World War 3 Now?, #54, 2024. World War 3 Illustrated. 250pp, $25.00. Distributed by AK Press.
Guest review by Paul Buhle
The very launch of World War 3 Illustrated in 1979 offered a grim view of the future. Sadly, not much has altered for the better since then. We are now in a most perilous situation, and the annual comics anthology offers a way to look at things and, just possibly, also offers some potential ways out.
Many of the contributors to WW3 remain from its long-ago origins, most evidently Seth Tobocman and Sabrina Jones. One might risk calling them the darker and lighter spirits of the team, respectively. How WW3 has evolved through the decades is mostly through globalizing. Once mostly if never entirely North American in its artists and subjects, it has become a truly global anthology. Lots from the Middle East, not surprisingly. More from Latin America.
One of the most striking pieces, by Nico Donatti, treats the Bolsonaro years in Brazil. The Trump-inspired rightwing politician and his movement looked to wipe out as much of the Amazon rainforest as profitable, deal the last final blow to the surviving tribes, and blame the social unrest on “Communists.” Happily, Bolsanaro went down in defeat. Yet the regional peril remains, as we see in the pages of Carlo Quispe and Nadia Rondon, two Peruvian artist/activists. They depict the continuing role of colonization launched by Spain centuries ago and very much alive in the violent repression of protesters. As of the present, new changes in the laws give the judicial branch the ability to blunt environmental laws in the name of profit and international investments.
It gets worse, if possible. Certainly around color pages on the climate protests in New York City and the violent assaults upon Palestinian civilians. Like the treatment of the war in the Ukraine, these are studies of people under attack. With good reason, many depictions of fear appear in these pages, but none worse than the fear and terror experienced by an Israeli woman who sees nothing good in the narrative of revenge and hope. Only a change of mood that will bring the hostages home can offer hope. Maisara Baroud and Mohammed Sabannet offer visual treatments of Gaza, and readers may shudder as they turn the pages.
I am drawn (as always) to Sabrina Jones’s work, because of her unique comic art style but also because her intense humanism finds a basis for redemption. Here, a deteriorating old building in the Lower East Side is repeatedly revived by artists and musicians until…it was snatched up by a random billionaire. And yet the struggle of 9th Street continues, as it has since the labor uprising of Tompkins Square Park in 1873.
There’s more here, almost incomprehensibly more. Another familiar contributor, Susan Simensky Bietela, offers a hard look at her adopted Milwaukee, how the Republican convention brought out the worst in a city proudly governed by socialists, only a century ago. Near the end of the book, Kevin Pyle shows us a “wasteland” in New Jersey, close to Manhattan, somehow remarkably become a haven for birds and other species who can live in the marshes untouched by suburban life. “Nobonzo,” a non-gendered artist, closes the book by renewing the “beautiful idea”of anarchism reborn for the near End Times. Two children learn about the ideas of Kropotkin among others, with this pregnant thought:
“Rather than looking at history backwards, starting with the conclusion, when everything we love will have ceased to exist, let’s begin from the present moment; Let’s become capable of action in the context we’re in….The real content of utopia is the concrete actions it enables you to take.” Along with the very final one: “There will always be something beautiful.” We need to hold that thought.
