This Slavery. By Scarlett and Sophie Rickard. London: SelfMadeHero, 2025. 368pp, $23.99
Review by Paul Buhle
Rising stars in the comics world, with nominations for Eisner and Broken Frontier awards, the Rickard sisters may register as the leading artists of historical, proletarian dramas with socialist morale. Or rather: Scarlett is the artist, Sophie the story-teller, a creative pair from the same Lancashire country as their subject.
They have already done thousands of avid readers a favor by adapting the enormous, historic novel by Richard Tressel about impoverished paperhangers, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, and brought a widely misunderstood woman suffage movement back to life in an adaptation of Constance Maud’s mostly forgotten work published more than a century ago.
And now, we see Lancashire, famous for its nineteenth century textile mills with thousands of underpaid workers, for the working class participation in the Chartist movement and for their self-sacrificing support of the antislavery cause in the US. The novelist, Ethie Carnie Holdsworth (1886-1962), has not exactly been forgotten, but her status as the first blue collar English woman to write a novel, and her remarkable output of at least ten novels, had long been neglected until British feminist-socialists helped bring it back to light.
Textile owners naturally wanted continuation of sales to the Confederacy. A decade before the Civil War, masses of workers in Lancashire had nevertheless greeted Abolitionist speakers with enthusiasm, embracing an antislavery cause that many American workers shunned. The protagonists of the novel take another path through history: two sisters unemployed when “their” mill burned. Rachel sets herself to a course of reform while her sister fatalistically accepts the inequality of contemporary marriage to a capitalist swine.
We see mass street events, meetings around radical causes, and a bang-up conclusion that no conscientious reviewer would reveal. If This Slavery sometimes leans into melodrama, it faithfully follows its source. But plot summaries and narrative high points offer scarce appreciation of the graphic novel’s accomplishments and sheer beauty.
Perhaps the exactness of the industrial, blue collar setting and the precision of the detail of clothes, but also of contemporary working class language, will strike the historically-minded reader the most forcefully. The sheer length is staggering. This reviewer is a poor judge of the use of color, which is now obviously accomplished (like nearly all the rest of comic art) by way of computer graphics rather than laboriously by handwork, likewise dialogue, no longer written out, a point of pride for comic artists only a decade or so ago. To have accomplished this vast visual text any other way would likely have been a life-long task for these sisters obviously with their eye on future radical projects.
Something more needs to be said about working class portrayal in comic art, or rather, its near-total absence until the recent past. “Out Our Way,” one of the long-lasting and popular early newspaper strips, holds the dubious honor of being the first strip with a recurring factory scene (usually, the supervisor is frustrated at the kinks in the production process) and the first to feature a corpse. Lower class types go back to Mutt ’n Jeff, racetrack touts, or even to the Yellow Kid, the 1890s slum-dweller whose ethnic identity remains uncertain but whose coloring gave the comics a daily identity.
Actual working class people, their families and neighborhoods, receded further with the triumph of the family-oriented strips in the 1920s. Famously, Blondie needed to leave her secretary-and-flapper life for home and Dagwood. Comic books rose to their apex with working class guys at war, never at work; and in the grim strips of blue collar violence, in which escape from wage slavery meant guns and molls (themselves apparently escaping dull working lives).
The rise of Underground Comix brought intense, radical themes to the surface as never before. Despite the political leanings/commitments of the artists themselves (in the Bay Area, they even launched a union drive that promptly failed), the sharpening contradictions of blue collar life were rarely seen, except through glimpses of satire.
Graphic novels, now in the global thousands or tens of thousands, not even to mention digital comic creations, treat the widest possible settings and characters. With some notable exceptions—among them Wobblies!, the 2005 history of the Industrial Workers of the World, with a handful of artists, edited by Nicole Shulman and myself, on the centenary of the famed organization—we have not seen much else.
All the more important, then, is This Slavery, for what it seeks to do. Anyone who puts on a pair of shoes knows, or should know, that factory work continues, blue collar life continues across the world. Let us hope to see more in comic art.
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