Tag Archives: History

September 20, 2026 · 9:18 am

If I Could But See It: A Graphic Biography of William Morris comics review

If I Could But See It: A Graphic Biography of William Morris. Nick Thorkelson. Ed. Paul Buhle and Mari Jo Buhle. Pluto Press. 126pp. $25.76.

William Morris . . . equate him with a bundle of energy, on the move, hungering for a new challenge. A person who took the liberal arts ethos to heart. Born 1834. Died 1896. His doctor famously said of Morris dying at a relatively young age: “William Morris died from being William Morris. He lived ten lives in his time.” Just like so many young people before him and after him, he dearly wanted to make his mark and to help make this a better world for all of us. All of his activity informed his work as a textile designer, poet and activist. All of his activity was fueled by revolutionary socialist and anti-capitalist passions to oppose industrialization and make authentic hand-made art to be shared with the masses. During a lively discussion on a worker revolt, a full scale revolution, Morris famously said, “If I could but see a day of it. If I could but see it!” Thus the title to this graphic biography by acclaimed cartoonist Nick Thorkelson. It requires a great passion, bordering on obsession, to do a graphic biography properly–and this Thorkelson has done.

William Morris (1834 – 1896)

Does the young student hear the siren song of William Morris as loud and clear as generations past? No, it’s a different playing field. Any young person will tell you that, if they don’t know something, it’s besides the point since they can get an instant summation by a quick tap and scroll. Aside from that, it is inevitable that William Morris will make contact with every new crop of freshmen at least in the same manner as academia’s delivery of Plato’s cave and Beowulf. But is that good enough? No, it’s not. That’s where a graphic biography like this can step in and bring home what is engaging, exciting and relevant about William Morris and related matters. A.I. will not suffice! You need a cartoonist with ferocity, that unique human touch, to light up the page. Thorkelson, a true cartoonist down to his bones, employs a variety of visual delights to keep the narrative flowing and secure that the information presented is clear and concise. As you can see in the example below, depicting a creative discussion/debate, William Morris and a colleague literally dive from one panel to the next during their lively exchange.

If you’re newly invested in the liberal arts, why wouldn’t you want to get acquainted with one of the greatest polymaths ever known? I recall, in my youth, having a quick appreciation for Morris. I connected him with the Pre-Raphaelite movement in the arts, circa mid-1800s, having to do with a return to a more earthy approach prior to academic painter, Raphael. Indeed, it was a vision intertwined with the whimsical, pastoral, humane and so much more; nothing less than seeking the meaning of life! A noble mindset that Morris and his friends fed upon. Young people of his day worshiped painters and poets in the same way that pop stars and influencers are today but at a decidedly profound level. Thorkelson does a great job of evoking that sense of wonder.

And then it’s all about the follow-through, and Morris and his college coterie were well up to the challenge. That was the whole point. As young people from another generation would be inspired to start up a band, Morris and his group wanted to tap into a way to bring art back to the people and, remarkably, they would settle upon forming an arts and craft design firm specializing in affordable decorative domestic items, focusing on furniture and textile designs. This being a profoundly art-friendly group, it is something of a miracle that they were to become such a successful business, catching the attention of everyone, including Queen Victoria. And therein lay the rub. As well as the group did, particularly with rich clients, it could not help but conflict with their natural alliance with the poor and working class. Victorian capitalism was on shaky ground: the new era of industrialization exploited the working class; the two-party system appeared to be utterly bankrupt. The British Socialist movement was on the rise. This inspired William Morris, who would go on to contribute significantly not only to art, design and poetry, but also maintain a lifelong role as an activist.

Furnishing fabric; – Strawberry Thief; cotton; indigo discharge and block print; by William Morris (1834 – 96); English; 1883.

William Morris . . . equate him with a bundle of energy, on the move, hungering for a new challenge–and fighting for a solution to the poor being subjugated by the rich. If you hunger for a better world, one that brings people first, then William Morris is an excellent entry point. Nick Thorkelson makes the case so very well. We live in such a hectic and fragmented time but pause we must, contemplate we must–protest and never give in to an easy fix lest capitalism swallow you whole.

England’s Victorian era, for all its pomp, beneath its surface faced a massive political, economic and cultural rebellion. We see a similar perfect storm in the U.S. A first corrective step is just weeks away with the midterm elections.

Editor’s Note: After the main feature to this book, Sharon Rudahl, an accomplished comic artist and noted member of the Comics Underground, provides a delightful illustrated adaptation of the literary works of William Morris. Many thanks also must go to this book’s editors, Paul Buhle and Mari Jo Buhle, who provide an insightful and highly informative Afterword.

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September 13, 2026 · 12:00 pm

WAKE NOW IN THE FIRE graphic novel review

Wake Now in the Fire: A Story of Censorship, Action, Love and Hope. By Jarrett Dapier and AJ Dungo. Ten Speed Press. 2026. 463pp. $39.95.

Review by Paul Buhle

Book Banning is very much in the news these days. We may usefully remember the controversy kicked off by student protests in 2013 when the Chicago school system somewhat mysteriously and without warning, banned Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi’s widely-read, universally admired graphic novel.

Crying in the classroom.

By a fateful tragedy, the passing of Satrapi, in Paris in March of 2026, at age 56, came only a month after the publication of the book in question. We can hope she appreciated the splendid documentation of the Chicago struggle from the student point of view. They made educational history with and through her work.

Marjane Satrapi (1969 — 2026)

The larger significance of Satrapi’s life and work still remains perhaps too recent to be fully absorbed by comics devotees and others around the world. Her life project across several media (she also wrote and directed films) is large, her life is too large, for easy comprehension. The first women comic artist’s work—or feminist comic work— to be read in dozens of languages, made into a much-admired animated film, landed like a political bombshell, if not entirely the kind the artist intended.

Marjane Satrapi repeatedly insisted that a US war against Iran would only worsen the condition of Iranians. The massive, heavily youthful rebellion against the hated Iranian Shah, imposed by the CIA upon Iranians in 1953, also became through Satrapi an artistic outcry against the Ayatollahs seizing power afterward. Western critics, even Western audiences, heard the second message by Satrapi but predictably almost blotted out the first, despite the protests of the artist herself.

Put that aside. As a graphic novel, Persepolis portrayed social struggles realistically, mirroring the work of Joe Sacco among others in tracing the tragedies of the region. More than that, the book touched a new generation, millions of young people discovering this new kind of comic and in large numbers wondering if they, too, might be agents of political and/or artistic creation.

The significance of Satrapi and Persepolis also returned the careful, probably older reader to mull the rise of modern comic art. In Wake Now In the Fire, a complex and stirring narrative of youthful self-revelations through the student activity around Persepolis also recalls comics and Chicago from another angle. Justin Green’s 1970s-80s recollections of Chicago (including a near-suburb, Skokie) arguably reinvented comics or at least a major trope within the Undergrounds. Recalling his painful teenage years and quasi-religious delusions, Green established a narrative tone for the very different personal revelations of Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel and Lynda Barry among others, artists recalling their youthful struggles. Today, women’s comics across the world seem especially intent on retracing the autobiographical thread, reinventing it in their own ways.

Crying in the classroom.

And here, curiously enough, is the story-behind-the-story of Wake Now In the Fire. The saga of a Chicago public school is, at first glance, most remarkable for its narrative. Students at a public prep school in 2013 come across Persepolis in class and not surprisingly begin to discuss the book’s contents and meaning. It is, after all, in part about Satrapi’s own youthful rebellion within the larger struggles. A higher-up in the Chicago educational system orders that class lessons on the book cease and copies be removed from school libraries, a foolish act with major consequences. Some copies are even burned.

The school system is rocked by petitions and even a street protest, with student unrest in one form or another continuing for months. NPR and local Chicago news media hop on the story of book-banning, rightly seeing a dangerous warning of worse to come in the future that turns out to be our present. Wake Now faithfully recounts all this, almost entirely through the lives and actions of adolescents themselves, elaborated in granular detail. The classes they attend (sometimes skip), their daily school social life and their lives outside of school—often minority students in a city of prosperous white Chicagoans and cops suspicious of nonwhite youngsters’ actions—are seen sympathetically but also realistically. The dialogue crackles with teenage banter.

The art, at first seemingly scaled-down detail with a reductive wash of blue tints with some red (used mainly for the cover of Persepolis copies), becomes more and more obviously an artist’s sensitive response to the daily lives of the students. They can be said to live blurry lives. Or perhaps (another theory of the reviewer) the saga encompassing a staggering 456pp simply could not yield crosshatching and other such artistic detail that would have taken a small army of artists. In any case and in the face of this reviewer’s initial doubts, it works.

Writer/editor Jarrett Dapier, a figure among school librarians nationally even before the publication of this book and already a creator of children’s books hit with threats of censorship, would appear to have overseen every aspect of Wake Now. He acknowledges the artist as handicraftsman, but more than that. He has evidently worked at close range with AJ Dungo, already an award-winning artist of comics for young people.

The story triumphs as it slides into interpersonal relations of the students, and thence to a particular boy from what my parents’ generation invariably called “a broken home.” Mom had disappeared, and Dad, who himself had staged a personal campaign against the conservative effort of recent years to defund PBS and effectively ban Sesame Street, cannot handle the details of their daily lives. He crashes one day and is hospitalized, leaving the boy dependent upon family friends. Other such stories follow, less dramatic in some ways, more in others, like kids busted by Chicago cops for skate-boarding in public areas. It all seems starkly realistic to me.

Crying in the classroom.

The resulting conversations among teens about the meaning of book banning flow in and out of their other conversations and their actions on behalf of keeping the book in the Chicago school curriculum. It is clear, from early on, that the authorities feel threatened and their instinctive response is to slap down the threats in various ways while resorting only in the last instance to suspensions, expulsions and the usual tracking of troubled kids out of the system. They knew, in real life, that they were being watched.

The interactions of teachers and parents who clearly sympathize but whose lives are overflowing with other demands, offer fascinating psychological angles. These grown-ups are not good or bad. Even if their own personal, pedagogical projects are worthy, they have no time for the trouble. Uncertain, against their own better selves, they would clearly prefer having the students’ collective actions go away, be put aside, deferred for another day.

The students, for their part, have enormous difficulty getting themselves together. A young woman of color, facing a world of difficulties, refuses to give in easily to join a struggle led by a white classmate on his way to an elite college and a life of privilege. How can she trust him when he wants her to take chances with the authorities?

What saves the day is the spirit of student rebellion in a righteous cause of free speech/reading and the ways it allows the various contradictions of young people’s lives to be set aside or dealt with in useful ways.

Students rally around the idea that no book and no one should be censored, Muslim or Jew, black, brown or white. The administrative compromise, that the book will not be taught in seventh- or eighth-grade classes, is itself a victory. That the school administration of Chicago is actually eliminating most school libraries as a purported cost-cutting measure is an indication that even victories are limited.

Perhaps in that spirit, it is worth noting that Satrapi herself answered an appeal from a Chicago student to write a “public statement” (p.148) that “I am ashamed of people who take these kinds of decisions” of censorship. She knew these students, in crucial ways, and they knew her back.

Paul Buhle is an American historian, who is (retired) Senior Lecturer at Brown University, author or editor of 35 volumes, including histories of radicalism in the United States and the Caribbean, studies of popular culture, and a series of nonfiction comic art volumes. He is the authorized biographer of C. L. R. James.

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June 22, 2026 · 7:25 pm

Love and Desire in the Promised Land comics review

Love and Desire in the Promised Land: The Private Lives of Israelis and Palestinians. writer: Salome Parent-Rachi. artist: Zac Deloupy. translation: Jenna Allen. Seattle: Fantagraphics. 2026. 160pp. $24.95.

Review by Paul Buhle

Comics reader, please suspend your immediate thoughts, even or especially the most horrible and apocalyptic ones, about the current wars in the Middle East. Imagine yourself, for a moment, to be a young person in Israel or the West Bank, striving to live out a life that despite everything remains in some ways near-universal for a young person almost anywhere. That is: sexual desires and active encounters, often subrosa and undisclosed to surrounding older generations.

Parent-Rachi is a young French journalist, a sometime correspondent-journalist writing from Israel but also a creator of podcasts and collaborator on documentaries related to sexual practices. Deloupy, born in 1968 and twenty years younger, is a free-lance illustrator who earned some much-deserved fame by working under Marjane Satrapi on the 2023 anthology Femme, Vie, Liberté.

To say that the art here is wonderfully expressive would be a gross underestimate. The street scenes, the bedroom scenes, the close-ups of bars and even prison cells are captured in subdued tones, perhaps to bring a quiet clarity to the conflicts on hand or only implied.

Love and Desire appeals to this reviewer not only as a brilliantly-drawn comic but as an exercise in interviews, not example life-stories but not far away, the stories of sexual encounters that reveal much more. I feel the need to add that I have guided oral history projects and conducted hundreds of interviews, if mostly with old people and generally not concerning their sex lives. Still, the personal narrative is the key to the interview. They are wonderful here, in their candor and their careful descriptions.

In their Introduction to the book, Parent-Rachdi and Deloupy stress that the book was finished in late 2023, and if so much has happened—much of it dreadful, almost beyond words—so much still remains. An important preface by Vincent Lemire, renowned scholar of the region and co-author with Chistophe Gaultier of The History of Jerusalem, offers “Transgressing the Conflict,” the same message. Everything is messy, perhaps nothing more than breaking old bonds, yet some things remain hopeful, obviously including the wish and the willingness to transgress in order to find love.

So we have the writer herself on the streets in Israel, a normal workday, young people crossing busy streets and talking to the illustrator as they embark on the saga of Lana, 34, in Tel Aviv. She’s a Palestinian whose best friend, Jewish, signed her up for “a dating life,” (p.6). She met a young man on the beach and confessed her identity on their third date. Not a peacenik, her new lover was both too distant to understand her complicated self-identity, and too distant from her community. But they struggle with the complications and things work out somehow. There’s a happy Jewish/Palestinian ending here that I leave for the reader to discover.

In the meantime,the book transitions to a Famous Couple story, with a handsome male star of several Israeli film and television series, a renowned singer to boot, with his partner, the very first Arab presenter in Hebrew, on Israeli television. Critical of Hamas but also of the Israeli PM, she has enemies galore, and also admirers everywhere. Their families, after serious doubts, accept the celebrity pair, and so apparently does eighty percent of the public expressing opinions. The twenty percent remain bitterly opposed for their various tribal reasons, but life goes on.

Not everything is nearly that pleasant. The number of Israeli/Palestinian marriages remains astonishingly few; and sexual encounters must surely add up to thousands unrecorded. Often, one partner is a French national, confirming perhaps our old stereotype of the Romantic French!

Collective, willful ignorance about sex along with their various issues and problems of conception cloud the lives of many young people, especially those in deeply religious communities. Gay sex among the Haredim, the strictly Orthodox Jewish community, seems at first glance almost unthinkable but, of course, it happens anyway.

Our artist and writer follow documentary photo-journalist Tanya Habjouqa through Ramallah, and by asking questions she finds a lot of intense personal conflict. More than a few women have two lives, one on the street and another at night, including the bedroom. The “good behavior” of women, Palestinian or Israeli, is often “policed” whenever they appear in public.

Relative open-mindedness is not likely enough for a gay man in Gaza, where such real relationships prove daunting. The easiest thing to do is to leave, as another of her interview subjects, a man married to a Palestinian widow of the war, manages to do but only, by leaving for Jordan. He laments, not without reason, “there will always be new wars,” (p.97) and hopes that his adopted children can, at least, avoid the worst of them. Likewise, an intermarried couple seen here gives up, solving their problems by moving to France while another couple, experiencing their child born in a Tel Aviv hospital with a staff both Jewish and Palestinian, retains hopes. We can hope that they are still there, making a life under difficult circumstances.

The book nearly closes on a special part of the Israeli Jewish population, Russian immigrants, now more than a million, adding up to an amazing fifteen percent. A third live outside the religious definitions of Jewishness, according to the standards of the Rabbinate. They remain largely secular, as they were in the old Soviet Union, hoping for a better life by emigrating. A Russian woman has married a Nigerian, and like many other mixed couples, escape difficulties by making the marriage official in Cyprus. As a painter, she struggles with both the pervasive Israeli stereotype that women from Russia are probably prostitutes and racial stereotypes about people of color as common in Israel as anywhere in Europe or the US.

The last stories in Love and Desire in the Promised Land come back to the difficulties of crossing lines. That is, the odds against mutual understanding between populations that have been kept apart or kept themselves apart, for any reason, whether history, religion or exercise of military power. The intensity of the Middle Eastern conflicts creates yet more barriers.

Can engagement of one another among young people, obviously including sex of any type, smooth out the roughest parts and point toward something better? Perhaps we do not know yet. Let us hope that time is not running out.

It is no exaggeration to say that with Love and Desire in the Promised Land, the splendid work of Salomé Parent-Rachdi and Zae Deloupy have made a contribution to every reader. Fantagraphics, with its volumes by Joe Sacco and others, continues to open new worlds for comic art and ways for the mostly young readership to grapple with the troubled societies where they find themselves.

Paul Buhle is an American historian, who is (retired) Senior Lecturer at Brown University, author or editor of 35 volumes, including histories of radicalism in the United States and the Caribbean, studies of popular culture, and a series of nonfiction comic art volumes. He is the authorized biographer of C. L. R. James.

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June 14, 2026 · 12:42 pm

Declaration Illustrated/Emancipation Illustrated by R. Sikoryak comics review

Declaration Illustrated/Emancipation Illustrated. Robert Sikoryak. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly. 2026. 128pp. $15.00.

Review by Paul Buhle

The comics artist R. Sikoryak is known for many things, these days likely for a collaboration with film star Tom Hanks, that is to say, an illustration of Hanks’s 2023 novel, The Making of Another Motion Picture Masterpiece. I go back all the way to 2009 for Masterpiece Comics, a staggering innovation in using comics as literary history. Here, retelling totemic literary sagas like Dostoyevsky and Bronte, most memorably (for me) The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne—with Little Lulu’s Tubby as Chillingworth, the villainous accuser of Hester—he opens up the idea of mainstream comics and high literature as a two-way flow.

Sikoryak was also seizing on the now largely forgotten stories from Classics Illustrated. Launched by a former office supply salesman in 1942, Classics became a vast series of comic books that, most uniquely, stayed in print for decades, and for good reason. Their adaptations of “classics,” no matter how cramped in narrative and stiff as comic art, delivered a hefty message to kids: literature is for everybody.

Wizard of Oz to the rescue!

Here, he does it again, stunningly. Some years ago, I edited comics biographies of Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt that went nowhere and for understandable reason: the competition is too rough, books numbering in the thousands for either. Sikoryak has avoided this trap by doing something unique. Once again inserting totally recognizable comic icons, from comic books, newspaper characters and cartoons, TV animation (think Family Guy) and even Underground Comix characters as the key historical actors, he has reinvented the text.

That the artist/author places the Emancipation Proclamation and Gettysburg Address alongside, at the same level as, the Declaration of Independence adds something urgent to 2026, the celebratory year with so much falseness already added to any popular interpretation. The two documents speak here with the same voice.

Sikoryak’s take on Morrie Turner’s Wee Pals.

It makes sense. Historians dissenting from mainstream mythology have long since argued that the Constitution, a creation of lawyers and other property-holders to secure their status, is quite conservative when contrasted to the Declaration of Independence. Put aside its absence of interest in non-whites and Native Americans (and worse, that notorious phrase about “merciless Indians Savages” on the frontier, p.57). The larger point is the break from the Crown, and in these phrases the Declaration almost sounds like it came from the pen of Thomas Paine, our revolutionary radical so dearly hated by various Founding Fathers.

Marvel Comics to the rescue!

Simply to cite the mainstream comic art characters repurposed for Sikoryak’s purposes here would be impossible. But seeing the Furry Freak Brothers escaping the Redcoats, Plastic Man stretched across the colonial charters or Major Hoople reminded of British offenses by his ever-stern wife, brings back a flood of comic-reading memories. Younger generations will surely reference Disney characters and South Park.

The simple pleasure of seeing these old friends again, all just as they were, together in one place, would be enough. But Sikoryak is also delivering a political punch when and where it is most needed, in our benighted Republic today.

All this goes double, treble or quadruple for the Emancipation Proclamation. Many readers are surely going to be reading this for the first time. They may not grasp the pressure of the historical moment: the threat of Confederate Army’s victories that might well lead to the defeat of Lincoln in 1864 and the triumph of slavers with their claim on Black flesh. Or remember—perhaps learn for the first time—how Abraham Lincoln, at Gettysburg, laid out the fundamentals.

Reviewer’s Privilege Moment: my great-great-grandfather, a farmer-abolitionist, marched with the Union Army under Sherman through Georgia, the campaign that made the continuation of the slave system impossible. Sherman himself recalled that his troops sang “John Brown’s Body” as they moved into battle. Ezra Fuller lived long enough to visit my mother’s family during her childhood, and she had a vivid memory of the old soldier, long since returned to his crops and animals.

What then, might Ezra Fuller have made of the Emancipation Proclamation, in startling new form? How might he have greeted the erstwhile, now comic-style slaves responding (p.20) to his command that “all persons held as slaves…. henceforward shall be free,” even with the declaration existed, for the moment, only in the rebellious states?

The Gettysburg Address, following from p.27, restates the best purposes of the Revolutionary War for the commemoration of the Union dead, in Lincoln’s memorable phrase: “We can not dedicate, we can not consecrate—we can not hallow, this ground.” (p.34) “The brave men living and dead who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.” (p.35) The “new birth freedom” (p.41) now under such real threat in 2026, is realized here by superheroes among others. Back on p.27, on the first page of The Gettysburg Address, we see the original GI Joe, the creation of comic artist Bill Mauldin who himself, champion of the ordinary soldier of the Second World War, was reviled by haughty generals.

I am not sure that every reader of Sikoryak’s little book will be as moved as I am. But at whatever age—and we hope, especially, at a young age—they will have come across a new means of telling a story grown overly familiar or in some ways, especially the Emancipation Proclamation, perhaps hardly known at all.

Lincoln now seems suddenly to have grown distant in some ways. Neo-Confederates are on the move, their message of white racial superiority shared in the highest places. The Abolitionists and “runaway” slaves seem to be at the core of a newly endangered narrative, the stories to be tucked away again as too unfavorable to national greatness and American Exceptionalism.

On the presumption that we get past this moment, the appreciation for Sikoryak’s work is bound to grow. He found a way forward, in comic art, when we feared the routes out had been blocked. By raising up the vernacular—and what could be more vernacular than comic characters?—he seizes the moment as it needs to be seized.

Paul Buhle

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June 2, 2026 · 9:30 am

Vidal by Danila Botha book review

Vidal. Danila Botha. At Bay Press. 2026. 120pp. $30.

This is such a beautifully realized work in many ways. It is, no doubt, a grounded, thoughtful and graceful combining of words and pictures. It is one of those narratives that encompasses the world-at-large with its immense joys and tragedy, all within the journey of one individual, one scrappy and dapper man, Vidal Ben Soussan. The creator of this work is Danila Botha, an exceptional writer, having proven herself many times over with an impressive body of prose fiction. This is her first work combining her prose with her own paintings. It is a work full of good sentiment that evokes the quality of an autobiographical work.

The greatest strength to Danila Botha’s new book is in its prose narrative followed closely by her passionate paintings. The plot to this work is following the life struggle of our main character, one Vidal Ben Soussan. Young Vidal grows up in Tiberias (Ottoman Empire and then British Mandate Palestine) and moves to Paris to pursue his art and freedom and gets trapped there during World War II. Botha traces the steps of Vidal’s life with a combination of her poetic prose laid over her paintings that evoke Chagall. The reader goes back and forth between the paintings and the prose that present the life of Vidal Ben Soussan, from his Sephardic upbringing in Tiberias to studies in the Technion in Haifa, his artistic life in Paris, his work with the underground resistance, and his ultimate arrest and time in Auschwitz.

Botha’s family, like the one depicted in this book, are fifth generation Moroccan Jews who grew up speaking both Hebrew and Arabic and coexisting with their neighbors and friends in diverse harmony. There are numerous examples of these all-too-human exchanges. One culture blended into the other in everyday life. For instance, Vidal’s mother, who hated having to go to the market, would curse it in Hebrew and then again in Arabic for good measure.

Vidal undoubtedly offers the reader a wonderful window into history and a rich cultural experience. The question as to where it falls within comics is interesting and worth consideration. I see this work falling within the world of picture books, given that it is a series of paintings with text, while also laying claim to a spot within the world of graphic novels. The spirit of comics and graphic novels is such that all forms, including wordless comics, are welcome while some are going to be more closely related to the traditional sequential comics art form than others: works following the use of panels, word balloons, and various techniques that link words and pictures together. The important thing here is that Botha’s work is very special in its own way. I just offer an observation. She could certainly continue to create other works just like this and blaze a new trail. That’s exciting. The main point is that Botha is creating very compelling work, providing that valuable window of accessibility. It brings to life such subjects as Sephardic Jewish life and the Shoah in ways beyond words and, for that, it is essential. This is an important work any way you look at it.

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September 23, 2025 · 10:00 pm

This Slavery by Scarlett and Sophie Rickard graphic novel review

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.

Paul Buhle

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September 6, 2025 · 2:25 pm

The Once and Future Riot by Joe Sacco graphic history review

The Once and Future Riot. Joe Sacco. Henry Holt & Co. 2025. 144pp. $27.99

India was once a confident and reliable ally of the United States. Lately, due to the Trump administration’s belligerence and blundering, India has leaned deeper into Russia and China’s orbit. India is simply not enough on the radar of the average American, without some tie to India, to really know or care one way or another but, as Joe Sacco’s book makes clear, there are undeniable universal truths that India has to share with the rest of the world. Once again, Joe Sacco lays out the essential, and ever elusive, truth.

The elusive truth, lost in an instance. At its core, this is what Joe Sacco’s new book is about and what all of his comics journalism books are about. You don’t think you can relate to India, or to Palestinian genocide in Gaza at the hands of the Netanyahu administration? Well, think again. We live in a world where up is down and down is up and, all too often, we fight shadows and ignore the substance. In the case of this new work, Sacco focuses on the conflict between Hindus and Muslims in India. Some would say it is irreparable. Others would say it is a manufactured conflict that favors those in power who gin up the public, stoke the flames of hatred, exploit resentment and distrust.

Sacco interviews a Muslim cleric during his travels in India who plainly lays it out: The media is responsible for the hostility between Hindu and Muslim. “You start telling a lie again and again to make it a truth. TV channels have done it. TV channels are liars. They keep telling lies 24 hours a day.” Where there once was a friend, now there is a demon.

India, it must be stressed is a democracy, with a federalist framework similar to the United States. What happens in India is not from some distant and remote region. The world grows smaller every day, as it is. And India reflects this in a powerful way. Joe Sacco’s book lays out the dynamics that led to the bloody 2013 riots in the streets of Uttar Pradesh, the most populous and diverse state in India. What caused the violence is misinformation that fueled a mob mentality. It can happen again in India. It can, and is, happening in the United States. And it can happen anywhere.

“I was crying. Like anything . . .”

As easily as the United States can experience a collapse of order by the insurrectionists on January 6, 2021, so can a region of India once celebrated for harmony. The lethal power of demagoguery can not be overstated, despite what others who traffic in misinformation may say. We live in dangerous times with no sign of it letting up in our collective lifetimes. As long as there are people in power with the time and money but no wisdom or integrity, we remain in an endless cycle. Well, this should be painfully obvious. Sacco does not beat one over the head with the obvious but steadily covers the specifics of a specific moment in time. The reader gets to know particular people. The reader is guided along as these individuals confront their struggles, some needlessly to die. And it is through this specificity that Sacco reaches the universal.

When will this horror end?

It is within this calm and steady approach that Sacco builds up to the horror and tragedy of the riots in Uttar Pradesh. In one incident that Sacco documents, Muslims ambush droves of Hindus attempting to flee. The Muslim attack is relentless. Hindu farmers attempt to hide behind their trolley trucks only to have their vehicles ransacked. They are attacked with guns, rocks, swords and knives. One man witnesses his son bludgeoned and tossed off a truck. When he attempts to help him, he is overwhelmed by an oncoming mob. He calls out to the police who manage to get his son to a hospital, where he dies. It begs the question, When will this horror end? It is a question that perpetually begs for an answer.

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August 17, 2025 · 7:00 pm

Partisans: A Graphic History of Anti-Fascist Resistance book review

Partisans: A Graphic History of Anti-Fascist Resistance. Editors: Raymond Tyler & Paul Buhle. Between The Lines. 2025. 148pp. $34.95.

A bold statement is asserted in the introduction to this book: “History does not repeat itself. But the example offered of the Partisans’ courage must not, cannot, be forgotten in our time. We must find our own creative ways, individually and collectively, to rise to the challenge.” This is a collection of short works in comics that chronicle the fight against fascism leading up to and all through the Second World War. I don’t know what to make of the relatively calm assertion that history does not repeat itself when, each day, it looks like history is repeating itself. The best I can come up with to reconcile this statement is to say that we must embrace the calm before the storm, even seek it out during the storm. Each story here offers some moments of contemplation, featuring stories from survivors with their own set of insights.

“Freedom or Death: The French Partisans” by Daniel Selig

For these sort of works in comics, especially a collection such as this, I believe the most compelling work cuts to the chase. This is why I find the straightforward piece by Daniel Selig, known in Europe for this work with Éditions FLBLB, so compelling. He sets out to outline the evolution of French Partisans and does exactly that. There’s even a quick and precise nod to the creative and intellectual contingent on one page featuring Jean Paul-Sartre, Paul Eluard and Elsa Barraine. Food for thought as we engage with our own times.

“The Hungarian Resistance” by Sander Feinberg and Summer McClinton

There are a number of more traditional depictions of testimony coming from the average person. In that vein, some examples: David Lasky‘s rendering of diary entries from Eastern Europe; Trina Robbins and Anne Timmons honoring teenage Paritsans in Holland; and Sander Feinberg and Summer McClinton‘s tribute to the Hungarian resistance. Each work brings the struggle down to the human scale in very distinctive ways in terms of style and approach.

“Andartiko: Fighting Fascism in Greece” by David Lester

Another more straightforward approach focuses on the fight in Greece. David Lester, known for his historical graphic novels with a dramatic flair (Revolution by Fire: New York’s Afro-Irish Uprising of 1741) , offers a study of the Andartiko Partisans, with roots going back to the Ottoman Empire. His approach is gritty, bold and dynamic and really keeps the narrative moving.

“Piccola Staffetta” by Isabella and Franca Bannerman

What each piece in this book has in common is that urgency to connect the dots from the past with the present. The most explicit example comes from long-time World War 3 Illustrated contributor Isabella Bannerman. In her piece, she depicts the words of her mother, Franca Bannerman, who grew up during the rise of Mussolini and can’t help but see a distinct similarity between that fascist dictator and our current U.S. president. Well, someone had to say it and this one hits the nail on the head. So, where do you go from here? Days, let alone months, even years, can go by and the future remains murky and sinister. One thing is for sure, we can all use as much calm contemplation as we can get.

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July 16, 2025 · 3:50 pm

Steve Benson (1954 – 2025)

“People are testy and uncomfortable, and they really don’t know where the country’s going. That’s why cartoonists are here.” That quote is by political cartoonist Steve Benson regarding Trump 1.0 back in 2017. Sounds very relevant for today, as does the above editorial cartoon, also circa 2017.

Steve Benson (1954 – 2025) was one of the greats with a career spanning over 40 years. Benson won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in The Arizona Republic in 1993. Benson grew up in the generation influenced by giants in the industry, Jeff MacNelly and Pat Oliphant, the caliber of cartoonists that even the most casual observer took notice of. As happens with the best, Benson found his own take on things and the rest is history.

Steve Benson is not a name I was particularly acquainted with. Sadly, a good chunk of Benson’s career oversaw the steady decline of newspapers and the overall splintering of media into a thousand pieces. That said, his work was powerful and speaks to the need for more of it, not less. Political cartoons are a perfect vehicle to speak truth to power. We still have any number of cartoonists who aspire to at least try to make as strong a mark as Benson on this or that online platform. We need them to continue their good work since nefarious politicians aren’t slowing down any time soon if ever.