Tag Archives: History

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.

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June 5, 2025 · 7:30 am

Democratic Socialists of America: A Graphic History Kickstarter

Democratic Socialists of America: A Graphic History was featured here on Comics Grinder a while back. It is, as the creators of this comic book describe it, “a lively history of the Democratic Socialists of America for all members and not-yet members.” Your politics do not need to lean left to appreciate and enjoy this work.

A Kickstarter campaign is on now thru July 3, 2025 to help spread the word.

Support a cause and an engaging comic book during its Kickstarter campaign (ends July 3) here.

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April 7, 2025 · 11:30 pm

Remember Us to Life by Joanna Rubin Dranger comics review

Remember Us to Life. By Joanna Rubin Dranger. 432 pp. Ten Speed Graphic.  2025. $40.

Joanna Rubin Dranger presents a most compelling testament to uncovering truths about family, history and the present in her monumental graphic memoir, Remember Us to Life, the winner of The Nordic Council Literature Prize. As a young Jewish person growing up in Sweden, Dranger had simply assumed the best about the country she called home but an incident as a teenager triggered a lifetime of seeking answers. It was while taking part in a youth Christian workshop, that Dranger approached the priest leading the class. She asked if she could complete the course without going through the confirmation ritual. To that, the priest derisively said: “You Jews, you don’t evangelize, do you?” This struck her as cruel and unusual. Where was all this animosity coming from? Essentially, that is the question driving this book.

“For the building of a Jew-free Europe.”

Dranger’s quest leads her to uncovering the truth of how her Jewish relatives “disappeared” during World War II. Through her research, she comes to find a rich and vibrant family narrative and the devastating violence that led to their senseless murders. Her searching follows her family in Poland and Russia to their subsequent immigration to Sweden and Israel. Dranger also provides historical accounts of the persecution of Jewish people in Germany, Poland, Lithuania, and Russia prior to and during World War II, as well as the antisemitic policies and actions of the supposedly neutral government of Sweden. While it may sound harsh to suggest Sweden collaborated with Nazi Germany, history shows that the Swedish government kept meticulous records of its Jewish citizenry and reported that back to Nazi Germany.

The Evian Conference of 1938: zero tolerance on immigration.

History also shows that the U.S. Congress would not budge in allowing in more Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany in 1938 since it would interfere with their quotas, already set back in 1924. As Dranger explains, it was made clear during a meeting of thirty-two countries at a conference in Evian, France, in 1938, that even though countries might be sympathetic to the plight of the Jewish refugees, they would not tolerate anymore immigrants.

Dranger’s book is a moving and eye-opening account merging history with personal observation. Following in the tradition of classics such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Remember Us to Life is a new landmark work in the ever-evolving comics medium. Dranger’s graphic memoir is not only an investigation into her Jewish family’s history but an essential record.

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December 17, 2024 · 7:00 pm

The Complete I, René Tardi, P.O.W. graphic novel review

The Complete I, Rene Tardi, P.O.W. (Fantagraphics, 2024, $99.99)

Guest Review by Paul Buhle

To say that Jacques Tardi is a major figure in comic art and in the development of contemporary comic art, its meaning and its expression, is insufficient. To many thoughtful readers,  Tardi has not only the brilliance of the artist but also the courage and resolve of the resister within a world where “resistance” is often described as futile and its activists are derided as a public embarrasment when not a menace.

There is something about Tardi’s work that is, for many readers including this one, deeply personal. CLR James, the great Pan African historian but also world-historic writer on the game of cricket, remarked that a good writer can say “it happened” but only a great writer (or artist) can say, “I see it, myself.” And make that claim credible. Again and again, Tardi shows us convincingly what he has seen and by doing so, why it is important. That the son appears always young while talking to the father in various stages of 1930s-40s life is a convention to make this personal story possible.

If another prefatory remark to a review of this trilogy does not overburden the reader, I would add that Tardi is the master of oral history, a “field” so recent that it has never reached academic respectability and so rooted in human history that it surely goes back to the earliest tribal communal expressions. The trilogy is an extended oral history, easily one of the first nonfiction efforts in comic form and almost certainly the longest.

The first volume.

He has been at this work a long time. Back in the 1990s, Tardi produced a two volume comic about the massive truma suffered during the First World War. It Was A War of the Trenches, noted for its realism, was followed by Goddamn This War!, praised for its accuracy as well as its sardonic, “black” humor.

In this stunning new three volume set, with its art intermittently tinted, Tardi tells the story of his father but by extension, the story of many millions of participants in war, non-participant victims and those destined or trapped to see the horrors up close.

In the first volume of the trilogy,  Tardi’s wife and collaborator Dominique Grange offers five large  prefatory pages of photos and drawings. Tardi himself chimes in with three more, mostly an acknowledgment of assistance from various quarters. They are paying homage to a generation fast slipping away. They are also telling younger people about their own collective past, their collective responsibility to French history, sometimes heroic, sometime monstrous (think of colonialism), but real and continuing.

These books are, crucially, also a testament to oral history of a certain kind, in this case assissted but only assisted by diaries that Tardi’s father had kept. A handful of other artists working on subjects ranging from the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s to the Vietnam War and the Israeli Occuption of Gaza have run up against the familiar problems. “Truth,” if the word is useful at all, is the truth of the story, the vividness and detail of memory rather than its factual accuracy. The son asking his father about a past that would be more painful than pleasant to detail, adds himself to the story.

It is oral history, after all, that allows the depth of detail but also a running dialogue about the details and meaning of memory. At every stage, generational conflict is on display.

A son who becomes a father resents the tedium of small town life and the dull certainties of a civil service career. A grandson, obviously devoting years to collecting a story, nevertheless needles his father, especially but not only about recruitment into the military and repeated re-enlistment. How could one choose an authoritarian organization full of class privilege, romanticizing violence and practicing violence on colonial victims from Africa to Asia? These are good questions answered with the stoicism of the working class or lower classes anywhere to military enlistment: a feeling of few alternatives for young people, and the often-later-regretted impulse to get away from home and “see the world.”

But there is more here, of course. This is also the story of Grange, the scriptwriter proper, Tardi’s partner in life and the daughter of another veteran of the same war. Her father died too early for Grange to get a detailed reminiscence, but this trilogy is very much a partnership. A recent outing by the pair, Elise and the New Partisans, in another fine Fantagraphics production, tells the story of the courageous radicals from the new left era, seen through the eyes of a Maoist-feminist militant.

The “Partisan” label has remained since the 1940s a crucial sign-of-sorts in French culture and politics. For outsiders, the “Resistance” is the official narrative: Marshall DeGaulle and the Free French Army march on Paris and heroically end the German occupation. As the concluding volume of I, father Tardi notes with special bitterness, De Gaulle had been off protecting the French empire in Africa from anti-colonial rebels while the dangerous and heroic antifascist struggle took place within France itself.

That the influence of Communists weighed heavily among the Partisans, a key source of post-war Left political popularity, offered another reason for a contrary and “official” narrative shared most of all by Americans. Not so in much of Europe: even the horrors of Stalinism in the War and after could not abolish the heroism of Partisans across large parts of the continent. The artist titled his latest volume The New Partisans for a reason: the memory has not gone away, even as the last of the antifascist underground pass, receiving good obituaries as far from France as the New York Times. The memory of the Partisans is not only a celebration of life and commemoration of bravery. It is also a reminder of the cowardice of the collaborators.

Rene himself remains, however, distant from all poltiical parties, saving much of his bitterness for the phony heroism of DeGaulle. Likewise for the bourgeois French citizens who made fortunes on the black market, likewise for the French police who rounded up Jews for deportation to the Death Camps, joining the Resistance just ten days before the liberation of Paris.  A hard-bitten veteran of real war, he saves the rest of his bitterness, the largest part, for the French Army leadership and the politicians who might have crushed the Germans in their first violation of the Versailles Treaty of 1919, but waited and waited. By the time they mobilized, the Wehrmacht was overwhelming, while French officaldom stupidly counted upon their revised Maginot Line to halt the German march. And then, among the officer corps, fled the Germans alongside the refugees, throwing down their guns along the way.

All this reflects a bitterness that revives a bitterness that he feels by generational sensibility to the soldiers and civilians of the First World War, the grandparents of Tardi and also of Grange. They survived but many of their own relatives did not. The false expectations of glory and easy victory, the painful sense that the Germans had been pushed back only because the Americans entered the war, and above all the horrors of the trenches left behind a collective sense of exhaustion. Tardi’s parents grow up under this shadow, a postmaster and postmistress who are satisfied, more than satisfied, to be civil servants with a quiet life in small (and to him, boring) French village.

Thus Tardi’s father, restless in adolescence and feeling a sense of nationalism at the first stirrings of German revanche expressions, makes his great error (or so Tardi the son believes) enlisting in the army. Tardi’s youthful disdain in this decision is perhaps the only real moment of disagreement in the comic, reflecting conversations that might have happened or might have taken place mainly in the young man’s mind, finalized on paper.

A kind of generational peace is achieved, perhaps, when Rene recounts the only violence that he actually committed: in his day running a tank, he runs over German soldiers so thoroughly that only traces of body parts remain, a memory that haunts him for years. Still, even this apparently guilt-ridden retelling is an artistic re-enactment.

And perhaps that disjuncture between reality and retelling  is the last important conceptual point of this trilogy. The artist and his scriptwriter cannot really go back in history. And yet their effort to do so, based on an informal but deeply felt and ardently pursued oral history, father to son, is something remarkable, something still little seen in a comic art world where non-fiction remains a fairly small category with no rules.

What does the enormous achievement of Jacques Tardi but also Dominique Grange mean for comics in particular, for comic art and a fairly recent method of the telling of some large and complicated history? These are not likely questions asked by the casual comics reader or even the armchair critic. Or I should say: not asked easily.  The trilogy under review will be at the center of scholars and reviewers, also readers of French history in particular, for a long time. And for good reason.

Paul Buhle

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