Creating Left Wing Comics: Left Forum Day 3

The Comics vs. Capitalism panel on Sunday afternoon at Left Forum featured artists and creators talking passionately about their work and the challenges posed by creating art with a left-wing political bent.

Ted Rall, Stephanie McMillan, Dave Rine, and Chris McCamic showed the crowd some of their recent work and gave their take on the status of the left wing political comics industry.

[R]ine spoke about his work creating Partee Revolution Comix, a strip that grew out of his dissatisfaction with his job and frustrated attempts to organize a union. The comic developed from that frustration and became his artistic outlet.

Rine said he believes anger is a force for change. The idea of carrying on peacefully in the face of inequality and class war is bullshit, he said.

“When we come together and bitch and moan about our jobs, that’s how we can achieve class unity,” he said.

Rine also said that he feels his work is no substitute for what he called “movement work.”

“Actively engaging with the working class and organizing is the only way to build solidarity,” Rine said.

[R]all spoke next, via videoconferencing.

He talked about his recent work doing comic biographical pieces on Edward Snowden, Bernie Sanders, and, soon, Donald Trump.

“Biographies are a backwards way of getting into discussions about politics,” Rall explained. “The bios are another way to use comics to explain movements.”

Rall said one of the main reasons he was inspired to create the biographies was his feeling that some of the information about the NSA’s surveillance was being lost in translation in prose.

“I tried to make the information on NSA surveillance easier to understand,” he said. “Comics can make the information more accessible through their deceptively simple form.”

[M]cCamic described running a comics production company and the challenges and rewards of working with teams of creators.

“There is great value of having a team to work with,” he said, describing how different viewpoints and ideas can combine to create greater works of art than they would individually.

McCamic also disagreed with Rine’s assessment of the work of creating left comics.

“I feel this is real movement work,” McCamic said. “You can bring people to a place politically. They might argue with you but they’re there. Stories create a space for change.”

[F]inally, McMIllan talked about her work and the challenges of creating art from a revolutionary, leftist perspective.

“I try to illustrate concepts of capitalism and exploitation and domination,” she explained.

McMillan said she finds her ideological assertion through creating comics and uses the medium to push her radical message.

Still, she said, she has to pay the bills, and that makes financial censorship a harsh reality on some of her work. McMillan described losing work over her unbending principles because of the practices and beliefs of her employers.

“Financial censorship is effective,” she said ruefully.