Some artists paint peaceful landscapes. Others draw kittens wearing business ties. Maaike Hartjes, meanwhile, looks at racism, war, political hypocrisy, climate anxiety, discrimination, and media manipulation and says, “Let’s put all that into a few brightly colored panels.” The result is a collection of comics that initially appears playful but frequently lands with the emotional subtlety of a brick wearing a party hat.
These 21 new illustrations combine social criticism with autobiographical humor, using simple characters and tightly written dialogue to expose the contradictions people encounter every day. A casual compliment becomes racial stereotyping. A conversation about justice reveals a double standard. A television report demonstrates how word choice can determine whose suffering receives attention and whose becomes background scenery.
The drawings are accessible, but the questions behind them are anything but simple. Who receives empathy? Whose anger is considered reasonable? Why do institutions condemn some violence immediately while describing other violence with foggy, passive language? And when did buying one tiny shelf become a performance deserving a standing ovation?
Who Is Maaike Hartjes?
Maaike Hartjes is an Amsterdam-based comic artist, cartoonist, and illustrator known for reducing complicated subjects to their emotional core. She has drawn comics since childhood, published autobiographical books, created editorial work, and produced an illustrated diary about recovering from burnout. In 2016, she received the Stripschapprijs, a major Dutch award honoring a cartoonist’s body of work.
Her visual language is deliberately uncomplicated. Characters often have rounded heads, minimal facial features, and an almost innocent appearance. That simplicity is part of the strategy. The drawings do not bury an argument beneath cinematic scenery or technical showmanship. Instead, they place the contradiction directly in front of the reader and politely refuse to move it.
Hartjes has explained that her comics may be autobiographical, political, or both. Her inspiration frequently comes from news, social media, daily conversations, and personal frustrations. She sketches many more ideas than she completes, selecting the concepts that communicate most effectively. In other words, behind every finished comic is a crowded waiting room of abandoned jokes, disappointed doodles, and political arguments that did not survive triage.
What the 21 New Comics Reveal About Modern Society
1. Consumerism and the Need for Applause
The collection opens with an apparently harmless story about buying a small shelf. The joke is not really about furniture. It is about the expectation that ordinary purchases must be celebrated as achievements. The buyer insists she purchased nothing else at IKEA, yet her listener refuses to provide the award she clearly believes is due. Somewhere, a decorative candle feels personally attacked.
2. Racism Disguised as a Compliment
Another comic shows a woman being told she is attractive “for” a member of her ethnic group. The speaker presents prejudice as praise, apparently expecting gratitude for lowering the bar and then announcing it. Hartjes captures how racial stereotyping often arrives in friendly packaging, making the target responsible for managing both the insult and the offender’s feelings.
3. Unequal Punishment for Protesters
A courtroom illustration contrasts lengthy punishment for environmental activism with lighter treatment for people protesting racial injustice. The cartoon questions how authorities define danger, disruption, and acceptable dissent. The point is not that every case is identical, but that punishment often reflects political priorities as much as the conduct being judged.
4. When Anti-Transgender Hatred Is Called an “Opinion”
One of the starkest images depicts hateful claims about transgender people literally covering a trans character in black paint. The speaker retreats behind the familiar defense that it is merely an opinion. Hartjes answers visually: language is not weightless when it contributes to humiliation, exclusion, fear, or violence against real people.
5. The Elastic Definition of Self-Defense
Several comics focus on Israel, Gaza, and the language used to justify military action. One challenges the repeated invocation of self-defense when civilians continue to suffer. The comic represents the artist’s political viewpoint rather than a neutral summary of the conflict, but its broader question is universal: At what point does a justification become a shield against scrutiny?
6. Pride History Is Not a Cute Trivia Category
A Pride pub quiz becomes an unexpectedly serious lesson about marriage equality, persecution, resistance, and LGBTQ+ history. The narrator expects cheerful questions about romance and pop songs. Instead, she discovers that Pride is rooted in survival and political struggle. The punchline about demands for “straight pride” exposes what happens when celebration is separated from historical context.
7. The Euphemism Olympics
In another strip, a character confronts disturbing footage while a defender cycles through softer terms such as accident, collateral incident, or unfortunate event. Hartjes shows how euphemisms can function like verbal bubble wrap around moral responsibility. The language becomes increasingly tidy while the scene being described remains horrifyingly untidy.
8. The Words That Follow “Yes, But”
One comic presents an accusation of genocide followed by an attempted “yes, but.” The outraged speaker physically interrupts the qualification. Because genocide is a grave legal and political term, readers will disagree strongly about its application. Hartjes’s artistic argument concerns a different issue: whether constant qualification can become a method of avoiding the suffering directly in view.
9. Invisible Work and the Trusted Man
A seemingly lighter comic follows a woman preparing an event while repeatedly checking whether a male colleague has completed his small assigned task. She worries that she is controlling, only to discover that he forgot it. The strip illustrates mental load: one person performs the work while also remembering, checking, reminding, and preparing for everyone else’s failure.
10. Pretending Racism Disappears When Discussion Stops
A man argues that racism would vanish if people stopped talking about it while a newspaper beside him reports racist attacks. The contradiction is simple and effective. Silence may reduce a comfortable observer’s awareness of discrimination, but reduced awareness is not reduced discrimination. Turning off the smoke alarm does not make the kitchen less smoky.
11. Symbols, Suspicion, and the Watermelon
A watermelon becomes the center of an argument about Palestinian identity and alleged support for terrorism. The exchange shows how symbols associated with a people can be reinterpreted as suspicious, while even naming that people becomes politically charged. Hartjes depicts a debate in which attempts to erase national identity eventually become more revealing than the symbol itself.
12. Condemnation With Terms and Conditions
A royal figure prepares to condemn a violent attack but hesitates after learning the suspected perpetrators belong to an allied country and the victims to a stigmatized group. The cartoon satirizes institutional statements that sound principled until political loyalty enters the room, removes its coat, and begins editing the speech.
13. “Do Something” Includes Voting
One comic features a person enthusiastically insisting that European countries must solve major shared problems. The response is blunt: vote. Political participation is not the only form of civic action, but Hartjes mocks the comfortable habit of demanding enormous change while treating the most basic democratic responsibility as an optional household chore.
14. Selective Outrage in Foreign Policy
Another illustration compares official reactions to attacks in Gaza, Iran, Lebanon, and Israel, noting that only one version matches the actual public response Hartjes observed. Its criticism centers on asymmetry: governments often present foreign policy as a consistent defense of international principles while applying those principles differently according to alliances and strategic interests.
15. Free Speech for the Speaker, Censorship for the Critic
A character complains that people “cannot say anything anymore” while standing beside someone whose political statement has been heavily crossed out. The comic captures a recurring free-speech paradox. Powerful speakers may describe criticism as censorship while supporting restrictions against views they find uncomfortable. Apparently, free speech is sometimes sold as a single-user license.
16. Looking at Suffering and Looking Away
One panel shows graphic news footage. A bystander scolds the viewer for looking at it; another later scolds her for looking away. The dilemma reflects the psychological burden of witnessing distant suffering through screens. Constant exposure can produce distress and numbness, yet disengagement may feel like abandonment. There is no perfect viewing schedule for human tragedy.
17. Turning Elections Into Slogans
A comic reduces the 2024 U.S. presidential contest to two crude descriptions: one candidate presented as barely alive and the other as having survived an assassination attempt. A character asks about policy, only to be accused of making everything political. The joke targets personality-driven elections in which spectacle crowds out discussion of governing plans.
18. Leaders Asking Questions They Do Not Want Answered
In another political panel, President Joe Biden appears to ask whether honesty, justice, and freedom still matter, only for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to answer negatively. The characterization is openly satirical. Its target is the perceived gap between democratic language and a government’s willingness to challenge an ally whose actions contradict that language.
19. Active Language for One Side, Passive Language for Another
Hartjes contrasts forceful descriptions of one group’s violence with passive phrases about civilians being displaced, facing hunger, or experiencing a “dire situation.” The comic highlights how grammar shapes responsibility. “A building was destroyed” and “a military destroyed a building” may describe the same event, but only one sentence identifies an actor.
20. Ageism Arrives Through a Coffee Bag
Not every image is geopolitical. One comic shows confusion over “slow coffee,” prompting the suspicion that “normal coffee” is simply coffee for younger people. The joke captures how lifestyle marketing can transform ordinary habits into generational categories. Even coffee, humanity’s beloved legal morning stimulant, now apparently requires a demographic strategy.
21. War Explained as a Bedtime Story
The final illustration depicts Netanyahu reading children a story in which enemy groups become cartoon monsters that must be bombed away. The book is labeled as a Western media playbook. Hartjes criticizes narratives that divide complicated conflicts into innocent heroes and inhuman villains, making civilian suffering easier to dismiss and military escalation easier to market.
Why These Social-Issue Comics Work
Political cartoons have always compressed large arguments into memorable images. A long report can describe institutional hypocrisy in fifty pages; a cartoon can show a leader changing one word in a speech and expose the same contradiction before the reader finishes breakfast. Visual satire does not replace reporting, historical study, or evidence. It performs a different job: it makes an abstraction emotionally visible.
Hartjes’s childlike characters are especially useful because they lower the reader’s defenses. A detailed, realistic depiction of war or discrimination may be difficult to approach. A simple figure with two dots for eyes feels less threateninguntil the dialogue reveals what is happening. The reader has already entered the scene before realizing the exit door has been replaced by a moral question.
Her use of humor also prevents the collection from becoming a continuous lecture. The IKEA shelf, workplace QR codes, pub quizzes, and coffee confusion create breathing room. This matters because media overload and repeated exposure to distressing events can contribute to stress, anxiety, helplessness, and emotional exhaustion. Humor does not erase those realities. It gives the audience enough oxygen to keep looking.
Social Commentary Is an Invitation, Not a Final Verdict
These comics are unmistakably opinionated. Readers may agree with some, reject others, or argue that a panel simplifies a conflict too aggressively. That response is part of political art. A cartoon is not a diplomatic agreement with little flags arranged on a conference table. It is an argument designed to provoke recognition, anger, debate, or discomfort.
The most productive approach is to treat each drawing as a starting question. What information supports the claim? What has been omitted? Does the language used by officials and news outlets assign responsibility consistently? Would the same behavior be described differently if the identities of the people involved were reversed?
That method turns passive scrolling into critical reading. It also helps prevent social media from becoming an endless conveyor belt of emotionally charged claims. Before sharing an image, readers can compare sources, examine the context, identify manipulative wording, and separate verified facts from interpretations. Outrage travels at broadband speed; careful thought usually arrives carrying luggage.
A 500-Word Viewing Experience: From Quick Laugh to Uncomfortable Reflection
A common experience of reading Hartjes’s collection begins with false confidence. The artwork looks friendly. The colors are bright. The characters resemble people who might be discussing a delayed train or an unexpectedly expensive sandwich. The reader settles in expecting a few jokes and perhaps a mildly sarcastic observation about modern life.
The first everyday comic encourages that assumption. A woman wants praise for leaving IKEA with only one shelf. It is recognizable, harmless, and funny. Many people know the strange pride of entering a store for one object and escaping without adopting three lamps, a fake plant, fourteen storage boxes, and a Swedish meatball dependency.
Then the mood changes. A compliment turns into a racial insult. A courtroom joke becomes a question about unequal justice. Hate speech appears as black paint dripping over a transgender person. The visual style remains cute, but cuteness is no longer protection. It becomes contrast.
The reader may initially respond by deciding whether each political argument is correct. That instinct is understandable, especially when the comics address war, state violence, elections, and accusations involving international law. Yet a second reaction often follows: discomfort with the patterns the cartoons expose, regardless of agreement with every conclusion.
Consider the comic about active and passive language. Once the difference has been pointed out, it becomes difficult not to notice it elsewhere. One headline says a group “attacked,” “killed,” or “seized.” Another says civilians “died,” homes “were damaged,” or families “became displaced.” The facts may be technically present in both reports, but the grammatical structure directs moral attention differently.
The workplace comic produces another kind of recognition. Many readers have prepared an event, managed a household, or completed a group project while another person performed one task and still required reminders. The humor comes from familiarity. The frustration comes from realizing that remembering everyone else’s responsibilities is itself labor, even though it rarely appears on a schedule or invoice.
The news-footage comic may create the most personal tension. Looking at suffering can feel invasive or overwhelming. Looking away can feel selfish. A reader may recognize the habit of opening a news app, absorbing several terrible stories, closing it in distress, then reopening it minutes later as though the world might have installed an emergency happiness update.
By the final images, the collection has shifted the reader’s role. The audience is no longer merely observing the artist’s characters. It is examining its own habits: the language it repeats, the jokes it excuses, the stories it shares, the causes it supports only when convenient, and the suffering it has learned to scroll past.
That experience is not comfortable, but discomfort is not automatically harmful. It can signal that an old assumption has encountered resistance. The useful next step is neither endless guilt nor instant online combat. It is curiosity followed by action: reading reliable reporting, listening to affected communities, challenging prejudice in ordinary conversation, supporting credible organizations, participating in civic life, and recognizing when humor reveals something that polite language has been hiding.
Conclusion: Small Drawings, Enormous Questions
Maaike Hartjes’s 21 new comics demonstrate how a few panels can carry an impressive amount of political and emotional weight. Her characters confront racism disguised as admiration, discrimination defended as opinion, political participation reduced to slogans, and civilian suffering obscured by strategic language.
The collection does not provide a complete policy manual for repairing society. That would be ambitious for any comic, particularly one already busy supervising an IKEA shelf. What it provides is a sharper way of looking. It asks readers to notice who is believed, who is blamed, who is protected, and who is described only in the passive voice.
Great social commentary does not always tell people what to think. Sometimes it simply makes it harder to continue thinking carelessly.
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