I wrote to cartoonists that Fantagraphics publishes, inviting them to do a drawing responding to the massacre at the Charlie Hebdo office on January 7. The purpose is to show solidarity to our fallen comrades and to the scorched-earth tradition of cartoon satire. We would run whatever we received, uncensored. It seemed not only appropriate but imperative that Fantagraphics offer cartoonists a place to display such cartoons since we have published so much satire ourselves – from R. Crumb to Drew Friedman to Johnny Ryan to Jonah Kinigstein.
There is a debate simmering as to whether or not Hebdo was indeed an "equal opportunity offender," as the political cartoonist Ann Telnaes has said, a characterization disputed by, among others, Glenn Greenwald. This may go to the integrity of Hebdo as a magazine or it may not; satirists and the editors of satirical magazines are not necessarily obliged to follow quotas— but it is irrelevant to their fundamental right to express themselves without being murdered. I have seen no statistics that categorize their offensive cartoons, but claiming that they were more offensive to one group than another or insufficiently anti-semitic begs the question as to whether their rights should be protected only if they’re equal opportunity offenders; clearly, we at Fantagraphics believe their rights to free expression should be protected and defended irrespective of how personally repellant or lopsided their cumulative opinions may be.
France’s own anti-speech laws are onerous. Shortly after the Hebdo tragedy, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said, “We must not confuse freedom of opinion with antisemitism, racism, and negationism.” Actually, exactly the opposite is true, and it’s a shameful hypocrisy to laud Hebdo on the one hand and utter a statement like this on the other. “Freedom of opinion” means freedom of opinion, not freedom of opinion I approve of.
A new image will be posted to the Flog every day and archived on this post so that, eventually, every image we’ve received will be collected here:
