I think there’s a huge difference between Crumb, who’s trying to honestly explore his own misogyny and racism, and someone like the Tome/Janry team, who are just moving around stereotypes for, basically, the fun of it. I always found Tome and Janry’s SPIROU technically proficient but uninteresting and have read only a couple of them, so it’s not as if my ox is being gored here. THE SOPRANOS is probably a lot more insidious than a clearly parodic spaghetti-slurping mafioso like the one here. But if anything the over-the-top ridiculousness of the imagery in SPIROU works in its favor. Which is not to say there aren’t explicitly, viciously racist or misogynist or homophobic works out there (TINTIN IN THE CONGO remains inexcusable by any metric) or that a culture that continually propagates the same insulting stereotypes doesn’t eventually do some cumulative harm. I also think there’s a certain continuum of literal-minded naïveté that stretches from Fredric Wertham’s conviction that readers of TALES FROM THE CRYPT will think murder is fun to GLAAD’s conviction that viewers of BASIC INSTINCT will think lesbians are all icepick killers to Alex’s unbridled horror at SPIROU here. Personally, I think France has/had achieved a level of cultural diversity that even the adolescent SPIROU readers were capable of filing those characters away as playful stereotypes that had nothing whatsoever to do with the real world, and if anything have to opposite effect of pointing out their ridiculousness - a junior version of the INNOMABLES and Chaland effects. But if you think the readers of SPIROU will genuinely take these absurd caricatures to heart as part of their world view, than it’s a profoundly evil racist work. (Another cartoonist using extreme racist imagery satirically in the 1970s and 1980s: Joost Swarte.) If you assume the readers of SPIROU are sophisticated enough to recognize the silliness of the racial caricatures, then it’s a relatively harmless book that skirts tastelessness. I think Jean-Paul Jennequin has it exactly right. I thought I’d highlight them here (he’s in conversation with me for much of this, but I figured I’d let his words stand alone you can click over and read what I have to say if you want.)
Kim Thompson had a number of comments on Alex Buchet’s post about Spirou and Fantasio.
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