by Katie Miranda (comics.katiemiranda.com)
Column » Comics & Dialogue: Islam in Graphic Novels
by A. DAVID LEWIS for ISLAMiCommentary on FEBRUARY 18, 2015:
A. David Lewis
Currently based in Portland, Oregon, Katie Miranda is a Cartoonist-Calligrapher-Jewelry Designer-Illustrator-Activist. A hyphenate par excellence. “Comics and Dialogue” had a chance to talk with her about, among other things, her views on Islam and comics, Palestine and Israel, the International Festival of Comics at Angoulême, and Scarlett Johansson.
C&D: Could you discuss, from your personal perspective, the relationship between Islam and comics? Between Muslims and comics? Is there any natural affinity there? (Or a natural antipathy?)
by Katie Miranda (comics.katiemiranda.com)
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KM: There’s a long held stereotype that comics are for white males. Surveys have proven this to be untrue; comics are for everyone. Unfortunately, the mainstream comics industry is still very far behind in recognizing this because most comics are still aimed at the white male demographic. You see this in the way female characters are drawn and the roles they play. You might have a comic book that’s supposed to be about a strong warrior woman, but the picture of her on the cover is a low angle shot looking up with her crotch as the focal point. I have to wonder what the creators are thinking when they do this. Are they really trying to empower women or are they still stuck in the mindset that if it doesn’t appeal to straight teenage boys, they’re going to go bankrupt? The arguments made by Anita Sarkesian about the video games industry also apply in the comics industry.
So I don’t see either a natural affinity or a natural antipathy between Islam/Muslims and comics, because comics are for everyone. In time, the comics industry, like the video games industry, will start creating content that appeals to a more diverse crowd for financial if not moral reasons. We see this starting to happen already.
C&D: Was there a specific “warrior woman” in comics that you had a particular issue with?
Katie Miranda (comics.katiemiranda.com)
KM: The example I was referring to was something that I saw in my Twitter feed a few months ago. I don’t remember the name of the comic or the artist and even if I did, I don’t want to name and shame another comic artist. I can just hope that other artists eventually come to see the inconsistency between having a comic book with a strong female lead and then making her boobs bigger than her head.
One of the aspects that drew me to Islam is that it elevated a woman’s mind above her body with the notion of modesty.
C&D: Much of your work has been featured on Mondoweiss, a blog focused on widening perspectives on the Middle East, particularly Israel and Palestine. How’d you first become affiliated with them?
KM: I sent them some cartoons and they liked them so they published them and then I got hired as a regular contributor. I love working for them. The two editors, Adam Horowitz and Phil Weiss push me to develop my ideas. Sometimes my ideas can be a little crude, so Phil or Adam might tell me to improve it, to make it more sophisticated. The readers of Mondoweiss, at least from what I’ve seen in the comments, tend to be pretty sharp, so I have to keep that in mind. It’s always a challenge because sometimes I just want to do a poop joke.
by Katie Miranda (comics.katiemiranda.com)
C&D: In your most recent contribution to Mondoweiss (see top), coming in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo killings, you say, “My role as a cartoonist is to challenge power and dominant narratives, not to attack marginalized people. I draw cartoons about Obama, Netanyahu, Arab dictators, and Israeli settlers because they’re the ones in power, they’re literally calling the shots and making people’s lives miserable.” What do you feel your comics can accomplish in terms of these high-ranking and powerful figures?
KM: First and foremost, they accomplish making me laugh. If they didn’t, if I didn’t enjoy doing them, they wouldn’t get done. I hope they make others laugh because it’s easy to get overwhelmed by people in power doing bad things, so it’s helpful if we can level the playing field using comics. I also use comics to illustrate a point of view or a new concept: maybe it’s something I know a lot of people are thinking but it’s hard for them to express. Sometimes it can be a much better medium for this than writing.
For example I did this comic (at right) and I tweeted it to @CIA, suggesting they use it as a storyboard for a new recruitment commercial. Because to be honest, some of the stuff it’s been revealed that they’ve done really isn’t that dissimilar to the stuff people get locked up for decades for doing. It’s terrifying that you can have someone — or in the case of the CIA, a whole organization — who is actually paid with our tax dollars to carry out the same kind of sick and twisted and diseased behavior that we saw, for example, from American kidnapper and rapist Ariel Castro.
And I’m not comparing the victims here, I’m comparing the perpetrators. I don’t care if you’re guilty or innocent, no one deserves to be tortured. That I can troll the CIA on Twitter with a cartoon about them, in front of the whole world, well there’s just something gratifying about that. It’s my way of giving them the finger.
I also hope my cartoons motivate people into positive action that challenges and ultimately changes the status quo.
C&D: What kind of responses have you had to your comics, particularly those that might be critical of Israel or President Obama?
KM: I’d say 95% of the responses are positive. Occasionally I’ll get an ObamaBot (C&D: By “ObamaBot,” you mean a blind supporter of the Obama administration’s policies, I take it) or a Zionist apologist who will unleash their fury on me in an email but it’s rare. The last piece I did for Mondoweiss was featured on the front page of the Huffington Post. That was kind of a surprise to me because I think of HuffPo as pretty mainstream. But it’s good, because it means the mainstream is becoming more accepting of Muslim perspectives.
C&D: So, you don’t think of yourself as mainstream? Or you don’t think of the Muslim viewpoint as mainstream?
KM: I don’t think Muslim-American viewpoints are mainstream. But I think that, perhaps 20 years from now, American society will have changed in such a way that the majority of the country will look back and say “wow, during that post-9/11 era we really did a lot of bad things to Muslims, they didn’t deserve it, and what we did to them made the world a less safe place for everyone.” People will look back with regret like the way we look back on the internment camps we built for the Japanese-Americans during World War II.
C&D: You’re working on a full-length graphic novel entitled Tear Gas in the Morning, based, as you’ve said, about the non-resistance movement in Palestine.
KM: Based on my personal experience when I lived in the West Bank from 2006-2009, yes. I’m still working on it.
C&D: What brought you to live in the West Bank at that time?
KM: I come from a Jewish background and self-identified as Jewish even though I was not religious. Up until around 2005, I was still working to overcome the mythology that American Jews grow up with. Being an active part of the anti-war movement at the time helped with that evolution. I’d first heard of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) in 2003 when Rachel Corrie died, but it was really by chance that I got involved. I attended an ISM meeting in Berkeley in 2005, and I was so blown away by what they were doing and wanted to be a part of it that I sold my possessions and went to live with them in the West Bank.
C&D: You were more recently part of a group of international artists who wrote to Franck Bondoux, the head of the International Festival of Comics at Angoulême regarding the events’ ties with Sodastream. In fact, last year you put out a cartoon against the company, featuring the likeness of Scarlett Johannson. When did this first become a cause for you? And what do you see as the moral issue underpinning the controversy?
KM: Supporters of Palestinian rights heed the Palestinian civil society call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel. The Sodastream boycott is part of that movement because SodaStream has a factory on stolen Palestinian land in the West Bank. After an intense international boycott, SodaStream announced plans to relocate its factory from the West Bank to the Naqab (Negev) desert in southern Israel and employ Bedouins displaced by the Israeli government. Israel is implementing a forced resettlement of Bedouin from their traditional nomadic way of life into a township called Rahat. The new SodaStream factory will be situated near Rahat in order to take advantage of unemployed Bedouin who wouldn’t be facing “unemployment” if they had been left to their traditional lifestyle of living off the land.
There’s a statement on the Jewish Voice for Peace website that reads:
While SodaStream has announced plans to close their West Bank factory, we continue our boycott until SodaStream demonstrates that they are no longer profiting from displacing Palestinians and abusing their labor.
The moral issue is simple. Palestinians need and deserve equal rights as equal citizens in the land controlled by Israel which includes the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights. Until they receive justice and equal rights, the international community will continue to boycott.
C&D: Which is the stranger question for you: “Why comics?” or “Why Islamic jewlery?”
KM: Neither. I consider myself first and foremost an illustrator and a painter. When I got out of art school, I was really struggling to make a living this way and, due to the bad economic situation, I chose to put my effort into comics and jewelry because they were easier for me to sell than a painting or illustrations for a book.
If for some reason the jewelry industry or the comics industry suddenly became unprofitable and sculpting was where it was at, I’d switch to sculpting. If you have a basic foundation in art, you can really pursue anything with a little practice. I’d love to be a sculptor actually! If I ever tire of comics, I’ll probably go back to painting.
Visit comics.katiemiranda.com, www.katiemiranda.com and comics.katiemiranda.com/tear-gas-in-the-morning. Follow her on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/katiemiranda.bazaarkhalil and on Twitter: @KatieMirandaArt.
A. David Lewis, Ph.D. is the co-editor of Graven Images: Religion in Comic Books and Graphic Novels, co-author of Some New Kind of Slaughter from Archaia Entertainment, and a founding member of Sacred & Sequential, a collective of religious studies and comics studies scholars. He currently teaches at colleges throughout the Greater Boston area, including Northeastern University, Bentley University, and MCPHS University, and has previously lectured at Boston University, Tufts University, Merrimack College, and Georgetown University. He is a steering committee member for the American Academy of Religion’s “Death, Dying, and Beyond” Group as well as co-editor of the forthcoming Digital Death: Mortality and Beyond in the Online Age. You can follow him on Twitter @ADLewis. Continue to watch this space twice-monthly for his new column “Comics & Dialogue: Islam in Graphic Novels.”
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This article was made possible by the Transcultural Islam Project, an initiative launched in 2011 by the Duke Islamic Studies Center — in partnership with the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations and the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies — aimed at deepening understanding of Islam and Muslim communities. See www.islamicommentary.org/about and www.tirnscholars.org/about for more information. The Transcultural Islam Project is funded by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
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