Comics are surprisingly powerful packages. They appear to be such ephemeral things, sources of momentary smiles and thrills, easily read and quickly forgotten in yesterday’s paper or the previous discarded issue. Yet they have proved unusually effective at seizing and imprinting on the imagination, at transmitting information and ideas. Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer-prize-winning author of the Holocaust graphic novel Maus, suggests that this is because their unique visual and verbal blendings enable them to approximate "a mental language" - one that comes closer to our real human thought processes than either words or pictures alone. This may explain why the best have a way of sticking in our minds.

The pen, especially of a cartoonist, can be mighty and sometimes lethally poisoned. Before World War Two, David Low was rumoured to be high on Adolf Hitler’s hit list because of his stinging political cartoons, among the first in Britain to criticize the Nazi leader. Back in the 1870s, crooked New York boss William Tweed is alleged to have complained about Thomas Nast’s constant exposes of his corruption, saying: "I don’t care what the papers write about me… but stop them damned pictures." Earlier still, British monarch George IV’s bribe to George Cruikshank to "show him no more in immoral situations" was not enough to restrain the cartoonist’s barbs for long. Despite freedom of the press, to this day cartoonists face being imprisoned under certain regimes, even assassinated, for the criticisms, intended or misread, in their drawings.

When it comes to populist persuasion and instruction, governments, state institutions, corporations, activist groups, lobbyists and individuals of all persuasions have long known that comics and cartoons can get their messages across more efficiently and entertainingly than columns of text. Benjamin Franklin, America’s first political newspaper cartoonist, understood this when in 1754 he sketched, carved and published an image of a snake, curved to suggest the coastline and dissected into eight parts representing the individual colonies. With the caption ‘Join Or Die!’ the cartoon brilliantly encapsulated his urgent plea for unity. It was reprinted or copied in dozens of colonial papers as a founding symbol of the new nation’s shared identity.

Don’t underestimate comics' explosive alchemy in mixing clear artwork and concise words. Reading their text and characters is a ‘show-and-tell’ double-act akin to deciphering diagrams or maps, ideal for hooking people with little time to read. The danger is that the medium can be exploited equally for good and for evil, for propaganda and indoctrination as well as for more positive, enlightening purposes. There’s no better way to dehumanize and demonize ‘the other’ and instil hatred against them than through brutal, distorted cartooning. From the early 20th century, antisemitism has been spread and ‘justified’ in Germany and beyond with the help of caricatures vilifying Jewish people. Similarly, ethnic hatred was in the 1990s, stoked in Britain by the fascist Stormer magazine and in Rwanda by an explosion of periodicals full of inflammatory anti-Tutsi cartoons.

In this respect, comics are open to the same misuse and abuse as any other powerful communications medium, except that they have long been misunderstood by many as appealing solely to the young, poorly educated and impressionable. Their very graphic impact, fixed on the page for all to see, arouses controversy whenever cartoonists dare to deal with more adult subject matter. Old prejudices persist, but over the past 20 years or so comics in the form of graphic novels have acquired a degree of respectability in literary and art circles. In 2005 British cartoonists Posy Simmonds and Raymond Briggs were elected fellows of the Royal Society of Literature, the first ‘graphic novelists’ to join those hallowed wordsmiths.

Comic script supplied by Joe Sacco

Read part 2 of Paul's blog on Wednesday...

Words: Paul Gravett
Writer, journalist, broadcaster and Director of the Comica Festival
Consultant Editor of Ctrl.Alt.Shift Unmasks Corruption
www.paulgravett.com