CSotD: Cartoon as witness: Making the most of the medium
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You will really be missing something if you don't go here and read this cartoon.
On one level, the incident it bears witness to, the shootings of civilians by American contractors, is critically important and you should know about it. But let me get back to that.
Dan Archer has created an interactive comic that uses its format to present information in a way that is easily understood, chilling and persuasive. Wiley Miller has repeatedly groused that simply featuring comics on-line that might have been printed instead is a waste of the medium's potential, but, while he's said it most often in terms of layout, that's only the beginning. Unconfined by the paper page, the cartoonist can experiment with new formats for his work beyond simple layout.
Archer is givng Wiley his wish in spades: What he has done to take advantage of the medium is much more than toying with layout: By creating an interactive piece, he preserves the sequential storytelling of the cartoon form, but brings the reader into the process, making you a part of what is happening on the "page."
His comic is easily navigated: You start by hitting the "play" button, then mouse over the colored sections on the map before advancing the story with the timeline at the side.
This very elementary, but more involving, method of "turning pages" provides a sense of participation that heightens the impact of what you are seeing. By controlling the flow of the sequences, you become a witness to the events.
Cartoons can mask intensity without destroying it. You read "Maus" or "Persepolis" and, as you work your way through the narrative, each panel is "cartoonish" and mundane, but the overall impact builds. It's not that you couldn't stand this impact in a more direct form, but you might well turn away from it because it was too didactic, too insistent in its lack of nuance that you feel a specific way.
Archer's piece is Thomas Nast gone electronic, and it's potentially as impactful, though Nast had the advantage of a less fragmented audience. Those who cared, those whose opinions mattered, were likely to see his cartoons.
It's harder, if not entirely impossible, to engineer such an audience for much of anything today.
Which brings me back from the overall medium, and Archer's use of it, to the specifics of Nisoor Square.
When Seymour Hersh reported on the massacre at My Lai, it was shocking to Americans who had no idea that such things might be going on in Vietnam, but, for those of us who had friends there and were hearing their stories and stories from Vietnamese sources that departed from the official narrative, the shock of My Lai was not that it happened, but its scope. It was of a piece with the Democratic Convention in Chicago, where we weren't surprised that cops were beating up longhaired kids, but we didn't expect them to do it on such a scale, and in front of our parents on national television.
The whole world was watching. That doesn't happen very often. And it isn't happening now.
The shootings in Nisoor Square are shocking not so much because of the body count but because of how public they were and yet how little the story has drifted back to the United States. And these are not barefoot people in grass huts whom we can dismiss as less-than-us. These are people who drive cars and go to school and have jobs and, except for the occasional hijab or pair of sandals, look and act much like us.
How many more Nisoor Squares are there, that we aren't hearing about?
And does it matter, once we've discovered this one?
And at what point does ignorance become complicity?
Through Cartoon Movement, the site set up by Matt Bors and Tjeerd Royaards, Dan Archer has shown what is happening in Iraq.
It's our responsibility to look.
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