Like many other TV lovers, and I hope readers of spoilertv, I love comic books. I love their art work, their stories, and most of all I love that they are able to use a medium that many would categorize as "childish" to speak about real world issues and hold up a mirror to our society to show what is wrong with it. I was reminded of this yesterday when I read that the website Wikileaks had once again leaked a large cache of war documents that revealed raw data from the Iraq war, and among other things, indicated a large number of civilian deaths and torture that was largely ignored by our government.
Now at first glance this may seem like it has NOTHING to do with comic books but let me take you back in time in order to show you the link. The year is 2001 and the comic is Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis. The main character Spider Jerusalem is a Hunter S. Thompson-esque reporter who is trying to blow the whistle on the president's illegal activities but is being constantly censored and threatened. This is until he gets into contact with "The Hole", a drop box news feedsite that allows users to post any story, no matter how much it may hurt the president's image. This idea of a anonymous drop box website where anyone can post sensitive materials that may damage the government's image/reveal secrets sounds a lot like the modern day Wikileaks. They may be very different in appearance, but are essentially the same in structure. Wikileaks also bears somewhat of a resemblance to the newspaper that decides to run Rorschach's journal at the end of Watchmen by Alan Moore.
Of course in our world today no one would ever give credit to a comic book because comics are just goofy stories for kids, right? Wrong. Comic books are starting to gain the respect that they deserve in certain circles but they should have as much respect as any other type of media. The only difference is that instead of Shylock giving a monologue in The Merchant of Venice, you have Rick Grimes giving a monologue to the survivors of a zombie outbreak at their prison stronghold.
I also wanted to say that any of the info I didn't already know for this article I got from wikipedia and if you are not already you should pick up The Walking Dead, the trade collections of Transmetropolitan, and anything by Brian K. Vaughan and Mark Millar, among others.
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