Mike Peters Defends His Chernobyl Theme Park Strips

A recent Mike Peters cartoon about a tourism initiative in the Ukraine led to an angry denunciation in a New York paper from a radio host whose audience includes people from regions affected by the 1986 Chernobyl incident at the heart of Peters' satire. Peters responds here. What's compelling about this is that it's an old-fashioned tussle: a cartoonist wants to use satire to make a point, a reader or group of readers doesn't see the point as much as some element of the satire they find makes light of them or insults them in some other way. It's also kind of intriguing to me that Peters would idiosyncratically pick and choose topics on which to comment like this one; a lot of real-world commentary in comics seems to stay within a very limited, prescribed purview. At the same time, the lack of context that comes with not knowing the back story on the issue being presented could make the criticism seem arbitrary and selective. I think an incident could be very instructive in terms of how certain strips may function in a fractured media landscape.

The strips ran February 7 to February 12 and can be accessed here.
 
posted 8:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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