Belgium's Spirou undergoes censorship

The UK Guardian reports the veteran Belgian comic series Spirou has come under woke assault for caricatures:

A comic book has been withdrawn from sale by its Belgian publisher after an outcry over racist depictions of black people and “hyper-sexualised” images of women.

The publisher Dupuis announced that its graphic novel, Spirou and the Blue Gorgon, would be removed from shops after the book caused a storm on social media.

In an announcement last week, Dupuis said it was “profoundly sorry if this album has been shocking and hurtful”, adding that it had been done in a “caricatured style of representation from another era”. The publisher added it was “more aware than ever of our moral duty and the importance of comics,” adding: “We take full responsibility today for this error of judgment.”

Spirou and the Blue Gorgon, a satirical tale of so-called “eco-terrorists”, junk food and plastic rubbish, was first published in September 2023 and widely reviewed in the Francophone press with little controversy.

That changed last month when a TikTok video denouncing its portrayal of black people and women went viral, triggering a great deal of criticism. One internet user noted that all the white characters were human beings while black characters were depicted as monkeys, and the women, typically drawn with plunging cleavage and tiny waists, were “hyper-sexualised”.

After the publisher’s decision, local media reported that approximately 30,000 copies would be removed from sale, a decision said to be the first of its kind in Belgium.

While I don't condone censorship, I will say it's surprising when some modern artists think it's inherently acceptable to draw black characters in deformed shapes. On the other hand, it's regrettable whoever filmed that video on a social media site that must be replacing X/Twitter as a place where creepy people engage in social justice propaganda did not want to make any distinctions between drawings that could be racially offensive and drawings depicting women as hot. What next, will Francois Walthery's Natacha come under the gun? If nobody's willing to defend Walthery's notable comic strip that debuted in 1970, that's what'll happen next. I guess because most cartoonists for these sort of comic strips may know better than to draw sensationalized depictions of sexual violence, that's why the wokesters go after them for something as cheap as sexualization, even if it's in good taste.

Comic strips, or bandes dessinées, are celebrated as an art form in Belgium and France, but some once-fêted works have been strongly criticised for their stereotypical depictions of women and people of colour. In 2011 an attempt to ban the 1930 comic book Tintin and the Congo over its portrayal of Africans failed in the Belgian courts.

The cartoonist behind the Blue Gorgon, Daniel Henrotin, who uses the pen name Dany, said he had been emulating the style of the late Belgian comic strip artist, André Franquin, who was celebrated in the 1950s and beyond. Dany said he recognised he had “made a mistake” and was “truly sorry if I could have hurt anyone”.

Dany, 81, denied any racist or misogynist intentions, saying it was never his goal to mock or denigrate people of colour and women, while offering a partial defence. “I heard it said that we cannot draw like that today. I respond that humour and caricature are in the DNA of the Belgian school of bande dessinée”.

Leading lights of the comic world pushed back against the idea that caricature was no longer possible. “Comics are automatically caricatures,” Isabelle Debekker, the director of the Comic Strip Centre in Brussels told Le Soir. She said artists should not stigmatise groups of people as was done in the 1980s. “It is up to us to be a little more intelligent, whether in our humour or our way of representing reality.”

“I find it a shame that there are still people who do not understand what is problematic,” she said.

I do agree that racial caricatures of blacks as seen in the early 20th century were inappropriate, but drawing an analogy between that and "hypersexualization" of women is ludicrous. If women were drawn as alarmingly ugly ducklings with hook noses, would that be acceptable? It reminds me that there's also been anti-Jewish caricatures in the past where Jews were drawn grotesquely, and black men weren't the only ones subject to insulting stereotypes - even black women were too, like having short hair, and not being drawn as attractively as white women at the time could be. One example I recall finding years ago from the Golden Age of comicdom was a story starring the original Quicksilver from the 1940-49 National Comics anthology by Quality - now owned by DC - who was later renamed Max Mercury in 1993: a black woman in the tale was illustrated with very short hair, while her boyfriend was depicted with large lips. Seriously, would today's SJWs want black men and women subject to that kind of demasculinization and defemininization? Would they even want white women subject to the same? Because that would be far more stereotypical, and dehumanizing.

What's really angering is how the cartoonist who turned out the Spirou comic that led to this scandal wouldn't recognize why racially insulting caricatures are taking a big risk, and as a result, gave the TikTokker the opportunity to plough through defenses and attack his renditions of women as well. If there aren't any crude and sensationalized depictions of sexual violence in the comic, you can't say it's "misogynist". That would only be if the artist had subjected women to uglification, physical/sexual violence, and even denigrating slurs. Where do these screwballs get the idea it's bad if you draw women beautiful? That only contradicts their alleged stance on racially offensive art to boot. This whole affair also demonstrates what's wrong with the kind of people found on TikTok, owned as it is by a Chinese company, and the biggest irony is that they were accused of racial discrimination. So where does anyone involved with such a shoddy social network get off ranting about racism and misogyny when the whole business is that shoddy?