Comics Against the Dark

If Trump’s incoming presidency is frightening me from thousands of kilometers away—and it is, genuinely, sitting here with coffee and good music and the comfortable fiction of distance—I keep thinking about what it must feel like without that buffer. Twenty-two years old, female, undocumented, queer, in an American city right now. Watching the same inauguration arrive with no ocean between you and it.

New Yorker art director Françoise Mouly and her daughter Nadja Spiegelman—daughter also of Art Spiegelman, the cartoonist who made Maus—created a tabloid newspaper called Resist! and distributed it for free on inauguration day, specifically targeting young women, immigrants, and queer people. The paper is full of comics and essays by both well-known and obscure artists, all working through the same territory: abortion rights, racism, sexism, fear, lost hope, what comes next when what’s next is genuinely unclear.

What I keep coming back to is the format. Not a website, not a social media campaign—a newspaper. Something you print and hand to a stranger in person. There’s something almost defiantly physical about it, and I mean that as a compliment. Comics have always been unusually good at making fear visible in ways that prose journalism struggles with. The image plus the word, something you hold in your hands: it feels right for a moment when screens are where all the bad news lives.

How bad will the next four years actually get? Nobody knows yet. Resist! doesn’t claim to answer that. It just says: someone made something, put it on paper, and gave it away for free on the worst day of the year. That’s not a solution. But it’s not nothing either.