The Ridiculous Continuing Saga of the January 6th Comic

Four years ago, a riot, or insurrection, or coup, at the United States Capitol became a date that would live in infamy in American history. January 6th. The day democracy died. Well, that was the idea anyway. But as we stand on the next January 6th, with Donald Trump being sworn into a non-consecutive second term with little apparent apocalyptic overtones, the question is naturally begged. Why was January 6th ever such a big deal anyway? How exactly could the right-wing extremists at the capitol that day have destroyed the government? The third issue of the limited comic book series 1/6: The Graphic Novel attempts to answer that question, with ambiguous results.

Originally, they meant for the third issue of the limited series to come out in the summer of 2024, with the fourth issue arriving in time for Election Day. It’s worth noting that the debut issue came out all the way back in January of 2023. Publications like The Washington Post wrote it up. It’s also worth noting that despite the headline implying otherwise, the January 6th comic book does not, as of the first two issues at least, explain how, exactly, the January 6th incident managed to destroy the United States government and turn the country into a dystopian nightmare scape.

In the recently released third issue, the main point of convergence between that timeline and our own hinges on Eugene Goodman. In our reality, the good one, presumably, Eugene Goodman heroically distracted and lured insurrectionist rioters away from the unguarded entrance to the U.S. Senate chamber. In the alternate reality, he was stationed somewhere else, still heroically, of course, and apparently nobody was around to tell the January 6th rioters to turn left instead of right, resulting in them arriving at the U.S. Senate where they murder Ted Cruz and eventually Mike Pence.

Part of the problem with January 6th alarmist rhetoric is that it’s hard to make this sound all that awful. Indeed, the January 6th comic itself can barely even pretend to tolerate leaders of the Democratic Party. It gives the fictional staffer Autumn precedence over actual Democratic Party leaders bickering over powerpoint presentations for the already marginalized press. This might be for the better. I have had the misfortune of reading Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Freshman Force, and you should probably take my word for it that buff Nancy Pelosi in the shower is an image you’re better off assuming that I made up for comedic purposes than trying to locate in context.

Despite describing the actions of Eugene Goodman as being the core inflection point, it only takes two pages for the January 6th comic to bring up the far more significant sounding inflection point of armed militias taking over eight federal buildings and bringing firearms to the capitol. But then, that’s part of the problem. The only time anyone actually tried to fire a gun on January 6th 2021, a woman was killed, and all of her compatriots ran away in terror. The January 6th graphic novel has to assume, for the sake of argument, that all of these people were engaged in a fight to the death, since otherwise the question is begged. Let’s assume the January 6th insurrectionists took over Washington D.C., and that the police, the National Guard, and the military were all either unwilling or unable to stop them.

Wouldn’t all those organizations have to at least be sympathetic to the insurrectionists, if not outright supporting of them, in order to back Donald Trump’s illegitimate claim to power? Isn’t that a much bigger issue than what any of these protesters or insurrectionists or whatever could have plausibly done that day? The January 6th comic has suffered a lot of setbacks, most notably the death of lead illustrator Karl Moline. But its main issue is just, there’s no good explanation for any of this that doesn’t amount to the United States government already functionally being a fascist state.

Indeed, the footnotes, or Easter Eggs, of the third issue, discuss book bannings and concentration camps as if they were unique outcroppings of the illegitimate second Trump term. In reality, this has been going on throughout Biden’s legitimate presidency as well, and Trump’s legitimate second term is going to lead to more of the same rather than any significant changes in any direction. There’s something horribly discouraging about the fact that the awful world created by a successful January 6th isn’t much different than the one we’re already living in. 

In another farcical moment of Trumpian evil, he defies the Secret Service personnel charged with his safety by crashing their car when he demands they take him to the Capitol so he can speak with the insurrectionists. Trump dramatically says “you’re fired” as he walks away from the crash. The footnotes don’t mention this moment specifically, but it did happen, aside from the part where Trump actually crashes the car. It’s just not normally a part of the January 6th lore because Trump claims that he wanted calm the insurrectionists down, and it’s impossible to prove that wasn’t his intent, mostly because there wasn’t really anything else he could even try to do.

Even in its most serious depictions, January 6th is just too…absurd  is the big issue with it. Probably the single best known icon of that day is the QAnon Shaman. Have you ever seen the QAnon Shaman? Does he look like a person who could command the respect of the government simply by physically occupying the building where government business takes place?

It’s to the credit of the January 6th comic, I guess, that the QAnon Shaman doesn’t feature in the serious story turn of the third issue. But what few other depictions of the event exist can’t avoid him. And I do mean few. Jerry Seinfeld’s bizarre Pop-Tart origin story movie has a scene where Kellogg’s mascots rebel against the company January 6th style. Obscure though that movie already is, this is probably the most serious parody of the event anyone has even attempted.

Where the January 6th insurrection even appears in media, it has to be underspoken. The first episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds rather notoriously snuck January 6th footage into a montage of bygone Earth chaos. Although really, even this kind of lip service is a bit insulting. The Euromaidan Protests in Ukraine actually succeeded in driving the democratically elected president out of the country and directly led to the ongoing Ukraine War. The recent coup attempt in South Korea involved the president trying, and failing, to use the military against the country’s parliament, leading to ongoing arrest and impeachment drama.

What did the January 6th insurrectionists do by comparison? Well they…mostly just encouraged liberals to create this ridiculous mythology about January 6th most people barely even cared about. One of the darker ironies of election night exit polling was that voters rated democracy as an issue that mostly ran in Trump’s favor. Apparently, when people thought about democracy under attack, they were more likely to think about politically-motivated criminal prosecutions against Trump, or the Democrats covering up the senility of their chosen candidate and designating a successor by fiat, than they were about something Trump’s most fervent supporters did nearly four years ago.

Honestly, the January 6th comic, despite its pretensions of being educational, and even being distributed in Pennsylvania schools, is just aimed at people who already take the apocalyptic potential of January 6th for granted. In the wake of the election, it’s at best petty and at worst unimportant. The world, if not the creators of this comic, will soon forget about it in any case.