In the now-famous protest photo of Greg Ketter by Theia Chatelle, Ketter is poised, tree-like, in mid-stride, his body clouded in mists of tear gas. Moments earlier, he had given the quote to the TV cameras that wrote itself into a part of cultural and political history: “I’m 70 years old, and I’m fucking angry.”
Ketter had come out on that Saturday not to protest, exactly, but to be a part of the Minneapolis community confronting ICE and CPB. He had been drawn out, initially, by the killing of Renée Nicole Good earlier in the month, and when ICU nurse Alex Pretti became the second Minneapolis resident killed by federal authorities in the space of three weeks, Ketter felt compelled to stand with others at the site of the murder. “I got there about an hour after the murder and went right up to the intersection that ICE had taped off and stood guard. There were perhaps 50-100 of them and several hundred observers/protesters milling around. Some were right up front yelling and swearing. I became one of them,” Ketter wrote on his Facebook page.
Ketter is a comic shop owner, and a notable one: his shop DreamHaven Books, founded in 1977, is the oldest continuously operating comic shop in Minneapolis, and among the oldest in the United States. And while the extent of national attention has been somewhat new to Ketter – he spent the three days following his appearance on the news fielding interviews with national and local press – it is not the first time he has stepped into the media spotlight. In 1987, he became one of the founders of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, and remained on the board of that organization for the next two decades. In 2020, his shop was damaged during the unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd, prompting Ketter to reluctantly open a GoFundMe to support the store’s recovery.
But while Ketter sounds weary after the past three days, none of this seems to have dimmed his commitment to either comics or to political principle. The Comics Journal spoke with him on January 27 about where he, and his community, find themselves now. {read}