I really appreciated the visual depictions of Middle Eastern and Arab people in the comic “Start-of-Century Experiences Compared” (link) from the September 3, 2018 issue of the Korean weekly magazine SisaIn.
For context, this comic series by Gupsinist visually represents different countries and groups with different animal and occasional plant heads on characters. From the panel below you can see that the terror group ISIS was represented as a goat separate from Middle Eastern people at large, who are shown with sheep heads. This depiction also acknowledges that ISIS’s primary victims were other Middle Eastern people, with the sheep-headed character running from the goat-headed character armed with a sword.
(The sunflower is Ukraine and the polar bear is Russia. The visual gag with the bear eating the ice cream comes from the Korean spelling of Crimean Peninsula, “Crim,” which is the same as Cream in Korean.)
You can again see the depiction of Middle Easterners with the sheep head, with an acknowledgment that terror and war affect too much of the Arab world.
(The rooster represents France in the visual language of this comic.)
You can see again the divide between ISIS and most people in the Middle East in the visual representation of goat and sheep respectively, together with the acknowledgment that it was primarily people in the Middle East, in this case Iraqis, who fought against ISIS and defeated them.
(The original comic had the sheep calling the goat Ilseong-Ilseong, which is a play on the letters, but I thought it appropriate to substitute it in translation with “Daesh,” the pejorative Arabic speakers have coined to refer to the group.)
Comic styles might seem like a small point to notice, but they can be potent symbolism and should be used responsibly. I liked the amount of thought the artist put into using that symbolism to make statements about Muslims and the terrorist group that terrorizes Muslims in the name of their highly repressive and heterodox vision of Islam.
