Few things reportedly vexed Napoleon Bonaparte more than being mocked in print by a popular British cartoonist of the era, James Gillray, who tormented France’s ambitious emperor-general from afar by depicting him as a deluded homunculus of a king. Napoleon himself, near the end of his life, is said to have remarked that Gillray did more damage to him than a dozen generals.
“Gillray is the reason that we think Napoleon was short and stupid,” says PureHoney artist of the month Christopher Sperandio, who can relate to political cartooning as a bane of power-hungry rulers.
A Texas-based illustrator and college professor drawing under the moniker of Pinko Joe, Sperandio is taking on the MAGA movement one single-panel comic at a time, with special attention to its leader, President Donald Trump, who has favorably compared himself to Napoleon and other historical despots. As Pinko Joe, Sperandio says he is “trying to land punches on the most corrupt administration in U.S. history.”
Athough “pinko” is, as Sperandio notes, “derogatory slang for a socialist,” he feels the slur puts his artwork alter ego in distinguished comics company. “In his early days, you could call Superman a socialist,” Sperandio says. “Pinko Joe, as a character, is just following in his footsteps, fighting oligarchs and out-of-control capitalists.”
Sperandio creates his comics by re-inking public-domain cartoons from the 1930s and earlier and juxtaposing them with contemporary political imagery. “In my early graphic novels, I was heavily reliant on vintage comic book genres,” he says. “’I’ve been doing these daily single-panel comics, 6,000 and counting, for a long time.”
Whether or not viewers recognize the source imagery or the political figures he skewers, they can appreciate his tongue-in-cheek humor and the pulpy medium he employs to convey his viewpoint in a single image and a few well-chosen words.
Sperandio’s interest in vintage comic iconography extends beyond his personal practice. An associate professor at the School of Visual and Dramatic Arts at Rice University, he founded the Comic Art Teaching and Study Workshop, or CATS, on the Houston campus in 2015. Equal parts art collection and educational resource, CATS grew out of Sperandio’s belief that, as he puts it, “it’s easier to learn to draw if you have physical examples to look at.”
“So I began pulling together a collection of drawings for comics and all sorts of rare and unusual comics for my students to use,” he says. “Now it’s sort of exploded — we’ve got a collection worth more than a million and a half dollars. It’s not just great material for students but also for researchers and writers.”
Americans have taken time to embrace comic illustration as a fine art, and CATS has become an important resource for scholarly study of the form. But Sperandio, as an instructor, encourages experimentation.
“My teaching philosophy is to support my students but to let them find their own way,” he says. “I think the last thing anybody wants to do is make work exactly like mine. I came to what I do naturally and over a long period of time. There are so many ways of working and so many influences to absorb. My advice would be to follow your nose and look at everything.”
For his own continuing studies, Sperandio has traveled to Japan, where comics have long been considered art. He is currently “enmeshed in the 1,500-year legacy of papermaking,” he says, and is learning how to produce washi, a paper fashioned from mulberry bark. “The process is fascinating,” he says, “and the results are unbelievable. Using just two ingredients, this incredibly hardy material is produced.”
“I’m also looking at manga — both vintage manga, which I love, and contemporary manga, which I’m not as warm on,” he says.
The DIY ethos of zines, comics, and print runs through Sperandio’s lifestyle and values. “I don’t think about an audience at this point. I’m making and saying the things I want to say,” he tells us. “If other people connect with it, that’s great. And if they don’t, they are welcome to keep scrolling. Printing is democracy, plain and simple. It’s also screenless, so you don’t have right-wing, anti-life AI distorting what you’re trying to say.”
Follow Sperandio on Instagram @pinko_joe and pinkojoe.com and visit CATS at cats.rice.edu ~ Kelli Bodle
