The growing divide between different political views is a tricky subject to take a serious look at from ANY perspective. Writer Gregg Hurwitz tackles one of the biggest issues of the postmodern world in NewThink #5. Artist Will Conrad attempts to help frame a remarkably wide-ranging discussion on contemporary discourse in America. Colorist Marco Lesko adds some atmosphere to the issue. The scope of Hurwitz’s dialogue is impressively ambitious. Ultimately, the chapter feels like a dazzlingly detailed overgeneralization of a great many aspects of the central problem. It’s a dizzying exercise that valiantly attempts to be a children’s educational comic for adults. 

Kids are playing in a park in the shadow of their parents. A wholesome-looking educator attempts to engage the kids in an in-depth conversation about what makes people different from each other. The kids’ parents look on, waiting for the right opportunity to be offended by what the teacher is saying, but she appears to be making important points that are both strikingly simple AND remarkably challenging at the same time. Maybe the kids will learn what their parents don’t seem to understand. And if luck holds out, they may have the intellectual tenacity to avoid the problems that their parents continue to deal with. 

When Hurwitz’s script isn’t being painfully simple, it tends to overgeneralize. He’s very aware of this, as various parents and others point out around the edges of the monologue being delivered by the educator. Hurwitz is leaning really, really heavily on the idea that there ARE a great many problems of overwhelming complexity, but we won’t solve them if we’re all fighting each other. Hurwitz actually does a pretty good job of trying to be approachable to everyone left, right, and otherwise in his treatment of the subject matter. It might even be an effective way of bridging the gap between the left and the right. 

Hurwitz’s script DOES allow for some pretty stunning visuals. Conrad brings them to the page with style. The single most effective image in the entire issue involves the kids putting on donkey and elephant costumes and gradually building an animosity that grows into a fight. The layout of ideas on the page is suitable for the most part. It can be pretty heavily bogged down in theory and detail in places, but the overall feel of it DOES cleverly mix contemporary adult comics with the concept of a grade school educational text. It’s a sharp visual fusion. 

Straight-ahead educational comics don’t find their way into comic shops all that often, but the medium DOES have its advantages. At its best, the fifth issue of NewThink achieves the kind of extreme cleverness made by Larry Gonick’s cartoon histories or Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. When it falls flat, though, it feels sort of hopeless and dark. 

Grade: B-