Ground Zero Comics--Interview with Creator Leonard Rifas

Leonard Rifas knows his line--an activist documentary comic tradition he pioneered 50 years ago when he used a frog as the voice of authority in All-Atomic Comics. In 1982 he published the first English version of I Saw It,  a manga comic by Hiroshima survivor Keiji Nakazawa. 

In Ground Zero Comics, narrators "Earl Crow" and "Mo Squirrel" treat a wide spectrum of interlocutors, e.g. military historicists, with that would play well at West Point, and fission imaging to satisfy the nuclear scientists at MIT. A graph revised for more clarity in the second printing (Aug. 2024) incorporated feedback from Alan Robock, co-author of a 2022 paper that according to Forbes "so important to the worldwide discourse on the fate of the Earth following a massive nuclear war" it has been viewed more than 200,000 times. 

Portraits of suffering that elicit care, interpret statistical compassion and expose the war crime must test a mature hand. Rifas and his collaborators have a background in spontaneous, amateur zines, preferring that a reader attends to the content at least as much as the drawings. Talented production aid from Paul Baresh from co-publisher Fantagraphics led to high quality heavy stock paper. 

In this comic, a tidy 32 pages, the happy ending is a validation of decades of struggle, activism understood as nonviolent resistance. In the style of Howard Zinn's "People's History of the U.S." the story evokes two heroes of the disarmament movement, Daniel Ellsberg and Bob Aldridge. 

 

 

Co-founders of the Ground Zero Nonviolence Center Shelley and James Douglass credited Bob Aldridge:

"Always remembering the founder of that campaign was Bob who designed the re-entry vehicles.  

We were all potential members, if not actual," Shelley Douglass said in an interview with Pax Christi.

 There were no enemies in that campaign, only potential allies.  As a theologian, that humbles me. My interaction to either groups tells me too often what I want to hear, assuming anyone with a moral fiber will get the immorality of nuclear weapons. And here is the accounting of Ground Zero Comics: Aldridge--"one or more of his children looked over the script" Rifas writes --"wanted to live consistent with his Christian faith." It doesn't mean we end up sitting down and praying, faith leads to action--even wholeheartedly turning everything over in readiness to the reign of God. 

 

 For sources, lesson plans, readers are sent to Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action: https://www.gzcenter.org/comic_book_sources

 

C.R.S. Making the u-turn, of the nuclear-weapons possessing countries..requires getting in the hinges of the (nuclear button) trapdoor Elaine Scarry writes in Thermonuclear Monarchy (2016). 

LR: I have not yet read her book, but I have been meaning to. Great title.

A remedy to the immobilizing nuclear dread, or 'statistical compassion', certainly is to do what you're up to, narrating with that squirrel, raven and grampa. The raven, for instance, suggests a reference... is that right?

LR:That's "Earl Crow," a character we made up for this project. ("Earl" rhymes with squirrel ... namely the crow's buddy "Mo [rhymes with crow] Squirrel.") I eventually realized I had done something similar in 1972 with my characters "Tommy the Carrot and Carl Tomato."  When writing Ground Zero Comics, on the three blocks from my house to the cafe where Glen and I had our weekly meetings, I always saw squirrels and crows. 

I saw a raven at the arboretum maybe around the time we wrote the comic. I threw it a peanut, and it responded by flying away and I felt that I had accidentally insulted it.

I made a small effort to see what local native traditions had said about ravens when working on the comic and I did not find anything in print that felt like a warning about any necessary revisions or rethinking.

Perhaps it was Glen who asked me, "why a squirrel and crow?" I answered that years ago I had decided that if I ever did a locally based comic, it would feature as its main characters a crow and a squirrel.

Eventually I realized that using a crow and squirrel in this way was very similar to how I had used a frog as the voice of authority 50 years ago in All-Atomic Comics.

Can you share some background: Did you ever meet Ellsberg or Aldridge?

LR: In 2018, I heard Daniel Ellsberg give a presentation about his extraordinarily important new book The Doomsday Machine at a church across the street from the University of Washington. That church building was torn down a few years ago and is still an empty lot. I waited near the end of a long line of people to get my copy of his book signed. When I shook his hand, I gave him a copy of Nakazawa's I SAW IT. He smiled when he recognized the comic, but I had the clear impression that Nakazawa's work meant a lot less to him than it does to me. 

If I had not moved to Seattle in 1986, I expect that I would have encountered him more frequently, because I was friends with Jan Thomas, who managed his office for decades. I remember being in his house with her once, and that Patricia Ellsberg was there at the time. Thanks to Jan Thomas's unique ability to read Ellsberg's handwritten notes, we now have his (highly recommended) posthumous book Truth and Consequence: New Book by Daniel Ellsberg: Truth and Consequence – Daniel Ellsberg's Website.

I read Aldridge's book First Strike! The Pentagon's Strategy for Nuclear War (1983) when it first came out. That was when I was deep in debt for publishing Nakazawa's I SAW IT and worrying that my days of being able to afford to self-publish might be over. To assure myself that I could still keep going, I created a heavily researched, short, pocket-sized comics zine based on First Strike! and photocopied less than 100 copies. Within the last few years, I found in my files a postcard that Bob Aldridge (who I never met face to face) had sent me, thanking me for sending my zine an explaining how I had missed his main point. I had forgotten receiving it. I really hate to misrepresent the points that I am trying to communicate. I put the card aside, planning to reread it more closely later, and to my frustration promptly lost it in my papers. I still have hopes that it will turn up in my lifetime. One or more of his children looked over the script for the page about their father in Ground Zero Comics, and I think we got his story right.

When was the script primarily settled?

LR: The story took shape gradually and revisions continued even after the first printing. I saved practically every draft, so I'm resisting an urge to go to my files to compose an answer with much more detail than you need. I can look at almost every page and remember changes that we made, suggestions that we incorporated, and editorial changes that I requested of the contributing artists.

 Were aspects like the 2022 nuclear winter added? 

LR: I knew I wanted to include the issue of nuclear winter. I had drawn a story about it for itchy PLANET #1 in 1988, called simply "Nuclear Winter." I corresponded briefly with Alan Robock, co-author of that 2022 paper. He did not care for that graph I had created for Ground Zero Comics, so I tried to make my intended point clearer in the revised second printing. Two days ago, Forbes magazine ran an article largely based on that now four-year-old scientific paper:  Abolishing Nuclear Arms Can Avert War That Kills Billions, Experts Say. Forbes says: "This study has proven to be so important to the worldwide discourse on the fate of the Earth following a massive nuclear war that it has already been viewed, across the globe, more than 200,000 times."

What drove your production value? 

LR: As you know, I don't like comics that are so slick that the reader attends to the drawings more than the content. My collaborators and I share a background in spontaneous, amateur zines, but also an interest in raising our work to its highest level. Thanks to co-publisher Fantagraphics, I was able to get production help from their brilliantly talented Paul Baresh. If you look at Fantagraphics' books, you will see him credited for production assistance in many of them. Perhaps the main thing that influences a reader's perception of Ground Zero Comics' production values is the unusually heavy paper stock. I was surprised (and, after the shock wore off, not displeased) when the comics were printed and delivered, and I discovered what paper Fantagraphics had chosen.

I really like the People's History of the US, Howard Zinn vibe (recovering the UW students out there on the streets, the billboard cost, the ask to distribute the comic as leaflet) to make resistance the emphasis.

LR: Like many others, I read Zinn's "People's History" in the 1980s, or maybe in 1980 when it first came out. I went to grad school with a filmmaker who had been his student, and she invited me to join them and a few other people after one of his talks at UW. I don't remember where we were, only that it was on "the Ave." and there was beer. I don't remember that we said much or anything to each other, but what I remember was thinking how happy, joyous even, that old man was! He died at the age of 87 and was lecturing until close to the end. I have a history of activist cartooning. I have not yet figured out, in this day of social media, how to most effectively spark the kinds of activist responses that I aim to support. One thing that makes it worthwhile for me is when I can get into a conversation with a reader with plans to carry the work forward. Having this opportunity to engage with your questions is deeply meaningful for me. Thanks!