A growing number of political communication and media scholars are attending to representations of American political processes and institutions in entertainment content, mostly agreeing that there is considerable democratic value in the inextricable link between politics and popular culture. Yet few of these studies have yet considered comic books and their related media as a source of “politainment.” This volume demonstrates the rich and relevant political content of comic books and their related media. From biographies to biopunk, superheroes to science-fiction, humor to horror, and articles to allohistories, comic books offer depictions of the American political arena as site of White masculinity, mired in cynicism and disaffection that is tempered by perpetual hope and optimism. Though such themes and narratives may be found in other pop culture media, comics are important because they are as often proactive as they are reactive in their political content. From the time Captain America punched Hitler in the face nine months before Pearl Harbor and the United States’ entrance into World War II, comics have not only depicted current trends but also the trajectory of those trends. This book familiarizes scholars, teachers, and students of American politics with the presidential and campaign content of comics, exhibiting how comics reflect and shape our political knowledge and attitudes. It is also written for comics studies scholars and students, offering the perspective of rhetoric and political communication to the interpretation of comics content.
This paper considers depictions of politicians as servants of the Dark Side in political cartoons and political satire comic books from 2015-2020. Particular attention is given to images of Donald Trump as Darth Vader. The use of such pop culture references provides what Morris (1993) called “domestication” – the conversion of abstract ideas into concrete ones, unfamiliar people to familiar ones, and/or distant events to close ones. Guided by the interaction view of metaphor offered by the philosopher Max Black, this paper will discuss how different audiences may decode Dark Side allusions in political satire differently and, significantly, how the domestication of public figures like Donald Trump as Darth Vader and Darth Sidious may result in greater public acceptance of egregious political acts.
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