graphic art far more than an escape comics can pack a political punch and our guests do just that first off muhammad's a bunny who describes how he transposes his lived experience to the page exposed in the cruelties of israeli occupation and celebrating popular resistance then nate powell uses his art to break down a specifically american phenomenon the creep of fascists that excess into our police and consumer choices that's all coming up with little coverage and even less sign of much world concern about the ongoing disaster in palestine our guest muhammad has turned to graphic art he's lived in ramallah with war his entire spending five months in israeli detention much of it in solitary confinement he's also the lead political cartoonist for the daily paper al hayat he says he is part of the struggle but his weapon of choice to do it or i'm sorry your subjects have to be what they are but i'm glad you're doing your work yeah what do you think you can communicate through cartooning that those of us in traditional news maybe maybe because of the cartoon is like a visual language is very easy for all of these in the audience from around the world to understand that without any need to translate this this cartoon goes my artwork without any text and that's what's the people should know here not just in united states and even around the world although in the united states we have the connection of helping to supply that y by any any way now you're acting you're making this art how it looks like is it line no cuts is that is that how you're making the work and that's all my artwork in this book along cut most of them we know you uncut some of them try to talk about what's going on in that they're not just because of the great marsh return marsh was going guys that have been happening when more than ten years ago and now and i think no one cared about what's going on there well and what you have here is also the checkpoints which is all about looking and observing you know we can't see anything yet because i think we need more than a more concentrated one going on in gaza from the work works our president has put rolls and rolls and rolls of razor wire barbed wire on the border of the u s and mexico you might and to me that piece also speaks to the work that build the wall he want to stop that immigrant it is the same it's exclusive exclusionary nationalist state so we're in the same boat you and i yeah thank you so much thank you and thank you for your work thank you for the conversation you've probably seen images of heavily armed u s soldiers in wraparound sunglasses walking through dusty villages in far off places the same mistakes are showing up among the u s police too and they're being adopted by the country's burgeoning white nationalist movement what are the dark glasses hide and how is it that comic book symbols a migrating into a deadly macho white identity today we sit down with nate powell the first cartoonist to receive a national book award and the author of about face it's a graphic novel essay published on popular dot com and its work traditionally explores militarism memory and culture in an american  asure of kind of journalism and journaling about face centers the commodification of paramilitary aesthetics and the complacent creep of white supremacy in the u s while exposing the threat  joe man child poses to all of us nate welcome to the program and can catch congratulations on the national book award thank you very much is cut to just an a politically ok term or is graphic artist always mandatory no i mean cartoonist i think is the most accurate description of era not you did you grow up doing cartoons yeah i started drawing about age three and when i hit junior high school started making in self publishing my own work and really what i do now is no different than what i was family as a g i joe kid in the cold war and and you were in the south yes indeed yeah in a stationed in alabama arkansas and all that montana as well but yeah i think a lot of my i joe head cold war upbringing provided a room to begin to ask more complex questions and generate dialogue back and forth especially with my dad to get a little more of his perspective on his service  contradictions on on things that push people to serve but then sort of moving forward from that moving through punk rock and moving into publishing and moving into my own expression once i became an adult finally i had an outlet for pushing that discussion and that childhood discussion further and bringing it into the twenty first century you stop the book saying that it is about style as a normalizing force is something that you suggest had been of interest to you even the kids but became increasingly serious certainly in general this this essay came from a slow accumulation of observations in my own community but also reflecting upon what i was seeing develop over the last five or six years as compared to my childhood military brat knowledge of military regulations in changes in dress code changes in facial hair guidelines  and especially once the iraq war part two of the endless middle eastern conflict kicked in recognizing the ways in which those a static changes were being brought back from overseas service into law enforcement private security and then into civilian life so explain it i mean if you think of g i joe or if you least if you think of the military in the area you were growing up pretty firm rules about facial hair and uniforms and uniforms with identification a lot of this had to do with historically had to do with not just military but paramilitary groups evolving some of the lessons of guerrilla and insurgent warfare during the vietnam war and so what you'll find is like by the mid two thousand certain special forces units and privatized military privatized mercenary  groups in central asia and the middle east gained certain advantages in terms of growing facial hair having more approachable demeanor for certain locals but also being identified by locals  by their facial hair as being more prone to abuses of power and violence i guess some of that popped up on the radar first once the quickly quickly mytholog tale of navy seal team six chris kyle started to merge and brought brought into the forefront the punisher skull being the icon of the marvel comics antihero the punisher so explain that a little bit more and who he's created was and what he thought he was creating a shirt so the punisher was you know a character who debuted in one hundred seventy four at the close of the vietnam war  and co created by gerry conway but sort of to symbolize not just veterans concerns and disaffect taishan but also sort of the breaking of a social contract in terms of turning the rule of law on its head when we were discussing comic book antiheroes we're really discussing vigilante justice and i mean that's as old as batman he is a vigilante and in that case he is an antihero but in the one nine hundred seventy s we saw this real the way for a sense of a sense of aggrievement entitlement outside of that pool and so developed a symbolic life of its own and when brought back stateside in the twenty first century you'll find it being used i mean almost immediately after the murder of michael brown you'll start to see police departments incorporating the punisher icon into some of their cars i think the first major story was in kentucky there is a sheriff's department or police department which started painting them on all their cars and you know this sort of spreads in a viral way but it doesn't really settle and normalize itself until it escapes the specific context of law enforcement or private security once it becomes normalized as consumer goods for civilians for us to purchase to consume it sort of gains enough plausible deniability as being woven into these facets of power and a force that becomes that much more pervasive so it should be obvious but in case it's not i want you to tease out a little bit more what does taking on that  person or people to do that they couldn't do when they were just g i joe with the uniform and the well i mean generally speaking what we're talking about is a kind of exceptionalism we're really talking about the notion of the notion of sovereignty as it relates to being above the law which becomes particularly dangerous when we were talking about in forster's of the law you know getting and  think it's it's symbolic value has has rested in this decade as a signifier of a signifier of force and justice regardless of the rule of law it's sort of part and parcel of a declaration of aggrieved white male america declaring itself to be to be above the law in a particular cross section to really be more specific that's in accordance with a long tradition of living and acting above the law just as a product of privilege you call it white allowance yes yes white male allowance certainly how does gender play out in all of this i saw in your beautiful piece just one gendered female character who seems to be the vampire right that was a quick reference to dracula and to the allure of submission to power so like there's there's that great sexy scene in the book dracula in which there are these sort of like she vampires who seduce jonathan harker because your point is this is also seductive oh certainly certainly  i mean even as a kid you know with my dad sort of giving his caution his cautionary descriptions of military service and requirements in recognizing that one of the primary functions and basic training in a lot of these regulations was to sort of whittle away at the edges of individuality the in the the willingness to you know question to question orders or to question your role in a larger a larger system but dracula i think perfectly  in bodies and describes the allure of sort of taking one's own agency away the allure of simply following orders the allure of not worrying about the moral distinctions or the questions that you may bear respond ability for if someone else is passing those orders down to you and that's something i was cautioned about from my dad from his from his perspective of experience but let's go back to the gender question yes just a guy thing i'd say donnelly it is it has a lot to do with it with a sense of entitlement with the continuation of privileges that some people perceive  being threatened it's also true that you know when when we're on the verge of you know building towards a more egalitarian society those accustomed to privilege you know might perceive a lot of equality is feeling like oppression for themselves so here we have a whole lot of static sort of a lot of aesthetic symbols migrating from vigilante military to armed force force men policing here to now kind of white power movements and we're seeing we're speaking as they have been what looked like austin attacks on four churches burnt to the ground black churches in louisiana an attack on  precious highlander school leaving a symbol of white supremacy right there on the on the grounds who's accountable i mean are the military accountable is the police countable these are big institutions and what about corporate america is that is propagating the what you call a commercial design cycle i think or a cyclical design that people we can hold to account to do we just need to say it's just art i think wow well i think the most immediate  and accurate answer to that is that yes it's less than fair to let's say hold under armor accountable for mimicking the three percent hers logo and i can  shirts but it's crucial to understand that for businesses seeking to make money the bottom line is that once once trends are embedded and particularly once the political sting is a little bit whittled away at a neutralized that sort of takes away more and more of that wiggle room for debate and for pushback so like it's it's not a it's not as much a degree of direct accountability on behalf retail retailers as this is the part that actually is on us as citizens to continue to call things out as we see them and going back to normal ization this is where you know two and a half years into this regime you know we're we're just hit every day with this never ending news cycle of horrors shocks and things that are far beyond the constructs of our society to the point which stuff like this seems only most ridiculous to call out and that's precisely how and why it has been able to embed itself so deeply that is true normalization your advice to people i mean this goal itself that punishes symbol that you described also has a place and mexican culture doesn't have that different people's cultural traditions suggest that it's fighting back against you know mortality so how do we confront this stuff while also being culturally sensitive well a lot of it has to do with being specific so for example when when sort of outlining that thread within the essay about face i recognize that danger of mindlessly drawing other cultural traditions and other you know other purposes for the skull and it's symbolic value into discussion so i had to sort of stick with a thread of three interrelated uses of you know the evolving death's head skull and recognizing that the death's head as we see whether it's the punisher or whether it's the tot used by nazi germany has a very different history that needs to be distinguished from the latin american tradition and elsewhere but we can still speak up a we must i mean this is we're far far beyond the point in which a lot of these signifiers a lot of these canaries in the coal mine are in danger of being normalised it is done it's already normalized i  think every day that passes in which and i'm guilty of this too i'm very guilty of it we have so many battles to pick and choose we do need to trust each other to be able to pick up causes that we don't have the time the bandwidth to do ourselves but these little things really matter as well we're talking about our ability to observe and remember facts and to be able to can text your lies them with our personal experiences and we are at grave risk of losing the ability to use that constructively when we're letting little things like style a static these normalizing components we let them slide it has an impact you did also collaborate with john lewis in the beautiful graphic story of the march from selma someone to montgomery march and that's the one that got you the national book award is that the answer to tell those other the successes of the movement but the failures of the movement and the recognition that the same modes of resistance and the same kind of non revolution nonviolent revolution isn't going to happen in the same way the same time so working very hard to equip people of all ages in the twenty first century with the tools and the revitalized history they need to actually continue making good trouble continue speaking out these things don't go away because problems aren't neatly fixed and packed away and i think you know that became more and more evident as the trilogy went on and we watched the temperature change in the room over the course of those four years in which the three of us  and it remains more vital now than i think when we embarked on the project do you do you do you use graphic art to reach different audiences or because you can do things in graphic art that you can't do in text or movie i'd say for part one of that i choose comics because i love comics and they do have a they do have unique strengths in storytelling that that activated reader as readers in ways that no other medium can but there is a universal quality there is an incredible excess ability issue with comics as a medium and as a language but especially in terms of like an essay like about face the ability to navigate this train of thought in a linear fashion but simultaneously be able to can text july's different points in real time while moving through a comic these are strengths of comics which allow some ideas to be crystallized in a more powerful way than could be done in any