Category Archives: Comics Reviews

August 6, 2023 · 10:50 am

BUILDINGS ARE BARKING: Diane Noomin Remembered in Comics Tribute by Bill Griffith

The Buildings Are Barking: Diane Noomin, in Memoriam. By Bill Griffith.

Seattle: F.U. Press, Fantagraphics,  2023. 23pp, $7.

Guest Review by Paul Buhle

We are nearly a year now since the passing of Diane Newman, who took on the comics moniker “Diane Noomin” as she began to publish her work in the Bay Area-centered world of Underground Comix in the 1970s. This is, then, a tribute booklet, but singular, in the way no one except her husband Bill Griffith could conceive and draw. As far as I can recall, no homage from a comics spouse has ever achieved this conceptual depth or intensity. It is a remarkable miniature, with a surprising depth that will please but fail to surprise the regular readers of Griffith, a master of the self-reflection that is also mass-culture-reflection.

The Buildings Are Barking might be compared, if comparisons are possible, to the many pages of Robert Crumb’s Biblical-adaptation Genesis in which Aline Kominsky Crumb’s physical self appears and reappears as the women of ancient Hebrew lore. Real-life Aline had a couple of decades ahead.

Within the last year or so, the artists of Underground Comix lore have been disappearing in haste: Justin Green, Jay Lynch, and Aline Kominsky-Crumb, to name only the most widely known. Spain Rodriguez and Harvey Pekar (not artist but writer/editor and self-publisher) passed a decade earlier, signalling how easily even the memories of a unique and vital development in comic art might slip away.

Griffith has seized the moment,  rather taken his time to seize the moment, perhaps as a yohrtseit (symbolic Jewish commemoration on an anniversary) to Diane and her ambiguously and also unambiguously Jewish identity. Urged on by Ko-Ko the Clown—Max Fleischer’s magical animated creation of the 1920s—Griffith gets around within a few pages to telling us about Diane Newman’s alter-ego, Didi Glitz, the soul of her comix or comics work. A teenage inhabitant of Canarsie of the 1950s, Didi had all the appealing/repellent qualities of adolescence seizing onto popular culture as a means of identity. Bouffant hairdos, garish clothes, garish crushes on boys (sometimes goys), clique-obsessions among girlfriends, above all a need for expression, no matter how embarrassing to the objective viewer.

Griffith (let’s call him Griffy here, as Diane did) enjoys his rumination on life in San Francisco of the 1970s-80s, perhaps not really the “idyllic city…before the Dotcom boom,” but idyllic for them and for many artists. Always badly overpriced, losing its architectural beauty decade by decade, their San Francisco was still arguably (with New Orleans) the most beautiful of American urbanscapes. Here, at any rate, Griffith and Newman moved past earlier long-term relationships to grasp each other, marrying in 1980. From there on, and no doubt connected to their mutual grasp of the varied icons of popular culture seen as “history” (her poodle pin collection, his vintage diner photos), they sunk or rose into each other.

Bill Griffith has famously been producing the near-daily strip Zippy the Pinhead since the middle of those San Francisco days, while Diane became part of a subset of women comics artists who ruthlessly delved into their lives and psyches. She aspired to draw a comic about her parents’ secret (and very Jewish) connections with the Communist Party in the McCarthy Era, but she didn’t live long enough. Griffith has found his own way to produce real history-based comic works as Zippy stumbles through time and space. In other words, and laughs aside, they were both serious artists.

The Buildings Are Barking is deeply personal in ways that this reviewer cannot describe adequately, and to which the reader is advised to proceed intuitively, that is, following Griffith’s own shifting moods of consciousness. At the end, we are with  Ko-Ko the Clown again. Ko-Ko always expressed a grimness behind the jaunty exterior: there is a bit of a Grim Reaper about him.

What any serious artist (or writer) leaves behind is the effort at expression, brilliant or less than brilliant but a striving with purpose. Griffith has captured Diane Noomin aka Newman, and thereby captured himself as well.

Paul Buhle’s latest comic is an adaptation of W.E.B. Du Bois’s classic Souls of Black Folk, by artist Paul Peart Smith (Rutgers University Press).

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August 4, 2023 · 3:00 pm

Maskerade #7 (Kevin Smith) comics review

Fans of Kevin Smith, and fans of the offbeat and unusual, have been keeping tabs on the Kevin Smith-led Secret Stash Press imprint at Dark Horse Comics. So far, it has offered fans a couple of titles: Quick Stops, an anthology series set in the world of Kevin Smith movies;  and Maskerade, a crime noir about a cut-throat vigilante. The latest issue, number 7 (of 8), comes out August 9th and here’s a taste of this wild and woolly thriller.

Writers Kevin Smith and Andy McElfresh came out of the gate with this title like two bats out of hell. This is grim stuff mashed up with dark humor, smashed with even darker stuff. Ah, but if that’s what your horror radar has been looking for, then it must be pinging like crazy. This is high-octane horror more than anything else. There’s humor but it’s not there to lighten the horror load as much as it’s there to set up the next jolt. As long as you, my dear mature reader, know that going in, you should be good to go.

Our main character, Felicia, is a female version of every character that Liam Neeson portrays in movies now, a character bent on revenge and willing to do anything, literally anything, to exact vigilante justice. So, if you haven’t already, be prepared for blood to spurt out all over the place and, well, prepare for blood to flood any nook and cranny. You will see red over and over again. The artwork by Giulia Gualazzi is on point, and compliments all the action and horror, and blood. Colorist Giulia Brusco is quite adept at providing vasts quantities of the color red, which is, as I suggest, the prominent color in this comic book. You like red, well, you’ll see lots of it here.

No vigilante story is complete without the villain, or villains, getting ample amounts of comeuppance. You thought you could get away with that, Mr. Evil? Think again! Here’s a poker through your hand; and how about we saw off your . . . yeah, that should do it! In this issue, one of the Mister Evils in this story somehow escapes the cage he was placed in and, against all odds, has somehow managed to turn the tables on Felicia. There’s a good bit of high tech shape-shifting going on in this comic and it looks like one Mr. Evil managed to outwit Felicia with her own shape-shifting powers. That makes for a very interesting issue leading up to the grand finale. So, if you’re a big fan of Kevin Smith, this is the mother lode. And, if you’re new to Kevin Smith, especially his weird brand of comic books, you’ve been warned. Who knows, you might love it!

One last word, I sincerely do have to tip my hat to everyone involved with this comic. Horror comics have a long history and tradition. It’s not easy to maintain the pace once the scenario is in place and the key players have been set loose. No doubt, our main player, Felicia, is quite a force of nature. And all the baddies have what’s coming to them. This is a well-oiled comic, that really works, and that’s saying a lot.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Maskerade is published by Dark Horse Comics, available as of 9 August 2023.

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July 19, 2023 · 10:30 am

Nudism Comes to Connecticut comics review

Unashamed Comic Nudes!

Nudism Comes to Connecticut. By Susan Chade and Jon Buller. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 175pp, $30.

Nudism (many prefer “naturism”) is more familiar than most Americans can now imagine. The omnipresent rural skinny-dipping probably did not draw much upon a rich and varied European (or other) nudist traditions among the respectable classes as well as others. Communitarian groups in the US developed a nudist ideology of sorts, as far back as the 1890s, but memories of Walt Whitman and even Benjamin Franklin “air bathing” had likely been forgotten by the time the Greenwich Village fashionable set disrobed in Cape Cod summers of the 1910s.

Nudism Comes to Connecticut, written and drawn by a veteran children’s book team, offers a convincing historical experience of free thinking Yankees during the 1930s. They make creative use of a real text, Frances and Mason Merrill’s Nudism Come to America (1932), a volume itself no doubt reflecting the free-spirited, short-skirted 1920s Flapper Era.

Somewhere around Lyme, Connecticut, not far from Manhattan by train,  a Hungarian immigrant hatches a plan for rural land use. A few years earlier,  an American diplomat unhappy at his job in Budapest shared with a friend some of the current German magazines extolling nudism’s many healthful benefits. Back home in the US in 1915, the American and his wife, a native Estonian, take over a defunct hotel in a pleasant landscape, near an underused lake.

Here, somewhat embroidered fiction really does more or less coincide with fact. The idea of “cooperative colonies,” guests and residents doing most of the maintenance and in turn owning shares in the property, was very much alive in the European middle classes of the pre-fascism days, and even philanthropically extended, for periods of the summer, to groups of urban slum dwellers. Before Stalin’s rise to power, a nudist culture of Russian “Proletcult” also seemed to take hold: it was considered especially good for workers to get naked in the countryside, when possible. By the later 1920s, these experiences even gained a pedigree of American scholarly interest.

No surprise, then, that out in the Connecticut woods, not far from a lake, a “cabin colony” sprung up, built on loans and the wishful thinking that it might pay for itself. Takers seem to enjoy themselves thoroughly, even with husbands and wives understandably nervous about their own mates in the buff. As in real life nudism, nude  versions of barely competitive games like volleyball seem to be the mandatory accompaniment to swimming. The comic portrayals of nudes here are tasteful and charming, if not quite realistic to sagging flesh.

The community thrives for a while, never quite overcoming the resentment and hostility of some neighbors, and then runs into the economic collapse of the economy in the Depression. The quasi-utopian adventure ends. As the author/artist team concludes, “most of this actually happened.” (p.173).

It is a footnote, perhaps not so far from this realistic comic, that by the 1960s, bohemian-minded American readers of Bertold Brecht, Georg Luckacs and Wilhelm Reich would draw the conclusion that nudism had to be, was indeed inevitably, political. The bohemian-radical tradition had already been revived after the Second World War in other parts of the world including both Germanies. Although this detail has been largely forgotten, the East Germans, the most proportionally nudist population in the world, actually resisted Russian edicts and took pleasure where they could under a repressive regime. Just as amazing, the bureaucratic class joined them.

Spending their summers on the Cape, American veterans of antiracist and antiwar activism staged dramatic nude-ins at the National Seashore during the middle 1970s. This political action would lead to decades of lobbying politicians for more “free beaches,” an idea that has come, gone and perhaps come again in parts of the US. Today’s nudists should enjoy the innocence of Nudism Comes to Connecticut, so deftly defying the hostility of religious conservatives and  lawmakers right up to the present. “Naturism” seems to have escaped comic art otherwise, save for a few brief, wry commentaries in underground comix. Perhaps the subject has only been waiting for its comic art re-creation.

Paul Buhle

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July 5, 2023 · 10:50 am

MY BODY, OUR RIGHTS, World War 3 illustrated #53 review

WW3 Strikes Again!

MY BODY, OUR RIGHTS, World War 3 illustrated #53. Edited by Paula Hewitt Amram, Sabrina Jones and Rebecca Migdal, assistant editor Seth Tobocman.  AK Press, 212pp. $15.

This is, for starters, an incredible bargain of a comic or any illustrated book these days. The two-hundred-plus pages are packed with work from what seems like hundreds of artists but in reality comes down to 35. Its appearance, almost but not quite needless to say, is prompted by the draconian attack upon abortion and women’s control of their bodies by the Supreme Court and the legislatures plus courts of dozens of states. To say that even the limited advances made in the last fifty years are now threatened is a vast understatement. This book offers a struggle against a species of sexual fascism, and like the antifascist struggles of old, holds our attention with its urgency.

Two fresh themes especially attract the reviewer’s attention. In the true tradition of WW3, the rising crop of talent is harvested. This time around as well, more gender fluidity is apparent: another development in radical comic art showing itself in narrative and drawing styles adapted and created anew.

Cover art by Sabrina Jones

The reviewer will inevitably pick favorites and “Post Procedure” by Sabrina Jones, the opening story after a two-page table of contents that also serves up an anatomical lesson,  shocks with its candor. This could be the artist’s own story—and, indeed, does happen to be her story— or the normal saga of trauma (with some occasional exuberance) in a young woman’s life. A sexually active single feminist gets pregnant by accident, and now what? Having a baby appeals greatly, being stuck as a parent and a single parent has much less appeal. There’s a bitter-sweetness here that says more than the reviewer’s words can express.

There are ample other looks backward, for the historically-minded, like this reviewer, to earlier times. Back then, especially before 1949, birth control information let alone legal abortion would be practically unknown among wide classes of Americans. Several gripping pieces here including Tom Keough’s “What My Catholic Religion Taught Me about Abortion,”“A Choice of Life,” by Sam Migliore and “You Could Be a Broom!” by Emily Waters, together lay out what we expect from the Religious Right but what young people are not prepared to deconstruct. Others, notably “Lifeblood Driving” by Lee Marrs, carefully recollect a history of abortion struggles including “bad new days” and…the courageous Resistance. Sue Simensky Bietala’s  “Thank You Nurses,” means a lot to this reviewer, the son of a nurse and social worker who offered illegal advice to married and unmarried women in Manhattan of the 1930s.

The sagas of irresponsible males, dangerous abortions and long-time struggles for sanity remarkably bring forth some great humor. “Late,” by Joyce Farmer, recalls a time not so far away, back in the middle 1950s, with a young woman already engaged but not at all happy to be “late” month after month, then pregnant and married to an unsympathetic husband, and then onward in life. If this sounds grim, Farmer makes every panel weirdly humorous and weirdly very realistic, in the comic-art sense.

Other high points surely include a fantasy high point, “The Doll’s Picnic” by Jenny Gonzalez-Blitz, and sometimes grim as well as brave adventures in the world of gender-identity as in “I Survived the Horror of Puberty” by Liz Keough, and “Trans+binary Reproductive Health Care,” by Jessica Raynor Sturdivant. Not to mention the direct frontal attack on the current Supreme Court by the Guerilla Girls and by Sue Coe, herself the best known of the artists here.

For me, these strips and others in the book, so widely varied in styles but so keyed in on the issues, collectively bring us back to that old question, “What is comic art anyway?” Apparently, the answer could be “whatever a sequential drawn narrative can do.” To make such an observation is at once too vague and too little appreciative of what is going on in these pages.

Paul Buhle

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May 29, 2023 · 7:04 pm

B. is Dying (#5) by Tom Hart comics review

B. is Dying (#5). by Tom Hart. Sequential Artists Workshop. 2023. 24 pp. $8.

Tom Hart’s new comics series is about a man dying in a ditch. Well, ostensibly so. Yeah, there’s a lot more to it than that. Tom Hart’s work looks incredibly alive as if it is being created as he’s thinking it. But the end result, the actual content, has been refined in a million different ways. So, come take a look at one of the most alive comics about dying, or any subject.

Tom Hart speaks to the utter disconnection we all must confront as human beings. It’s an existential crisis on a personal and global level, even a cosmic one. The focus here is on the planet and how we interact with it. As a cartoonist, Hart gives it his all to express his dismay and heart-felt desire to find some answers. The reader is led on a journey atop the crust of Mother Earth. What does that mean? It’s a perfect metaphor for how we usually interact with nature, all superficial, never digging deeper.

With a gentle nudge, Hart gets me to thinking about how we routinely take our environment for granted: we exploit it, endanger it and rape it. We are more prone to tear it apart than we are to try to understand what we call home. How can we ever ignore our own home? And yet we do. This comic expresses the collective nightmare we are all having, whether we choose to accept it or deny it. If we’re being honest with ourselves, we’re all afraid. Hart leans into that fear with his comics: direct and simple, but not so simple, more elegant-simple. Ah, yes, Tom Hart, the master of the elegant-simple.

I appreciate these comics on many levels, not the least of which is on an entertainment level. I’m thinking of how I cherish any time I spend viewing the work of Buster Keaton or, say, Peter Sellers at their soulful best. I can only imagine what Peter or Buster would have done if they appeared in a Tom Hart comic.

There’s the main character to Tom’s story, a lanky Everyman with hair sticking straight up. He is self-aware enough to know that he’s merely walking on the crust of the Earth. If only all of us could reach that point! It troubles him. It frightens him. It gives him nightmares. He dreams that he’s a helpless/hapless parakeet somehow let loose from the home he’s known as a pet and sprung free into the wild. He is out of his element. He is clueless. He has no real notion of how to interact with nature, just like–you guessed it–the average human being.

Tom Hart’s Everyman is just self-aware enough to know that something’s wrong. He thinks he may have come from a great place but has lost his way. It’s all too easy to lose one’s way, especially if you’re on such an uncertain path. This is not new. This has been going on for a very long time, for as long as there have been humans. Tom Hart has been at his comics-making craft for a long time too, for decades. Tom even makes a reference in the introduction to this issue to a recurring theme in his comics of a lone man in a vague landscape in an existential crisis.  Tom’s experiments have led to masterful award-winning work year after year. And one thing is clear: Tom Hart has not lost his way. In fact, Tom has many followers who wish to create comics every bit as good as his comics. Learn more about Tom and his Sequential Artists Workshop where you too can learn the fine, subtle and rewarding art of making comics.

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May 28, 2023 · 6:20 pm

The Compleat Moscow Calling (Amatl Comix #5) review and interview

The Compleat Moscow Calling

A young American journalist had the time of his life chronicling the Yeltsin years in Russia. A heady, disruptive and chaotic time to say the least. There was Jose Alaniz, the first to plant his cartoonist flag: Moscow Calling, was the first daily English-language comic strip to be published in Russia. It ran in the Moscow Tribune for nine months beginning in the fall of 1993. Over the years, Alaniz kept adding to the initial story and that has led to this collection published by Amatl Comix, an imprint of San Diego State University Press.

If you’re a fan of Richard Linklater’s 1990 cult classic film, Slacker, then this could be for you. Imagine Austin, or Seattle, back in the grungy free-wheeling early ’90s and then drop that absurd hype and mayhem into the cauldron of dysfunction that was post-Soviet Russia under the less than steady leadership of Boris Yeltsin. Yes, anything goes until it all goes up in smoke.

Moscow Calling comic strip excerpts (1993)

That is the scene that a young Alaniz was privy to and navigated within as a newly-minted college graduate overstaying his last semester abroad in Moscow by a few years, with a spirit for adventure and a burning desire to avoid a daily grind back in the States. The comic strip that held these misadventures together is dutifully archived in this collection, given a deluxe treatment with added material and even an excerpt from a novella. Essentially, it’s a treasure trove of material to enhance the experience of reading the comic strip in question. All lots of fun for the academically inclined as well as the free spirit with a hopeless case of wanderlust.

Yeltsin gives way to Putin.

As Jose points out during our interview, the main character of Pepe serves as a bit of an alter ego, at least in the sense that his story loosely follows Jose’s own progress: going from an expat hanging out with other expats to making new friends among the natives. Of course, Pepe’s progress is spiked with larger-than-life mishaps most befitting the comic strip world. But there is that nagging feeling that both Pepe and Jose are privileged, finding ways to be plucked out of harm and discomfort. In the end, it is Jose’s insight and humility that adds another layer of charm to this engaging and inventive comic strip.

The Compleat Moscow Calling

Jose Alaniz is in a wonderful position to continue what he’s begun with Moscow Calling–and he has every intention of doing so. I know, for a fact, that the comics medium attracts all kinds of people for a multitude of reasons. The ones who stick around, I mean a lifetime of working at this craft, of genuinely exploring and growing, are people attracted to the uncanny power of words and pictures. The strongest connection tends to create auteur-cartoonists. I’m one of them. Jose is one of them. It’s not a boast. Some may say it’s a curse!

If you are a writer-cartoonist, then you will find yourself forever being tugged by the demands of prose and visual mastery. That said, I know it’s a gift too. It doesn’t come easily, all tied in a bow at your front door one crisp and bright morning–although many may think that will magically happen. No, it’s a balancing act and a juggling act. Ultimately, you need to figure it out on your own, work at it alone, but that’s how it needs to be. I know that Jose has the ability and the passion to pursue his comics narrative adventures. This collection is an exciting portal into one person’s creative journey byway of accepting the challenge of being a stranger in a strange land.

I hope you enjoy my interview with Jose Alaniz. I ask that you consider dropping by and leaving a Like and Comment. Likes and Comments are the lifeblood of any YouTube Channel and are always very much appreciated. Subscribe to my YouTube Channel too and I’ll be most grateful. Be sure to order your copy of The Compleat Moscow Calling by visiting Amatl Comix.

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May 25, 2023 · 4:42 pm

Maximus Blade (#1) comic book review

Cover art by Franco Bevilacqua

Maximus Blade #1. w. Chris Warren a. Ken Lavin Chris Warren Media. $4.99

The first issue of a comic book, especially from an independent publisher, can be a very exciting thing and Maximus Blade does not disappoint. The writing is crisp and crackling with urgency and humor. The art is spot on, transporting the reader through time and space with a cast of engaging unlikely heroes up against a truly motley crew of villainous baddies.

Maximus Blade, a sentinel on a mission.

Our story takes places way into the future, 2480, enough to make my head spin. But that’s part of the fun, of course. Time enough for all sorts of mayhem to have happened leaving good ole planet Earth a mere shell of its former self. Time enough for the upper class to have gone even higher, all the way to an outpost on Earth’s moon. Everyone else stays behind back on Earth which has devolved into a Mad Max wasteland.

“When” the hell am I?

Despite all the dystopia, there is hope, or at least it seems that way. There’s no shortage of possibilities to this comic. Meet Steve, a guy from our own present who had it all, only to be swept up by a time portal. Meet Penelope, a member of the super elite who lives on the moon but not anymore. And meet Maximus Blade, the result of some heavy genetic mutations and not much for words. Between the three of them, you’ve got everything you need to keep the adventures rolling along quite nicely.

Maximus Blade and Steve.

My favorite scene in this issue is probably the first scene between Maximus Blade and Steve, who is no slouch back where he comes from but is totally out of his depth in the distant future he’s been teleported into. Maximus, in the few words he grunts, makes it pretty clear he needs a tech guy and fast. Steve hesitates, but not for long. Just as Maximus is walking away for good, abandoning the “stupid kid” to certain death, Steve chimes in to say he’s actually the best tech guy ever. It’s a funny moment and pivotal to what happens next. I’m not sure why Maximus was so easily convinced but maybe we’ll find out in the next issue. For now, Max, Steve and Penelope are up to their eyeballs in death-defying adventure. This comic does a fine job with balancing action and humor leaving the reader wanting more. Not bad at all for a first issue.

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May 10, 2023 · 8:50 pm

COVID COP by Dean Haspiel review

COVID COP. Art & script by Dean Haspiel. Dean Haspiel Deep Cuts. 28 pp. $15.

Dean Haspiel is in fine form with this short work in comics that transforms the Covid pandemic into a surreal parody of a sci-fi/horror story. In this scenario, the virus has completely taken over to the point that the government has clamped down hard on anyone disobeying protocol. It’s a take-no-prisoners battle plan and one police officer, Lincoln Bio, is doing his best to follow orders. If you’re a fan of Dean Haspiel, then you can expect that kooky sense of humor, bathed in pathos, made famous in the Billy Dogma comics series.

Our anti-hero Lincoln Bio is aware that he’s living in very strange times making very strange demands on him. How he comes to terms with his marching orders and how he confronts an insurgent group out to kill everyone makes up a good part of this dark comedy. Drawn in the mock heroic style that Haspiel is known for, this comic book will deliver a weird and entertaining jolt right to the jugular and then some. You probably won’t have nightmares from reading this but I can’t guarantee it. And, if there’s a sequel, all bets are off. This comic, by the way, is the first in the developing line of indie comics, Dean Haspiel Deep Cuts.

This comic will defy your expectations, especially if you don’t really know what to expect, and offers up the most recent example of a cartoonist at the top of his game. The winner of a recent Kickstarter campaign, this comic book is making its way to its backers and will make its way to you. Keep up with Dean Haspiel for more details.

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April 20, 2023 · 8:10 pm

Thaddeus Stevens: The Great Commoner comics review

Thaddeus Stevens: The Great Commoner. writer Ross Hetrick. artist Noah Van Sciver. editor Paul Buhle. Thaddeus Stevens Society of Pennsylvania. 18 pp. $5.

Thaddeus Stevens is an American historical figure who is brought to life in this remarkable mini-comic. You may not recall or recognize the name, and that is part of the reason this little book has come into existence. Stevens is one of the most significant players in the fight for human rights outside of Abraham Lincoln and, some may argue, there is no Lincoln without Stevens. These are the kind of issues dealt with in this pamphlet-sized comic.

Fans of the work of Noah Van Sciver will appreciate the distinctive style and masterful use of the comics medium. If you haven’t gotten a chance, you’ll want to check out Noah’s landmark book from last year, Joseph Smith and the Mormons. You can read our review here. That same intense level of scrutiny, combined with brevity, is on display for this tribute to Thaddeus Stevens. At a brisk and steady clip, each page here packs a punch. We see how pivotal Stevens was in securing freedom and rights for America’s former slaves. Yes, it’s safe to argue that we needed to have Stevens in order to have Lincoln. In other words, we all know and honor Lincoln but credit must be given to the man at the forefront for the fight for freedom and human dignity.

Paper copies are $5 and if you’d like one, send an email requesting one to info@thaddeusstevenssociety.com and one will be sent to you with a self-addressed envelope to send back payment.

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March 29, 2023 · 1:10 pm

Harriet Tubman Demon Slayer Vol. 1 review: America’s Most Wanted

cover by Courtland L. Ellis

Harriet Tubman Demon Slayer. w. David Crownson. a. Courtland L. Ellis and others. Kingwood Comics. 252 pp. $59.99

The subject of slavery has been depicted and processed in many ways, from critical analysis to cathartic expression. This new comics series takes the reader on a mystical journey led by none other than Harriet Tubman (1823-1913), the famed leader of the Underground Railroad (1850-1860) which led enslaved people to freedom in America. Creator and writer David Crownson gives his story just the right bite, which makes sense for this mashup of genres.

Meet Harriet Tubman, Demon Slayer. Crownson goes all out casting Tubman in the role of a superhero ninja freedom fighter who must do battle with whatever monsters slave owners can throw at her: vampires, werewolves, demons, you name it. This trade paperback is a graphic novel collecting the previous six issues to this series. In this story, we follow Tubman as she is helping a family to freedom. Crownson has done a great job with character development. I was quickly engaged in the plight of the Edgefield family: the young girl Vanessa; her parents Caesar and Catherine; and her brother, Nathan. Tubman, like a mysterious angel, suddenly appears in their lives as they are attempting to flee from slavery. The right amount of action, humor, horror and fantasy ensues.

I was immediately intrigued by this book. The cover art got my attention and the artwork throughout, led by Courtland L. Ellis, kept me turning pages. The book begins with a photograph of Tubman and a quote from her: “Never wound a snake; kill it.” That sets the tone very nicely. From what I know, Tubman appears to have been a very driven, reserved and no-nonsense person. That’s the way that Crownson depicts her. She has a job to do and she does it with speed and precision. She knows exactly how to drop a vampire or werewolf in seconds flat. Out comes the magic sword or the wooden stake and that’s that. It’s cathartic to see how swiftly Tubman takes care of all the villains. In comics, we often find some righteous justice and this comic delivers on that promise.

Harriet Tubman and her son, Chip, battle monsters.

To take a historical figure and then put that person into a fictionalized universe is one of the most satisfying things you can do as a writer. No doubt, Crownson is having a great time with his superhero version of Harriet Tubman. On the creative side, it’s great fun. And you can also call it a sacred privilege. Crownson celebrates and honors Tubman with respect and joyful energy, fully aware of the painful and sensitive subject; fully aware of hope and healing. There’s no record of this anywhere but Crownson includes a character, Chip, a young white man, as Tubman’s adopted son. It’s just part of the story, an uplifting use of creative license, and something that Tubman would probably give a wink to and approve of. I’m confident that she’d approve of this whole audacious comic book series and enjoy it.

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