How Comics Smuggle Truth Past Reality Control
Why slow art matters when the news moves faster than the nervous system can handle.
Drawing Comics Because the World is Awful
People like to draw lines around things.
Forty thousand years ago, people on the island of Sulawesi painted hybrid animal-hunters on cave walls. They took the chaos of their daily life and sketched it in pigment. In the Middle Ages, the Bayeux Tapestry wove the Norman Conquest into a continuous, 230-foot narrative. A story you can still walk alongside to this very day.
History as sequential art.
Benjamin Franklin drew a rough-chopped snake to tell the colonies they would die without unity. Thomas Nast attacked corrupt city bosses with caricature when the law couldn’t touch them. Proving it’s OK to punch Nazis, Jack Kirby drew Captain America punching Hitler in the jaw long before the United States entered World War 2.
Comics have a peculiar magic: they can smuggle ideas and challenge injustice in ways that words alone cannot.
A long time ago, I found my own version of this superpower. When I was 12, I was an awkward half-Jewish kid drifting between Marvel stories and my father’s stash of underground comix. That’s when I pulled Art Spiegelman’s Maus off a public library shelf.
Spiegelman took the Holocaust and drew it with cats, mice, dogs, and pigs. Not to soften it, but to add a layer of metaphor and make its horrors digestible. He used the medium to gain perspective over a family history too big to swallow whole.
Back when I first read Maus, I was having a hard time in middle school. Overweight and awkward, I found escape in drawing comics. With my savage Bic pen, I toppled untouchable bullies on the page, transforming my humiliation into a story I could command. It was my secret superpower: shrinking daily threats until they fit inside a handful of panels.
TikToks and tweets can be useful in political turmoil. Their strength isn’t depth. It’s speed and realism. A tweet can put a feeling into plain words and make it portable. Videos go further by creating a sense of being there. Sometimes it is carefully edited persuasion. Sometimes it’s raw footage to serve as evidence. Sometimes it is a parasocial lifeline, like a FaceTime with a friend. These media can witness, rally, soothe, or inflame. And much like a gas station burrito, they pass through you quickly. And then it’s on to more. Keep reacting. Keep scrolling.
Comics are different. They wait for you. They tell the story at the reader’s pace. Each panel is a bite-sized chunk of the story. Words and pictures conveying ideas and/or stories. Comics do a wonderful job of taking an abstraction—a policy, an injustice, a sinking feeling of dread—and give it a face. You can make it discussable. You can make it mockable. Going from panel to gutter and then panel again, you can look at the monster from a safe distance and acknowledge the reality of it without being ruled by the feeling.
That is where I find myself in January 2026.
Lately, I have been drawing comics about the ICE invasion in Minnesota. I don’t labor under the illusion that my shaky, crude lines will change policy or anyone’s mind. They aren’t strategic. They certainly aren’t refined.
I draw them because the reality of the day feels like swallowing glass.
Right now, the crises are coming from every angle. Occupation in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. Neighbors and community members getting disappeared by secret police. A return of colonialism in South America. Threats of annexing some of our closest allies. It is a flood of awful that can’t help but make you feel small and scattered.
But there is a specific, tactile power in drawing a frame around a nightmare. Inside that black rectangle, the chaos has limits. The dread has edges. We can’t stop the next Civil War or World War III with Sharpies and Apple Pencils. But we can create vantage points. We can draw the lines.
We live in an era of slop and reality control. This makes everyone question everything. The official story often doesn’t match the lived one. Comics are refreshing in their storytelling honesty. We immediately know they represent the subjective reality of their creator. And because of that, we can take them at their face value.
As someone who has been drawing a lot of comics in recent months, I’ve found a critical coping mechanism. Drawing is a pressure valve. It’s a place to put the rage so it doesn’t rot inside me. Sometimes the drawings are mean. Sometimes they are just a way to survive the day. But comics don’t have to change the course of history to matter. Sometimes they just help you stay human, stay awake, and keep functioning.
One panel at a time.
Resistance in any way is still resistance. It matters.
I wept when I read this. You have encapsulated the horror, highlighting the absurdity of the ICE-fanged view of what is best for our country. I cried with sadness at this reality. I cried with anger at this rot in our government's morality and the putrid decomposition of the hearts of our administration. I cried with sorrow that at 77, I have seemingly lived through the best years of this nation's arc, and I cried with relief that you, a trusted messenger, have encapsulated this moment.
I awake in the morning, now, discouraged by the governmental lies and the sense of being helpless. My self-treatment includes recharging by checking for new posts by you and others who speak truth. My own bit in this world (other than protesting, which surprised my grown children), my own way to contribute, is to use my math skills from my years of being an engineer to teach math (pre-algebra through calculus) to home-schooled teenagers. I am able to fence out the evil by passionately teaching math, preparing engaging lessons, and rejoicing as the students redefine themselves as "good at math" and energetically pursue the answers to complicated problems, gaining a glimpse from my many stories at how these skills can help their futures. Despite these small steps forward, it is painful to think of the world we are in danger of leaving for them.
So, Morgan, keep up the great work!