‘…’Tis a Common Observation here that our Cause is the Cause of all Mankind; and that we are fighting for their Liberty in defending our own. ’Tis a glorious Task assign’d us by Providence; which has I trust given us Spirit and Virtue equal to it, and will at last crown it with Success.’

-Benjamin Franklin

‘Violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect… Violence is man re-creating himself.’ -Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

‘(T)he stereotype is the basic building block of all cartoon art’ -Art Spiegelman

Let the dog bark; the moon shall beam on. -Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, from Gholam Reza Afkhami's The Life and Times of the Shah

‘I had learned that you should always shout louder than your aggressor.’ ― Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood

‘None of our republics would be anything if we weren't all together; but we have to create our own history - history of United Yugoslavia, also in the future.’ -Josip Broz Tito

Everyone knows that we (comic artists) are ‘gangsters, trampling on the sacred name of art,’ that our works are ‘little pictures for morons,’ that our muse is ‘a mad radioactive mutant.’ —Khikhus, from Jose Alaniz’ Komiks: Comic Art in Russia

Comics have been used to reduce individual characters into representations of cultural ideas, allowing characters to become powerful representations of nationalism or the search for societal stability. Due to their glossing of subtlety or complexity in socio-cultural relations they have been consistent in creating clearly identifiable mass-produced images for communities, giving collective desires visible shape and strong narratives.

In India, Amar Chitra Katha can be said to have played a similar role of reviving interest and confidence in Indian mythological and folk narratives when the market was largely unrepresentative of Indian or indeed any non-western comic products. With this early attempt to forge cultural confidence, however, came other problems as described by Par Christophe Dony: ‘…the series has often been criticized for presenting a very conservative, simplified, and pro-masculine version of India’s cultural heritage… many stories emanating from the Amar Chitra Katha comics have employed narrative and visual strategies that are at odds with some of the tropes traditionally embraced and/or promoted by postcolonial studies and scholars, namely hybridity, multiculturalism, and resistance. Thus, the Amar Chitra Katha series has to some extent distanced itself from some of the social, historical, and cultural remnants of the colonial regime and it has carved a niche for indigenous comics in India. However, it has simultaneously produced a very conservative historiography and supported a nationalist agenda that was arguably influenced by the former colonial rule.’ It became the task of more conscious comic book artists to break through this bind of revival and recovery—in a process that is still ongoing with artists across the decolonial world.