Category: Non-fiction

Posted on

Wait, What? – A Comic Book Guide to Relationships, Bodies, and Growing Up


By Heather Corinna, Isabella Rotman, Luke B. Howard & various (Limerence Press)
ISBN: 978-1-62010-659-4 (PB) eISBN: 978-1-62010-660-0

Comic strips have long been acknowledged as an incredibly powerful tool to educate, rendering tricky or complex issues easily accessible. They also have an irresistible capacity to affect and change behaviour and have thus been used for centuries by politicians, religions, the military and commercial concerns to modify how we live our lives. Call it visual nudge-theory…

Here’s a splendid example of the art form using those great powers for good.

Sometimes it looks like the entire world’s political and moral leaders are seeking to re-mystify the most basic human experience by obfuscating all knowledge of it – leaving our most vulnerable at the mercy of their own basic instincts, wicked exploitation, cruel misinformation and simple ignorance. So if school, church and parental guardians can’t deliver, where can the new and confused go to learn about sexual interactions?

The Comic Book Guide to Relationships, Bodies, and Growing Up begins with an introductory message from Scarleteen – a sex and relationships information, education and support organisation/resource aimed at young people. As official consultants on this project, they start the ball rolling with ‘sex ed for the real world’, detailing the work and purpose of the project and other places the confused or cautious might seek advice and help.

Like many other Limerence publications, this one uses strips, games, puzzles, debate and tutorials – delivered via an engagingly diverse cartoon cast – to explore a variety of potential situations, share vital information (that my generation got from a succession of embarrassed and unwilling teachers despite what our parents thought or said) and proffer advice on where to obtain more.

The publisher’s sequence of informational comics and books has an admirable record of confronting uncomfortable issues with taste, sensitivity and breezy forthrightness: offering solutions or starting points as well as awareness and solidarity. Crucially here, that comes wrapped up in a blanket of reassurance and accepting non-judgement. The message is that every one of us is different and brings something unique to the table…

‘So Who’s at the Lunch Table?’ introduces Rico, Malia, Max, Sam and Alexis: generalised teen spokes-people representing a variety of races, backgrounds, ambitions and sexualities. There is also a narrative usher to authorially move things along …the sublimely neutral Weird Platypus…

The mess and muddle around Sex is systematically tackled, beginning with an assault on the myth of timing and physical development in ‘Due Dates’: explaining biology, emotional maturity and even consent and opportunity, whilst contributing numerous anecdotes and opinions in ‘What Do You Think and Where Are You At?’

The carefully manufactured war between media, self-aspiration and everyday life is deconstructed in ‘IRL: in real life’ confirming that “the way things are in media are not necessarily how they ACTUALLY ARE”, after which we gain great graphic and factual clarity in ‘What is Puberty?’

The chapter details the basic ‘Stages of Puberty’, initially concentrating on ‘For Every Body’ before affording specialist data with ‘If You’ve got a Vagina’ and ‘If You’ve got a Penis’…

‘You’re a Man/Woman Now!’ then busts some fallacies on the subject to reveal ‘These Things Don’t Actually Mean Very Much About Growing Up’…

The next topic opens with overview ‘Ohhh Yeah, Real Mature!’: asking the gang ‘What Does Maturity Mean to You?’ before plunging into the charged subject of ‘Masturbation!’

Expanding into lesson and anecdotal discourse, we learn ‘Masturbation is Healthy – and nothing to be ashamed of’ and sensibly enquire ‘Why Do People Masturbate’ before tackling an increasingly serious problem in ‘Weird Genitals!: Worried Your genitals look weird? Feeling like other people’s do???’

This section is augmented by ‘A Whole Bunch of Genitals’ in a gallery display plus a join-the-dots activity page cheekily page proving ‘Genitals come in all sorts of different sizes, shapes and colors’…

The major issue of Difference is laid out and explained in ‘Boys vs. Girls’, covering every aspect of possible confusion and contention via sports or toys to genderised colours, cunningly rationalised by a series of non-binary paper-dolls and clothing outfits with gender-fluid Max guiding us in making declarations and identifications…

A seemingly overwhelming youthful hurdle is cut down to size in ‘What is a Crush?’ with hapless cisgendered heterosexual Rico pointing out some pitfalls, assisted by his tablemates answering the question ‘Have You Ever Had a Crush?’ and ‘Do You Really want to Be Someone’s Partner, Girlfriend or Boyfriend?’ Whilst exploring ‘Promises and Dating’ and negotiating a bewildering maze entitled ‘As If There Was Only One Path!’ we learn how to end relationships kindly and safely in ‘It’s Okay To Go’…

The mysteries and challenges of informed choice are explored in ‘By Invitation Only’ – reinforced by a ‘Consent Word Search’ – before we move on to the bit every parent always freaks out over…

What defines intimacy and sexual behaviour is debated and explored in ‘It’s Not Sex, It’s Just Messing Around’, pictorially questioning ‘Why Do People Have Sex Together’, ‘So What’s the Difference between Sex and “Messing Around”’ and gaming out ‘If it Wasn’t a Choice’…

Graphs and statistics are deployed for ‘How Do You Know When You’re Ready for Sex Stuff’, backing up the cartoon wisdom of vox-pop ‘When Do You Think You Will Be Ready for Sex Stuff’ and pivotal enquiry ‘Why is Sex Such a Big Deal?’: only pausing to ask ‘Are You… Gay? Straight? Both? Neither?’ and if it even matters…

A ‘Sexual Orientation Crossword’ – with handy ‘Sexual Orientation Word Bank’ – introduces a new (and increasingly toxically contentious contemporary topic) in ‘Sexual Identity Isn’t a Lifelong Commitment’, with pictured points of view culminating in a space for readers to verbalise their own thoughts, after which the end approaches as we ponder ‘What Does it Mean to be a Virgin?’

Here Malia, Rico and Sam deconstruct the term from widely differing starting points, whilst ‘I Hate That Word!’ examines the infinitely loaded term’s accusatory and demeaning contexts before unleashing ‘A Note About Double Standards’…

When beginning or even just anticipating a sexual life, support is crucial and a trustworthy network is a must if it’s possible at all. ‘Assemble Your Superteam!’ offers some sage advice on how in ‘Your Sidekick’, ‘Your Parental Figure’, ‘Your Mentor’ and ‘Your League’. The process is reinforced by another Wordsearch – ‘Find all the people you could maybe talk to!’ – before neatly segueing into ‘Know Your Community Resources!’ and affirming questionnaire ‘Who is on your Superteam?’

The cerebral sex session ceases with ‘In Conclusion: What is One Last Thing You Want to Leave Everyone With?’, supplemented by ‘Dear You’: a direct message from the creators that endeth the lessons…

Cartoonist Isabella Rotman (A Quick & Easy Guide to Consent, Bodies, and Growing Up; Not on My Watch: The Bystanders Handbook for the Prevention of Sexual Violence; You’re So Sexy When You Aren’t Transmitting STIs) and New Orleans colourist Luke Howard have crafted a cogent and compelling primer covering the irrefutable basics for a wide and varied range of potential users, with the facts and messaging scripted by author, educator and youth advocate Heather Corinna (S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-To-Know Sexuality Guide to Get You Through Your Teens and Twenties; Our Bodies Ourselves).

Identifying as Queer and disabled, Corinna is the founder, designer and director of Scarleteen and Rotman became the organisation’s artist in residence in 2013.

A comprehensive ‘Glossary’ of pertinent terms opens a section of codicils including ‘I Can’t Keep Up With the Slang!’ – an advisory on changing trends in talk about sex; ‘Puzzle Solutions’; creators bios and appreciation ‘We are so grateful for:’ after which ‘More Cool Things!’ offers a bibliography and listings of other resources online, organisational and other for kids and adults to further explore…

This book is a bright and breezy primer covering the irrefutable basics on beginning one’s sexual life and confirming a gender that most suits each individual. By sharing facts and honest opinions it may hopefully help readers safely navigate all manner of relationship and explore the spectrum of experiences that should be available us all…
Wait, What? – A Comic Book Guide to Relationships, Bodies, and Growing Up is ™ & © 2019 Heather Corinna and Isabella Rotman. All rights reserved.

Posted on

Irmina


By Barbara Yelin; translated by Michael Waaler (SelfMadeHero)
ISBN: 978-1-914224-13-3 (TPB/Digital edition)

Award-winning German illustrator, cartoonist and comics maker Barbara Yelin (Le Visiteur, Le Retard, Gift, Riekes Notizen, Spring, Gigaguhl und das Riesen-Glück, Tagebuch eines Zwangsarbeiters, But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust) was born in 1977 and studied illustration in Hamburg before scoring her earliest successes in the French Bande Dessinées market.

She favours fact-based human interest stories and biographical tales. When Yelin found letters and diaries revealed unknown aspects of her own grandmother’s closeted past, she was inspired to dramatize the history: crafting an exploration of race and identity; forensically dissecting the notion of compromise, allure of self-deception, force of social pressure and weight of personal responsibility. The graphic novel won great acclaim and led to her being celebrated as Best German Graphic Novelist 2016 at the Erlangen comics festival.

First released in English that year, the tale of Irmina is now available in a paperback edition and offers timely and still uncomfortable insights into a problem that has never really gone away…

It begins in ‘Part One: London’ as in 1934, Irmina von Behdinger skirts the fringes of English society. Dour and a bit dowdy, she is extremely forthright and outspoken as she pursues a dream. Seeking education and a profession, she studies at a commercial school for young women: learning to be a typist. Dragged to a party for useless snobs and swells, she again feels a like a target and communal object of amusement for the so-cavalier In-Crowd until she meets Barbadian law student Howard Green.

Mistaking him for a waiter when he’s actually one of the first black students at Oxford, she finds they have lots in common…

A close, covert and frequently strained relationship develops as they trade life stories that are far from commonplace and compare experiences of being outsiders in a hidebound culture constrained by class, race and constant disdainful judgement by distant, graciously hostile and forever exclusive British society. As the odd couple get to know each other better, it transpires that neither was particularly well-suited to life in their own homelands either…

For instance, the new rulers of a resurgent Germany encourage women to eschew learning and self-reliance in favour of motherhood and the building of a stronger Fatherland through service to their men and the state. All she wants is to be her own woman and see faraway places like the sunny West Indies that spawned such a complex paradox as Howard…

Further complicating her life – which she sees as separate from the greater world – are newspaper reports from Germany which her “host parents” and everyone else around her somehow feel are connected to her. It’s as if they hold the exchange student responsible for the acts of all her countrymen. The defence that these are not “her Germans” means nothing…

Of course, it’s not much better in England, as Howard learns when he and Irmina stumble into a “Blackshirt” rally in Hyde Park. The encounter with the British fascist movement prompts a move and Irmina becomes the companion of an émigré countess from Germany: an old suffragette who has made the Empire her homeland and now works with the Labour Party to improve the lives of the poor, disenfranchised and female…

Despite being ferociously gripped by her ideal of an independent, autonomous existence, Irmina cannot escape the labels and assumptions piled upon her. Howard too is feeling the pressure as his exams loom. Both are caught up in the chaotic tides of the times and as the global political situation calcifies and crystalises, they part and she is compelled to return home and adapt to a new Normal in ‘Part Two: Berlin’…

Having finally achieved her long-desired independence, Irmina in 1935 is far from secure or happy. Behind on rent, underpaid in her government secretarial/translator’s position at the Ministry of War and a constant target for lecherous men in uniform or administrators taking the credit for her work, she persists because of a promise of an official transfer to London. The promise is never fulfilled and the pedestrian chore of staying ahead, making no waves and endless stream of bureaucratic form-filling that comprises her life gradually wears the ambitious isolationist dreamer down.

Even the occasional social flurry – like a party held by her cousin – only serves to highlight that she is not a proper German anymore, tainted as she is by her time amongst the decadent British…

Moreover, her sense of being “othered” kicks into overdrive after meeting up-and-coming architect Gregor Meinrich, who has embraced the new national philosophy with the frenzy of a zealot. As promises fail to be met and national pride swells, Irmina endures perpetual disappointment and, as her chances to leave Germany dwindle, she withdraws from life, slavishly passing each successive day. The drear existence culminates in marriage to SS officer Gregor and the shattering boredom of a dutiful hausfrau…

Sidelining and abandoning her few friends, Irmina becomes a ghost of her former self as all around her ordinary people are caught up in a new zeitgeist: embracing pride and a toxic ideology. By the time her son is born, Germany is officially at war and Gregor is gone all the time. Now she doesn’t even have his borrowed dreams and ambitions to sustain her and as the war proceeds her beliefs and hopes and all human decency are similarly whittled away…

The story climaxes in ‘Part Three: Barbados’ as in 1983, stand-offish school secretary Irmina Meinrich contemplates her imminent retirement. Her life is carefully and scrupulously devoid of all emotional extravagance and foolish, pointless joy or hope: everything is simply making time with the least effort until death claims her. Then one night she receives a letter from Barbados. His Excellency Governor General Sir Howard Green is hoping to carry out a promise he had made to a young exchange student in 1934…

Delivered in moody muted colours and rendered in expressionistic soft tones and childlike simplified lines, Yelin’s exploration of extraordinary people in catastrophic times is uncomfortable, distressing and challenging, but is all the more powerful and topical for that.

Counterpointed by Dr. Kolb’s stringent exploration of everyday life in Nazi Germany and enquiring just how an entire nation seemingly surrendered to its collective dark side, this is a timeless and compelling treatise on aspiration and personal integrity as affected by extreme circumstance and unrelenting peer pressure.
Potent, powerful, moving and memorable, this is a true romance tale well told and impossible to forget. © 2014 Barbara Yelin & Reprodukt. All rights reserved.

Posted on

Fists Raised – 10 Stories of Sports Star Activism


By Chloé Célérien & Karim Nedjari translated by Peter Russella (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1-68112-303-5 (HB) eISBN: 978-1-68112-304-2

Having just recently endured the most nauseating and crass example of sports-washing I can think of – and I’m including the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Moscow 1980 and Los Angeles 1984 in that statement – here’s a wonderful comics counterpoint and riposte, detailing the power of sports to do good.

Sadly – and as seems quite usual now – it’s generally cases of well-meaning individuals working against the advisement and wishes of their own sporting governing bodies and governments. It’s almost as if the people running the show care more about money and power than honour, history, achievement or the fans that pay their wages…

It seems there’s nothing you can’t craft compelling comics about if you’re talented and inspired, as seen in this spellbinding celebration of sports stars weaponising their fame and glory to change the world in ways that truly matter.

Originally released au Continent in 2021 as Générations Poing Levé, quand le sport percute l’histoire, this beguiling and amusingly infuriating book blends history, biography and social commentary thanks to scripter Karim Nedjari (French pundit, journalist and CEO of Radio Monte Carlo and RMC Sport) who teams up with sports-mad cartoonist Chloé Célérien to précis the lives and careers of ten true champions.

These noteworthy stars have all used their celebrity to call out hypocrisy and injustice, fighting to better the lives of the Poor, Disenfranchised, Oppressed or otherwise Othered our rulers choose to ignore or outlaw…

Sports and public competition have always enraptured the masses: eternally viewed as a great and unifying leveller. Even the most lowly and downtrodden can derive joy from playing or participating and, for the impoverished, excellence has always offered a means of escape: a way to turn their talents into a kind of liberty and agency.

It has never, however, been enough to make players into billionaires. Even the greatest can’t make the leap from “player” to “owner”. That takes generational wealth…

Moreover, we haven’t changed much from ancient times. Women are still excluded or simply included on arbitrary male terms and there’s little difference in the status and treatment of a top footballer and a champion racehorse, a boxer or a show dog: ultimately they’re all property of an elite that runs the game and makes – and changes – the rules.

Even so, some modern-day gladiators risking themselves for the benefits granted by cunning commerce and contemporary Caesars may have personal Spartacus moments: telling the powers-that-be when, how, how much and how often they are betraying the people they smugly lord over…

That’s certainly the case in the brief biography of ‘Marcus Rashford – Big Brother to the Poor (1997, soccer, England)’. He’s a young black athlete who translated his astounding footballing triumphs into a very public war of wills with the entire British Government, and especially inept, pitifully attention-addicted prime minister Boris Johnson.

Émigré comedian Henning Wenn summed it up best when he said “We don’t do charity in Germany. We pay taxes. Charity is a failure of Government’s responsibilities…”

A grateful beneficiary of free school meals as a child, Rashford used his elevated public position to school the ruling Conservative party – who had near-unanimously voted AGAINST FEEDING STARVING CHILDREN – in a media campaign that resulted in Johnson repeatedly bowing to the footballer’s gadfly “suggestions”.

In a backward-looking Britain that has adopted the dogma that money is more important than people, the toxic policies of the Tories had never been more powerfully or effectively opposed than in this case of a working-class hero who never forgot where he came from…

‘Muhammad Ali – The Greatest (1942-2016, boxing, United States)’ recalls the career of another icon. Ali was a sporting superstar who evolved into a paragon of black liberation and human equality, and global symbol of power, endurance and dignity.

American prize fighter Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., found his true name and purpose after years of social othering, where he was readily permitted to entertain millions of Americans, but only to eat, sleep or share space where white people said he could…

Born in Louisville, Kentucky on January 17th 1942, Clay began boxing at age 12. He won titles and acclaim and notoriety, not simply for his incredible sporting achievements but for his quick wit, cultural savvy and moral standing. Gold medal Olympian, World heavyweight champion, critic, pundit and street poet, in 1966 Clay took on the American government and paid a high personal price for refusing to fight a “white man’s war” in Vietnam.

Originally declared 4F due to dyslexia, he was abruptly re-classified and called up after becoming a voice of the Civil Rights Movement. Many still believe he was only drafted to shut him up… a tactic repeated over and over again throughout modern history.

A lifelong equal rights advocate, in 1964, the forceful Conscientious Objector had converted to Islam and formally renounced his “slave name”, adopting new appellation Muhammad Ali.

A living symbol of black pride, Ali retired from boxing in 1981 to concentrate on commercial, social, political and philanthropic works. He was declared Sportsman and Sports Personality of the (20th) Century by Sports Illustrated and the BBC respectively, and died in June 2016 from complications associated with Parkinson’s disease. Like Pelé, he changed the way the world saw colour…

Such was also the case with ‘Surya Bonaly – Black Blades (1973, figure skating, France)’: a black female skater who overcame all odds, broke records and revolutionised her sport, only to be denied its greatest awards and rewards thanks to constant gaslighting and the immovable forces of institutionalised racism. Her fight to correct those injustices for all who followed in her spectacular footsteps comprises the greater part of her entry here.

The same is true for the now largely anonymized icon whose very stance and image gave rise to the concept of sport as symbolic culture weapon.

‘Tommie Smith – The Black Clenched Fist of America (1944, track and field, United States)’ overcame poverty and entrenched bias to win gold at the 1968 Olympics, educating himself to the rank of college professor

His actions particularly outraged closet racist and antisemite and President of the Olympic Committee Avery Brundage (you should look up his sterling record…): a man whose influence tainted sport for generations from his apologist stance at the 1936 “Nazi Olympics” all the way through to the terrorist-blighted 1972 Munich games. He’s worthy of his entry if not book, but it wouldn’t be very complimentary…

How Tommie Smith willingly surrendered everything to make the political statement he believed more important than his own future, and how not just he and black teammate John Carlos (bronze medallist) but also white Australian silver medallist Peter Norman (who contributed a crucial twist to the Raised Fist incident) were punished for the visual statement is something every sports lover should be ashamed of and outraged by…

This chapter also carefully deconstructs the events and planning leading to that moment and the carefully conceived symbolic assault on the Establishment. Here we see Smith enduring decades of FBI surveillance in the aftermath. Moreover, he was designated one of ten athletes considered “a threat to America”, but ended on a triumphal high as the man who inspired Colin Kaepernick’s latterday protest, the Black Lives Matter movement and the career of Barack Obama finally received the acclaim he deserved…

Just as ingrained and unassailable was the attitude to women in sport and ‘Megan Rapinoe – An American Feminist (1985, soccer, United States)’ traces a painfully similar and oft-rerun path. Rapinoe was born to a poor white staunchly Republican family, and endured a different kind of bigotry. She and her siblings employed sport – or petty crime – to escape their stifling social problems, but Megan’s unique triumphs in soccer made her a global icon.

World Cup winner, Gold-winning Olympian, openly gay and a media megastar, she used her fame to champion pay inequality in US sport and constantly battled racial, sexual and gender bias. She was the first sports professional to support and emulate Colin Kaepernick’s stance and gesture, and proudly basked in the wrath of one-time President Donald Trump: constantly doubling down in a personal campaign to “smash the Patriarchy”, against the express wishes of much of her family. She too was celebrated and encouraged by more rational American Presidents and continues her forthright war on repressive conservatism…

‘Caster Semenya – The Woman Who Ran Too Fast (1991, track and field, South Africa)’ relates the shameful treatment of an African Olympian whose actual biology was considered aberrant and unwelcome. Targeted by (some) fellow competitors as well as international sporting authorities, the World Champion runner’s achievements and gender were constantly and repeatedly questioned. She was accused of being a man unfairly competing against women, and that man Brundage had plenty of unpleasant, unhelpful things to say on this issue too…

Her struggle for personal validation encompassed and overcame many official attempts to reclassify the sporting definitions of gender, and her later life has been dedicated to championing the rights of intersex women across the world…

‘Arthur Ashe – Humanitarian Aces (1943-1993, tennis, United States)’ was a world-shaking trailblazer who broke a monopoly. As seen above, sporting success has always been the only real weapon poor people have in a world tailored to accommodate the wealthy – usually white – and their offspring. A descendent of slaves, second class Virginian citizen Ashe shattered an age-old State colour bar preventing “his kind” playing tennis against white players. He fought hard and progressed, going on to become a global superstar: the first black man on UCLA’s team, first to play on the USA’s International (Davis Cup) team and first to win a prestigious Wimbledon tournament (where he controversially raised a Tommie Smith style fist after beating ferocious rival and Great White Hope Jimmy Connors).

Ashe was also a self-educated intellectual, a pacifist, a fashion icon and born social warrior who happily made waves. He too was classified as fodder for Vietnam, but his brother – a veteran – volunteered to take his place, leaving Arthur to continue his campaigns against injustice and intolerance, such as his early opposition to Apartheid in South Africa.

The crusader seemed born under an unlucky star: his sporting career ended early after a massive heart attack, and he survived quadruple bypass surgery to become a tennis coach who numbered John McEnroe amongst his protégés. His influence inspired many players of colour, from Yanick Noah to Venus and Serena Williams …

A second heart attack led to an agonisingly slow decline and dictated the course of his last crusade. Blood used during another heart operation had been contaminated with HIV and infected Ashe with AIDS. Diagnosed in 1988 with the mystery disease then decimating gay and black communities – and whilst writing a definitive history of black sportsmen and women in America – Ashe became the spokesman for AIDS sufferers everywhere after blackmailers threatened to expose his condition.

Instead, he went public, frustrating the criminals, demystifying the modern bête noir and becoming a UN consultant on HIV/AIDS until his death in February 1993. He lived long enough to see Apartheid end and meet his idol Nelson Mandela…

An unending fight for personal freedom and autonomy follows in the history of ‘Nadia Comaneci – The Dictator’s Doll (1961, gymnastics, Romania)’. Raised in the Soviet satrapy of Romania, determined sportswoman and legendary Olympic gymnast Comaneci fell under the absolute control of monstrous dictators and deranged personality cultists Nicolae and Elena Ceau?escu. Henceforth, her astounding accomplishments (first ever to achieve maximum possible scores and youngest athlete to win gold) became just like her pay, awards and prizes: property of the State as manifested in Mrs & Mrs Ceau?escu – whose many insane edicts included classifying sex education as a state secret and establishing Menstruation Police to enforce a population boom the bankrupt nation could not support…

Nadia’s abuse, struggle, flight to freedom in the West and subsequent bondage to a coercive controller is the stuff of nightmares and her eventual triumph and loving later life an utter cathartic joy.

Even for a nation that has produced many messianic footballers ‘Sócrates – Half Plato, Half Pelé (1954-2011, football, Brazil)’ is a remarkable figure. Another poor, talented and self-educated soccer star drawn from the underclasses, his struggles against addiction (“beer, cigarettes and women”) and the toxic allure of celebrity fed a fierce desire to be the best, but never affected his aims to help the people through socialism, medicine and ultimately political power. His early death might have robbed the world of a force for change, but his admirers’ and followers’ successful struggles against the Right – as manifested in dictatorial President Jair Bolsonaro – prove that his legacy ranges far beyond his sporting miracles…

Ending this potent exploration of individual achievement lifting all boats is the inspirational story of ‘Hiyori Kon – Little Miss Sumo (1997, sumo wrestling, Japan)’.

A resolute Japanese girl of lowly origin, she was early besotted by the national sport and battled two millennia of entrenched chauvinism and anti-female prejudice in a paradoxically forward-looking but hidebound society where many male and female roles are backed up by draconian laws and ironclad cultural conditioning. Even today Japan is one of the most gender-restricted societies on Earth (ranked 121st of 153 in terms of gender inequality by the World Economic Forum). The very term “feminism” equates with “hate” and “hysteria”…

Hiyori’s battles to compete as a female sumo wrestler were the stuff of legend, taking her across the country and the world as both competitor and coach for a sport growing evermore popular amongst women everywhere but in its nation of origin.

She has won medals everywhere but Japan, where the National Olympic governing body actually excluded the sport/discipline from their own (Covid-delayed) 2021 games because all events in any Olympiad must be open to male and female competitors…

Nevertheless, as part of a growing, inexorable tide of resolute women working for change, Hiyori has started a wave of reform and her crusade continues to this day…

These days a seemingly infinite variety of subjects fit under the umbrella of modern graphic novels – everything from superheroes, sci fi and the supernatural to philosophy, journalism and education. Thanks to their global reach and outlook, NBM are at the forefront of this welcome revolution, bringing a range of visions to the English-speaking table that apparently daunt most mainstream publishers here and in America.

Today’s book is a perfect case in point: a sequence of visual adaptations of some of the world’s most celebrated role models, chosen not only for their scintillating accomplishments but also the force of their convictions. The result is an utterly enticing graphic treasure, and there’s not a single tragic supervillain in sight… unless you count assorted governments, individual politicians, scurrilous administrators and business owners…

NBM’s library of graphic biographies are swiftly becoming the crucial guide to the key figures of modern history and popular culture. If you haven’t found the answers you’re seeking yet, then you’re clearly not looking in the right place…
© Hatchette Livre (Marabout) 2021. © 2022 NBM for the English translation. All rights reserved.

Fists Raised – 10 Stories of Sports Star Activism will be released on January 12th 2023 and can be pre-ordered now in both print and digital editions.

Most NBM books are also available in digital formats. For more information and other great reads see http://www.nbmpub.com/

Posted on

Look and Learn Book 1964


By many & various (Fleetway)
ISBN10: 901267-49-X – ISBN13: 978-0-90126-749-8

One the most missed of publishing traditions in this country is the educational comic. From the fact features in the legendary weekly The Eagle to the small explosion of factual and socially responsible boys and girls papers in the late 1950s to the heady go-getting heydays of the 1960s and 1970s, Britain had a healthy sub-culture of comics that informed, instructed and revealed …and don’t even get me started on sports comics!

Amongst many others, Speed & Power, World of Wonder, Tell Me Why and the greatest of them all Look and Learn spent decades making things clear and bringing the marvels of the world to our childish but avid attentions. They always did so with taste. wit, style and – thanks to the quality of the illustrators involved – astonishing beauty.

Look and Learn launched on 20th January 1962, brainchild of Fleetway Publications Director of Juvenile Publications Leonard Matthews, and executed by Editor David Stone (almost instantly replaced by John Sanders), Sub-Editor Freddie Lidstone and Art Director Jack Parker.

For twenty years and 1049 issues, the shiny beautifully printed comic delighted children by bringing the marvels of the universe to their doors, and was one of the country’s most popular children’s publications. Naturally, there were many spin-off tomes such as The Look and Learn Book of 1001 Questions and Answers, Look and Learn Book of Wonders of Nature, Look and Learn Book of Pets and Look and Learn Young Scientist, as well as the totally engrossing Christmas treat The Look and Learn Book.

This volume was released for Christmas 1971 (as with almost all UK Annuals it was forward-dated) and is a prime example of a lost form. Within this 132 heavy-stock paged hard-back are 46 fascinating features on all aspects of human endeavour, history and natural wonders.

Technology always played a growing part in proceedings and – aided and abetted by printing advances photography – the ever innovative editors subdivided this volume into themed categories: opening naturally with a Science Section that includes – in drawn and painted but mostly photo – features Beneath the Waves – the Story of Submarines, A Jet in your garage?, Cities in the Sky, Our Polluted Planet (yep they were bloody warning us way back then!), Quiet Please! and Tested for Toughness.

To keep readers on their intellectual toes there are tests at the end of each course module and a Science Quiz ushers readers into the next phase – Our Wonderful World of History…

Here – although photographs are increasingly used throughout – traditional illustrators still rule. Diagrams, cartoons, paintings and drawings were rendered by some of the world’s greatest commercial artists and might include such luminaries as Ron and Gerry Embleton, Helen Haywood, Ron Turner, Ken Evans, Angus McBride, Peter Jackson, “Pratt”, Fortunino Matania, John Millar Watt, John Worsley, Alberto “Albert” Breccia, Clive Upton, James E. McConnell, Ken Lilly, C.L. Doughty, Wilf Hardy, Dan Escott, R.B. Davis, Oliver Frey and many others, illuminating the articles and making these books (and the comics) an utter delight for hungry minds to devour whilst the Roast Beast and plum pudding slowly digested…

Right here back then that meant revealing such marvels as Conquerors of the Incas, The Heart of Sienna, When Horses Went to War, Are You Superstitious?, Signs of the Times, The First Americans, and Christmas Customs which comes with its own History Quiz and heralds a swift sojourn in the Wonderful World of Nature.

That means admiring and studying our native fauna in Their Home is the Highlands, Marine Marvels, The Grand Canyon, Winged Beauties (butterflies on stamps), Gems from the Ocean, Fish with a difference, When a Boar Goes to War, Creatures of the Night, Builders without hands, Puma – or Rumour?, Snakes Alive!, Fabulous Monsters and Birds of Prey and then taking the Nature Quiz…

Our Wonderful World of Art injects some high culture to the mix, starting with The Artist at War – enhanced by famous contemporary images from G.H. Davis, Bruce Bairnsfather, Frank Wooton, Paul Nash and Dame Laura Knight – which is followed by facts, photos and paintings of Pompeii.

An examination of silent cinema comedies in The Banana Skin Boys, The Young Road to Fame (acting and actors) and exploration of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in He Lived His Books covers more sedentary interests before Their Fathers Made Them Stars and The Revolutionary Genius (William Morris) segues into The Arts Quiz. That takes us to the end with a peek at Our Wonderful World…

Here Round-the-World Sailors take the lead after which This town was… Buried for 1,500 Years (Herculaneum this time) offers more insights in lost worlds and Australia’s original inhabitants take centre stage in Corroboree! The Silent City explores Mdina in Malta before Ballooning over the Alps, The Making of a Sea, Ellan Vannin, Land of Music and Song and Under a Spanish Sky bring the session to a close – with its attendant Quiz – and of course all the answers…

With modern digital media I suppose this kind of book is unnecessary and irrelevant now, but nostalgia aside, the glorious art in these editions make them worth the effort of acquisition, and I defy anyone of any age to not be sucked into the magic of learning that looks this lovely…

© 1971 IPC Magazines, Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

 

Posted on

Algorithmic Reality


By Damian Bradfield & David Sánchez (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1-68112-306-6 (PB) eISBN: 978-1-68112-307-3

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: You Better Watch Out, You Better Take Care… 9/10

In the modern world we are constantly watching and perpetually watched. We are society but society follows us everywhere even as it isolates us, and we cannot escape or avoid it. Are we unconscious or willing subjects of voyeuristic scrutiny or complacent participants in an increasingly intrusive overwatch culture that we really want but may not need?

This compelling graphic clarion cry wryly questions if that’s the randomly evolving progress of a wild system or somehow the gameplan of more sinister forces. Is unified technology, with all its benefits and instant gratifications the servant and builder of a truly integrated uniform and global society or just the newest means of a certain sort of predator (let’s call them “Tech-Barons”) making us all both cash cow and component consumer in a perpetually self-sustaining closed system – an internet battery farm where us chickens are both consumer AND product?

It’s clear that for many of us, our digital tools are now inescapable, essential, inimical and ultimately faithless and disloyal…

Comics are a nigh-universal, extremely powerful media that lend themselves to a host of topics and genres, but the area where it has always shone brightest is in its chimeric capacity for conveying complex arguments in a clear and compelling manner. Although daubing marks on a surface is possibly our oldest art form, the potential to ask questions, make stories and concisely communicate via that primal process remains infinitely adaptable to modern mores and as powerful as it ever was in exploring the unchanging basics of the human condition.

Narrative plus image – and the interactions such conjunctions can embrace – underpin all of our communal existence and form the primary source for how we view our distant forbears; especially as if employed by incisive, sensitive, uncompromising agents and interlocutors…

Here UK author, eminent digital pioneer, “tech exec” and lifelong comics fan Damien Bradfield posits in pictorial form some crucial and chilling questions about how and by whom, for what purpose and to what ends digital technologies have become such an inescapable and imperative force.

Casting a nervous yet knowing eye on the inept antisocial elites – Super-Rich mavericks spawned by manipulating Big Tech – Bradfield conjures up – via mordant, if not trenchant -incisiveness a sequence of ironically dystopian scenarios made chillingly clear and pervasively memorable by Spanish illustrator David Sánchez González.

Co-Founder of WeTransfer and its Chief Creative & Sustainability Officer, Damien Bradfield is also its Chief Strategy Officer, having created digital platform WePresent, co-founded digital design studio Present Plus, and formed illustration platform Kuvva. He owned an art gallery in Amsterdam and prior to all that worked for all the top advertising companies and Stella McCartney.

In 2019 he wrote The Trust Manifesto: What you Need to do to Create a Better Internet (discussing online privacy, trust and Big Data) and began by scoring a degree from the London School of Economics and Politics. You can regularly hear him on the Influence podcast…

Shaping thought and controlling information is also a deep concern for artist, designer and illustrator Sánchez: a solidly refined, intellectual draughtsman expert in restrained and understated imagery strongly influenced by Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes and Hergé. Among his most impressive and disturbing publications are Tú me has matado, No cambies nunca, La Muerte en los ojos and his illustrations for Robert Desnos’ El Destripador.

In Algorithmic Reality they combine to unleash sedately ironic speculations on where we are as a planet and where we’re going as a species in a range of wildly enchanting modern fables exploring our relationship with commerce, with particular emphasis on Short-termism, privacy, social media herd mentality, the tyranny of choice and information control. After all, isn’t Data the new fossil fuel: precious, invaluable, easily used, but so very dangerous when – not if – overexploited and misused?

Everyday tasks, major achievements, personal breakthrough and moments without merit jostle beside strange days and minor miracles in this tome, beginning with ‘Shoes’ as a visit to a store results in a sales assistant refusing to accept no sale as an outcome and doggedly stalking the failed purchaser, with confrontational encounters in the park, other stores and further inducements. By exploring how we’d react if a human vendor in the offline world behaved the same way as internet sales tools and bots do, the creators make a chilling point about pester power and the wisdom of making that first enquiry…

A search for ‘Insurance’ makes an equally distressing point about why a single simple sales transaction demands the surrender of so much apparently “necessary” extraneous personal detail just to secure a cheaper tariff after which ‘Shopping’ sees a one-off, first time buyer stumble into a sales emporium entirely patronised by shopping zombies programmed by repeated use of the system to make their needs accommodate the company’s demands…

A manifested nightmare for all collectors, ‘The Hoarder’ charts the inescapable downfall of an outlier and avowed social pervert who clings to physical objects rather than embracing digital experiences. His reluctance to abandon physical currency, books, vinyl records, polaroid photos and human interactions inevitably lead to Byron’s incarceration for “Data Avoidance” and “Health and Safety violations”…

Closing this packet of prophecy is ‘California Boomtowns Tour’, as an experience tourist takes the bus for a quick round up of all the Golden States’ boom-&-bust fads: accessing in person and a strictly curated abbreviated manner the desolate but so-picturesque remnants of gold mining, oil-drilling, Hollywood and pop music celebrity, computing and the property speculation that destroyed Silicon Valley, ending on the terrifying prospect of offworld expansion for the Next Big Things…

Being told that your personal electronics actually own you and incessantly work to make you targeted, monetizable fodder for attention-seeking, plutocratic weirdoes and faceless corporations is not new information, but seeing how masking that message works has never been more entertainingly handled than here. Bradfield and Sánchez deftly fudge and blur the line between offline and digital worlds: asking that readers look and think again.

Re-examining with wit and deadpan humour the addictive power of social media, enhanced and weaponised conformity, clandestine invasion of privacy and the appalling harmful potential of illicitly harvested, misused persona data, Algorithmic Reality demonstrates that there’s a such a thing as too much connectivity, and a little personal space is no bad thing…
Text and illustrations © 2021, 2022 Damian Bradfield and David Sánchez. All rights reserved. © 2022 NBM for the English translation.

Algorithmic Reality is scheduled for release on December 13th 2022 and is available for pre-order now. For more information and other great reads see http://www.nbmpub.com/. Most NBM books are available in digital formats…

Posted on

Josephine Baker


By Catel & Bocquet, translated by Edward Gauvin (SelfMadeHero)
ISBN: 978-1-91059-329-5 (TPB/Digital edition)

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: The Story of an Actual Wonder Woman… 9/10

Here’s a rather short review of an astonishingly eventful life celebrated in a superbly expansive, compellingly detailed account from two of the best graphic biographers working in the field. As I’m always implying, my Less is your More, and this is one story you’ll want to appreciate fresh and full-on, so just buy it and be done. You won’t be sorry and will have a revelatory time…

Born Freda Josephine McDonald on June 3rd 1906 in St Louis, Missouri, the black icon, free spirit and symbol of self-determination who called herself Joséphine Baker was no scholar or schemer, but used her innate gifts as a dancer and entertainer to survive horrific acts of random racist violence and ultimately escape her origins as a despised second class citizen in the land of her birth.

A forceful, irrepressible, warm-hearted optimist with colossal empathy and a relentless sense of humour, Baker’s drive and willingness to take chances carried her to the peak of European sophistication and culture: rubbing shoulders with royalty and the cream of global creative intelligentsia: everyone from Picasso and Man Ray to Le Corbusier and Hemingway, Max Reinhardt, Buñuel, Cocteau, Colette, Pirandello, Georges Simenon and so many glittering others.

She was a vedette, singer, dancer, actress, movie star, civil rights activist, paramount artistic inspiration and – during WWII – an actual spy and French resistance operative working for future President Charles de Gaulle, as well as a ferocious defender of animals and devoted mother. Above all else, she was an entertainer par excellence…

Here, Baker’s incredibly eventful life is traced from cradle to grave in black-&-white vignettes, concentrating on her achievements, family life and relationships, seen through her progress from exploitable bit player to media sensation “La Baker”: Queen of Paris in the Jazz Age.

Her astounding energy, creativity and resolve to succeed was only exceeded by her adoration of children, secret acts of charity and unfailing ability to love men who were bad for her, but her legacy was almost erased in the years after she stopped working. Countless comeback attempts and financial troubles followed.

Perhaps she was never truly in earnest but pursuing the means to a greater end. Due to her inability to have children and immense fellow feeling for the downtrodden, Josephine had turned her post war years into an incredible social experiment, gathering orphans from many devastated countries into a single loving family… her multinational, multi-ethnic Rainbow Tribe…

All that achievement, accomplishment, unprofitable charity, disillusionment and ultimate abandonment by the august and wealthy in her own country (both of them!) led to Josephine fading from history until relatively recent times, but now she is being reclaimed by a world which could really benefit from her example…

Baker’s international fame led to frequent and painful attempts to reclaim her birth nation’s attention. Eventually – in 1937 – she renounced her American citizenship to become officially French. In later years she tried to help America’s fight against Segregation, but was shunned by both side of that struggle. At the end, as economic woes, life and ongoing illness plagued her final years, she found a few unexpected friends in powerful women like Brigitte Bardot and her final years were spent in Monaco, a guest of equally constrained and misused female icon Grace Kelly. Josephine Baker died on 11th April 1975.

Her public and private lives coalesce in this chronological dramatised narrative from award-winning graphic novelist Catel Muller (Ainsi soit Benoîte Groult, Adieu Kharkov, Lucie s’en soucie, Le Sang des Valentines) and crime novelist, screenwriter/biographer/comics writer José-Louis Bocquet (Métal Hurlant, Sur la ligne blanche, Mémoires de l’espion, Panzer Panik, Anton Six), who in their other collaborations have also explored the lives of Kiki de Montparnasse and Olympe de Gouges (…and we’ll get to them in the fullness of time).

Entertaining, enthralling, informative, and continually sparking explosions of aggrieved but justified outrage on Baker’s behalf, the book is supplemented by a vast supporting structure of extras, beginning with a heavily illustrated and highly informative ‘Timeline for Josephine Baker’, incorporating pivotal events in her public and private lives. It’s further augmented by ‘Biographical Notes’: 55 character portraits in prose and sketch form of the historical figures with supporting roles feature in this epic saga, plus as an essay on ‘The Rainbow Tribe’ by her son/historical consultant Jean-Claude Bouillon-Baker. Also included are a Bibliography and Filmography for further study.

If you love history, comics, justice triumphant or just great stories, you really need to set some records straight and read this book.
© Casterman 2021. All rights reserved.

Posted on

Illegal


By Eoin Colfer & Andrew Donkin, illustrated by Giovanni Rigano & lettered by Chris Dickey (Hodder Children’s Books)
ISBN: 978-1-444-93400-7 (HB) 978-1-444-93169-3 (Digital edition)

Former primary school teacher Eoin Colfer is an award-winning author who written stories about everything. Most renowned for his Artemis Fowl books, he’s crafted many other novels and series, including Benny and Omar, Highfire, W.A.R.P. (Witness Anonymous Relocation Program), The Supernaturalist, Iron Man: The Gauntlet, Half Moon Mysteries and more.

Acclaimed Irish raconteur Colfer also penned the first official sequel in Douglas Adams’ Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy sequence and served from 2014-2016 as the Laureate na nÓg (Ireland’s Children’s Laureate). It’s safe to say he knows what kids like and how they think…

Almost all of his works end up as sequential narratives and his long-term partners in adapting the Fowl series into graphic novels are writer Andrew Donkin (The Terminal Man, The Valley of Adventure, My Story: Viking Blood, Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight, Doctor Who) and Italian illustrator Giovanni Rigano (Daffodil, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Incredibles). In 2017, in the face of an escalating international crisis, they harnessed their powers for good to produce an evocative fictionalised account of the forces in play compelling migrants to risk slavery and death, to leave their own homelands in search of – if not a better life – at least one less lethal and hopeless …

Following a Dedication and poignant, pertinent quote from Noble Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Weisel a saga simultaneously unique and shamefully ubiquitous unfolds. Across 17 chapters flipping between recent flashbacks and immediate peril, we get to know Ebo: a 12-year-old from Ghana trying to reunite with his sister…

The now is midnight in the middle of the Mediterranean. Ebo is one of 14 scared voyagers currently overloading a rubber raft built intended for 6. Hours earlier he, brother Kwame and new friend Razak were – at gunpoint – forced into the “balloon boat” by people-smugglers who had been paid and didn’t want anything else to do with their “clients”…

As they rock in the salty darkness – hopefully heading towards Italy – Ebo’s mind washes back 19 months to the village in Niger. It was just him and Kwame since their mother died and sister Sisi left for Europe where she could earn money to feed them…

One morning, Kwame also disappeared, and Ebo instantly followed, tracing well-established routes across the sands to Agadez in Niger: a city of survivors in transit. Hardworking and smart he found ways to survive, dodging human predators, before miraculously finding his brother. Together they scraped together enough cash for a desert crossing, paying the bandits who trafficked drugs, cigarettes and other contraband like the desperate…

Despite incredible odds, the brothers survived the ordeal and retrenched in Libya. Even though Tripoli sees migrants as unwelcome parasites, many work illegally in the city until they have enough money to buy passage across the waters. Overcoming appalling hardship, the brothers make new friends and are soon ready to leave…

History is intercut with the failing sea-crossing, and more details emerge as the raft founders. The travellers universally lament never learning how to swim as realisation comes that they are all about to die. Ebo recalls friendly people he met along the way and suddenly, after accepting death, the paddlers are rescued from doom. However, the respite proves to be even more awful than their near-death escape. Even this chance event will end badly for all of them…

At all stages sheer luck had been their friend, but always an awful price was exacted. That proves horrifically true again when the weary voyagers are located by the Italian navy and ghastly human error triggers a disaster…

Supplementing this agonisingly current affair is a map of  ‘Ebo’s Journey’ and a ‘Message From the Creators’ appealing for common sense, understanding and human decency in handling this ongoing global calamity. Following them is ‘Helen’s Story’: an account of one girl’s experience provided by Women for Refugee Women and adapted by Colfer, Donkin & Rigano, after which the usual ‘Acknowledgements’ and information ‘About the Creators’ accompanies a superbly enthralling glimpse at the artist’s ‘Sketchbook’.

This story is constructed from many actual accounts and despite being for a general audience – particularly school-aged children – pulls no punches. This kind of targeted reportage can liberate young minds and has frequently changed the world in the past. Let’s hope that’s the case here too, and that the next generation of leaders can see their way clear to dealing with economics and political problems with warmth and understanding, and not thinly-veiled racist rhetoric, dog-whistle exceptionalism and parsimonious patriotism…

Shocking harrowing enlightening and rewarding, this is a children’s book every grown-up should read.
Text © Eoin Colfer & Andrew Donkin2017. Illustrations © Giovanni Rigano 2017. All rights reserved.

Posted on

Run Home if You Don’t Want to Be Killed: The Detroit Uprising of 1943


By Rachel Marie-Crane Williams (The University of North Carolina Press in association with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University)
ISBN: 978-1-46966-326-5 (clothbound), 978-1-46966-327-2 (TPB), eISBN 978-1-46966-328-9

The greatest weapons in the human arsenal are lies and obfuscation. The number of shocking and unpardonable atrocities inflicted on all kinds of underclasses can never be known because those in the upper ranks of everywhere control the narrative and write the histories. In recent times, however, dedicated scholarship has increasingly reappraised what we “know” by ceaselessly challenging how we learned it.

When explored with the full power of sequential graphic journalism, lost or sabotaged stories can come to life with all the force and immediacy of the actual event and even be enhanced by late-gained context and the perspective of time passed: offering a fuller evaluation of what has actually occurred.

Here’s a powerful and unforgettable re-examination that proves it: the other version of a carefully sidelined, pragmatically sequestered moment of shameful racism from World War II. It employs all the tools and techniques of comics storytelling to shine a stark light on manipulated history that still affects American citizens struggling to come to terms with issues of colour and poverty in the modern world.

Researched and created by Rachel Marie-Crane Williams – Associate Professor of Art and Art History, and Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa – Run Home if You Don’t Want to Be Killed: The Detroit Uprising of 1943 details one of so, so many comfortably forgotten clashes between black and white, rich and poor to have been airbrushed (or is that whited out?) from our collective experience.

It is primarily an academic text delivered in pictorial form but is no less chilling and effective for that.

Rendered mostly in spiky monochrome pen & ink, combining contemporary quotes and photos, found imagery and collage, targeted typography, informative historical context, inspired documentary reportage, incisive analysis, inspired extrapolation, and candid investigation of the many personalities involved, it tells of how aspiration, deep-seated prejudice and long-cherished beliefs warred with common sense and patriotic fervour at a time when America faced foreign fascist aggression whilst its own citizens employed the foe’s principles and strategies to keep suppressed sectors of its own population…

The book opens with ‘A Note on Language’ as Professor Williams details the purpose of the project and her methodology, addressing the highly charged topic of terminology as used outside its original historical setting…

The report begins with a ‘Prologue’ establishing the situation in Detroit as America faced external aggression and internal conflict. In an era of advanced paranoia and pronounced patriotism, Jim Crow laws continued rolling back the rights of black citizens. These tensions were constant and had recently spread to include the internment of Japanese Americans: adding to a pattern of injustice that had historically constricted or excluded African slaves, Chinese immigrants and the original victims – “Native Americans”.

The situation was exacerbated by government demands that the war effort be “integrated”: all American’s working together for Democracy’s survival. However, as ‘No Forgotten Men. No Forgotten Races’ reveals, long-held antipathies of powerful men on all sides and in every camp prevented progress. At that time, war industries were desperate for workers in their factories, whilst unemployment and artificially-low wages for blacks was at an all-time high…

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s response is seen in ‘The Four Freedoms – Executive Order 8802’ with America’s most privileged still wilfully excluding black workers from employment, and sparking a proposed Negro March (for jobs) on Washington. The Commander-in-Chief’s landmark response was  an Executive Order prohibiting racial and ethnic discrimination in defence industries. Tragically. even he couldn’t desegregate the military: that was only accomplished in 1948 by his successor…

‘Meanwhile, Back in Detroit’ shows how ineffective passing laws is in changing minds. When black workers rushed out of the South and towards promised jobs, tensions escalated as they competed with impoverished whites for not just work and wages but also housing, transportation and recreational spaces. The industry-heavy city became a powder keg of pent-up intolerance and animosity. One proposed quick fix was a Washington-directed project to build homes for black families, but its completion led to white protesters seeking to prevent the occupants moving in.

‘The Sojourner Truth Housing Conflict’ ostensibly resulted from the white middle class residents of Conant Gardens reacting to the project being arbitrarily situated opposite their own dream homes…

As always, tensions were fuelled and stoked by lies and warnings of robbery, rape, fighting, miscegenation, property value reduction and social collapse: all useful racist slanders which never failed to enflame tensions on all sides. Most importantly, it was true that many leaders of all parties concerned found ways to personally profit from the chaos: businessmen, clerics, agitators, politicians and pundits used the situation to further their own causes…

As civic decision-makers dithered, older solutions also resurfaced and wooden crosses started burning in Detroit as they had in the South for decades. When the first families tried to move into their homes on February 28th 1942 an inevitable riot started, and black people were singled out by police, who used extreme violence and even mounted horseback charges to quell the chaos. In the end 220 people were arrested: 3 were white and never convicted of any crime…

Hostile white crowds picketed the Project until March 10th, when police finally dispersed the organised resisters, and black families began moving in with a minimum of conflict on April 15th. For the rest of the month, 24 companies of State Troopers, 1,400 City Police and 1,720 members of the Michigan Home Guard patrolled the area to keep the peace…

An overview of ‘Labor, Race, War’ details an ongoing undeclared war as federal government struggled against regional intolerance and intransigence to shift America’s working practices. The motivated, mobile black labour force was well-accustomed to lower wages and organised resistance from both rival workers and employers – as demonstrated here with a brief history of white supremacist Henry Ford’s record in the automotive industry, his brutal riot squads and many attempts to stop black workers and women joining the unions he so despised and feared.

A rundown of negro work opportunities from the end of WWI also covers Ford’s part in 1937’s Battle of the Overpass at River Rouge where his enforcers assaulted and terrorised women and workers leafletting the public in hopes of building support for higher wages…

Between ‘1941-1943’ the many organisations that formed to counter the bias against ethnic and female workers finally began to make headway, but constant clashes between white and black populations of Detroit in the wake of numerous new “Fair Employment” measures only intensified. Mass demonstrations eventually forced Ford to hire four black women at the River Rouge plant, but even this minor triumph came at an unanticipated cost…

Further protests and interventions by the NAACP – and other burgeoning pro-rights groups – were countered by white supremacists, adding to the mounting tension and ensuring that – in June 1943 – the pot boiled over…

‘Íle aux Conchons, Hog Island, Belle Isle’ reveals how leisure not toil was the final spark. The Belle Isle Bridge (renamed MacArthur Bridge) connected urban industrial Detroit with an island that was the conurbation’s largest park. On Sunday 23rd over 100,000 working people of all denominations sought to escape punishingly high temperatures, via a quiet day out, with simmering racial tensions studiously put on hold. However, as the sun set something happened and another race riot erupted

Casualties quickly mounted, the police moved in and again almost exclusively attacked and arrested black men. In an era before telecommunications, the situation was clouded in confusion, misinformation and even secrecy. Scared families on all sides were ignored or deliberately deceived by the authorities who believed daylight would bring calm. Instead, morning only brought escalation and ‘Trouble in Paradise’ as the clash evolved into a mobile clash extending deep into the black parts of town.

…And as violence and disorder grew, scurrilous lies on both sides ramped up the fear, outrage and furious responses. Before long white districts were also on the firing line as seen in ‘Rumor, Riots, and Rebellion’…

‘Topsy/Eva’ then deconstructs the event via an anthropological construct derived from the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, demonstrating how trigger stories repeatedly used to fuel racial clashes are the same, but flipped to fit each listener’s ethnicity. It’s backed up here by a sampling of typical tales told to potential victims of justifiable outrage, before ‘Up and Down the Street’ resumes as the Island clash assumed mythic intensity, drawing fresh and aggrieved white and black combatants from further afield to defend “their kind” from a ruthless enemy. Fires were lit, rioters became looters and the battle began its second day…

Adapting first-hand accounts, the story builds into an appalling account of institutionalised racism and deprivation that continued for three days, with unprovoked and unsanctioned police reprisals against black citizens continuing for weeks after. Then a sustained police cover up began. The actual riot was not ended by cops, but only after the criminally ineffectual Mayor Jeffries and t State Governor Harry Kelly capitulated to citizens’ demands for federal troops. By the time they requisitioned forces from the President, it was to stop white mobs hunting black citizens…

The troops remained until after the July 4th celebrations, and the uprising’s official death toll was 9 white people and 25 black. City police had killed 17 of the latter. Almost exclusively, the 2,000 arrested were black…

The artful removal of the story from history and shifting of the narrative began immediately and is covered in ‘White Lies’, revealing how opportunistic politicians built their careers on managing how the uprising was remembered, whilst ‘Aftermath’ focuses on contemporary attitudes of the public, indicating how meaningful change had once again been delayed by the hard lessons of fear and intimidation…

The Detroit race riot was one of five confronting the USA in the summer of 1943, and the topic is granted intriguing perspective in ‘Eden’ as survivors of the event recall its worst moments and assess its impact from the safe distance of 1968: a time when the nation again reeled from panic in the streets based on skin colour and good men of all colours were being murdered for seeking change…

Staggeringly forthright and frequently truly disturbing, this tract is chilling, contentious and often overwhelming as it picks at social scabs many believed long healed or non-existent. It is engaging, astoundingly informative and should be compulsory reading for anyone in a multi-cultural society. However, it’s not all doom, gloom and injustice and offers as a ‘Coda’ an adaptation of the Philip Levine poem Belle Isle, 1949 plus an ‘Author’s Note’ detailing her debt to comics journalist Joe Sacco and the road to this book. It also includes even more context on the plight of the poor and disenfranchised in the last century and just how little things have change in today’s world of Black Lives Matter.,,

Completing the experience, a ‘Glossary of People, Organizations, and Laws’ lists in forensic detail the many players and groups (54 in all) that helped shape this occluded debacle, and is supplemented by copious, cogent and compelling chapter ‘Notes’ and a splendidly broad ‘Bibliography’.

There are books you should read, books you Must Read and books like this that one can’t afford not to read. Who you are is determined by which category you fall under…
© 2021 The University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved. “Belle Isle, 1949” © 1976 by Philip Levine, from THEY FEED THEY LION AND THE NAMES OF THE LOST: POEMS by Philip Levine

Posted on

Alice Guy: First Lady of Film


By Catel & Bocquet, translated by Eward Gauvin (SelfMadeHero)
ISBN: 978-1-914224-03-4 (TPB/Digital edition)

I’ve reached a ripe – really, really ripe – old age and only learned one true thing: Men should not be allowed to be in charge of history. We have a very nasty and juvenile tendency to balls it up and – I’m going to say – “forget” stuff that women actually did.

I’m not going to embarrass us all with a list of female accomplishments and discoveries excised from the record, but I might wax quite a bit wroth whilst reviewing this superb graphic biography that joins the movement to redress the wrongs done to an extraordinary talent who shaped the primary entertainment medium of the last century and was then made to be forgotten…

Alice Ida Antoinette Guy-Blaché was born on July 1st 1873 and is officially the world’s first female Film Director as well as. by most metrics, the first person to add narrative to the nascent scientific diversion and tent show phenomenon of Cinema. Where once the spectacle of objects moving, ordinary people walking about and trains entering stations was the sum total of creative endeavour, she added storytelling and birthed a whole new world.

However, her legacy was almost erased in the years after she stopped working. At one stage none of her films were officially registered anywhere and to this day no complete archive of her works exists or even a complete record of how many motion-pictures she made…

A well-travelled, well-read daughter of educated parents (her father owned bookshops and a tri-national publishing house in Chile, before war and natural disasters destroyed their fortune), Alice Guy’s connection to photography began in 1894, when she joined a photographic instruments business that would become the mighty Gaumont Cinema empire. She started as a stenographer (possibly the first ever in France), and quickly – pretty much sans any acknowledgement – became company secretary, business manager and – when the explosion of individual technical discoveries converged to make a scientific oddity into an unexpected entertainment phenomenon – the company’s foremost maker of films for public consumption.

Initially indulged and soon eagerly supported and encouraged by (most of) the men in charge Alice Guy wrote the first scripted films, beginning in 1996 with a charming fantasy about where babies come from.

La Fée aux Choux (The Fairy of the Cabbages or, in at least two later remakes benefitting from her technological and narrative inventions, The Birth of Children) was huge hit with the public and resulted in her scripting and/or directing hundreds of further films of varying lengths. A passionate pioneer, she blended strong, visually arresting narratives and constant examination of social inequity and inequality with cutting edge and innovative technology, art direction and set making.

At the turn of the century, Guy made many dozens of sound-enhanced films in the now all-but forgotten “Chronophone” system (synchronising phonographic recordings with projected film decades before 1927’s “Talkies” revolution); championed and perfected location shooting; devised new special effects; instituted purpose-built studios and specialised sets and experimented with colour-tinted film.

In 1906, Guy invented historical/biblical epics and chapter serials with La vie du Christ (The Life of Christ): a 25 part extravaganza employing 300 actors and in 1912 – after moving to America to found her own studio Solax – made the first film with an all-black cast.

Minstrel comedy A Fool and his Money would have had only one African American character and loads of white guys in traditional and popular “blackface”, but when her established white American actors refused to work beside even one actual negro – vaudeville comedian James Russell – she let them all go and hired Russell’s fellow performers instead…

In 1913, she directed The Thief: the first script sold by Harvard student William Moulton Marston, eventual polygraph pioneer and creator of Wonder Woman…

Guy also created groundbreaking feminist satires, and used her films to explore women’s rights and champion birth control politics. She made international dance and travelogue films in incredibly successful “one-reelers” dedicated to sharing the wonders of terpsichorean movement across borders, and always looked for the next new thing, but her rising star burned out after moving to America and ending her marriage to a faithless man who speculated away all their money amidst the chaos of changing economic systems, Spanish Flu, and the Great Depression. Sounds like a classic movie plot, right?

Guy directed her last film – Tarnished Reputations – in 1920, and began an inexorable descent into poverty and obscurity, spending her days seeking to find copies of any of the hundreds of features she had created.

Alice Guy died in 1968, just as other, more appreciative truth-seekers who had taken up her later-life struggle to re-establish her  place in history were finally making headway and returning her to the annals of cinema history.

Written after WWII, her autobiography had languished on a publishers desk for decades before finally being posthumously published in 1976. Since then, a veritable Who’s Who of academics, historians and industry greats have toiled to overturn her erasure. Alice is now getting the acclaim and appreciation she earned incognito. As always, it appears to be one more case of Too Little, Too Late…

All that achievement, accomplishment, disillusionment and ultimate abandonment by her own colleagues and the public she invisibly captivated has been given a sublimely moving human face in this chronological, episodic, dramatized narrative from award-winning graphic novelist Catel Muller (Ainsi soit Benoîte Groult, Adieu Kharkov, Lucie s’en soucie, Le Sang des Valentines, Kiki de Montparnasse, Joséphine Baker, Olympe de Gouges) and crime novelist, screenwriter, biographer and comics writer José-Louis Bocquet (Sur la ligne blanche, Mémoires de l’espion, Panzer Panik, Kiki de Montparnasse, Joséphine Baker, Olympe de Gouges, Anton Six). Here, Alice’s life is traced from cradle to grave in black-&-white “shorts”, concentrating on her family life and relationships, with her astounding energy, creativity and catalogue of innovations and successes acting as a mere spine to form an impression of the woman whose guiding motto was always “be natural”.

Entertaining, engaging and subtly informative, the book is supplemented by a vast supporting structure of extras, beginning with a heavily illustrated and highly informative ‘Timeline for Alice Guy’ incorporating pivotal events in the invention of cinema. That’s further augmented by ‘Biographical Notes’: 32 character portraits in prose and sketch form of the historical figures who also feature in this epic saga, as well as a Filmography of the movies researchers have since confirmed and acknowledged, and a Bibliography of films, documentaries and books about her.

If you love film, or comics, justice triumphant or just great stories, you really need to set some records straight and read this book.
© Casterman 2021. All rights reserved.

Posted on

Big Scoop of Ice Cream


By Conxita Herrero Delfa: translated by Jeff Whitman (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1-68112-294-6 (PB) eISBN: 978-1-68112-295-3

Comics are a nigh-universal, extremely powerful medium that lends itself to a host of topics and genres, but the area where it has always shined brightest is in its chimeric capacity for embracing autobiographical self-expression. Whether through fictionalised narratives or scrupulously candid revelation, imaginative forays into self-realisation and self-expression frequently inevitably forge the most impressive and moving connections between reader and author.

Conxita Herrero Delfa’s vibrant collection Gran bola de helado was originally released in 2016, containing lifestyle short stories crafted before COVID changed the world. She is Barcelona born – in 1993 – and studied Fine Arts, but found another outlet for her artistic and raconteurial tendencies by publishing fanzines exploring aspects of free discourse, tireless observation and personal introspection. If you’re open-minded and well-travelled, you may have seen her follow-up work in various magazines and collective books. She’s also a singer, so look out for the album Abducida por forma una pareja by Tronco, if you’re so inclined…

Big Scoop of Ice Cream sees Conxita explore in compelling detail her metamorphic life via comic strips, with what appears to be relentless honesty and inspired veracity. Gathered here is a broad menu of experiences true, slightly true, made up, tedious, meta-real and maybe even a bit untrue, made in response to an ineffectual youth becoming – in fits and starts – a grown up. Everyday tasks, major achievements, personal breakthrough and moments without merit jostle beside strange days and minor miracles in ‘Resolutions’, after which we survive spectral invasion ‘Ghosts’ and learn what “adulting” means in ‘The Bathroom’.

The significance of playing alone shapes ‘Talking’, and perhaps a hint of potential romance looms in ‘The Couch Cushion’, before ‘The Arrival of Spring’ induces travel and causes a mini crisis. Sex happens in dusky pink monotones while ‘Relating’ before solitude returns, sparking thoughts of ‘The South of California’ and triggering ominous internet hook ups in ‘Enter’…

Acquiring an item of furniture attains the status of ‘The Metaphor’ for her and her friends whilst a beach break with Ricardo in ‘Alghero’ turns into a partial break with reality before ‘The Castles’ sees perspective restored – and endangered – by an over-sharing drinking buddy and other travelling companions…

A temporary liaison doesn’t pan out, but that’s okay because of what Conxita carries in ‘The Pocket’, and there are always marvels in abundance when ‘Looking Up’ or finding someone who will play ‘The Game’…

Visually experimental, the eponymous ‘Big Scoop of Ice Cream’ contrasts flavours and relationships without reaching any useful conclusions but segues neatly into a strange encounter in a bar with ‘The Reject’ before the ruminations conclude with confirmation that ‘People are Only Human’…

Boasting quotes from Marcel Proust, José Sainz, and Conxita herself, this whimsical confection is uplifting but never self-deluding, wryly inviting and features a breakout performance by pet cat Julia and a recurring box of toffee apples.

These 17 slices of Latin soul are delivered with verve and gusto in a minimalist cartooning style afforded surprising depth by swathes of flat colour: stylishly masking earnest inquiry and heavy introspection with charm, wit and carefully ingenuous nonsense. Big Scoop of Ice Cream is a book to delight and enthral and get in your head, and should be there with you wherever or however you holiday and forever after when you get back to mundane reality.
© 2016 Conxita Herrero Delfa and apa apa comics. © 2022 NBM for the English translation. All rights reserved.

Big Scoop of Ice Cream is scheduled for UK release July 14th 2022 and is available for pre-order now. For more information and other great reads see http://www.nbmpub.com/. Most NBM books are also available in digital formats.