The place that sends you MAAAAD!

Okay, one last parody of Asterix and I stop...

I wouldn't have done this without a handy little Youtube video of the original classic:

Now, that is clever cartooning. You laugh a scene like this when you are a kid but when you see it as an adult, you laugh even harder because you know what it's all about. If you're french, "la maison qui rend fou" is called "préfecture", if you're american it has the dreaded initials; D-M-V. If you're Canadian, it's a double-headed dragon with one head being called Service Canada, and the other being Service New-Brunswick if you're in Moncton, or Service Québec if you're in Montreal, or Service Ontario if you're in Toronto...and of course, no matter where you are in the Great White North, the two are never in the same darn building.

In short, this little segment says all about those guys' genius at blending jokes about the ancient World and our own. A lot like I try to mix animality and humanity in my characters ("citizenship collar").

The dangers of activism as entertainment...

I'm taking a vacation from my Facebook wall, which is 75 percent political causes, 20 percent people I haven't spoken with since high school. A lot of that stuff sounded true when I added it and I don't know if it is me getting old or just something getting out of style, but the internet has given a weird meaning to the very word "revolution"...

I've grown skeptical of cyber-activism, not that I think it's absolutely worthless. It's just that we sill have to learn what to make of social media and the ability to push information around like never before. The absolute lack of skepticism that some people have towards the information highway is discouraging. How many times a day can you hear people in those groups chant that everything you see on CBC, CNN , BBC and the rest is the evil government controling your thoughts but mindlessly believe everything that's on the internet because it's "the media of the people".

Wrong! Any person's ability to manipulate others has nothing to do with who's on the board, who's friends with who's on the board or if there is a board at all. Anyone who has the possibility to pass a message around has the possibility to manipulate others! You just need to know which sensitive nerves to scratch over and over again...people being manipulated may even be convinced that it is for their own good, especially if you tell them what they want to hear.

Cyberactivism is, if anything, a huge achievement in propaganda. Think of it for one second; the first guy to use Facebook for political reasons was Barack Obama for his first election campaign, after Bush. Is an action still revolutionary if the guy who represents power did it himself already? If we had social media in 2003 when Iraq was invaded, all Bush and the CIA would have needed so everyone would approve their war would be a few fake Twitter accounts, supposedly originating from Iraq about the horrors or Saddam's regime and the 2003 Iraq war would have been as popular as the intervention in Libya.

Yet, cyberactivists completely buy everything that's online and fits their views with a frightening naiveté. Just last week, with WW3 simmering in Ukraine, much of what I've read on Facebook fell into two categories; "Putin's evil incarnate"  and "The US is evil incarnate with its invasions, so Putin must be the good guy". Like the whole thing was just an action movie, Good vs. Evil but this is real life. With the World at stake, there are no angels and no demons, just humans, both in Washington and Moscow.

But the objective of this form of entertainment (like all other medias) is to get as much attention as possible. Moderate words don't get attention. You have to sound shocking to get your word around, hence all the latte-drinking anarchists (those who would never know how to run a country but do they know how to count Platoes on pin heads!), the feminists who equate telling a woman to smile (that's annoying and a tad bit sexist) as bulletproof evidence that men are absolutely hard-wired to oppress women. I heard a black activist say that interracial relationships are a form of racial oppression, of consuming one's race for sexual pleasure. With all due respect to those people, who do they think they are to tell people who they can or can't sleep with over skin color? People did that in the past, until they legalized interracial marriages. I heard it was seen as a good thing...

...but those kind of positions have to make sense, they just have to catch attention They divide the World between good and evil, but that's what people want!

The one big flaw of considering activism as entertainment is that it's not really "for" something, it is often against a "villain". Think about it one second; if there are native canadians oppressed in 2014, they must have been oppressed also earlier, even under Prime Ministers that we consider wise like Pearson, Trudeau and, in a lesser meassure, Chrétien. Yet nobody paid attention until an evil conservative showed up with his tar sands. Suddenly, CBC (liberal media!) made a t.v. special on the issue and everyone who hates Harper (all of the country except Alberta) jumped on the bandwagon. Harper won't be Prime Minister forever. When the Liberals (or the NDP) come back in power, will people still pay attention or think the Dragon has been slain and it's time to go back watch t.v.?

There's no ligne claire between good and evil.

If Belgium is France's little bilingual brother, then franco-belgian comic books are the little brothers of the Louvre's paintings. In anglo-saxon culture, cartoons are often seen as entertainment for children and computer geeks who live in their mom's basement but in french-speaking culture, cartooning is the ninth art (neuvième art ) and cartoonists have the full respect shown to writers who write books without pictures. The most respected among them is Hergé, born Georges Rémi, creator of a timeless little guy named Tintin, whose adventures lasted between 1927 and 1976.

Hergé first published Tintin in in a newspaper called le Petit Vingtième or, the little twentieth (century). Predestinated, considering that after inviting us to Soviet Russia after the 1917 revolution, to Chicago during the prohibition, China during the 1930's japanese occupation, Hergé drew the whole twentieth century as it unfolded in front of his eyes, from the Anschluss in King Ottokar's Sceptor to the arms race in the Calculus Affair to the Moon Landing in Explorers on the Moon, until we see general Alcazar, that Che Guevara-sort of semi-rebel lead a revolution that would make Anonymous proud in Tintin and the Picaros, the only complete album of the series drawn after the 1960s.

I was surprised when I was a teenager and heard that Hergé had been accused of collaborating with the Nazis after World War II. All I knew from Hergé was, if anything against that sort of attrocity. The Blue Lotus is a smart denunciation of the Japanese occupation of China (same war, other place), The Calculus Affair is a warning against all those Cold War weapons that can wipe all life off the planet and even after all this time, page 29 of Tintin in America could be re-named Tintin in Alberta.

...but then there's also Tintin in the Congo. An album fans are uncomfortable with because it puts Tintin in Africa, carrying the « white man's burden » there on behalf of Belgium.

It is easy to be uncomfortable with that reality but we have to admit it; there was a point in history were people thought like that and decades from now, people will look back at us and think the same thing about our way of though. It is easy to retroactively look down at an author for publishing The Shooting Star and The Crab with the Golden Claws in a paper that collaborated with the ennemy during WW2, especially seen from modern days, without a SS under your windows. We all want to be the hero, but heroes are few and far between, that's why they're heroes. Sold as the symbol of innocence, Tintin seen from that angle is...remarquably imperfect, like all of us and a lot like the twentieth century that gave us Mandela, MLK, Gandhi and women's votes but it could not have learned that without making a few major fuckups first.

At the time I'm writing this, Ukraine is on the news. Is it a new Cold war or is the news channel running a good show again? Putin is at odds with what we call « the West » and after whatever comes out if it, who of the two will say, like Kaiser Wilhelm« I did not want this »?