Fight Fascism!

World War 3 Illustrated #48

by Peter Kuper (editor), Seth Tobocman (Editor), Susan Simensky Bietila (Editor)

" World War 3 Illustrated is the real thing."— New York Times "The best and longest running alternative comics anthology around."— Comics Journal Since its founding by Seth Tobocman and Peter Kuper in 1979, World War 3 Illustrated has been publishing cutting-edge, political comics that have inspired the developing popularity and recognition of comics as a respected art form. Now rebranded as a book series, the first, and timely, theme of this new imprint is fascism. Contributors Erik Drooker, Sue Coe, Kate Evans, Peter Kuper, Steve Brodner, Isabella Bannerman, Kevin Pyle, Seth Tobocman, photographs from Unite the Right in Charlottesville by John Penley, and more.

Genres: Graphic Novels

190 pages, Paperback

First published October 16, 2017

About the author

Peter Kuper is an American alternative comics artist and illustrator, renowned for his politically charged, socially conscious, and often autobiographical work. He co-founded the influential anthology World War 3 Illustrated, and is best known for his long-running reinvention of Spy vs. Spy for Mad magazine from 1997 to 2022. Kuper has produced numerous graphic novels, including award-winning adaptations of Franz Kafka’s Give It Up! and The Metamorphosis, as well as autobiographical works like Stop Forgetting To Remember and Diario de Oaxaca, documenting life, travel, and social struggles. His illustration work has appeared on covers and in publications such as Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times. Kuper’s style often merges comics and illustration techniques, with both wordless narratives and text-driven storytelling, reflecting his belief that the two disciplines are inseparable. He has traveled extensively across Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia, often documenting these experiences in sketchbook journals. Kuper has taught courses on comics and illustration at the Parsons School of Design, the School of Visual Arts, and Harvard University’s first class on graphic novels. He has received numerous awards, including recognition from the Society of Newspaper Designers, the Society of Illustrators, and Eisner and NCS awards for his work. His comics combine sharp political commentary, personal observation, and inventive visual storytelling, establishing him as a prominent figure in contemporary alternative comics and illustration.

Reviews

[Meepelous · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very diverse collection of types of things combining visuals and words, as this is more of a magazine (historically) this anthology actually includes ads for different leftist stuff, which was kind of fun. Each piece is only one to four pages long. So a good bathroom book I suppose or coffee table if you have one of those.
While most of the artwork is largely black and white there's also a short selection at the middle in colour.

Just about half of the pieces are focused pretty tightly on Trump, which does lead to a severe lack of gender diversity being shown (although there are plenty of white women supporting him). That said, there were a number of really well-done stories about people on the female side of the binary and they or their family's immigrant experience, which was obviously super prescient. There's also the well-titled "A Sheltered White Girls Decent into Lesbianism & The Far Left" which was some of the only sexuality representation other than commentary on Trump's entitlement to other people's bodies.

As far as race goes, there were a lot of limitations on representation due to the strong focus on Trump and his most notorious underlings. A couple of the immigrant stories do fall outside of the current social construct of whiteness though, and the colour section is mostly focused on ICE and immigration detention. Although Trump's sexual transgressions got a lot more space than his racism, perhaps that was easier to gloss over earlier in the administration IDK.

As always with short stories anthologies, I feel like I might have missed some disability representation but I don't think so... We need more disability representation!

Overall I found this collection pretty interesting, I guess the one shortcoming that I started feeling about this issue while I was reviewing it was just how much time was given to just showing Trump - generally uglified which is a whole 'nother issue. I can see why it's a thing, but at the same time why let him (and discussions about him) take up so much space when we could be talking about how other people relate to fascism?

[Brock Birkner · Rating 5 out of 5]

This scratches every venomous liberal bone in my body.