Priya Saxena, Bitches on Comics:
“With science fiction and fantasy literature, there is a need to quickly establish some rules of the world so the reader can follow the action. In this comic, you orient the reader by opening with an in-universe propaganda comic depicting Magni’s origin story as a hero. But it soon becomes clear that this origin story is not completely accurate. It seems to me that the journey the reader goes on in parsing what is true and what is false somewhat mirrors the experience of someone who is being fed propaganda and is trying to determine the truth. How interested were you in challenging readers to rethink their perceptions and figure out the truth for themselves?
This was absolutely one of my interests! We live in a media landscape that becomes more and more sensational by the day, with research and nuance and ambiguity becoming farther and farther from the default mode of intaking information. We’re absolutely inundated with messages signaling “this is good!” and “this is bad!” and if companies and advertisers had their way we wouldn’t have a single breath to think our own thoughts.
I do think it’s really important for people to learn how to take a step back and not just question “Is this supposedly bad thing actually good? Could this thing being marketed as good to me really be bad?” but also be able to discuss things on the level of “Are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ even appropriate ways to view this? In addition to A vs. B, is there a factor C that neither side wants you to think about as a possibility? What information am I missing? What information is being obscured from me?” When thinking is flattened into black and white, good or bad, I think it’s easy to create this category of “other,” where what and who counts as “other” becomes easy to manipulate.
These thoughts are really just my own opinion on the matter rather than a “lesson” in Of Thunder and Lightning, though I try to veer away from that kind of storytelling to begin with. I think my way of holding true to these beliefs was to not use characters to lecture the reader and honestly approach this comic as an exploration of topics like propaganda and being part of the construction of culture, instead of pretending I had some absolute moral and universal answer. I think it’d be the greatest praise for my work to be a text that gives the reader a framework or curiosity to start asking questions of the tangible and intangible institutions around us with a healthy skepticism.”
Read the full review on Bitches on Comics‘ website here!
