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
