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You ever read a comic book with characters with big blocky fists and feet? You ever notice how the comic book villains in those stories were completely incompetent and SUPER weird? Yeah that's because Jack Kirby, a Jewish man from NYC was a forward scout during WWII and saw the nazis for who they were first hand. He spent a career trying to communicate to the world the horrors of what he saw: these weird dumbasses were somehow able to kill 6M of his brothers and sisters simply by doing it.

He also portrayed his Jewish-coded characters such as The Thing as being deeply emotionally connected to the people around them and invested in social causes because

1. That was his own personal understanding of his Jewish faith
2. Something very disturbing happened after WWII. A particular set of violent weirdos like the ones he'd seen in France and Germany came to define what Judaism was to the world at large (I'm talking about Zionists right now). He hoped to reach young boys reading his comics and instill in them that this was not the way, and that the way was for them to find allies and coalitions with similar ideals to them without establishing a hierarchy of racial classes

None of the way silver and bronze age comics depict violent weirdos is an accident. Comic Books as an art form has its roots in a mix of street art and war-time propaganda. The weird part (or perhaps the beautiful part) is that across the globe this is true. Spanish Comics have their own look and feel influenced by that Iberian street art has its own look and feel. Same with Japanese comics, Latin American comics, comic books from people outside of NYC. I could go on. But there's this... Incredible force of... Human nature where when we gather together we tell stories and spread messages to each other. Comic Books are a low art, and they're often seen as being for kids, but their creators don't see being low art as being lesser art. A lot of them have high art training and have seen what the high art world values and have rejected that.

And like... There are some comic books out there that have TRULY incredible things to say about the world, history, and humanity. My very favorite, One Piece, is super accessible, too, written and conceived to communicate to 10 year olds that resistance to fascism is rooted in the following: environmental protections, comedy, and giving nazis a good old fashioned punching. Maus is a biographical examination of the experience of a holocaust survival. Monster is about the traumas of the cold-war era for people "protected" by the mass control mechanisms established by the Soviet Union and United States. Footnotes in Gaza is an expose of the long running genocide in Gaza that is currently intensifying into total elimination. V for Vendetta explores what it means to resist fascism. Saga is... Jesus what do I even say about Saga. Saga is... An exploration of... Everything. It takes a deep close up look at what it feels like to try to survive in a total system of torture while maintaining a normal relationship (hint hint: it's messy). Too often we think of war as being a top level thing between groups when those groups are made up of individuals experiencing daily personal tragedies. Saga addresses that. Which means there's a mass scale war and interpersonal drama and neither draws focus from the other, but instead places both into stark relief about what's going on.

New paragraph because I'm not done saying there's comics out there that y'all should check out. Obviously there's Watchmen, the examination of American fascism and its downsides. Actually I guess that's the last one. But like... I hope this makes an impression on someone. Comic Book artists aren't just trying to make a buck drawing doodles. A lot of them could make more money selling their work to high art assholes, but they choose to share their work with you and inspire you into being a better more complete person. And the accessibility and relationship between Comic Books and Street art is also an invitation. If you have a message to promote to the world, there's a place for you in the arts, even if your art isn't refined enough for the high art assholes. Still you can make something that connects with someone.

If you really pay attention, too, to the street art in your community, you can start to notice that street artists are having an asynchronous conversation with eachother. One will tag something and include a message with a tag, and then another street artist will tag something nearby with a message that's related or in response. And when you see street art covering up other street art? That's a dire message. The second artist is telling the first "I don't just disagree with you. I think you should shut the fuck up and stay out of the streets"

And comic books are always having this conversation back with the streets, too. That's part of what's so incredible about the Spider-Verse films. They're the first super hero films that engage with that the intersection of activism, art, and fantasy is where superheros come from. Every Spider-Man in those films is an artist of some variety and Spider-Punk (Hobie) is an EXPLICIT demonstration of exactly how far this can go. His activism and art aren't an undercurrent or a side hustle for his spider-man. They're an explicit aspect of his "heroism" (he's not a hero because calling yourself a hero makes you a self mythologizing autocrat (by the way Luffy in One Piece says the exact same thing))

Fair enough, I stand corrected.