The slaughter in the offices of Charlie Hebdo is likely to be the cartooning story of the year 2015, and it echoes another cartooning story of the year from 2005, about Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. In both cases, violent thugs decided any action was justified to punish the crime of drawing the prophet Mohammed, with a deliberately offensive message or otherwise. The Jyllands-Posten case led to a foiled assassination plot, the Charlie Hebdo case into a bloodbath. Such extremists are as willing to target other Muslims as they are those outside the faith. Dr. Naif al-Mutawa has faced fatwas from multiple countries and death threats from Twitter accounts linked to ISIL and Al-Qaeda. ISIL has even put a price on his head. His crime? He created The 99, a Muslim comic about 99 young heroes who reflect the 99 attributes ascribed to Allah in the Quran, well-received in both the West and the East. These terrorists believe this is somehow more justified than threatening a comic creator's life for continuing to write Kyle Rayner, or different from the time Nazi sympathizers in the U.S. threatened the Jewish creators of Captain America. It isn't. The only difference is it is more likely to be praised. We live in a messed-up world sometimes. That's why it's easy to blame the lines.
T Campbell has written quite a few online comics series and selected work for Marvel, Archie and Tokyopop. His longest-running works are Fans, Penny and Aggie-- and his current project with co-writer Phil Kahn, Guilded Age.
