The Four Color Media Monitor: Art Spiegelman withdrew essay from Golden Age Marvel collection because they didn't want attacks on Trump inside

Cartoonist Art Spiegelman is famous for his Holocaust-themed graphic novel Maus from the 1980s. Unfortunately, he's also a boilerplate leftist who believes rightists are the root cause of all evil, including Donald Trump, and recently wrote an essay that was originally to be included in a collection of Golden Age Marvel reprints, but the editors balked because of his use of a slang that's been associated with Trump, and as a result, he had it published in the far-left UK Guardian's pages instead. Here's the paragraph in question from the essay itself:

Auschwitz and Hiroshima make more sense as dark comic book cataclysms than as events in our real world. In today’s all too real world, Captain America’s most nefarious villain, the Red Skull, is alive on screen and an Orange Skull haunts America. International fascism again looms large (how quickly we humans forget – study these golden age comics hard, boys and girls!) and the dislocations that have followed the global economic meltdown of 2008 helped bring us to a point where the planet itself seems likely to melt down. Armageddon seems somehow plausible and we’re all turned into helpless children scared of forces grander than we can imagine, looking for respite and answers in superheroes flying across screens in our chapel of dreams.

And at the end of the essay, it looks like he had some addendum specially for sources like the Guardian:

I turned the essay in at the end of June, substantially the same as what appears here. A regretful Folio Society editor told me that Marvel Comics (evidently the co-publisher of the book) is trying to now stay “apolitical”, and is not allowing its publications to take a political stance. I was asked to alter or remove the sentence that refers to the Red Skull or the intro could not be published. I didn’t think of myself as especially political compared with some of my fellow travellers, but when asked to kill a relatively anodyne reference to an Orange Skull I realised that perhaps it had been irresponsible to be playful about the dire existential threat we now live with, and I withdrew my introduction.

A revealing story serendipitously showed up in my news feed this week. I learned that the billionaire chairman and former CEO of Marvel Entertainment, Isaac “Ike” Perlmutter, is a longtime friend of Donald Trump’s, an unofficial and influential adviser and a member of the president’s elite Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida. And Perlmutter and his wife have each recently donated $360,000 (the maximum allowed) to the Orange Skull’s “Trump Victory Joint Fundraising Committee” for 2020. I’ve also had to learn, yet again, that everything is political... just like Captain America socking Hitler on the jaw.

Let me put it this way. I happen to find Perlmutter dismaying because he showed no interest in improving Marvel's comics themselves, and he may have expressed disrespect for Stan Lee, startlingly enough. All he seemed to care about was building up the movie brand, which looks to be receding in terms of success now. But if Spiegelman's just attacking him because of his political standings, that's incredibly dumb. And it would only become dated in less than a few years down the memory lane. And no, not everything is political, but his fellow left-wing travelers sure seem to want it that way. Here's the same paper's news report on what happened:

Art Spiegelman, the legendary graphic novelist behind Maus, has claimed that he was asked to remove criticism of Donald Trump from his introduction to a forthcoming Marvel book, because the comics publisher – whose chairman has donated to Trump’s campaign – is trying to stay “apolitical”.

Spiegelman, who won a Pulitzer prize for Maus, his story of the Holocaust, has written for Saturday’s Guardian that he was approached by publisher the Folio Society to write an introduction to Marvel: The Golden Age 1939–1949, a collection ranging from Captain America to the Human Torch.

[...] After submitting the essay in June, Spiegelman says he was told by the Folio Society that Marvel Comics was trying to stay apolitical, “and is not allowing its publications to take a political stance”. Neither publisher responded to requests for comment from the Guardian, but Spiegelman claims he was asked to remove the sentence referring to the Red Skull or his introduction would not be published. He pulled the essay, placing it instead with the Guardian.

[...] Marvel: The Golden Age 1939–1949, which now carries an introduction by Marvel editor Roy Thomas, is published in September.

Well I gotta hand it to them - they certainly made a good choice for who to develop an introductory essay instead. A comics veteran who's mostly conservative himself, but usually far from political in the same way Spiegelman sadly is.

But Spiegelman doesn't think he's especially political? Back in the early to mid-2000s, he published another graphic novel called In the Shadow of No Towers, and the left-leaning Sequart describes it as such:

Spiegelman’s second original page (as numbered as ten) depicts Osama Bin Laden and George W. Bush standing over a sleeping Spiegelman, depicted as one of the mice from Maus; Osama Bin Laden carries a bloody saber, George W. Bush a U.S. flag and a revolver. A caption reads “EQUALLY TERRORIZED BY AL-QAEDA AND BY HIS OWN GOVERNMENT…” The image — which Spiegelman notes in his introduction “had made some editors visibly shudder” (perhaps with reason) — strikes me as almost a stereotype of the liberal response to 9/11.

The problem is that, not only does it reek of moral equivalence, but it practically does echo what some leftists at the time thought of right-wingers; not just merely Bush himself. The bizarre notion that al Qaeda was working for the US government, a conspiracy theory since come to be known as 9-11 Trutherism. Surprisingly enough, though the writer has a negative view of people like Bush for all the wrong reasons, he does admit this GN is mediocre, if not pan it altogether:

Spiegelman’s obviously straining here, and not only to produce political commentary in a tumultuous time. His narrative starts with his experience on 11 September 2001, then increasingly gets distracted by anti-Bush commentary. Spiegelman himself seems to recognize this, writing in his introduction that “new traumas began competing with still-fresh wounds and the nature of my project began to mutate.” He recalls how he’d planned at least three additional sequences depicting his experience on 9/11 and shortly thereafter. His narration of his day, on 11 September 2011, is good enough that one can regret that he didn’t stick to his original plan and complete that story. Yet by the fifth page, he abandons his narration of that day completely. It returns briefly on page six, as if he’s trying to steer his story back on course, but page six then jumps forward to an unrelated incident, and then Spiegelman surrenders completely to his passions. The A-plot of 9/11 disappears, not unlike those towers, and all that’s left is the wild B-plot of flailing political commentary.

Addressing Bush, Spiegelman writes, “You rob from the poor and give to your pals like a parody of Robin Hood while distracting me with your damn oil war!” Criticizing Bush as anti-progressive or harsh on the poor is certainly fair game, although the alarming gap between rich and poor Americans didn’t start with the current administration. But thinking Iraq an “oil war,” although conventional, shows a remarkable lack of contemplation: the U.S. could have opened Iraqi oil through the U.N.’s oil-for-food program, and oil companies routinely disdain destabilization of oil-producing countries while generally not caring that the stabile government selling oil oppresses or kills its people.

There's just one problem here: the oil-for-food program was corrupt. That aside, I've got a feeling Spiegelman would've been just as opposed if the Bush administration had declared war on Iran, their own nuclear warfare and violence-prone regime notwithstanding. His claim Marvel wants to be apolitical isn't true either: Saladin Ahmed currently stands out as the most political writer they're still employing. But, I'm guessing the reason they may have avoided making the introduction to their newest Golden Age archives politically charged is because they're not marketing that to the same audiences Ahmed seemingly is, and realize more sensible people are bound to notice and object. So to remain under the radar with what left-wing ideologies they're still forcing down everyone's throats, they may avoid putting such things in most of the older archival material they publish.

It's really too bad Spiegelman's got to be such a political firebrand in his own way, and otherwise maintains an ignorant view of Islam and Saddam Hussein's evils in Iraq. If leftists were to become less politically active, it could help make improvements.

Labels: islam and jihad, marvel comics, moonbat artists, msm propaganda, politics, terrorism

Yeah yeah, Spiegelman is just another in a seeming endless line of politically incontinent left wing artists. He did a comic about the Holocaust where the mice were jews and the cats were germans. A concept that, if even halfway professionally done virtually guarantees awards and media praise. The real news here is that there are Marvel editors who prevented a political statement in a Mavel collection. It would have been a nice idea to name them, but I understand that with the present neo fascist zeitgeist that wouldn't be doing them any favors.

Posted by Anonymous | 1:33 PM

"Spiegelman is just another in a seeming endless line of politically incontinent left wing artists. He did a comic about the Holocaust where the mice were jews and the cats were germans. A concept that, if even halfway professionally done virtually guarantees awards and media praise. "

Yes, because academia and many executives in the media are Jewish.When Progressives say BLANK has always been liberal or
BLANK has always been "political", they are saying that liberal Jews in a particular field have always used their occupations to promote liberal causes.
They are essentially saying all Jews are liberal activists.

It's strange that Jews outside Israel hate Trump and equate him with Hitler
while in Israel he is well-liked. I guess all those Jews are fake Jews or they're Nazis.

Posted by an0nymous | 5:34 PM

Marvel censored Trump-joshing in the comics too; remember when Spider-Man tried to tell the Thing that he was Spidey's second-favorite orange monster? That was deleted from the final comic book. But let's face it - if you spend so much time under a tanning lamp that your skin turns orange except for pasty white raccoon circles round your eyes, you have to expect some joshing.

Spiegelman is the child of Holocaust survivors. It would be hard for anyone with that background to look at the current state of American politics and not be concerned.

Hard to describe him as 'politically incontinent' though; he does not speak out much.

If you look at all politics through the lens of diversity, and see diversity as a left-wing issue, then Marvel looks left wing - as do Roy Thomas and Chuck Dixon, who both introduced a lot of non-white ethnicities into formerly white comic book universes, and pioneered the remaking of a lot of formerly white male anglo characters into other ethnicities and genders. Thomas introduced DC's first gay superhero in his All-Star Squadron. Mike Baron was pro-diversity, on a much smaller and more occasional scale. But Perlman isn't opposed to diversity, it is that he is right wing on more significant issues.

Posted by Anonymous | 7:20 PM

Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem, so he gets a lot of credit in Israel for that. And he is liked in Russia. But world wide he is generally disliked and treated with contempt. Domestically, he is very unpopular in the polls, and even people who approve of him on the whole are often embarrassed by him.

But nazis and white supremacists like him though, or did. His election was helped by the fact that many of them, who generally take a pox on both your houses attitude to politics and don't vote, turned out for him at the polls. He realizes that he is losing them because he hasn't lived up to what they thought he would be, and his recent over the top screeds are an attempt to keep them on board.

Let's face it - if you condemn particular nationalities, treat non white citizens like they belong somewhere else even if their families have been here for generations, treat nazis and white supremacists with kid gloves and retweet their memes, make antisemitic comments and reference antisemitic stereotypes, want to treat anti fascists as a terror group while not mentioning the white supremacist fight clubs that incite violence, and pander to white racists, you are going to get compared to Hitler. It goes with the territory.

Posted by Anonymous | 7:58 PM

Liberals just like to compare everyone they disagree with to Hitler and the Nazis. They don't know what real Nazis are. If they were alive during World War II, we'd have lost and would be all speaking German now.

And white supremacists supported Hillary Clinton, not Trump. They also support anti-Semitic loons like Ilhan Omar. David Duke is a supporter of Ilhan Omar.

Posted by AgentofSHIELD | 5:23 AM

According to David Duke, speaking after the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville: “We are determined to take our country back... We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in. That’s why we voted for Donald Trump, because he said he’s going to take our country back. That's what we gotta do." He supported Trump in the Republican primaries. He has said that Trump is saying implicitly what Duke says explicitly.

All of the white supremacist public personalities and leaders either endorsed Trump or stayed silent. Richard Spencer held a celebratory rally after the election, in which he yelled out "Heil Trump" from the podium and people in the audience responded with a Nazi salute. The Daily Stormer urged people to get out the vote for Trump and used to call him the God-Emperor in the early years of his presidency.

Liberals never seriously compared Bush or McCain or Romney with Hitler. It was the right-wing America Firsters who tried to keep the US out of the Second World War.

Posted by Anonymous | 7:29 AM

To "Anonymous" with the David Duke comment...

A lot of Nazis probably also like ranch dressing, Polo shirts, and The Little Mermaid. That doesn't mean those things are Nazis too.

Hilter liked dogs.

Posted by Tonebone | 10:32 AM

"Liberals never seriously compared Bush or McCain or Romney with Hitler. It was the right-wing America Firsters who tried to keep the US out of the Second World War."

Thanks for the laugh! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIgfiSzCy1o

Posted by AgentofSHIELD | 1:32 PM

You notice that In the YouTube video Posted above, not only is Jonah laughing, but everyone else in the room is looking at him like he is crazy.

I had looked up the video to find words of explanation and wisdom, but sadly, nah. You can't be disagreeing with the statement about America Firsters; that is basic historical fact. No one ever compared McCain with Hitler; McCain was well respected by republicans and democrats and only Trumpists berated him. Romney was a member of a religious minority and was generally pro-tolerance, so no one ever compared him with a nazi. Are you thinking of one of the Bushes? Prescott Bush had ties to nazi businesses and made a profit from them, and some protesters called his Branson's tactics out as nazi, but they weren't exactly mainstream liberal, and they were using the phrase as a derogatory slur, not the kind of sustained serious historical comparisons that Trump has forced knowledgeable people to raise.

Trump is an isolationist; he is not out to conquer the world. He does not have Hitler's gifts of oratory. He is not out to exterminate Canadians and Mexicans to make more land available for Americans. But his attitudes and policies on race can't help but remind you of Hitler 1934. Maybe Mosley would be a better comparison?

Posted by Anonymous | 6:42 AM

You didn't acknowledge what I said about David Duke supporting Ilhan Omar, a fellow anti-Semite, so don't be surprised that I didn't acknowledge what you said.

Bush was frequently compared to Hitler during his presidency. Romney and McCain were compared to Hitler, too.

And Trump doesn't remind me of Hitler. It reminds you of Hitler, because you're infected with Trump Derangement Syndrome like so many other liberals today.

Posted by AgentofSHIELD | 7:09 AM

American nazis hate Jews more than they hate Arabs. If they can use Arabs As a foil against Jews while sanctimoniously virtue signaling at the same time, they go for it. Duke voicing approval of Tlaib is par for the course. Don't mistake that for support of her.

When a politician uses ethnic and racial hatred as a wedge issue in politics, places people in internment camps and separates families in the process, and passes legislation aimed at particular nationalities, the comparison is fairly obvious. Hitler was a committed ideologue and Trump is an opportunist, but the tactics are similar.

Posted by Anonymous | 9:54 AM

"American nazis hate Jews more than they hate Arabs. If they can use Arabs As a foil against Jews while sanctimoniously virtue signaling at the same time, they go for it. Duke voicing approval of Tlaib is par for the course. Don't mistake that for support of her."

The Arabs collaborated with the Nazis during World War II. They're united by a mutual hatred of Jews. Duke also threw his support behind Omar, and there were neo-Nazis endorsing her and Tlalib.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2019/08/21/thats-a-scandal-new-york-times-columnist-calls-out-media-for-burying-neonazi-sponsors-of-omar-tlaib-trip-n2551985?utm_content=buffer7f538&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer&fbclid=IwAR3gBQqW4YEuVhJsoq_DY4NyA4g9G3hTtFngcDFH8CfowMH-4NXnpNGURnE

Tlalib and Omar both shared anti-Semitic cartoons, too. They're just as bad as Duke.

"When a politician uses ethnic and racial hatred as a wedge issue in politics, places people in internment camps and separates families in the process, and passes legislation aimed at particular nationalities, the comparison is fairly obvious. Hitler was a committed ideologue and Trump is an opportunist, but the tactics are similar."

There are no similarities between Trump and Hitler. Period. Anyone who thinks that is a moron. I guess that includes you, too, anonymous troll.

Posted by AgentofSHIELD | 12:45 PM

Would Trump get this much hate if he was still a businessman?

Posted by Anonymous | 11:50 AM

Would Trump get this much hate if he was still a businessman?

Maybe not, but then Ocasio Cortez would not get this much hate if she were still a waitress either. And no one would hate on Hillary if she had never got involved in politics. It goes with the territory. And Trump is no gentleman politician; he picks on people a lot in a nasty way. (To use one of his favorite put downs.)

By the way, he still is a businessman!

Posted by Anonymous | 1:36 PM

"The Arabs collaborated with the Nazis during World War II. They're united by a mutual hatred of Jews."

It was more complicated than that. The Mufti of Jerusalem had ties to Hitler, and several Nazi war criminals migrated to Egypt after the war. But many Arab countries were still controlled by or in sync with Britain during the war, there was an Arab brigade of the British army, and the King of Morocco protected his Jewish subjects from Nazi persecution after Hitler's conquest of France.

It is like saying the French collaborated with Nazis during the war. Some Frenchmen did, some joined the resistance, and some tried to act so they would survive no matter who won.

Posted by Anonymous | 6:20 AM