You know what I find interesting about Everett True? How people relate to the comic today.

Love it or hate it, there’s something about the way it attacks (semi-literally and figuratively) social issues in a way that shows how common some of them are, to have survived into another century. Makes the artist pretty damn perceptive.

Now, another thing I find entertaining is the way people look at the character. It really does seem that a majority of people side with Everett’s views, despite the fact that his core view is that he is the arbiter of rights and wrong, and has the freedom to punish the wrong, violently.

He’s a vigilante. A social vigilante. He’s a fat Batman that ignores crooks and goes right to the heart of social ills as he sees them.

That’s fucking fascinating to me. That, number one, the comic was popular enough to last long enough for so many to be made. Number two, that people are so willing to accept cartoon violence as the appropriate response to social problems, in the abstract (and, I suspect, in the privacy of the mind, in reality). And, number three, that all of us that enjoy this C/ seem to just ignore that True is a giant, flaming asshole because he’s entertaining.

Now, I’m not against the idea of violence as a tool of social change. To the contrary, viva la revolution! Something, something, tree of liberty and all that. I am, however, very skeptical that any given person that’s using violence for social change should be trusted enough to be allowed to do so.

But our comic Fatman, sans Robin, is the vicarious outlet for our more direct and tightly reined rage at the world. Which is, I suspect, what was intended.