Sell­ing books is all about timing. Or at least, that’s what the cap­i­tal­ists trying to make book sell­ing into a prof­itable market would have you believe.  Now that Prez W has led Amer­ica into de facto social­ism, it may come as some sur­prise that enter­pris­ing pub­lish­ers are still trying to put free-​market voodoo into prac­tice by using busi­ness horse sense and ever-​churning pub­lic­ity machines to sell books–about socialism.

Ezra Klein points to the release of a new Japan­ese manga comic of Marx’s Das Kap­i­tal as a water­shed moment in the edu­ca­tion of a future gen­er­a­tion of Marx­ist socialists.  Make it palat­able, make it fun.  Make it cool.  A spoon­ful of manga makes the social theory go down—forilla.

But this is not new, per se…how could we forget Rius?

Eduardo del Rio, a.k.a. Rius, is a Mex­i­can polit­i­cal car­toon­ist who was bitten with the task of send­ing up the Mex­i­can gov­ern­ment in the 1960s, which he did bless­edly well with a strip titled Los Super­ma­chos. The comic takes worka­day Rocky-’n'-Bullwinkle-type res­i­dents of the fic­tional town of San Gara­bato Cucuchan and has them throw up their comic hands in dis­be­lief at the labyrinth of Mex­i­can bureau­cracy, among many other social tar­gets. The dufus grins, broad pun­ning and subtle intel­li­gence of the comic, as well as the sophis­ti­cated social rela­tions estab­lished therein, paved the way for future incur­sions into denser social theory, as Rius fol­lowed up with a spate of longer works cov­er­ing left­ist rev­o­lu­tion­ary pol­i­tics 101:  Cuba for Begin­ners, ABChe (he skips a letter, but in Span­ish, “A B Ch” would be pro­nounced “ah, bay, chay”), etc.

Per­haps not so sur­pris­ingly, he found a market for these fun little books. So much so that they found their way into the States. Tom Engel­hardt, he of the essen­tial TomDis­patch blog, presided over their import into the U.S. in the late 1970s.  Marx for Begin­ners was the first one, and I had the plea­sure of using it to tutor a dis­tracted, some­times sullen Upland, CA 14-year-old sev­eral years ago in the rounder points of Char­lie Marx (as Rius names ol’ Karl).  Rius made even he chuckle. To the wit: “Wasn’t he one of the Marx Brothers?”; “There’s noth­ing but pol­i­tics in this Man­i­festo!!” “Not even a joke or two? Noth­ing about girls?.”

But don’t think it’s dumbed down: you’ve got an artic­u­lated his­tory of social theory con­tained within, as Rius drags in Hegel, Feuer­bach, Locke, Hume and all the usual sus­pects to get you to Marx + Engels.  And mas­sive block quotes from the Man­i­festo and the Man­u­scripts of 1844. There’s no dis­tor­tion of the words—just riff­ing com­men­tary off the words.

The ease of the humor itself reveals sophis­ti­ca­tion. After all, to joke is to com­pre­hend some­thing fully enough to under­stand inter­nal para­doxes and hinges within the object/system as well as under­stand its inter­re­la­tion­ships with other objects/systems.  And not to forget the audi­ence whom one is addressing.

My ear­lier allu­sion to Rocky and Bull­win­kle was no acci­dent; Rius’s arche­typal peanut gallery of one-​liners (both punch lines and simple pen sil­hou­ettes) cracks wise in that irre­sistible way that Rocky and Bull­win­kle took to an art form on tele­vi­sions across Amer­ica. R-’n'-B turned the Cold War pol­i­tics of per­ma­nent black and white solids into sophis­ti­cated gray cross-​hatchings with the sim­plest of jokes.  Rius knows the plight of the pro­le­tariat in the same way.