In 1979, cartoonists Peter Kuper and Seth Tobocman, along with painter Christof Kohlhofer, began work on an anthology of political comics. Founded in the shadow of the Cold War, it featured work by the founders and a coterie of cartoonists and activists. By design, the book was comprised of a broadly leftist array of perspectives and opinions, advocating for peace and social justice with an anti-authoritarian bent amid the ascendance of Reaganite conservatism. It was published in 1980 as World War 3 Illustrated, shortly after the debut of Heavy Metal and just before Raw.
In the intervening years, World War 3 Illustrated has featured contributions from the likes of Spain Rodriguez, Peter Bagge, and Art Spiegelman. But it’s the menagerie of mainstays like Sue Coe, Eric Drooker, Sandy Jimenez, Kevin Pyle, James Romberger, Kuper, and Tobocman, that constitute the magazine’s heart. Its soul belongs to the hundreds of contributors—professionals and non-professionals, alike — who have left their marks on its pages, on the streets, and on gallery walls with guidance from a rotating editorial board.
Forty-five years on, World War 3 Illustrated has just published issue 54, weighing in at over 250 pages. The featured stories elucidate too many issues to name, but some of them are the wars in Gaza and in Ukraine, the ongoing global climate crisis, housing shortages, and Cop City resistance in Atlanta. The stories are told by way of testimonials, poems, illustrated articles, and fables. Though the subject matter is dire, the tone is earnest and hopeful. It is probably best embodied by the opening story, “Apocalypse Now (Or Never),” by Kwakwaka’wakw artist and activist Gord Hill. Placing his words against a backdrop of starkly rendered Indigenous imagery, Hill offers a clear-eyed assessment, complete with citations, of the myriad effects of global warming. It concludes by inviting the reader to “Learn from the past,” and “Prepare in the present to defend the future.”
World War 3 Illustrated aspires to be both mirror and guidepost to global social justice movements. To borrow a phrase from the Zapatistas, World War 3 Illustrated seeks to create “A World where many worlds fit.” In this way, it is an anathema to the sterile, false binary on offer in American politics and a rebuke to the pervasive, willful misconception that casting a vote is the outer limit to personal responsibility and political participation. Voting may win elections, but organizing wins power. World War 3 Illustrated is waiting with a road map for anyone who is ready to begin.
For this interview, I spoke with the editors of the latest issue: Susan Simensky Bietila, Nicole Schulman, Seth Tobocman, and Jordan Worley. I am grateful for their assistance on copy-editing the transcripts of our conversations – Ian Thomas
IAN THOMAS: Going back to the very beginning, can you describe the landscape to which World War 3 Illustrated was first published? To what would you say it was responding?
SETH TOBOCMAN: We started World War 3 Illustrated in 1979 and got it into print by the very beginning of ’80. The atmosphere was of a rightward shift in American society, which came after a period of political disengagement in the late 1970s, an empty period that got filled by this right-wing shift. One of the things that we were responding to was the Iran hostage crisis, which was a situation where there'd been a revolution in Iran. They’d overthrown the Shah who was an American-backed monarch and people took over the American Embassy and held the Embassy staff hostage. [This] was seen with great outrage by people in the United States who didn't know anything about the history of Iran.
As a college student, I’d been in school with a lot of Iranian students and I actually knew Iranians of all political factions. There were socialists, one or two monarchists, and there was even one Khomeini supporter in my dorm. So, I got to talk to all these people. And I knew that there really was an issue between the United States and Iran because these students were afraid of the SAVAK, the Iranian secret police, finding out their views, harassing them in the U.S., or taking reprisals against their families in Iran. The SAVAK did this with the support of the U.S. So there was a real reason they took over the US embassy. They had something to be concerned about.
But in my hometown Cleveland Heights, people would wear these big buttons that said “Fuck Iran.” I was like “Well, if these people get to express their point of view, I guess we should be allowed to express ours.” And that was to me a big part of deciding to start the magazine.
Other things were going on. For instance, the meltdown at Three Mile Island. And that same year, there had been the White Nights in San Francisco where people rioted because of the very minimal sentence given to Dan White for killing the Gay politician Harvey Milk. So, all of those things added into what we were doing and it was a response to the fact that the United States was moving in this very conservative direction, basically. The mainstream of the United States went one way, and we decided to go the other.
To what extent did World War 3 Illustrated emerge from underground comics? Could you point to any other traditions or influences that informed it?
TOBOCMAN: Peter Kuper and I were both fanatical comic book collectors when we were in middle school. We went to comic book conventions. We read all kinds of comics. I was originally a Marvel Comics fan and then at conventions I got exposed to more sophisticated stuff. I did see the first collected edition of Trashman at the Detroit Triple Fanfare. It was the first comic book I saw where the cops were the bad guys. And I also found out what a vibrator was, which I assumed was some kind of Science-Fiction device because I didn't know they actually existed, but they were in Trashman. We had exposure to underground comics. We had exposure to alternative comics through fandom.
I had a close relationship with Vaughn Bodé and Jeffrey Catherine Jones, who made me aware that there were a lot of other possibilities in comics besides what was being done [in the United States]. They traveled to Europe a lot and they showed me European Comics, so I was aware of, say, the work of Druillet years before it was published in Heavy Metal, in the United States.
For me at least — and I think Peter’s story would be different— for me, it all kind of stopped for a few years. When I went to New York, I really stopped being involved in comics. I went through a lot of different things and finally decided I still wanted to do comics and got back into comics, but I kind of came into comics from the outside at that point. We certainly saw the underground comics but we also — for instance, when I was a teenager, I purchased a book of Lynd Ward's Gods’ Man, I was exposed to the art of Francisco Goya, the German Expressionists, Picasso’s Guernica, so I was aware of that work, too.
We were aware of a lot of different things. I think that with regard to the underground comics at that point, while we certainly respected the underground comics and had read tons of underground comics – I have a big box of them, still. At the point when we started World War 3 Illustrated, that was kind of in the past.
It's kind of hard looking at it from the perspective of 2025, which we're about to enter. The difference between 1970 and 1979 seems very small, but to us at the time, it seemed kind of huge. It seemed like the idea of trying to do the underground comics or trying to redo the peace movement or the Civil Rights Movement from the 1960s, we might as well have been saying “Oh, let's try to redo the Russian Revolution. Or the Paris Commune.” That would feel like anachronism to us in 1979, so we were saying “We're going to create something new here.” And we set about to create that.
World War 3 Illustrated was first published shortly after the debut of the US edition of Heavy Metal and shortly before the debut of Raw. I don't know if I'm mistaken, but I generally consider all three as trying to capture some aspect of the same counterculture, albeit from different perspectives. Do you consider those magazines to be kin in any way to World War 3 Illustrated?
TOBOCMAN: I feel like there was no place to publish alternative comics in the mid-70s. There were a number of people coming out of the comic book conventions and out of the community of people that existed around comics who wanted to try something different and, generally, you had to publish yourself. Heavy Metal appeared on the scene and it said, “Okay, these European Comics that have never been seen in the United States are now going to be published here,” and that seemed like a very hopeful development to us.
Raw, even though it came out after World War 3, there was so much advance publicity that we were hearing about Raw while we were working on World War 3 because Spiegelman's always been kind of a master of public relations. A couple of other publications that I would group with us at that time, as trying to expand the definition of comics, would be Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor and Ben Katchor's Picture Story Magazine.
In fact, one of the places where our magazine started is when I went to talk to Ben Katchor and asked if he would print something of mine in Picture Story Magazine. He wasn't really interested in publishing my work, but he said “Look, I know how you can publish your own comic very cheaply.” And he broke down a series of steps that could be used to get around the more expensive aspects of publishing, which involved taking every part of the printing process that you could do by yourself and doing it, so that the printer was only doing things that you couldn't possibly have done and then convincing the printer not to charge you for the things he didn't have to do. That included stapling and trimming the thing yourself. It included a lot of things. He advised me and Peter on this for World War 3 and he also advised Art Spiegelman on this for Raw. In fact, when I went to buy a long arm stapler, I got there and Spiegelman was buying the last three long arm staplers in the store. He decided to give me a break and let me buy one and he would buy the other two, then we could share all three.
The ridiculous thing was that the week he was putting together Raw, my girlfriend's mother died. So we went to Lansing to deal with the funeral and we weren't there to give him the stapler and my roommate called me and they said some German guy came here yelling that you had his staplers. So, that was a misunderstanding between us. But I really think Ben Katchor probably deserves more credit than he gets for both Raw and World War 3 Illustrated.
So this current issue, issue #54, has just been published 45 years after that first issue. How similar is this issue to those early issues in format and in content?
JORDAN WORLEY: The content’s evolved because we've always kind of focused on being relevant to what's happening currently. As times have changed, some of the subjects have changed. As far as format, all of our formats have changed based on the market, really, which I think is kind of funny because my first experience with the magazine was either in a zine shop called See Hear or it was Tower Records.
We used to be distributed through record stores [with Mordam Records]. I remember Seth telling me when we would get all these copies back from newsstand distributors with the covers ripped off because they were treated as magazines. When they didn't sell, they would rip off the covers and send back the body. The early format was just kind of a magazine format and it was thinner. And then later on when we were distributed by Top Shelf, we went to a smaller format. It's continued with that, being an imprint of AK Press, so that we are more of a book format. But what's also happened is that we've gotten thicker. I can't remember the last time we had less than 180 pages.
It encompasses more and usually, when laying them out, you figure out the flow, pagination, where certain stories fit together. You can separate them into personal stories and comics journalism versus autobiographical. I feel like that hasn't changed so much except that there's more of it. And I think it's more inclusive now. We have a lot more artists coming in. So, it's not always the same people.
I miss the early meetings, in person at ABC No Rio. Whoever showed up presented their ideas, if they had them, after we briefly introduced ourselves. Then we said what we wanted to work on in the book. The theme for each issue would formulate at those meetings, based on the material that we were getting from contributors. Now, we still get submissions and we can choose from those topics, but we usually put out what the issue is going to be about and then we invite people in. One of the things I think we get criticized for — but also I think is one of our greatest strengths — is all the fresh comics we have [from] people just starting out. They're kind of raw. Sometimes they’re funky, but I really like having new artists in all the time.
NICOLE SCHULMAN: My first experience was going to a meeting at ABC No Rio in the zine library with Jeffrey Lightning-Lewis, who's a cartoonist and musician. It was so crowded in this meeting that we were kind of crushed by the door, kneeling down. [It was] one of those typical Anarchist meetings where you’re packed in [with] no place to sit, so you’re squatting for an hour, then you propose your piece.
A couple years later when I first edited an issue, I remember gluing the issue down on paper because we would actually literally lay the art out physically to scan it, so it's come a long way and become more international now, as opposed to everybody we just know.
It sounds like there is something of a network of contributors in place. Are contributions generally submitted or solicited?
TOBOCMAN: We constantly are aware of what people are sending us and saying [what] they want to do a piece about. We have an editorial board of about sixteen people who are on the editorial board because they do the work of getting the magazine published, as well as doing their own artwork. Nobody's on the editorial board who's not an artist. It was a very serious decision we made early on that we didn't want to work for people who didn't actually do what we did.
So, the editorial board will meet. They’ll choose a theme for the issue and they'll decide which people on the editorial board are competent to be the editors of that issue. Then those editors will put out a call, which will go to everybody on the editorial board, plus whoever those editors feel like working with, which will be different for different issues.
On this issue, we put a lot of work into reaching out to people in other countries. There’s a growing comics movement in the Middle East and in other parts of the world. We were very fortunate that people responded. We have artists from Ukraine, Russia, Israel, Palestine, Brazil, and other countries.
Do each of you have a purview as far as editorial responsibilities? Given the nature of the content, are creative and publishing decisions made democratically?
SCHULMAN: It's definitely democratic. We all work together on it and there are some debates. If it's something big, then we put it out to the whole collective for everybody to decide on. And of course, these are very heated topics. There’s a spectrum of opinion in World War 3. We're all left, obviously, but within that there’s a nuance to things.
So, these decisions are pondered over. We discuss it. We meet periodically and then we delegate specific tasks. Some of us reach out to specific artists and so on and so forth.
Does work ever stop? It seems like a rather intermittent publication schedule, but I would imagine that it's kind of always churning.
TOBOCMAN: I think the fact that we have this rotating editorship means that some people might stop. Some people might say “You know, I really can't work on this” and they might be absent for a couple years and they might come back in and that's happened a lot. Some of the people who were on the original issues are still on the magazine, but, yeah, there could be an issue that I don't work on at all. There are several issues that I had nothing to do with.
There are definitely issues Peter decides he doesn't need to be involved in, although he was one of the original editors. That speaks for a number of people. I think peoples’ roles change based on what they can do and what their time is like and what their skills are. Say, on this issue and on several other issues, Jordan has done all the graphic design. Jordan chose to do that and that took a lot of weight off of me. There are other issues where I did graphic design. Our roles change, but we're always in touch with each other.
I think we have a way of working together that respects the differences between the different artists and understands that artists can't be forced into a mold and can’t be regimented. Nobody wants to treat this like a job. Everybody wants to treat this like something they care about and different people will come to that in different ways.
WORLEY: There is also coaching of the contributors, in a way. When they submit stuff, we'll push them in directions that we think would be better for their story and hopefully they're willing.
TOBOCMAN: That was definitely true on this issue. There were some very young artists who had just started to do comics, who came from countries where there was not a big comics industry and they were very open to our suggestions as to how to make their work better. So, there was a lot of interaction.
Would you say that the contributors generally consider themselves cartoonists or are they artists who happen to be working in the milieu of cartoons? Are they activists? To what extent do you think these distinctions are important?
TOBOCMAN: When we started the magazine, comics were this very narrow form with very limited subject material and even though there were very competent people connected to comics, most of them were basically producing the same things over and over again and we really wanted to open that up. Our approach was [to] talk to some people who aren't necessarily comic book artists and convince them to try their hand at comics. So there were people who were painters or print makers or graffiti artists, particularly people who were part of the Lower East Side art scene of that time. People like Anton Van Dalen and Michael Roman. And there were people who were political activists, who brought us information that somebody else would turn into a comic strip. And there were a couple of journalists. It was a wide mix of people, but there were also people who were definitely career cartoonists and illustrators like Peter Kuper or Eric Drooker or James Romberger or Kevin Pyle, who were very involved all the time. We very often like to bring different things together.
Of course, we’re in a very different landscape now in terms of comics. There are people doing comics about every imaginable subject. They're very sophisticated people and they are people all over the world, so we're reaching out in a different way to people. Still, if there's somebody who has some really important piece of information that's not getting out another way, we will put that in the magazine. For instance, I asked Priscilla Grimm, who was a Cop City defendant, to write a piece about the Cop City struggle and about her arrest and her case because I felt that the Cop City piece we had was very abstract and creative, but didn't give you all the information, so I said let's get somebody else to fill in that information for the audience. We definitely reach out beyond the limited circle of people who are in comics.
WORLEY: It's interesting because we originally came from “Artists Doing Comics.” Then, I remember the first time that we rejected something that was “Art For Art's Sake.” It kind of went all the way around, where you have people that are creating comics that are not necessarily narratives, but art. For us, it's really about the message. Usually, we’ll pick stories that are by somebody who's experienced it and witnessed it instead of somebody who's done research for it. We usually have a preference for that, but we don't really do “Art for Art's Sake” comics.
SCHULMAN: We care what somebody has to say and that they say it well and that they have a right to say it. They are experienced. They are a credible witness to something. And I think a lot of the young, developing artists — for example, some of the younger Palestinians in this issue haven't done a lot of comics, but they need to have their voices heard. So, we really care about what's happening and what people have experienced and allowing them a space to write or draw their experiences.
Can you speak to any particularly strong reactions — negative or positive — to material published in World War 3 Illustrated over the years? Can you point to any examples where the magazine moved the needle through its coverage?
TOBOCMAN: Beginning with issue six, we did art and comics and stories in support of the Lower East Side Squatters Movement, always with an eye toward encouraging the growth of that movement. We were one of the only publications that did this. Other publications had occasional articles from varying points of view, but I saw very little affirmative coverage, even in papers like The Village Voice. The Shadow came along after the 1988 riot and they were also consistently pro-squatter. The New York Times had a Pro-Squatter op-ed in the 1990s, which I had the honor of illustrating. But the Squatters Movement in Lower East Side wound up creating housing for about 500 people and legalized thirteen buildings, so they actually had some material results to all that activity and I think that if you were to ask the people who were involved in the Squatters Movement, a lot of them would acknowledge that World War 3 had a role in that. I think it was a significant role. That’s a place we moved the needle.
I think that we had a big role in the, unfortunately, not successful campaign to free Mumia Abu-Jamal, which did actually prevent him from being executed, but didn't get him out of prison. We did a lot to build that up.
SCHULMAN: On an individual level, I was one of the needles that was moved. I grew up on the Lower East Side. To tell you how old I am, I was like 22 when I first met Seth and everybody and now I'm going to be almost 50. I hung out on the Lower East Side when I was a teenager and I don't remember how I got my first copy, but I saw Kevin Pyle’s piece on the Tuskegee Experiment and it horrified me. I grew up before the internet and they did not talk about these things in school. We have a very whitewashed history that's taught in education and I'm an educator. So, that was a huge thing. We use the magazine to get these histories out to people.
I know some of our comics that we did after 9/11, when everybody was lock-step in line behind the Patriot Act, are in the Library of Congress. We were just like “Wait a minute, what's going on?” [We were] one of the few voices that was speaking from the perspective of “Yes, this is terrible, but be careful what you do now.”
WORLEY: The 9/11 issue, in particular, we had to reprint because we sold out of that issue. Also, we were able to publish a lot of people that couldn't get stuff published elsewhere when the country really went jingoistic and nobody would print anything that was kind talking against that. So the fact we had to reprint that issue, then put new content in the second printing, I think that was pretty big. The other one is probably the Bosnian issue, where that also was something that nobody was really talking about at the time. I felt really honored to put that out.
Do you have strong feelings about the concept of propaganda? Can you speak to the way propaganda is considered or — probably more often — disparaged? Since you work with artists from around the world, do you find the American reaction to propaganda to be a unique one?
SCHULMAN: I’m not sure propaganda and political art are the same thing, to be perfectly frank. I always liked the aesthetic when I was younger, but, again, I think Shepard Fairey ruined it and corporatized it. I don't know the textbook definition off the top of my head but propaganda is pushing a very specific, superficial message for a specific purpose. What we do is we are making an argument. That’s the difference between like a Soviet propaganda poster that is bold and beautiful and trying to kind of get you in there. We're a little rough sometimes and we're just making an argument based on evidence. We're more like a thesis statement.
TOBOCMAN: My sense is that propaganda is the product of a particular political faction that wants to convince its following of certain ideas. Whatever artists or media producers who work with that, they have a specific set of ideas that they want to inculcate on the individuals who read it. And I don't think that's what we do. We encourage artists to have their own reaction to things. The four of us don't sit there and say “Everybody is going to take this position on Palestine. Everyone's going to take this position on the war in Ukraine. Everybody is going to take this position on the election. Everybody has to support Harris. Everybody has to say that both parties are the same.” We don't do that in relation to the artists who work on the magazine. We encourage artists to have their own responses that will feel sincere and will feel genuine and we want the art to encourage discussion and debate and thought, not to make those decisions for the audience.
That said, I would also say that the accusation of making propaganda is very often used in the American context as a way to tell people who want to talk about politics that they should shut up: “Oh, you're making propaganda here!”
Most of what I do is not propaganda. There are situations where I've done illustration for a particular political group. They've asked to get people to come to a demonstration. “We want to get people to break into a building. We want to convince people [of] this or that.” Well, yeah, I will do that piece for them if I believe that group’s a good group, but when I'm doing my own comics, it's a little more complex.
SCHULMAN: I also think that there's a false perception that the Left is a monolith. We're not. And that's a perpetual problem. To piggyback on what Seth said, whenever anything is kind of leftist or more ultra-progressive or Anarchist, it gets that propaganda smear on it, that it is somehow less legitimate and that we’re projecting a false narrative, which is kind of my take on propaganda because of thinking of, like, the Stenberg brothers and Maoist art and things like that.
Can you talk a little bit about Klee Benally, to whom this latest issue is dedicated?
SUSAN SIMENSKY BIETILA: I met Klee in, I want to say 2019, right before COVID. He was on a speaking tour. I knew little about him and I ended up driving him from the Chicago train station to Milwaukee. We talked all the way. His energy sparkled. He was in the band Blackfire when he was a teenager, an Indigenous punk metal group. He helped organize the Taala Hougan Infoshop, an indigenous Anarchist Infoshop in Flagstaff, which does grassroots organizing for homeless Indigenous people.
Klee was an anti-fascist, anti-authoritarian and he organized a Mutual Aid network during the COVID epidemic in that part of the country. He was also an artist and filmmaker, very involved in the movement Haul No!, to stop uranium from being transported through native lands and then stored on the Ute reservation, which is near the Navajo reservation. He checked all the boxes for me as an incredible, incredible person. His beautiful portrait with his wife, Princess Benally by Justseeds artist Chip Thomas, were featured in a large billboard campaign. The text on it was, “What we do to the mountain, We do to ourselves.”
He taught a workshop on grassroots organizing in Milwaukee. We stayed in touch and I invited him to contribute to this issue of World War 3. He said “sure,” and he sent me what we printed in this issue. Shortly after he died of cancer. He was 48.
It was particularly shocking because of his age and because of his incredible energy. It was the first time we had anything of his in World War 3 and we had looked forward to more.
Because I've been active in indigenous and environmental movements for 40 years and in the Midwest, I am more aware than the other editors and contributors to World War 3 about the movements against the pipelines and the mines. I left New York in 1973 and am in other networks of activist artists from the Midwest and elsewhere. And so, one of the roles I play as an editor, is bringing on artists with similar worldviews to the magazine
Can you say a few words about Constance Norgren and Luke Norgren-Keough, to whom you pay tribute in this latest issue?
ST: Tom Keough, the husband of Constance Norgren and the adopted father of Luke Norgren-Keough, was involved in the very early days of World War 3 Illustrated. He was the most politically active person we knew in the late seventies and early eighties, which was not a period where there was a lot of political activism among young people, actually. He is the person who brought me to my first Civil Disobedience training. He was a very active anti-war pacifist [and] anti-nuclear activist. Constance Norgren was his wife and a poet and a really fine person who he met through movement activities. A person I met a number of times. They also had an adopted son. And Tom had a really rough year last year. He lost both of them.
Tom continues to do really amazing and important art. When Connie was in the hospital we decided to publish two of her poems illustrated by Tom. Great poems, great art!
SCHULMAN: Connie's been a poet for a while. She was a retired teacher, activist, [and] literally just a very kind and decent and warm, wonderful person. I was a muralist for many years and worked on a couple of murals with her son, Luke. He did different jobs, he did some art, he did a lot of activism, himself. Connie died of cancer after fighting it for a year after being misdiagnosed and then Luke died of an accident very shortly after.
So Tom has been through a lot and he, himself, is an activist illustrator. He illustrated Connie's poems in this issue. He also does amazing photo realistic, beautiful paintings. He's a member of our community as Luke and Connie were part of our community, as well.
My favorite piece in this issue was Mohammad Sabaaneh’s “30 Seconds in Gaza,” which deals with the record of activism and resistance lost when his social media was deleted. Would you say that people are short-sighted with regard to how much of their lives they put online? As an organizing tool, social media and the internet have done a lot. Is the potential for making connections worth the risks and downsides?
SCHULMAN: I can speak a little bit and I don't want to give too much detail, specifically because I am a teacher. We have to be very careful what happens online, especially now. The now-disgraced ex-chancellor sent a very threatening email to all of us about [how] we will not only be held responsible for what we say and do in the classroom, but what we do outside of the classroom. That is, about the situation in the Middle East. Publishing comics or being involved in political activism is a little bit risky for my job. I have very private online accounts. So, politically, we were concerned about some artists in Palestine using their full names and I think some of the younger artists expressed fear of [using their] full names and losing their blue card, which allows you to travel into Israel. I have a student who said she was almost arrested in Russia for criticizing the government.
Being online is an extremely important tool, but it can also be used against you.
WORLEY: Especially in activism. I remember in the Arab Spring issue that we put together, there were quite a few pieces where the government was tracking people's movements through Facebook and geolocation. There were quite a few comics about that, about people being put in prison just for their social media posts.
TOBOCMAN: At the same time, the ability to put this issue of the magazine together had a lot to do with the use of the internet. The fact that we are able to communicate with artists in Russia, in Palestine, and Israel and find common ground with them is very much facilitated by that technology. And, if I may, seeing as you brought up Mohammad Sabaaneh, I really would love to talk about Mohammad Sabaaneh because he's a great example of what's going on in the world right now in terms of comics.
We became aware of Mohammad Sabaaneh a number of years ago because he was in an Israeli prison. It was known that a cartoonist was in an Israeli prison and there was an international petition to support him. I put my name on that petition. I put world war three on that petition that was brought to my attention by Ethan Heitner, who's very active with Middle East stuff.
It's not unusual for a Palestinian man of military age to get thrown into jail for no good reason. In fact, they have a legal system where they can hold someone without charge for a very extended period of time and try to convince them to confess to something or to give them information. So it was not unusual to him that there was an arrest, but it was unusual that there was a petition. It was unusual that the world cared about it.
And so when Mohammad was freed, he felt that art must be something very important. This is what he said to me. And so, he wanted to be a much better artist. And so, anytime he was in New York, we'd go to the museums and he would look at Picasso and Jacob Lawrence and try to learn from that and his work improved enormously. He became a really amazing artist and put out this graphic novel called Power Born of Dreams a couple years ago. All of a sudden, he was no longer able to come to the United States. Our government decided not to let him in anymore. At exactly the time when he had a book to promote, they prevented him from coming here.
Mohammad started teaching other people in the West Bank to do comics. So there is a whole range of young comic artists, coming to us through Mohammed, who are in this issue. I think it's an example of how this thing, alternative comics, is taking on another life as it starts to become a medium used all over the world by people who have a lot to say.
On the other hand, I feel like protest and occupation of space has become an increasingly employed, or perhaps more visibly employed, component of organizing strategies in the last decade. What do you make of this?
TOBOCMAN: That actually goes back to Chicago in 1968. The Yippies set up an encampment in Lincoln Park that they weren't given a permit to be in and the fight became over whether people could be in that space in a gathering and their slogan was “Whose fucking park? It's our fucking park.” Twenty years later, in 1988 in Tompkins Square Park, we also used the slogan “whose fucking park?” There was, again, a struggle over whether people could be in a park after curfew, which, of course, affected both people who use the park and people who wanted to do protests in the park, but it also affected the homeless people who lived in the park. If they could clear the park every night, that wasn't really good for homeless people. So, that was part of that struggle. And then it very much became internationally part of the struggle. It was also the struggle in Tiananmen Square. It's one of the most basic things. Who gets to decide whether I'm in a particular place? Obviously, I have to exist somewhere. So, at what point do you say “Oh, you just can't be here. You’ve got to get out of here.” It's one of the most basic things. It's primal.
WORLEY: It's a way to get press, as well. It is a way of communicating. It's something that usually is going to get press coverage, so that's kind of why it's used as a tactic.
TOBOCMAN: Everything is more visible because of social media. It was used very effectively by Occupy. Occupy startled me. It blew my mind. I [thought] oh, people are still doing this, wow!
Under Giuliani, they really cracked down on your ability to go in the street without a permit. It got to where if you stepped off the curb without a permit, you were going to jail. And so I kind of wondered whether that would ever happen again. The first time I attended Occupy, I assumed they would be arrested the first night and it actually went on for over a month. And it spread all over the country, which was pretty amazing.
How was Occupy received by World War 3 Illustrated?
WORLEY: I couldn't go down there because I was working, but I sent a van with cardboard down there [laughs]. I tried to support it as much as I could because I couldn’t be there.
SCHULMAN: It was interesting and I was involved a little bit in the education working group and I heard some interesting ideas, but there's also—I don’t want to be overly critical, but just dysfunctional and kind of dominated by academics. A little bit of ivory tower academia going on there. I was going to work on a curriculum for high school students. I had one person that was interested.
TOBOCMAN: I’ve met a lot of people who began their activism in Occupy, so I think it was a good point for a lot of people.
Can you all speak a little bit about how your respective politics have evolved or changed as a result of your participation in World War 3 Illustrated?
WORLEY: My politics started out as anti-fascist work. So a lot of my politics before was about de-platforming fascists and Klan members. So, World War 3 gave me a way to express politics without putting myself in physical danger.
TOBOCMAN: Actually, I remember the first meeting you came to, you said “Well, I figured there must be something to politics besides fighting in the street.” [laughs] And I think your first piece was about beating up Nazis.
WORLEY: No, I think my first piece was on the Zapatistas.
TOBOCMAN: Then, your next piece. You and Barbara Lee, because you were both charged with beating up some Nazis.
WORLEY: Yeah, I wasn’t charged that time.
SCHULMAN: I've definitely expanded. I was very young when I got involved. I had always had a radical inclination, but, again, you don't learn these things in school, so you have to teach yourself. Working with different World War 3 people and meeting with different activists and reading. Just so many people coming through, you get different points of view and I don't agree with everything, but it's definitely expanded what I know.
Nicole, when you came to World War 3, were you already on the way to being a teacher? Were you already a teacher?
SCHULMAN: Yeah, I'm a little bit reluctant to talk about it. Well, I can talk about it because I have worked with teens for over 20 years at this point, because I worked as a muralist, as well, with teen programs. I've even worked with incarcerated youth, but that was also a form of activism for me in different teaching artist positions and I still love working with youth. I was never much of a street fighter, like Jordan [laughs], except for the occasional march. I am a firm believer in Paolo Friere’s teachings from Pedagogy of the Oppressed, that education should be an act of liberation, that every teacher is a student, and every student is also a teacher.
I always loved teaching, but there's a definite level of censorship in public schools now, and maybe it's not all malicious. I'll throw them a little bit of a bone. You don't want ultra right-wing teachers ranting and raving in the classroom. At the same time, I have a Palestinian student who asked me permission to do a "Free Palestine" art work and I said yes, but I don’t know what's going to happen. I'm not going to tell her she can't do it. She knows I'm Jewish, she knows I support her, but I'm literally not allowed to say that in the classroom. And I cannot give — and this is official — my personal opinion on anything, we can only “talk about the facts.”
TOBOCMAN: For me, when I started the magazine, I think Peter and I, in general, you know, we didn't like Ronnie Reagan. We didn't like what was going on, but we didn't really have strong political opinions in a lot of ways. We didn't have a lot of ideology. I'd read some anarchist classics like The State. I’d read Marcuse. I’d read Guy Debord. All that was fashionable to read in the late seventies and early eighties, but I didn't have real strong convictions except a general notion that most people are going one way, I’m going the other. That was the main decision we made. Everybody is going this way, we think we're going to go the other way
What happened is that I was doing a magazine that attracted all kinds of really interesting people and I learned from them. It attracted feminists. It attracted squatters. It attracted Black nationalists. It attracted people from all over the world. It attracted dissidents from Eastern Europe. So, we learn from all those people and continue to learn from all those people and I think my politics evolved from who came into the magazine.
What impact will the U.S. presidential election have on the issues explored in this issue of World War 3 Illustrated, such as imperialism, climate change housing, shortages, racism, and war?
SCHULMAN: Let me get my crystal ball. Lord, everything and nothing. It can get so much worse or we can have the terrible status quo. I'm hoping that we at least have a chance for the terrible status quo.
If one candidate wins, who knows? The magazine might not exist anymore, so we might not exist anymore. One of the candidates admires Hitler's generals, but, obviously, Democrats aren't that much better with many, many things.
WORLEY: Same thing, except that I was making jokes about all the stuff I was going to do in the prison camp this morning to my partner. [Laughs]
TOBOCMAN: I think this year's election makes much more visible what was always there, which is we have these two bizarre political parties that are, apparently, our only options.
At least in my lifetime, there’s [always been] a pretty serious fascist presence in the Republican party and it has grown consistently, from Ronald Reagan going to Bitburg to Trump using slogans, like “America first,” which was an American Nazi slogan in the 1930s. There was an American Nazi organization called America First that tried to keep the United States out of World War Two. So, he knows what that's a reference to and he's got overt ties to fascists. That's pretty disturbing and there's no question about the fact that anything I'm concerned about will be worse with Trump.
Then the thing that makes it difficult and, in a lot of ways, facilitates the rise of fascist tendencies is the incredible weakness and conflicted nature of the Democratic party, which, on the one hand has a very deep connection to labor unions, involvement with civil rights organizations — at least more mainstream ones — and, to a limited extent, does protect the interest of the Black community, the interests of women, et cetera.
And on the other hand, they're deeply tied to the defense industry, which is making money off of all the wars that are going on right now. They're deeply tied to the tech industry. We've just found out recently that American-made computer chips are in the Russian drone shot down in Ukraine, so American industry is making money on both sides of that war. The Democratic party is tied to that. They need the support of those people. They're tied to AIPAC, which puts an enormous amount of money into the political system, and they're not willing to do more than say that there's a problem with the war in Gaza.
We basically get to choose our enemy this week, get to decide which enemy we're more comfortable fighting. I tend to believe if the Democrats get in, we will have a political struggle around Palestine, around climate change, around every major issue. If the Republicans get in, I think, though, that that will be a lot more like a physical struggle. So, I think people need to ask themselves “Are you ready for a physical struggle with the state? Have you figured out how you're going to do that?” I think that's a big part of this decision.
I can totally understand why a lot of people in the Arab-American community do not want to support the Democrats right now. Biden could stop the war in Gaza right now by simply saying “We're going to cut off aid if you don't stop right now.” And he hasn't done that for a year. So, if my family were over there, yeah, I'd be pretty unhappy with these folks. I get that. But I still think we’ll probably be worse off with Trump.
SCHULMAN: How many women have died already because of the abortion bans? The infant mortality rate has also risen in these states. The Supreme Court is basically overriding democracy at this point and women in Texas and other states are going to be allowed to die if they have an ectopic pregnancy or another emergency. We're already in a theocracy, so things can get much, much, much worse and I'm hoping that, as much as we hate voting for the lesser of two evils, you kind of really have to do it this time
WORLEY: As far as climate change and housing shortages go, I think we’re in the same boat with either party. Because the Democrats are tied to big business, there's not going to be any radical change that's going to stop climate change and the crisis that we’re barreling towards. The housing shortage is the same issue: big business and real estate markets. That’s money coming in. There's no way that the Democrats are going to be any better on that. At least with the Democrats there are policies put in place like carbon taxes and things like that, whereas the Republicans completely ignore it.
TOBOCMAN: I believe there is a struggle ahead of us to change the Democratic party. To reform their position on Palestine, on climate change, on housing. To wean them away from corporate money. That’s difficult, but Sanders and friends have made some progress in that direction. That won’t be possible if we are living under a fascist dictatorship set up by Donald Trump. And I think we should take Trump on his word that this is exactly what he intends to do. So I think we all need to go out and vote for Harris next week. And to resist Trump’s attempts to overturn the election when he loses. But understand that’s a first step to building a real alternative.
What are some sources of optimism? What are you worried about?
SCHULMAN: What don't we worry about? [Laughs] I’ll start. I'm surrounded by smart young people. I'm not religious, but in the Jewish community, there is a lot of reckoning with what the state of Israel is and refusal to be defined by that. And it's becoming louder and clearer, even if we’re being ignored by the powers that be, you see marches in Tel Aviv. So human rights, for some people, comes before all other considerations and I'm hoping that will continue.
WORLEY: I'm astounded by the amount of activism that's happening with young people today on all fronts. On ableism on gender issues, on Palestine. It's just amazing the amount of thoughtfulness that's going on with the younger generation and I'm excited that I can even be on the periphery of it. It's really encouraging and not just because they believe in things I believe. There's so much activism across the board.
Now you have Fox News activating the country in a way with their propaganda.
SCHULMAN: That’s propaganda.
WORLEY: Unfortunately, they've activated these people and these people are racist and are pretty much what America has been for a very long time and [they are] showing that to the world and to the next generation. So, there is a praxis, there's a dialogue that's happening now that I think is pervasive throughout the culture and unfortunately it can be violent because America is violent. I think we have had like fifteen attempts on presidents’ lives and four who have been shot and killed. That violence has always been a part of America.
TOBOCMAN: I would definitely echo that point. A common mistake is to compare everything to 1968 and 1969 and say “Oh, well there was all that activity at that one particular moment” and not look at the much broader extent of history. If I compare this moment to 1978, there's an incredible amount of activism, an incredible amount of dialogue, an incredible amount of involvement everywhere. So, I'm very impressed at how active younger people are, how active older people are, too, and how much dialogue is going on and how people's ideas are coming out and being expressed. I'm impressed by that. Another thing that gives me optimism is the way comics are evolving and how we're seeing comics from all over the world that are very much using a language similar to ours, talking about things going on there. [There is an] enormous amount of art coming out of those places. The fact that we can have that international discourse is great. I'm meeting young people who are doing very daring things. We talk about the squatters movement as something that happened in the 1980s or 1990s and there is actually a squatters movement in New York now, of younger people who found abandoned spaces that they are occupying and I've had the privilege of meeting some of those people and I'm pretty amazed that that is going on now.
So, that's what gives me optimism.
What do we worry about? Yeah, we worry about everything.
The post ‘We worry about everything’: A <i>World War III Illustrated</i> roundtable appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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