Broken Frontier

This week, we continue our Back-to-School Special, a conversation with comics artist and scholar Leonard Rifas.

BROKEN FRONTIER: You often refer to "ideas" or "concepts" while discussing your work.  Would you say that ideas are central to your approach to making comics?

LEONARD RIFAS: While researching the history of underground comix, I've found a cartoonist who says that for him, it was all about the "jokes," another who says that for her it was all about the "stories," one who said it was all about himself, and clearly, for some it was all about the "art." I try to tell stories with some jokes and decent art based on my current concerns, but the least usual aspect of my work has been the effort to think things through conceptually in comics format. Other cartoonists who like to think on paper range from Saul Steinberg's New Yorker illustrations to Denis Worden's "Stickboy" comics.

BF: Ideas have great power to change consciousness, something very important to movements for social change.  What part can comics play in raising consciousness and promoting healthy change?

LR: We each have an implicit theory about how social change happens, as my friend Fran Peavey [http://www.crabgrass.org/] says. I credit her for that thought partly to underscore that these theories come into existence through our conversations, as social products, not personal brain farts. Telling stories may be the most powerful tool we have for sharing our ideas about how change happens: why we need it, what obstructs it, who can be effective and how they can do it. Comic books have wonderful storytelling powers.

One of my favorite consciousness-raising cartoons wordlessly tells the story of two donkeys connected by a rope around their necks who are straining in opposite directions toward two out-of-reach piles of hay. Then they figure out that by cooperating they can eat first one stack and then the other.

I remain ravenously hungry for some better stories about how change happens…. or maybe I just wish there were a convincing "change story" that doesn’t involve so much work and require so much time.

BF: I know you are working on some new ways of telling educational stories. Can you tell us a bit about cartooning and "virtual environments"?

LR: For over a dozen years, I have been thinking in my spare time about virtual environments as a new medium for storing, working with and sharing abstract information. My doctoral dissertation, The Dataforest: tree forms as information display graphics, was an exercise in imagining what histories of academic departments might look like if I visualized each person’s academic career as a tree. Trees seem especially wonderful to work with because we are so familiar with their various aspects: roots, fruits, branches, leaves, flowers, and so forth. Trees supply many visible variables for encoding meaning. Besides, I love being around trees.

I’ve been working on a comics story in which some characters travel through an imaginary world that represents the federal budget of the United States. With this one, I’m still imagining some virtual vegetation coded with meanings to keep the thing looking like a large garden or a park, but the basic element I’m working with has been imaginary stacks of $100 bills, one stack for each piece of the budget. The budget landscape works as a map on which we can locate and keep track of almost all our current crises.

BF: Sounds a bit like your comic that supported the World Trade Organization protest in Seattle.

LF: Yes, that comic, The Big Picture, was an early attempt I made at this.

BF: Can you explain what you mean by "virtual environment"? I tend to leap to the conclusion that you are referring to some kind of experience I can have wearing one of those virtual reality helmets.

LR: Yes, that's where I got the idea. I tried "virtual reality" during its brief moment of media hype in the early 1990s, and it made me nauseous (literally) and the graphics were painfully crude, but that did not dim my enthusiasm for the potential of virtual environments.

My federal budget project in its current state is a comics-format story about a trip through an imaginary landscape, but I like to imagine that environment as a place where someday people can go online to have their own conversations and adventures. Maybe it will end up on activeworlds – a 3D VR online community (described at Wikipedia) that I visited a couple of times some years ago.

BF: I've been having a pretty hard time with my own despair-driven paralysis.  Your comics don't flinch from the contours of the various crises we face, yet you remain optimistic.  Some of the positions you take on what we can do to achieve our goals -- such as ending malnutrition for good in our world -- are a real inspiration to me.  You stay pretty focused on the idea that collective action is possible, and that it can succeed.  How do you perceive the current challenges facing the human species?

LR:  Human beings have created a situation that makes unprecedented demands on our abilities to understand our global situation, rethink our customary ways of doing things, and share and evaluate our ideas. At this crucial historical moment, those with the largest stake in retarding our understandings and thwarting our progress dominate our means of mass communication, making a very uncertain chance of limiting the catastrophe even slimmer.

I see the problem of educating people, not as a hopeless task, and not as our only hope, but within a context in which each of our activities takes on a historically-recent kind of world-at-stake seriousness. 

To my thinking, sharing information can provide a deeper awareness of our present situation and of human history, give a stronger foundation to our efforts to make our next evolutionary leap, and remind us that our species has accomplished a series of such leaps in the past. 

Etymologically, it’s ironic for me to feel like an "idiot" for saying these things.