Fire in the jungle: Genocide and colonization in Russell and Pugh’s The Flintstones

Abstract

Mark Russell and Steve Pugh’s The Flintstones comic book (2016–17) addresses US colonialism much more directly than most popular media but focalizes its story through a white, settler American. Thus, it represents an unwillingness and/or inability to think outside of that narrow perspective, i.e. while it is anti-colonial, it is not postcolonial. The book was published through a licensing agreement between Hanna-Barbara and DC Comics in which several Hanna-Barbera cartoons were combined with contrasting genres to create grim and/or mature stories. DC’s The Flintstones, in particular, takes on a collection of social issues, including religion as cynical manipulation, military-industrial propaganda, exploitation of foreign/immigrant labour and media depictions of the environmental crisis. However, it consistently undermines its own messages, often through visual jokes that end up confirming the ideas the book satirizes but also through sincere pronouncements that prevent the satirical critique from reaching a concrete conclusion. The overarching narrative of the series is about the lingering trauma of colonization. It equates the colonization of the land presently held by United States with that country’s war in Vietnam. This equation results from depicting the literal colonization of an Indigenous space and land but using imagery that reflects US media depictions of their war in Vietnam: colonialist soldiers in green fatigues use fire (i.e. napalm) to exterminate racist caricatures of Southeast Asian guerrilla fighters in order to clear a forest and expose the literal bedrock from which the Flinstone’s city will be built. Fred Flintstone, who represents a settler American, states quite directly that he ‘participated in a genocide’ as a soldier in that invasion, thus confirming an anti-colonialist critique. However, the book never takes on the perspective of the colonized peoples, who by then have been wiped out, which is why it stops short of a postcolonialist critique.