Comic book colorist Brett R. Smith, the artistic mind behind Clinton Cash: A Graphic Novel, says the book about the Clinton family’s worldwide nexus of corruption — geared toward a millennial audience — is “the most subversive foray into pop culture the right has ever attempted.”
Much like The New York Times bestselling book and documentary film that inspired it, Clinton Cash: A Graphic Novel, adapted by Chuck Dixon and Smith, follows the shady connections and transactions between Clinton Foundation donors, paid speeches given by Bill Clinton, and actions approved by the U.S. State Department while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State.
Smith, a longtime DC Comics cover artist, says conservatives are getting better at communicating with millennials — in this case, in the form of a graphic novel that was a New York Times bestseller for several weeks, including two weeks at No. 1 (bumping Batman from the top spot).
“Comics are the original PowerPoint presentation. If we’ve done our jobs properly, they also have more laughs and suspense – and much better artwork,” Smith said in a recent interview. “Clinton Cash: A Graphic Novel is the most subversive foray into pop culture the right has ever attempted and, more importantly, it has been successful. So successful and effective in fact that it was recently banned from the shelves of a Florida Public Library.”
Indeed, as Breitbart News reported, the Alachua County Library District denied county resident Ann Loot’s request to place Clinton Cash: A Graphic Novel on its shelves — a ban that occurred mere weeks before the start of Banned Books Week.
The graphic novel was always meant to convey the fact-based reporting found in Clinton Cash “in a way that makes it accessible to people who don’t have time to sit down and read a serious nonfiction book,” Clinton Cash author and Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer told Fox & Friends in a recent interview.
“I think millennials love this sort of approach because it’s humorous,” Schweizer said. “They put in humor. It’s a lot of great visual images.”
In an appearance in August on Breitbart News Daily SiriusXM radio, Smith, reiterating what Schweizer had said, said the book’s form as a “subversive” message to young Americans is what initially attracted him to the project.
“One of the things that really attracted me to the project was it gave us an opportunity to do something really subversive – probably one of the most subversive things the Right has done when it comes to pop culture maybe since Clinton Cash, the documentary,” Smith said. “And of course, Andrew [Breitbart] always said that politics is downstream from culture. And I was really interested in seeing if we could make those two intersect. And I think we were able to do that in a crisp, engaging and new way with Clinton Cash: A Graphic Novel, and we do that through humor, which is also something which I think is new and cutting edge – definitely avant-garde for the Right – using satire and humor, parody, mockery.”
“The Right has not lost the culture war. The Right has almost ceded the culture war by not engaging, and I really wanted to use the Left’s weapons back on them,” Smith continued. “It’s payback time. They don’t own pop culture. They don’t own it all. They don’t own that territory, and we need to start taking it back. Jon Stewart just signed a four-year deal with HBO. He’s got an animation studio geared up. He’s got 3-D graphics cranking. We need to start fighting fire with fire and show up to the gunfight with a flamethrower.”
Since its highly anticipated August 8 debut, the book sold out in less than 24 hours, forcing a second printing.
Clinton Cash: A Graphic Novel is available online for purchase in hardcover and as an e-book.
Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter: @JeromeEHudson
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