In the early 18th century, Ireland was a terrible place to be Irish.A small class of English landlords owned 90% of the soil and exported most of the island’s productive capacity while locals starved. For 10 years an anonymous writer published a series of earnest objections. His arguments were forceful, reasonable and largely ignored. In 1729, he published “A Modest Proposal,” which suggested that 100,000 Irish children be sold each year as food to be consumed by the English landlords. Ten shillings a pop. It was shocking, outlandish and funny. It made the point. The writer was Jonathan Swift.Effective satire is rude. It does not seek agreement or argue through sincere reason. It arrives in disguise, cloaked in humor, and when the beguiled reader opens the door, it delivers a sucker punch of necessary truth. It is electroshock therapy for a cowed populace and its overweening ruling class.Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” appeared at the height of the Cold War, when a feeling of imminent doom was ever-present. We were told we were in a never-ending race — a space race, an arms race. To lose would mean annihilation. To argue against a maximalist policy was to endorse civilization’s suicide. It was a rhetorical trap. But incinerating hundreds of millions of people to prevent the incineration of hundreds of millions of people was an absurd proposition. By portraying the architects of this regime as laughable, childlike naifs — Gen. Buck Turgidson! Col. Bat Guano! — Kubrick created a vantage point from which to see the insanity of the entire arrangement.These two great works, created centuries apart, are examples of satire doing what earnest argument could not. Mad Magazine, “Doonesbury,” the Onion, “The Colbert Report,” “Triangle of Sadness,” “Don’t Look Up” and, of course, “Idiocracy” all perform the same trick. They punch up at those with power. They turn their subjects upside down and backward to expose a more revealing perspective on what we thought we knew.But more than anything, they are funny — both in the lighthearted, cat-fails-on-YouTube way and in a more ambiguous, disquieting sense, as when we somehow escape a catastrophic traffic accident and look over at our terrified yet relieved partner in the passenger seat. Humor is the sine qua non of satire and, often, of human connection. Laughter tempers our fears and fortifies us. Laughter builds bonds between us.In our current moment of chaos and contention, comics and graphic novels are an especially vital format for satire and subversive storytelling. Nearly all media try to convince us of their veracity. The internet, where the average American spends something like seven hours a day, is a battle cage of voices and images cranked to 11, all asserting authenticity and authority. Comics never enter that arena. Everything about them is contrived, and proudly so, removed from literal reality by filtering through the mind, heart and pen of the artist. This abstraction suppresses our reflexive urge to take our usual sides in our usual brawls. We are given a safe space to consider things anew. Comics scholar Scott McCloud sketches out the idea of “amplification through simplification”: A photograph is, by definition, not us and thereby hard to identify with. A simple drawing can be any of us, or all of us.Comics and graphic novels combine imagery with elements of cinema and literature. But the imagery predominates, and we know that images slip under and around the arbitrary logic of words to get more directly at emotion and memory.Powerful meaning can be conveyed visually, while the author can modulate the reader’s experience through the placement, presence or absence of words, the pacing and flow of panels, and the drama of page turns. Color and typography provide layers of subtlety. Comics are linear, but less so than prose or video, leaving room for readers to page back and forth, to pause and think. And in the era of literal book banning, AI slop and social media addiction, inviting an audience to set their phones aside, pick up a physical book and embrace a longer-form story is itself an act of trust, if not quite subversion.Put more simply: They’re comics. They seem harmless, which allows them to amuse you with funny pictures while they sneak explosives into your house.Two recent graphic novels make the point. “Justice Warriors,” by Matt Bors and Ben Clarkson (2023) presents a dystopian vision of the first “perfect city,” which exists in a literal bubble. All is good on the inside, but not so much in the Uninhabited Zone surrounding it. “Big Jim and the White Boy,” by David F. Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson (2024) turns the American classic upside down — with Huckleberry Finn as the stereotyped tag along and Jim as hero. At once ludicrous and poignant, beautifully rendered and sharp, both provoke abundant belly laughs that serve as chasers for the head-spinning shots of firewater woven into their narratives.In the best of times, satire is one part of healthy public debate. We do not live in the best of times. Something has broken. We all feel it. We have come unmoored from any connection to truth. Call it a pandemic of lying. There is no remedying this cultural illness without holding the powerful to account. That will require more laughter than ever — enough to overcome the lies.It is fitting that in this fraught moment, the most ridiculous voices are the bravest, most honest and most important. To the graphic novelists, filmmakers, artists, and comedians — and the publishers and producers and distributors — among us: Go hard at it, and spare no one. As Mark Twain put it: “Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.”Tim Disney is a writer, filmmaker and curator of the L.A. community art space 2413 Hyperion. He is the creator and co-writer of the graphic novel “The A.R.C., published by Gungnir. ”
