Broken Frontier

Leonard Rifas, comics creator and comics scholar, founded his company, EduComics, in 1976. He has generously consented to taking Broken Frontier's questions for a two-week back-to-school special, “Cartooning for Activists.”  Library of Babble stitched the following interview together from pieces of a week's exchanges of emailed questions and answers.

Let's start by asking him to introduce himself.

LEONARD RIFAS:  Thanks for your interest in my work. To introduce myself, I'll quickly mention some of the "educational" comics I've done. I have published comics, including Gen of Hiroshima and I SAW IT by Keiji Nakazawa, a survivor of the Hiroshima bomb, and MAMA! dramas, which was written and drawn about motherhood by cartoonists who are mothers.  I have edited comic books, including itchy PLANET, a comic about the multifaceted world crisis that Fantagraphics published, and Corporate CRIME Comics, which Kitchen Sink published.  I have also written and drawn comic books.  These include some I published myself, like All-Atomic Comics, and some I did for organizations, like Tobacco Comics, AIDS News and Food First Comics. 

BROKEN FRONTIER:  What is your aim in doing educational comics?

LR: I got into "educational" comics because I found cartooning to be hard, slow work, and the stories that I had to tell, the pictures I was able to produce, did not seem to be worth the effort it took to put them on paper.  I found my niche in comix by looking for those things that seemed most worthwhile to say, and then taking from that information the topics for my comic books. That explains the "educational" part.  I got into comics for the love of it.

BF:  Who is your audience?

LR:  Maybe because I'm a few years younger than the first generation of underground cartoonists whose work affected me so deeply, I guess I’ve thought of my audience as people who were just a little older and smarter than I was.  Since starting on this career, I have also worked on some contracts to do comics for younger audiences (fifth graders, middle school students, high school students), but when left on my own, I still try to make something that would be interesting and possibly useful for adults.

BF:  How did you get into writing for kids, like Tobacco Comics?

LR:  I proposed the Tobacco Comics project because when I had been cartooning about other dangers to health, I was shocked to notice the statistics about how much more damage smoking causes. It became a comic for kids, partly because the organization I found to fund the comic was focusing on kids, but they did that because most smokers begin at a young age.

BF:  Tell us about your characters.  They are so personable.  I always feel like I know them, even after just looking at their portraits and names inside the front cover.

LR: Characters develop depth as they get reused in different situations, but I have drafted a fresh cast for almost every project. My best character may be Greedy Killerwatt, the representative of the nuclear power industry in All-Atomic Comics and Energy Comics.  I loaned him to Marvel for an issue of Howard the Duck once, and then felt sorry for Greedy, because they turned him into a malevolent villain and then killed him.  They didn't see him as I do: a little guy with some honestly-held, factually-based, deeply-felt, somewhat self-serving, questionable and dangerous views.

Now that I think of it, that may be what gives my characters whatever depth they have.  I do not write stories in which the most serious problems are caused by ill-wishing, insane, evil characters who seek revenge against the world. I try to make the positions that I argue against in my comics clear and strong.  That requires that I respect the characters who articulate and advocate those views.

BF:  Can you talk a bit about An Army of Principles?  It's a very handy reference for the major issues of the American Revolution, without following the usual chronological path, or generating yet another set of biographies of the founding fathers.

LR: I'm so glad you're asking about my first full-length educational comic, because I still have plenty of copies in storage if anyone would like to write to me for copies (still 75 cents each plus postage and handling).  I first thought of doing a comic book about the founding principles of this nation in 1972 in Berkeley.   It seemed back then - perhaps especially in Berkeley - that by the bicentennial, we could be involved in a civil war over the meaning of the American Revolution.  As it turned out, by 1976 the war on Vietnam ended, tempers had cooled, memories of the recent sharp divisions had begun to blur, and the Bicentennial kind of flopped.

The subtitle of that comic is "The history and philosophy of the American Revolution." When I started researching it, I was a Philosophy major. I had little interest in the military history of the War of Independence.  I focused on the ideas of the American Revolution, not on the personalities of the people who had developed them.

BF:  So do you think of yourself as an activist?

LR: A few months ago I was arguing with a comics historian who had referred to me as an "activist," and I came to realize that even though I do not make speeches or organize demonstrations, I am some kind of activist, even though I had not thought of myself as one. I once offered a class called "Cartooning for Activists," thinking of teaching people more "politically active" than myself. People did not sign up for it, maybe because they had the same problem I did about thinking of themselves as capital-A "Activists."

Next week: Leonard discusses aspects of an activist approach to making comics, and gives us a sneak peek at a work-in-progress inspired by virtual reality.

Write Leonard Rifas at rifas@earthlink.net, or at EduComics, box 45831, Seattle, WA, 98145-0831 USA.