John Lennon's Imagine as a Comic by Pablo Stanley

Cartoonist Pablo Stanley turned John Lennon’s Imagine into a webcomic in which each line of the song is paired with a drawing of people from very different backgrounds, beliefs and causes, all living side by side. The full-colour comic is shown below, followed by the story of how it was made and the background of the song itself.

Pablo Stanley's Imagine comic

Stanley published his comics on his blog, Stanleycolors.com. According to Open Culture, his first take on Imagine appeared in June 2012 as a mostly black-and-white draft. It drew complaints, and he released a revised full-colour version in September 2013 with a note explaining that the comic is not anti-religion or atheist propaganda. A video version set to the song was also made.

Who appears in the comic

Rather than drawing abstract crowds, Stanley filled the panels with recognisable people who held very different beliefs. Open Culture lists among them:

• Albert Einstein, the physicist, who described himself as agnostic.
• Martin Luther King Jr., the Baptist minister who led the US civil rights movement.
• Mahatma Gandhi, the Hindu leader of India’s non-violent independence movement.
• Bob Marley, the Jamaican musician and Rastafarian.
• Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office in California, who joined the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1978 and was assassinated at City Hall that November.
• Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist whose reporting on the Second Chechen War for Novaya Gazeta exposed abuses; she was shot dead in Moscow on 7 October 2006.

The choice is the point. Putting a Hindu, a Protestant minister, a Rastafarian and an agnostic scientist into the same peaceful scene reads the song’s line about “no religion” as a world where belief no longer divides people, rather than a world without believers.

The story behind the song

Lennon began recording Imagine on 27 May 1971 at his home studio at Tittenhurst Park in England, with strings added in New York that July. It was the title track of his 1971 album and was released as a US single that October, reaching number 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. In Britain it came out as a single only in 1975, and after Lennon’s murder in December 1980 it reached number 1 in January 1981.

The lyrics owe a great deal to Yoko Ono. Her 1964 book Grapefruit, full of short instructions that begin by asking the reader to imagine something, was a direct inspiration, and Lennon himself later said much of the lyric and concept came from her. In 2017 the US National Music Publishers Association formally recognised Ono as a co-writer.

Why Imagine still divides opinion

Lennon was open about the song’s message, which questions religion, nations and possessions. He said it was accepted because it was sugar-coated, and that he had learned to “put your political message across with a little honey”. Critics have called the lyrics naive or contradictory, coming from a wealthy rock star asking listeners to imagine no possessions, and some religious listeners objected from the start.

Even so, it has become one of the world’s most familiar peace songs. Rolling Stone ranked it third in its 2004 list of the greatest songs of all time. Since 2005 it has been played in New York’s Times Square just before midnight on New Year’s Eve, and it has featured in several Olympic ceremonies, from Atlanta 1996 to Tokyo and Beijing.

Why a song works as a comic

A song moves at its own speed; a comic lets you stop on a single panel for as long as you want. That is what makes Stanley’s version effective. Each image gives a face to an idea that, in the song, stays abstract: a peaceful world stops being a slogan once you see Gandhi, Milk and Politkovskaya in the same frame. Whether you agree with every line of Imagine or not, the comic is an invitation to picture the people it describes.

Sources: Pablo Stanley (Facebook); Open Culture, 28 Sept 2015; Imagine (John Lennon song), Wikipedia; Harvey Milk, Wikipedia; Anna Politkovskaya, Wikipedia.

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