Cartoons are no stranger to controversy – to some they can be deeply insulting, so much so that they go to the ludicrous extremes of demanding books be banned or even that the artists should be killed. To many of the rest of us quite how anyone can be so worked up over a cartoon rather than worrying about the actual events in the world which the cartoon may be commenting on or drawing attention to is beyond us. Poor old Hergé had his name dragged through the mud in several countries this year over Tintin in the Congo: in Britain the Commission for Racial Equality, in the spirit of enlightened public debate, demanded the book be banned from sale in British bookstores (which lead to a surge in sales), in the US a new edition of the album was pulled from the publisher’s schedule and in Hergé’s heartland of Belgium a Congolese student went to court to try and have the book banned.
There was a terrible whiff of hypocrisy about the whole thing as political correctness overcame sensible judgement for some, fixating on Tintin and Hergé while blissfully ignoring an entire canon of classical novels from the 18th and 19th century which could contain similar – or worse -scenes which could offend (is it because Tintin is illustrated?), while those of us who love books were horrified at the thought of anyone being able to ban books, to dictate what the rest of us could or could not read in a free society. No-one denied some of the work could be distasteful to a modern reader – always a risk when you read a classic work from another era – but the book itself came with a clear warning that it depicted races and nations and politics in a way very much different and less acceptable to us than a modern book would. As such it seemed to me that, like many classic works, it shines a light into a particular period and the way people saw the world then, something we should be discussing so modern readers understand clearly why we strive to treat others equally today, to see the historical context of how different people have been viewed and portrayed, rather than hiding it away and pretending it never happened (besides, if we do that, what do we decide is uncomfortable next?). The reason I bring this up again as the year draws to a close is because over on The Ephemerist Wim has posted this cartoon comment (below) on the whole sorry tale by Balthazar B; please don’t tell us this cartoon too is offensive, because Balthazar is clearly using the whole idea of racial stereotyping to make a comment here (check Wim’s blog for the translations):
August 27th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
hey i dont get it