Crash-course in Turkish comics

Highly sexual, uncommonly progressive and entirely anti-establishment – Turkish newspapers are a haven for radical thought and political dialog.

Ha! Only joking.

This actually couldn’t be further from the truth. Journalism in Turkey is monitored to the point that it is now nothing more than a propaganda machine for various political interests.   Currently, there are 95 Turkish journalists in jail and Turkey ranks 148 out of 175 countries on the Reporters Without Borders index. Journalists are afraid to critique those in power, and of even those brave enough to do so face imprisonment and, in some cases, assassination.

But x-rated, anti-establishment material is still widely available in Turkey- just not in writing.

Enter comic books and papers. For years, Turkish comic books have gone surprisingly uncensored despite their overtly political messages; the highly charged and often vulgar comics make New Yorker’s famous cartoons look innocent.

This panel from popular comic Girgir is one of the less offensive images I found. Nudity and sexually explicit acts are often depicted in shocking detail.

Turkish political comics aren’t nearly as popular as they were when they were first mass produced in the 1970’s; Turkey’s most famous comic, Girgir, peaked with a circulation of 1 million in the 1980’s making it the third-best selling comic magazine in the world.

Government opposition – specifically, the military coup of 1980 – hampered the growth and added to the decline of political comics in Turkey.

But comics are very much alive and well today, much to the chagrin of President Erdogan, a favorite target of today’s political cartoonists. Erdogan is beginning (in the past few years) to attack the anti-government publications through lawsuits and fines. Recently, the offices of Penguen were suspiciously torched by unknown arsonists. However, I wish the president luck. No other leader before him has been able to squash the comic phenomena with any real success.

Why is this? For starters, comics can be cheaply and independently produced and are usually very well-liked. They are not newspapers – they do not hold any power in political spheres and they don’t claim to be factual.

But they can make President Erdogan and all of his friends look like fools. They can also talk about openly about sex, relationships and political scandals in a refreshingly blunt and hilarious way.

Not to mention, some of these comics are surprisingly informational- albeit, they are very biased,  but they are still up-to-date. By flipping through one issue of Girgir, Penguen or any other comic, you can learn a lot about the Turkey’s political climate; I learned about two current government scandals just by looking at today’s front pages.

Honestly, it’s perplexing how a journalist can be thrown in jail and a paper shut down for critiquing the wrong person, but comics can explore every Turkish social taboo with much less interference.

2 thoughts on “Crash-course in Turkish comics

  1. The building of a political magazine called Penguene caught on fire a couple of days ago and there are suspicions as to if it had to do with the government.

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