The Four Color Media Monitor

Here's a review from Noahpinion of several GNs focused mainly on the subject of immigration, and wouldn't you know it, one of the products listed here is written as a form of Islamic victimology of the most grating kind:

If rightists want to read a story about immigration that confirms all their worst fears, Huda F. Cares? will probably do nicely. It’s a story about a deeply conservative, completely insular Muslim family who lives in America but is not fundamentally of America. They stick primarily to themselves, living out their traditionalist religious lifestyle in seclusion. Their family trip to Disneyland — the one time they let themselves venture outside their enclave — is the subject of the story, and yet almost none of the book is spent describing Disneyland at all. Instead, it’s all about internal family dynamics.

They do occasionally encounter Americans outside their family, but these are pretty much always presented as threats or opponents to be overcome. Regular Americans insult Huda’s family and try to sexually harass the (conservatively dressed) women. When one of the girls is detained at the park for hitting a sexual harasser, the mother takes a video and threatens to summon the online mob against the park security, ultimately forcing them to let her daughter off the hook. At the end, the family decides that the world is always going to be against them, and that they have to stick together as a family to resist.

This is presented as a hopeful conclusion, since the family ultimately puts aside their constant squabbling to unite against the outside world. But it’s not the kind of story a lot of Americans would probably like to hear about immigration.

What's offensive here, of course, is how it presents regular Americans as revolting (and if the writer sees fit, I'm sure she'd also villify Europeans), and isn't that fascinating how the American citizens are even presented stooping to sexual misconduct. With the biggest oxymoron being that yes, of course even Muslim obviously aren't safe from sexual violence, but it's mainly that committed by Muslim men, and almost 2 decades ago, there was a horrifying case in Iran of a woman who killed a rapist in self defense, also to defend her niece, and for that, she was tragically sentenced to hang. Yet the writer of this disgraceful GN would rather accuse Americans, no matter their ethnicity, of being that evil.

Making matters regarding this propaganda GN worse, there was an atrocious incident in Westchester, New York back in 2011 where a Muslim group at Rye Playland caused a ruckus after women from the group wearing hijabs were denied access to some of the rides because they went against safety rules. Last year, a vaguely similar case regarding burkas occurred in Kansas City after a Muslim woman was told she couldn't wear it on the roller coaster ride for safety reasons. And she had the gall to call the staff "racist", but never "anti-religious". As a result, one can legitimately wonder if Huda F. Cares? really is based on fact, assuming that's how it's marketed. If anything, it's a pretty sick example of a propagandist who follows the beliefs in Islam that make a woman's body out to be an abomination, and has no confidence or self-respect. Stories like this are also obviously written as a belief that the host country should literally conform to the twisted beliefs of the "immigrant", but not the other way around. Is that acceptable?

This also reminds me of how almost 15 years ago, the awful Geoff Johns wrote apologia for the Religion of Peace when he shoehorned a Muslim protagonist into the Green Lantern franchise, and regular Americans who aren't Muslim were depicted as hostile and repellent. Similar problems occur in the Muslim Ms. Marvel series by the equally awful G. Willow Wilson (and later written by the now equally awful Saladin Ahmed). So this new GN is nothing new. But neither is it approvable.

Oddly enough, there's another GN on this list that might involve Muslim characters titled I Was Their American Dream, and this, by contrast, doesn't seem to build upon victimology propaganda:

I Was Their American Dream follows an archetype that has basically become the staple of the immigrant memoir genre — the story of a kid who come to America at a young age, and struggles to fit in at school while also dealing with their parents’ old-world quirks and problems. Malaka Gharib executes this in fine form, telling the story of her mixed Egyptian-Filipino family with humor and warmth, and adding plenty of informative cultural context.

Of all the immigrant memoir comics I read, this one was the most unambiguously positive. America never wrongs or excludes the protagonist in any way — she finds a way to fit in at school just as easily as any white kid in the 80s or 90s, and then she goes to college and has fun there too. Her parents get divorced, and her dad moves back to Egypt for a better job, but America remains the land of promise, wealth, and safety. The art is pretty cartoonish, but it adds to the generally silly fun tone.

Racial exclusion barely comes up. The protagonist/author grows up in an immigrant “ethnoburb” in Southern California where there are almost no white people, so white people are simply exotic and interesting to her, rather than dominant and threatening. When she first encounters white people en masse, it’s as a college student, and while they can sometimes be obtuse, she generally views them as fun and even exotic.

Overall, if you want a story of successful middle-class immigration, this is a good pick. There’s also a sequel called It Won’t Always Be Like This, about the author’s time visiting her father in Egypt.

This doesn't sound noxious like the prior example, so at least we're getting somewhere with this item. In a footnote, interestingly enough, the blogger also notes:

At one point the protagonist declares that “I KISSED A LOOOOTTTTT OF WHITE GUYS.” This is not necessarily the kind of thing you’d want to write in a graphic novel in the “woke” age, but I found its innocent confident positivity to be extremely charming.

One could wonder if the star's background is why he's letting it slide? Well, in any event, it's not something to get hysterical about if a non-white girl decides to date white guys. That's her choice, and nobody else's. What should matter is horrific incidents like this recent one that occurred last year.

And then, amazingly enough, Noahpinion also lists an item that covers the negative side of illegal immmigration, Just Another Story: A Graphic Migration Account:

This is the best comic I’ve read about illegal immigration. It’s about a Salvadoran boy (the author’s cousin) whose mother decides to take him to America to escape desperate poverty and the constant threat of violence in El Salvador. The story is gripping, tense, and harrowing — it feels like Lord of the Rings, with hobbits sneaking across Mordor. The main danger is not the U.S. Border Patrol, but the various criminals who try to exploit, rob, kidnap, or murder would-be illegal immigrants headed north. In the end, they make it, but only barely, and they’re emotionally scarred for life by the journey.

If you want to understand what’s really at stake when people immigrate illegally, and what they have to face in order to do so, this is a good lesson.

Those criminals who attack the illegal aliens could surely include Mexican mafias like Los Zetos. I'm amazed a blogger who confirms he's a leftist is willing to highlight a GN of this sort. However, he also lists one that, despite attacking communism, also attacks Donald Trump, titled Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey:

This is another story about a refugee from a communist dictatorship — this time, Castro’s Cuba. American leftists tend to have romantic fantasies about revolutionary Cuba, but Worm depicts an impoverished, slowly decaying country filled with fear, where neighbors rat on their neighbors and daily life is ruthlessly repressed. (The art style really compounds the feeling of anxiety.) The title refers both to a parasite that almost kills the author/protagonist, and to the protagonist’s father, who is labeled a “worm” for daring to secretly oppose Castro.

In the end, Rodriguez and his family escape Cuba on the famous 1980 Mariel Boatlift, and make it to America, where they succeed economically (after facing the usual challenges). The Rodriguez family idolizes America for saving them from a brutal dictatorship and giving them the opportunity to become middle-class.

But then Trump gets elected, and the nation suddenly seems far less friendly to immigrants. A now-grown-up Rodriguez decides that Trump is similar to Castro, and decides to use his art to oppose Trump. Rodriguez creates what’s probably still the most iconic political cartoon about Trump — an image of a melting, screaming, eyeless orange head that appeared on the cover of Time. It’s not the happiest ending, but at least America is a place where dissidents can still go against the President in public — at least for now.

Oh, good grief. A better question and topic would be why anybody approves of allowing a communist regime to continue existing instead of finding how to depose of the commies in charge and replace them with more civilized representatives. And how come Trump's seen as a problem, but not the time when Bill Clinton sent a Cuban boy, Elien Gonzalez, back instead of allowing him to stay with relatives? That wasn't bad in any way?

If one really has to take issue with Trump on anything, it's whether he's being soft on Cuba's communists, which is no more acceptable than being soft on Russia's. But when a GN like the above builds so predictably on a intentions that may not be altruistic, that's why it's appalling that yet again, another comic was written as an unfortunate excuse for attacking conservatives. Granted, the GN may take an objective look at how communism is an evil ideology. But that still doesn't make it okay to merely bash Trump because he supposedly created an atmosphere hostile to Cubans. I'll admit though, it's amazing the blogger acknowledged there's leftists who regrettably take a romantic view of communism, when it's all a lot darker than we think.

Labels: Africa, Europe and Asia, indie publishers, islam and jihad, misogyny and racism, moonbat artists, moonbat writers, politics