Back in the 1950s when comedian Lenny Bruce asked “Are there any niggers here tonight?” in front of an audience, he was being very bold and was likely to be spanked or even shot. But his point was good: words are only words, and we shouldn’t let our feelings be carried away by them. Sadly, Bruce didn’t live to see thousands of hip-hop albums being recorded where the word “nigger” is used as “friend” instead of “inferior African descendant”. But his point was made, and at least in this very specific case, it worked.
Something similar happens to comics. The wide plethora of names used to describe those little drawings and the words that sometimes go with them is very confusing, and only sometimes has an actual meaning. Warren Ellis addressed this in the 18th article of his brilliant series about comics, Do Anything. So I just want to focus on one thing: why does everybody worry so much about calling comics… comics?
Down here in Brazil, there used to be a few magazines back in the early XX century that were the basic source of comics people had back then. One of them was called Gibi, named after the little black boy who was the “mascot” of the magazine and appeared in all of its covers. Evem though it became an icon for the Brazilian comics scene, today he is seen by the moral police as a “racist” character, making Gibi sort of like the Brazilian version of the Yellow Kid.
Turns out that Gibi is an old slang that could be translated as Nigger or something like that.
Ironic to say the list. Dim-witted scandal-seeking assholes who eventual might find this post on Google might even imply that I am asking Americans to call their comics “niggers”, but that is not really my point. I just thought it was interesting that the word I use to describe comics here in Brazil is also a word that used to be offensive and racist, and today it doesn’t mean anything else but comics.
It’s considered a derogatory word down here. When you’re 15 years old and your mother decides do throw all of your comic books away because you should be looking for a job, she’ll call them “gibis”. And that’s exactly why I use this word.
Of course I want comics to be respected. But I think they should achieve that by being awesome, and by being read. I don’t want some fancy word to describe them. That won’t help at all. It’s the other way around: I want comics to be popular. Anything I can do to drive comics away from the becoming some kind of elite high-brow shit, I’ll do it. I want comics to be good, but also cheap. I want kids to be able to read them without feeling guilt. Comics, gibis, BD, manga, I don’t care what you call them.
Let’s focus on what really matters about them.
