Editorial

Charlie Hebdo

The killings of eleven people in the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris on 7 January 2015, and the related killing of five others, have engendered a wide ranging, and sometimes heated debate. There is a temptation for Westerners to see it just as a straightforward attack on free speech. It is certainly impossible not to condemn the callous killing of cartoonists and other staff in the offices without reservation. Even those who expressed their reservations about Charlie Hebdo’s position could not defend the actions of the killers.

A march in Paris on 11 January in support of the magazine attracted an estimated 3.7 million people. This show of solidarity included a range of world leaders, including British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, EU President Donald Tusk, and Jordan’s King Abdullah II.

But a number of journalists accused some of these leaders of not having that great a record of their own in supporting free speech, and the Israeli newspaper the Announcer was accused of hypocrisy when they removed Angela Merkel, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo and Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt when they published photos of the march.

There were also those who argued that there must be some limits to the freedom of expression. British MP George Galloway described the magazine as ‘racist and Islamophobic’, and Pope Francis argued that freedom of expression should be limited by respect for religion.

Perhaps the most striking response to the murders has been that of cartoonists worldwide. By 15 January, Je Suis Charlie: Pencils in Defence of Press Freedom (Je Suis Charlie. Matite in difesa della libertà di stampa) was published in Italy by Corriere della Sera, the proceeds of which went to the families of the victims. The small format book collected over one hundred and fifty cartoons from around the world. Much of the response to the killings was similar – images graphically represented the power of the pen over the gun. Many show pencils threatening, or blocking guns, and perhaps most eloquently French illustrator Lucille Clerc shows a complete pencil with the caption ‘yesterday’, a broken pencil with the caption ‘today’ and with the caption ‘tomorrow’ she shows the broken pieces forming two new pencils. American cartoonist Steve Benson shows a hooded militant with a smoking machine gun misquoting the Voltaire attributed saying, ‘I may not agree with you, but I will defend to your death my divine right to kill you.’

The book includes a nuanced strip by the American comics journalist, Joe Sacco. Sacco addresses the reader directly and, despite expressing his sadness at the killings, he ponders the effectiveness of satire whilst drawing images that might be offensive to a black or Jewish audience, and he comments, ‘In fact, when we draw a line, we are often crossing one too.’

Elsewhere Muslim cartoonists have also responded to the events, often with condemnations of the killings, but also drawing attention to the hypocrisy of some Western powers.

In the end the whole saga has no real winners. The first issue of the magazine to be published after the murders reputedly had a print run of more than five million rather than the normal sixty thousand, but that could be of no consolation to anyone connected with the magazine. The debate about freedom of speech versus the respect for religious beliefs has been raised in many forums but has in no way been resolved. Perhaps it cannot be resolved. Many Muslim writers have regretted the harm possibly caused to the image of the religion. Images of Mohammed – some in the new Charlie Hebdo, which caused some of the defenders of the magazine to have new doubts, are easily accessible on the Internet, to be seen much more widely than before.

Finally, for those interested in the field of comics and cartoons, Charlie Hebdo has emphasised the power of the medium, and clearly illustrated some of the dangers inherent in that power.

Special Issue: War and Conflict

This special issue deals with war and violence. The articles in the issue are based on papers given at the 60^th anniversary conference of The European Association for American Studies. The conference, America: Justice, Conflict, War, was held at The University of Leiden at The Hague in 2014. The panel ‘The Ethics of War and Conflict in Graphic Narratives’ was organised by Mihaela Precup (University of Bucharest) and Rebecca Scherr (University of Oslo) who have guest edited the issue. The articles cover a wide range of creators and time frames.

Ian Gordon’s ‘The moral world of Superman and the American war in Vietnam’ examines the problems of the ‘Man of Steel’ when confronted with real-world conflicts, concentrating on the contentious conflict in Vietnam, but highlighting a perennial problem that was evident ever since the character’s ambiguous engagement with the Second World War. Dana Mihăilescu’s ‘Haunting spectres of World War II memories from a transgenerational ethical perspective in Miriam Katin’s We Are on Our Own and Letting It Go’ deals with the transmission of the trauma of the Holocaust from her mother to Katin herself, and then from Katin to her son. The analysis of Letting It Go (2013) looks at Michael Rothberg’s ‘multidirectional memory’ as an ethical solution to the problem of post-traumatic representation.

In ‘Introducing the Rwandan genocide from a distance: American noir and the animal metaphor in 99 Days’, Laurike in ‘t Veld examines the juxtaposition between fictional violence and real genocide in Matteo Cassali and Kristian Donaldson’s 99 Days (2011). She argues that the comic unconvincingly connects the Rwandan genocide to L.A. street gangs, with the unintended effect of encouraging a stereotypical reading of African-American males as prone to extreme violence in any circumstances. Katalin Orbán in ‘Mediating distant violence: reports on non-photographic reporting in The Fixer and The Photographer’ proposes that it is possible that graphic reportage might be ‘immune to a kind of media blindness’, focusing mainly on Sacco’s The Fixer (2004). Orbán looks at the graphic reportage of conflict and violence highlighting the differences between comics and photography. Michael J. Prince’s ‘“Whose side are you on?”: negotiations between individual liberty and collective responsibility in Millar and McNiven’s Marvel Civil War’ looks at the way in which Marvel’s superheroes reacted to the deep political divisions in America which were exacerbated by the 9/11 attacks.

David Huxley and Joan Ormrod

Editors

Manchester Metropolitan University

[email protected] / [email protected]