“Special Coup Issue!”

Turkish police have censored the latest edition of LeMan, Istanbul’s radical comic weekly. 

Will this incident — and the ongoing crackdown on media, academia, and officialdom following the botched coup of July 15 — deter Turkey’s clique of opposition cartoonists?

It’s unlikely.

“We stir things up,” LeMan editor Tuncay Akgün told me in late June.

Since he co-founded the magazine in 1991, LeMan has produced bold and politically savvy comic art. But being a cartoonist in Turkey in 2016 — irrespective of current events — is more difficult than ever. For instance, LeMan is fighting a lawsuit in response to a cover of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It is just one of the myriad legal attacks that the president’s supporters have brought against humorists in the recent period.

LeMan posted its new cover online last night, but since then authorities halted its printing. 

Perhaps that is because the cover in question points to conspiracy. LeMan not so subtly suggests that the hidden hands of President Erdogan’s regime are responsible for the bloody events of last week. 

“I bet on the soldiers,” says the man who pushes the timid military men toward confrontation. Another man in a suit edges a handful of angry citizens toward the uniformed pawns, saying, “Good, then I’ll put my 50 percent on the people.” That’s a reference to Erdogan’s remark during the 2013 Gezi protests, in which he cited the AK Party’s electoral mandate (50 percent in the 2011 balloting) amid street demonstrations against his authoritarian policies. 

We might look to how Turkey’s comic artists operated three decades ago, in the aftermath of the military’s successful yet bloody overthrow of the government, as we consider how Erdogan’s government will react to radical satire.

After the 1980 coup, authorities shut down the notorious comic magazine GirGir, which at the time had a circulation of about 500,000. The reason for the closure: “allegedly mocking Turkish national identity with a cartoon of the Turkish flag on the naked body of a popular singer,” according to scholar Asli Tunç. 

A month later, however, GirGir, was up and running, lampooning the military government and its overreach. No doubt GirGir’s perseverance in the face of a clampdown on dissent galvanized a generation of Turkish comic artists, like Akgün, who today are the top artists and editors of the country’s vibrant illustrated, satirical press. 

“We have continued the tradition,” Akgün told me.

LeMan has attributed the censorship of its coup issue to its history of publishing caricatures and covers of Fethullah Gülen, the U.S.-based cleric whom Erdogan has blamed the coup on. But we may never know what else was inside the special issue.

That has not stopped LeMan from releasing this week’s regularly scheduled issue. The July 20th edition, like almost every comic published across the world this week, features a gag about Pokémon Go—except this one is rather dark.

On the left, youths are hunting for Pokémon. On the right, thugs are hunting for so-called opponents of the regime. (Since Friday, mobs celebrating Erdogan’s victory over the putschists have attacked Alevi and Kurdish neighborhoods in Istanbul, and burned down a Syrian-owned shop in Ankara.)

“Good luck youngsters!” say the thugs. “There seem to be many Pokémons in the park over there. Any Alevis or Syrians in that direction?“

"We haven’t seen any, bro,” say the youths. “Good luck to you guys too!”

And, we might add, good luck to Tuncay Akgün and his colleagues at LeMan.

Many thanks to Yasemin Ergin for translation help. 

Previous posts on Turkey here here here and here.

The Best Thing That Ever Happened to CCS

I’ve devoted most of this space to faculty, staff, and facilities, but this is the point where I have to draw attention to what really makes our beloved institution flourish. James and Michelle built the body we all inhabit, but the steady stream of cartoonists who’ve been crossing the Colodny threshold since 2005? They’re the blood pumping through the heart of this place, the oxygen breathing life into the classroom.

In the past ten years, more than 180 individuals have traveled to White River Junction from near and far in order to pursue their passion. They’ve endured the cultural isolation that comes with living in a small town, they’ve weathered Vermont winters (AKA ”Cartooning Season”), they’ve eaten at Yama more times than they’d care to remember. And they’ve found their tribe.

I’m fond of saying that, every spring, we graduate a little family. The average incoming student hails from a place where they were the only person deeply in love with comics, and CCS is the first place in their life where they are surrounded by people who share their obsession. Sure, their creative aspirations may have been nurtured by an online community or two, but the feeling of finding your kin is different when you’re learning in the classroom together, drawing and making books together, pulling all-nighters together. 

Each little family is different. There are interpersonal tensions, deep affinities, shared anxieties, disparate tastes that clash and mutate in the critical arena. I’ve had students at one end of the spectrum tell me that their time at CCS was bitterly disappointing, and at the other end that it saved their life. Regardless of individual experience, there’s an undeniable bonding, borne of high pressure and earned mutual respect, that occurs within each class. When we kick them out the door, they’re ostensibly on their own, but they’re really not, because ties formed at CCS tend to stick. They move to the same cities (Providence, Pittsburgh, Oakland!), see each other at small press shows (a new one seems to pop up every year), collaborate on anthologies via the internet (Awesome Possum, Irene, Dog City). 

Dakota McFadzean (class of 2012) broke my heart when he said, in his commencement speech, “I look forward to the day when I can tell my first child, ‘You’re the second best thing that ever happened to me.’” Well, four months ago Dakota and his wife Laura had that first child, and I found myself hoping that the realities of parenthood would encourage Dakota to rethink his plan and swap the #1 and #2 spots before little Clement was old enough to understand English.

After writing the preceding paragraph I took a break to attend the CCS 10 Year Block Party, where I unexpectedly encountered Dakota, Laura, and a stroller-full of adorable Clement, come all the way from Toronto to fête our fine institution. I voiced my concerns to Dakota right there in the crowded street, and he told me it was too late—he had kept his word and already told Clement. But of course he did it before the kid could understand anything more than wa-wuh wah wa-wah (you know, like adults in a Peanuts TV special), so win-win. 

I know that I speak for the entire faculty and staff when I say that the best thing to ever happen to CCS is the students. Yes, we do our best to foster a positive environment; yes, we share our experiences in hopes that the next generations can learn from and avoid mistakes that we made in our own careers; yes, we try to encourage them to find new ways to watch and listen and write and draw and play. But it’s the students that give this place meaning and make this job worth doing. It’s the students who inspire us, who force us to up our game and be better teachers than we were last year. It’s the students who teach us, new things, all the time. 

So to all of our little families—past, present, and future—I say thank you.  What an amazing cavalcade.

Thank you for everything!

Class of 2007

Class of 2008

Class of 2009

Class of 2010

Class of 2011

Class of 2012

Class of 2013

Class of 2014

Class of 2015

Class of 2016

This place, man.

Andy Warner is not only a long-time contributor to As You Were (he’s four for four right now), but he’s also sort of like the human version of Wikipedia; a quick glimpse at his work reveals a wide range of interests, in things both commonplace and obscure.

He’s also a really busy person, but luckily we caught up with him after an impressive year to talk a bit about his art, his teaching, and his forthcoming book. 

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