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Politics in the Gutter American Politicians and
Elections in Comic Book Media
Christina M. Knopf
University Press of Mississippi, 2021 Paperback. 278p. ISBN 978-1496834232. $30
Reviewed by Nicolas Labarre Université Bordeaux Montaigne
Politics in the Gutter examines the intersection between comics and political
communication [xviii], by studying exclusively comics which represent “political
structures and processes” [xix]. Though Christina M. Knopf notes that comic
books and their adaptations have been used by politicians in a variety of ways,
from allusions to memes, her goal is not to provide a general interpretation of
comic books as political discourse. Doing so enables her to delineate a
consistent corpus, instead of trying to account for a whole medium over eight
or nine decades. Martin Lund has shown that even a single series such as
Marvel’s X-Men has generated extensive
misreadings among scholars, due to the difficulty of reading and properly
historicizing nearly sixty years of
publications (“The Mutant Problem: X-Men, Confirmation Bias,
and the Methodology of Comics and Identity,” 2015). By contrast, Knopf focuses her attention not on
politics as an abstraction or on the ideology of comics, but on explicit
representations of US politicians and US elections, understood through a
variety of disciplinary approaches, including broad surveys and close readings
of specific comics. The
book is divided into eleven chapters, starting with historical subjects (the
origin of campaign comics, the Cold War) before tackling the presidency,
parodies, political journalism, campaigns, gender, race, Donald Trump as a
supervillain, and alternate histories. In each chapter, Knopf uses a specific
comic book or historical events as an entry point, offers a broad survey of
relevant comics, with concise and efficient summaries, before introducing and
applying key concepts in political representation or political communication
and bringing them to bear on selected examples. For instance, the pivotal
chapter on superheroes and the US presidency [ch.3], opens with an examination
of the many appearances of John Fitzgerald Kennedy in superhero comics since
the early 1960s. Knopf then highlights the parallels between the role of the
President, “woven in the fabric of national mythology” (Lawrence and Jewett,
2002, qted. p.39) and that of inspirational superheroes. Studying comic books
but also the TV show Arrow¸ adapted
from DC's Green Arrow, Knopf then unpacks the tension between the myth of the
superheroic presidency, “a crude form of wish-fulfillment” (Noon, 2016, qted. p.49)
and the limits placed on law-abiding politicians, real or imagined. As
suggested by this example, Knopf rightly chooses to take a broad view of what
comics means. Her historical surveys include illustrated books, nod towards
political cartoons and frequently mention comic book-adjacent cultural objects
in other media. Comic books offer a center of gravity to the book – accounting
for newspaper comic strips would have warranted a very different methodology –
but they are never treated as a closed corpus. In
her introduction, the author highlights the book’s potential usefulness to
students and teachers in addition to scholars. In line with this intended
target, Politics in the Gutter aims
for clarity. Knopf brings forth examples and theoretical taxonomies with a sure
hand, and the conclusions to each of the short chapter briskly recapitulate key
findings in one or two paragraphs. For the most part, Politics in the Gutter also strikes an efficient balance between
the comic book corpus, historical events and political theory, even though some
chapters devote too much space to listing comics (in chapter 7, for instance). Moreover,
in spite of the focused and systematic structure of its short chapters, the book
succeeds in offering a progression rather than a juxtaposition, revisiting
examples and concepts from the third chapter to make sense of representations
of Donald Trump as a supervillain, for instance. What
this structure does not allow, however, is a clear sense of the intended
audience of specific comics. Knopf discusses major works, including Watchmen (DC Comics), American Flagg (First Comics) or Umbrella Academy (Dark Horse), alongside
fairly obscure oddities such as Time
Lincoln (Antarctic Press) or Barack
the Barbarian (Devil’s Due), without detailing their respective readership
or delineating the shape of the comic book market at the time of their
publication, even as the political context remains in focus. This refusal to
create a clear hierarchy does not invalidate the project, for Knopf never
centers a chapter mostly on atypical examples, but it leads to questionable
assessments. In the case of Barack the
Barbarian, discussed on pp.152-155, Knopf reads Obama’s bare chest and
muscular body as an echo of stereotypical representations of black heroes, emphasizing
powerful physicality and animalistic traits. While this is a valid cognitive
frame to approach this comic book, the fact that it was sold in comic book
stores, to a small audience of comic book fans means that the reference to
Conan’s typical representation was probably the dominant frame through which
the image was processed. The same could not be said of other series mentioned
in the book, whose popularity appears to rest mostly on collected editions sold
in bookstores (such as the Image series Saucer
Country or The Manhattan Project).
This lack of contextualization thus obscures the pragmatic ways in which some
of these comics may have become sources of political meaning. The
other limitation of the project results from its explicit focus on US politicians
and elections, which exclude comics series along which some of the chosen examples
would customarily be discussed. This is especially obvious in the final
chapter, examining time-travel and alternate histories. The key uchronic work
in the comic book canon is undoubtedly Kevin O’Neill and Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, whose politics has been the object of much scholarly inquiry (most notably
in Marc Singer’s Breaking the Frames,
2018). Because The League of Extraordinary
Gentlemen does not fit into her project – it revolves primarily around
Great Britain – Knopf merely echoes some of the issues it has raised when
discussing lesser, and apparently derivative works. The narrow focus thus occasionally leads to a loss
of the context of comics consumption, but also of relevant scholarship. These defects were probably inevitable, to a certain
extent. Braiding two disciplinary fields in one slim book, and attempting to
provide a survey of political comic books rather than a more selective analysis
makes it nearly impossible to firmly position each of the examples. Similarly, refusing
to engage important works outside the boundaries of the main corpus was
probably necessary to avoid lengthy digressions. These shortcomings may be
frustrating, but they are the direct result of the book’s project, rather than
an oversight. In spite of these small imperfections, Politics in the Gutter provides a complex and ambitious vision of
its subject. Any of its sections could be expanded upon, enriched with other
examples and refined with more nuanced contextualization of the chosen comics,
but they all offer a strong theoretical framework and a rich survey of fruitful
examples. This is a useful book, which should spur further research, and could
certainly be used as a textbook in any class examining the intersection of
politics and popular culture.
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