Comics and Modernism: History, Form and Culture. Edited by Jonathon Najarian. Oxford: University of Mississippi, 2024. 326pp, $30.
Guest Review by Paul Buhle
Category Archives: Paul Buhle
BEN KATCHOR by Benjamin Fraser book review
Ben Katchor. By Benjamin Fraser. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2023. 130pp, $20.00
Guest Review by Paul Buhle
Filed under Ben Katchor, Comics, Paul Buhle
SOPHIE’S WORLD: Volume II comics review
Sophie’s World: a Graphic Novel about the History of Philosophy, Volume II: From Descartes to the Present Day. SelfMadeHero, London, 2023. 260pp. $29.95. Scripted by Vincent Zabus, based on the novel by Jostein Gaarder, drawing by Nicoby, color by Philippe Ory, translation by Edward Gauvin.
Guest Review by Paul Buhle
The publishing of novels is, of course, centuries old, in thousands of languages, and even after the competition of radio, television and the Internet, a hugely successful commercial business. By notable contrast, the Graphic Novel owes its prominence to the 1990s, in the US at least, and despite the awards handed out by various institutions, perhaps it came too late to find a secure footing.
Hardly had the virtual ink dried on a distribution deal for Fantagraphics in the late 1990s, when video games had begun to eat at the lower-age edge. According to some close observers, the age average of the adult reader has meanwhile continued to rise, as gainfully employed adults, 30 or over, take to GNs as a newer version of the “art book” seen for generations on the coffee tables of sophisticates. Perhaps these two trends might balance out, or perhaps not. Parents and grandparents may need, in the years ahead, to force educational comics on their pre-adolescents, an experiment rarely altogether successful. Art Spiegelman insisted, long ago, that with the demise of the daily funny pages, comics as a form of expressive entertainment had lost its practical basis, and would be forced into the world of art and even the museum.
Still, the market for self-improvement or “encouraged self-improvement” is likely to be large for some time to come. A French original translated into English for SelfMadeHero in the UK, Sophie’s World: A Graphic Novel about the History of Philosophy, saw its first volume covering the Ancient World to Descartes. According to this volume’s final page, the literary original was a world-wide best seller, prompting the Norwegian author, Josein Gaarder, to donate a large chunk of the royalties to sustainable environmental development. His heart is in the right place.
Scriptwriter Vincent Zabus, adapting a novel by Jostein Gaarder, is obviously adept and Nicoby, as the artist calls herself, more than talented. And yet, color (in the volume, “Colours”) by Philppe Ory, may be the best feature or at least the most striking one, a splash of primaries with plenty of black. Harvey Kurtzman used to say that only the old German-American craftsmen could get color signature right, the coloring work itself done by top craftsmen (sometimes craftswomen) in the artists’ section of the comics trade. Presumably, technology has made all this easier.
Our protagonist is an adolescent of perhaps fifteen, interacting with someone who could be her granddad. She is constantly in motion, climbing, jumping or running rings around him, while the two come across philosophers who say their own piece. After a while, actually on p.123, she realizes that she is herself a created character and her creator happens to be the father of her bestie or presumed bestie, the adolescent who happens to be very “real.”
This volume takes up the story from the famous (was he typically French?) chap looking inward to his mental cogitations, up to the present. Decartes thus yields to Locke, Hume, Spinoza and Hobbes, who should scare our teenager rather more than he does, and then onward to Rousseau, obviously a favorite of the author in his quest for freedom. Going onward to Voltaire, we even see the French Revolution (not its counterpart in Haiti: Black history is absent), then on to Romanticism and Appolinaire, seemingly another French choice.
It’s a convention familiar to better comics going all the way back to Little Nemo that allows our fictive adolescent to jump through panels as she moves across history. Perhaps the test of this comic’s intellectual acuity happens when we meet Hegel, who explains the dialectic without calling it dialectical. Instead, he points to a stream as the steam of historical change, with history itself “the slow awakening of thought.” (p.143). Let us say that this touches the main point of dialectics but leaves a lot to be desired. Hegel himself described his predecessor, the mystic Silesian cobbler Jakob Böhme, as the “complete German philosopher,” and others would say that Böhme, a child of the Radical Reformation (which also escapes mention), was also the godfather of German Romanticism. Perhaps too complicated a story to be told here. Never mind.
The stormier landscape of Kierkegaard offers a more dramatic informant (for all of three pages) and a real sense of the “subjective truth.” But with Marx comes the artist’s boldest and, if not perhaps the best, at least the most heartfelt effort. She goes “through the looking glass” like Alice, but actually plunges through a poster of Marx dawn roughly on a wall, following him as he describes structure and superstructure, the division of labor, class struggle and the estrangement of the proletariat from its own creation. Her mentor explains that the Russian version went “dreadfully astray” but that the prospects for a good use of Marxism remain—if they also remain vague. We grasp at some point the ecological catastrophe facing her own generation, but not the source in the crimes of capital, in all its varied forms.
This is, nevertheless, bold for a kid’s book or as bold as we can reasonably expect. Darwin, Freud and Sartre eventually yield to Simone De Beauvoir (the first woman in the list of giants), who has a lot to say. Compared to her, Camus is a cigarette-puffing introvert who thankfully does not offer his dim view of Algerians and their right for independence from the French empire.
Given the inevitable limits, Sophie’s World is engaging and useful, certainly a model of sorts for handling many large ideas in a fairly brief space.
Paul Buhle is an editor of more than twenty non-fiction, historical comics.
Filed under Comics, Comics Reviews, Paul Buhle
Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History book review
C.L.R. James’s Touissaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History. Adapted by Nic Watts and Sakina Karimjee. New York: Verso Books, 2023. 272pp, $24.95.
Guest review by Paul Buhle
This is quite a comic! A very intense treatment of the uprising in Haiti that paralleled and deeply involved the French Revolution and yet was treated for centuries as a mere sidebar to world events. Readers will need to think hard, even now, about the reasons why.
But your reviewer gets ahead of the story. This is the graphic adaptation of a play performed on the British stage with Paul Robeson, the phenomenal actor (also and otherwise mainly singer), during the mid-1930s. The author of the play, C.L.R. James, had emigrated from his native Trinidad to Britain in 1931, earned a living as a top-notch cricket reporter, but found himself immersed simultaneously in anti-colonial movements and in the Trotskyist corner of the political Left.
According to contemporary stage critics, the play came across too talky for the drama that it represented, perhaps inevitably: it could have required a cast of thousands. Then again, the subject had hardly surfaced by that time. James’s The Black Jacobins (1938), a parallel to W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction (1935), arose out of his research on the French Revoluition, then grew and grew. It was a story that had hardly been told at all. And if the book received respectable reviews, it fairly disappeared until reappearing as a textbook on campus campuses in the early 1960s. This was “Black History” written like a novel, one of the great successes of the time, definitely parallel to the reprinted editions of Black Reconstruction, one of the later editions introduced by none other than C.L.R. James.
Nic Watts and Sakina Karimjee fill the pages with dramatic dialogues (as well as monologues) that draw directly upon the play, and on many pages do not require a dense background. Here and there, we see a remarkable landscape or a vivid crowd scene, but speaking largely moves the story along. Neither the colonizers nor the colonized can be described as unified in their ideas and their actions. On the contrary, events play out with internal agreements astonishingly almost as volatile as between whites, blacks and mulattoes.
James, who also happened to be one of the very first non-white novelists of the English-speaking West Indies, never again had the time, energy or will to write a drama, nor did Robeson (who later captured the stage with his Othello) have the opportunity to play the great black revolutionary hero again. It was a one-time collaboration of giants, after all, but the artists have, in their way, captured both the sense of the play and its deepest meaning. Here, all the contempt of whites for their suppose “inferiors,” against the background of a French Revolution that supposedly broke down all the barriers of inequality. There, the rage of slaves who, contrary to stereotype, did not “go wild” but found their own way, choosing Toussaint as he chose them and following him to the death with a tolerance for suffering that seemed to whites unbelieveable.
Independent Haiti will, of course, be betrayed, by the U.S. among other world powers, isolated and punished for having the nerve to demonstrate the right and capacity for freedom from slavery. The persecution has not ended even now.
But at least the story has been told.
Enough said! Get the book!
Paul Buhle is the authorized biographer of C.L.R. James and editor of more than twenty non-fiction, historical comics.
Filed under Comics, Graphic Novel Reviews, Paul Buhle
THE BUND graphic novel review
The Bund: A Graphic History of Jewish Labour Resistance. Sharon Rudahl (Author); Paul Buhle (Editor); Michael Kluckner (Artist). Between the Lines. 144 pp. $25.99.
The Bund was a phenomenal uprising of people doing the right thing at a critical time when it was needed most. This graphic novel, or history, (call it whatever you like! It’s comics!) runs with its theme right out of the gate with a sense of urgency that embraces the reader all the way through to the very last page. Think of The Bund as a coalition, a movement, people power at its best. It was there to help people in need, people who happened to be Jewish and living by a thread. Let’s focus on the region, as it could not be more relevant. This is what was known as “The Pale,” what is now Poland and Ukraine. Let’s focus on the era. This is circa 1900 to 1940, covering Tsarist Russia into World War II. The Bund was a Jewish labor resistance movement that pushed back on its oppressors, namely Russia and Nazi Germany; and that cultivated and celebrated a Jewish identity, specifically in nurturing the Yiddish language and tradition. This book provides a history and insights into The Bund. And, if it makes you think of Bundt cake, you are on the right track: a metaphor for a strong and sturdy collective.
What is very exciting to me about this graphic novel is how it is put together as a vehicle to educate while also mindful of keeping the reader engaged. The artwork is pared down to the essentials, for the most part, with the added artistic flourish where needed. I can’t stress enough how important it is to include some personality even in the most straightforward graphic storytelling. If an artist is capable of it, well, go to it. Clearly, Michael Kluckner is in command of a compelling and expressive line.
The individuals behind this book are a creative dream team. The goal here is to provide an entry point, a doorway, into further study or a highly accessible overview. That is what this book does with Sharon Rudahl leading the way as the author. Rudahl is a veteran cartoonist, to say the least, who intimately understands what the comics medium can do. Rudahl is many things, including a passionate activist, along with the book’s esteemed editor, Paul Buhle. In fact, Rudahl and Buhle have a long and productive professional history, highlighted by working together on the Yiddish anthology, , published by Abrams in 2011. So, one can see this new book as a continuation of what was achieved with that landmark anthology.
The overriding theme to this book is how The Bund reached out and put itself in the places it needed to be, achieving time and time again the “hereness” that was so desperately called upon. The Bund was HERE! It met the moment, did what it could, and now lives on in spirit. Here we have a book introducing readers to the leaders of The Bund, such as Pati Kremer and Bernard Goldstein. For the first time, we have a concise visual narrative of this highly significant Jewish history. All in all, this visual narrative encapsulates essential history that will inspire new generations. This graphic history meets the moment in its own way, and helps return The Bund to the here and now.
Filed under Comics, Graphic Novel Reviews, Paul Buhle, Sharon Rudahl
GEORGE’S RUN, a graphic novel review by Paul Buhle
This is the book for any fan of comics, pop culture, and great stories!
George’s Run. by Henry Chamberlain. Rutgers University Press. 2023. 226 pp. $27.95.
Guest review by Paul Buhle
I leapt at the chance to write my foreword, what came to be called “A Historical Portal,” in Henry Chamberlain’s graphic novel, George’s Run. Now, with some time to reflect upon it, deeper and more personal observations come to me.
The Twilight Zone offered me proof positive—to this future editor/publisher of a little magazine dedicated to demonstrating the significance of popular culture—that a generation had been more than enriched by it. George Clayton Johnson, a writer for the show, as well as Star Trek, had a lot of insight to deliver, and Henry Chamberlain was the one to winnow it out and to illustrate it.
Astute critics of American cinema have often remarked that the Star Wars series of blockbuster movies, beginning in 1977, marked the return of films but also chunks of television shifting from serious social themes of the later 1950s to later 1970s, back to the Outer Space version of cowboys-and-Indians, with the “Indians” now aliens, some of them friendly (aka “on our side”) and others dangerously hostile. Many critics observed, after the 1999 Star Wars feature, The Phantom Menace, that “African Americanism,” aka Minstrelsy, had been transformed into amusing-looking aliens with humorous talk or behavior. The source of this gloomy transformation might be attributed to the world cinema market for action films or some other external cause, but it is hard to avoid the consequences for Hollywood-produced films as art or cultural/political statements. The social movements of the 1960s shook up Hollywood and created a socially critical audience whose favorite films came and went, in the following decade or so. M*A*S*H, their TV equivalent, was by the end of the century the most “re-run” of all shows and also held the most “peacenik” sentiments. It counted.
In this light, The Twilight Zone looms as a late, major statement of a different era. Rod Serling was a serious and important figure in US culture, a critic and artist who after trying various professions and skills, radio broadcaster to television writer, created the most important television drama in the era when television had a monopoly on media attention.
It was a moment when live television drama, vibrant and often socially critical despite the Blacklist and cultural cold war, hard shortly before reached its peak with a half-dozen theatrical-style shows, just as it poised to rushed production from New York to Hollywood. The Twilight Zone could not have worked as live drama, but it had the dramatic quality of what had gone before. Even in melodrama and seemingly far-fetched plots, the acting was serious. The show was showing something and saying something, working urgently to open up minds. At the right place and time, George Clayton Johnson found himself and helped make television and pop culture history.
George’s collaboration with Rod Serling occupies a central place in George’s Run. But the meeting of George Clayton Johnson with Ray Bradbury offers us something from the comic that retains all its meaning, six decades later. Bradbury (a museum bearing his name and artifacts, in my wife’s hometown of blue collar Waukegan, Illinois, opened last year) stands for a starkly different view of science fiction and its role in opening minds. His stories, adapted to EC Comics shortly before the massive wave of repression, offered readers a glimpse of the horrors ahead if the atomic/nuclear arms race were not halted but also a glimpse of aliens and civilizations that had something to teach the self-proud human race. Farenheit 451 along with a large handful of short stories best realized the social criticism made by a raft of science fiction writers, including some others who knew George well.
Onward and upward.
That George went onto Star Trek is logical, as part of the trajectory of a fantasy writer’s life. But there is much more. The world of fan publications and fan events can be traced back to networks of amateur (unpaid, mostly unpublished) writers who traded their own mimeographed newsletters as early as the 1920s. Sci-Fi fans gathered here, virtually, and then in person by the middle 1960s, trading publications directly, meeting and partying with authors as well as each other. “Trekkies,” a much-discussed phenomenon, led in time to comics events, later to Comic-Cons and all the regional events of today, sometimes grand but most often with self-publishers in the booths, chatting and selling copies to whoever the passers-by they could convince.
The subject of Star Trek itself remains, for many fans and scholars, important and bears symptoms of the richer mix of American popular culture emerging at the moment of its production. This brings us to the topic of the Other, a theme that endlessly drives discussion. Yes, Leonard Nimoy started in Yiddish theater; Spock is culturally Jewish without a doubt. And Uhuru is a staggeringly beautiful African American woman with all the sexualized implications, even if hardly acted out. And so on. But these, considered seriously, are minor notes. George Clayton Johnson’s scripts quietly urged viewers to ponder the fate of humanity within the cosmos, to get off the pedestal of human-centeredness and come to grips with terrestrial reality.
George’s Run bears all this meaning and so much more. But there is one more, albeit indirect, connection too delicious for me to leave out. Rod Serling called upon the blacklisted screenwriter Michael Wilson—before being purged from Hollywood, he had scripted the 1951 Oscar-winning A Place in the Sun—to help develop a crucial subplot that most viewers have taken in subconsciously. The humans are now allowed to speak. But when the human played by Rod Taylor asks to speak, the Chairman of the Tribunal interjects, “the exhibit is indeed a man, therefore it has no rights under ape law.” Those outside the definition of having the right to speak, cannot be allowed to speak, for fear that they will bring down the system. It was a plot that could easily have been taken out of Berthold Brecht’s Life of Gallileo, including the responsibility of the scientist to speak up against the threats facing society.
Such weighty considerations would have been thought, only a few decades ago, as being properly far beyond the scope of anything resembling comic art. Now, at last, we know better. Henry Chamberlain has given us a gift in George’s Run. Let us use it well.
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
Filed under Comics, Comics Reviews, Paul Buhle
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.
Filed under Comics, Comics Reviews, Paul Buhle, World War 3 Illustrated
MS DAVIS: a Graphic Biography review by Paul Buhle
Ms Davis: a Graphic Biography. By Amazing Ameziane and Sybrille titeux de la Croix, translated by Jenna Allen. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2022. 185pp, $24.99.
Guest Review by Paul Buhle
This remarkable and challenging work, translated from the 2020 French edition, offers readers a study in the history of comic or political art by adapting past artists’ work into a new synthesis of narrative. It is not a “biography,” as in “graphic biography,” that readers would expect. We see only the dramatic bits and pieces of Angela Davis’s life, and virtually none of the long aftermath (from the early 1970s until now) that biography readers would expect. And yet capture the drama of Davis’s life, the work does in grand form.
Ms Davis might be contrasted with The Black Panther Party Comic, a well-selling, straightforward visual narrative that a fussy aestheticism of comic art might wrongly call “pedestrian.” This tells the story of the short-lived but extremely dramatic Black Panther Party with suitable details, and would be valuable for anyone who enjoys Ms Davis, which goes the precise opposite direction in so many ways.
In the globalization of comic art, artist Amazing Ameziane and collaborator Sybille Titeux de la Croix credit four American artists: Milton Glaser, Norman Rockwell, Emory Douglas and Bill English. What do they have in common? Less than they have by contrast. Rockwell, who famously celebrated the “American Way of Life” (overwhelmingly the white, middle class way of life in the twentieth century), had moments when he went beyond his assumptions, as in his famed poster art for “The Four Freedoms” proclaimed by Franklin D. Roosevelt in wartime, and still not realized (“Freedom from Want.”) Emory Douglas is the Black Panther Party artist supreme, with his stark, propagandistic drawings. William English, illustrating some of poet William Blake’s works, is as far from commercial illustrator Milton Glaser (best remembered for the 1966 poster for Bob Dylan) as imaginable. And so on. Amezianne/De la Croix pick and choose what they want, in art as well as story.
They invent characters to suit themselves. Angela Davis, growing up in the 1950s South, thereby has an invented black woman friend who stays in Atlanta when Davis moves to New York. She also has a sympathetic and crypto-feminist journalist pal who struggles with her newspaper bosses to create a news story worthy or at least somewhat worthy of Angela Davis’s incredible life.
To describe the plot is grossly inadequate to the “look” of Ms Davis. Actress Helen Mirren, speaking at the San Diego Comicon after Harvey Pekar’s death, said (in her eloquent way) that Harvey had taught people to read comics “in a new way.” That is, comics could be about ordinary people in the unprestigious blue collar world of that presumably most ordinary place, Cleveland, around Harvey himself, his troubles and joys, and most definitely his work at the VA Hospital. (That Pekar and his artistic collaborators did this in comic books was another point of originality, following the underground “nothing forbidden” comix.)
The story-telling daily strips, appearing in the Chicago Tribune just about a century ago, made the same artistic and narrative point, more or less. Before 1920, comics readers expected a joke climaxing in the last panel; the following day would begin the story anew. Now readers of the hugely popular dailies would look forward to daily lives that did not change very much, had precious few adventures, but offered a kind of assurance.
How many comics, thinking now on a global scale from the twentieth to the twenty-first century, have set out consciously or otherwise to teach readers to look at comics in new ways, and how many have succeeded? It is an imponderable, although claims could be made in many directions. Sybille Titeux de la Croix and Amazing Ameziane are struggling page by page to make their own large contribution. Their sincerity and their determination, perhaps even more than the expression of their talent, speak for this comic’s value and importance.
Amazing Ameziane: “Ms Davis is the third part of my first SOUL TRILOGY ( Ali / Attica /Angela).”
As history, it can be narrow and even flawed. In its last pages, we learn that Nikita Kruschev’s revelations of Stalin’s crimes, in 1956, sent Communism into its “final throes.” This is more than a little too anticipative. Angela Davis would not have believed so (she resigned from the CPUSA in 1991). The Vietnam War, the survival of the Cuban Revolution, the Communist role in the South African struggle against Apartheid, the claims of China’s leadership….all these suggest something more than a detail absent in the overview. (On the following pages, the book turns our attention toward Neo-liberalism and here the book is accurate. Class society has grown worse.) Does this limitation harm Ms Davis? No, not much.
Perhaps we are not, after all, reading Ms Davis “as history,” but as an artistic statement about history and about the features in Angela Davis’s personal saga that are larger than herself. Drawing upon the most improbable sources of visual inspiration, changing formats almost page by page, Ms Davis is trying to teach us a different way of looking at comic art. Nothing, for me, is quite as stunning as the reuse of Emory Douglas’s styles, seen so vividly in the Black Panther newspaper of yore, so stripped of visual finery, so expressive in its message, artistically quite as if the artist, like the Panthers, invited death at the hands of violent authorities: revolution or martyrdom. How could Emory Douglas be combined with Norman Rockwell, the graphic artist of middle class contentment in “the best country in the world”? See for yourself.
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).
Filed under Black Panther, Comics, Graphic Novel Reviews, Paul Buhle
Paul Buhle on Comics: The Cargo Rebellion: Those Who Chose Freedom
The Cargo Rebellion: Those Who Chose Freedom. By Jason Chang, Benjamin Barson, Alexis Dudden and (artist) Kim Inthavong. PM Press, 2022, $16.95.
Guest Review by Paul Buhle
This is a good-looking experiment in a kind of collective art-and-text. So much has now been written about the Trans-Atlantic slave trade—no full blown comic yet—that the subject of the “Coolie Trade” can now seem to have been somewhat neglected. Actually, Asian-American scholars, among others, have been working long and hard on documenting this story. But we have here a effort to bring the story to light for young readers in particular.
Legitimized by the Opium War of the 1840s, the forced opening of Hong Kong to British domination also opened wide labor contracts for impoverished Chinese workers from Hawaii to California and parts South, China to Peru. The artist and writers treat this passage as a slavery-equivalent and they have a point. Like the transport of workers from India to the Caribbean later in the century, it was coercion-or-starvation, albeit one that, for some, would bring integration into economies in post-slavery times, with possibilities of collective struggle emerging sooner in their trajectory.
The comic art helps to propose a different way of viewing struggle on the high seas. The American government wanted the struggle to be seen as piracy, on the basis of a dubious “law of the sea” passed in 1836. The Chinese Quing courts insisted that Americans had deceived and kidnapped the victims. Abraham Lincoln ended the “coolie trade” formally in 1862, although the book asserts on good authority that racial stigma rather than something like Black emancipation prompted the “great emancipator” to take this step.
The traffiking in human lives, Chinese lives, continued in the American West as railroads were built and assorted industries, notably cigar-making, opened the way for underpaid servile labor. Sam Gompers himself, outspokenly racist leader of the newly-created American Federation of Labor (AFL), testified to Congress against the presence and not merely the continuation of Chinese immigration and immigrants.
The Cargo Rebellion closes with a short scholarly essay on the “Robert Boone Mutiny” of 1852 and a commentary on “Teaching Asian Indenture” by Jason Oliver Chang. One could lament that the comics themselves do not take up enough of the pages in this book. But that the larger subject could be tackled with such energy and effort dulls this complaint. It’s a good book.
Filed under Comics, Graphic Novel Reviews, Paul Buhle
