Barney & Clyde artists stand up for Charlie Hebdo victims

The Washington Post spoke with the artists for the Barney & Clyde comic strip, who decided to stand up for the victims of the jihadists who attacked Charlie Hebdo's office, and drew an interesting satirical strip:

“The idea: We’d draw a figure that was possibly Muhammad, but label it ‘Not Muhammad,’ and he’d be walking to what was definitely a mountain, but it would be labeled, ‘Not a mountain,’ ” Weingarten the Elder tells The Post’s Comic Riffs. “And the painting would be signed, “Not by Rene Magritte” — which was definitely true — it was either by Cynthia Pillsbury [the strip's 11-year-old girl], or by David Clark, depending on how you looked at it.

“So we had deliberately combined a truth, a lie and a maybe,” Weingarten continues. “And over it all was the epistemological question asked by Magritte in his famous ‘This is not a pipe [Ceci n'est pas une pipe]‘ painting: Is a representation of a pipe actually a pipe? Who is to define truth? The artist? The viewer? Who is in charge of reality?” [...]

Today’s “Barney & Clyde” also seems to signal a shift in the editorial winds since 2010, when Wiley Miller drew his syndicated “Non Sequitur” strip in an interactive picture-book style similar to “Where’s Waldo?” The strip, captioned “…Where’s Muhammad?,” was pulled from some newspapers, including the print edition of The Post. What was clever about that strip, then-Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander wrote, was “that the prophet does not appear in it”; Post editors at the time said the comic “seemed a deliberate provocation without a clear message.”

Compare that to today’s “Barney & Clyde,” in which a caricature said to represent Muhammad, according to Charlie Hebdo, actually appears in the strip. It is that very set-up panel, in fact, that carries so much of the deeper message of the cartoon.

It looks and sounds pretty clever. Above all, I'm glad if some press sources are beginning to come around and face reality, and to show they're unafraid of Islamofascism.