainment converge, we both ask our politics to entertain us and ask our entertainment to foreground its politics. This convergence might help to “motivate, educate, and connect the public to political issues and systems,” as Knopf notes (xxv). It might also drive the proliferation of narratives common to entertainment and politics: “conspiracy narratives that work to uncover the truth and/or achieve justice”; outsider or “antiestablishment, anti-politician” narratives in which traditional institutions and norms are an impediment rather than an aid to justice; understandings of politics that take their bearings from “fan cultures,” in which engagement with complex issues is replaced by shared symbology (xxiv–xxv, 25–28, 207). None of these developments seems entirely positive. Knopf shows us, convincingly, how comics, in requiring that readers “fill in the blanks,” might be especially useful in encouraging a deeper and more thoughtful engagement with politics (111). It might also be the case that comics, in encouraging the convergence of entertainment and politics, might be perpetuating the kind of destructive oversimplification of complicated things that Knopf’s supervillain presidents embrace. There’s much more to Politics in the Gutters than what I’ve covered here, and what I’ve left out is also well worth discussing—in another, longer engagement. If I had to complain about one thing, I’d say that, in reading Politics in the Gutters, I often wished for the wonderful wit and wordplay found in so much of Knopf’s other work. Of course, responsible scholarship is not entirely a laughing matter—but, to quote a famous supervillain: why so serious? Politics in the Gutters is most enjoyable to read when it has fun with its source material—which is, after all, fun. But this is a relatively insignificant gripe. All in all, Christina M. Knopf’s Politics in the Gutters is a great read. Your local or online bookseller will thank you—and ought to send Knopf a thank-you note, too—since, if you’re anything like me, you’ll want to order a whole bunch of the comics Knopf writes about, read them, and then come back to Politics in the Gutters again. What’s better than a book that makes you want to read more comics?