The Four Color Media Monitor

Ed Driscoll at Pajamas Media (via Big Hollywood) interviewed Amy Shlaes and Paul Rivoche, who've published a graphic novel called The Forgotten Man, which looks at the bad effects the New Deal had during the Great Depression. (Update: I hadn't noticed before, but Chuck Dixon was also a contributor to the book.) They also say that folks who uphold liberty should take a stand with their work:

MR. DRISCOLL: Amity, I don’t really follow the graphic novel industry. Are there left-leaning equivalents to your new project?

MS. SHLAES: Oh, absolutely. Our book’s pretty free-market. Forgotten Man is a free market concept. But I first noticed Howard Zinn, the progressive historian, had a graphic novel, [A People's History of American Empire.] And it was quite successful. Teachers were teaching it in high school. College students were reading it. Adults were reading it. They were trying to ‑‑ you know, Paul used the word “gateway”. And another artist said well, comics are a gateway drug to content. The ’30s and economics, those are difficult topics, but somehow through comics you can ‑‑ you can grapple with them and come up with your own solution.

Howard Zinn was succeeding massively with his cartoon history of the U.S. empire, and I said well, we’ve got to get in here too and draw our cartoon, and let people choose. The medium cannot be ruled by artists, as wonderful as they are, who only have one point of view, which is more to the left or progressive.

She's absolutely right. I'd even add that famous comic publishing companies cannot be ruled solely by blatant leftists obsessed with stuffing their politics deeper and more crudely into the products they're in charge of, among other awful things that destroy cohesion. And if said publishers are owned by corporations, those higher echelons cannot continue to ignore how they're employing people whose grip on morale is horrendous and could prove harmful in the long run. This looks like a very recommended GN project Shlaes and Rivoche have written, and worth trying out.

Update: here's another article by Shlaes on National Review about why conservatives should start taking the comics medium more seriously.

Labels: indie publishers, politics