While catching up on my blogroll, I spotted two posts about the impact of racist cartoons.

the what if question ...: BFP considers the implications of cartoons that show Native Americans doing "white thing" (like keeping immigrants out of the U.S.) and other such "through the looking glass" political cartoons, and how the message they send actually reinforces racist and imperialist thinking.

Tintin is F*cking Racist: Ridwan Laher discusses his first encounter with racism in Tintin comics, and how people still collect Tintin stuff, after the uncensored second issue of the comic, "Tintin in the Congo" (which portrays Africans as apes, among other things) was released.

These two posts so clearly outline why I've always found the tendency to write off comic books and cartoons as unimportant so infuriating. They aren't "high-brow" enough, they aren't "intellectual" enough (which screams of elitism as it is, because, just a couple of examples, Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman," Hiromu Arakawa's "Fullmetal Alchemist" and "Avatar: The Last Airbender" all deftly weave mythical and Biblical themes and imagery, philosophical questions and complex stories and characterization with beautiful artwork and humor much better than many of the new literary novels being written nowadays ... and I totally just let my geekitude show, didn't I?), so anything in them should not be taken seriously. Well, sometimes what's in them is serious. Sometimes they can introduce or reinforce some pretty nasty stereotypes, and if no one takes them seriously, that just makes it more insidious.

And even if they are just "kid stuff," what are children being told to believe about themselves by seeing cartoons in the newspaper or in the library that makes a mockery of their identity?

Both posts are very worth reading.