DECLARATION ILLUSTRATED

When in the course of humorous events…

There are many things that Thomas Jefferson couldn’t have anticipated about the Declaration of Independence 250 years in the future, and one was that its hallowed words would be accompanied by an image of Beavis and Butt-Head. And yet, thanks to the loopy imagination of cartoonist Sikoryak, this is one of the many funny pairings we have in his latest book. As in his Constitution Illustrated (2020), he marries the unabridged text of the nation’s foundational document with cartoons he’s done in the styles of dozens of American comics and cartoons, some going back generations. The double-sided book also includes the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address. The colorful images match the text well. For the Declaration’s famous opening words—“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another”—we see a cartoon of an impossibly muscular man in colonial garb breaking out of his chains; the image that inspired it is from Mike Manley and Terry Austin’s Superman Adventures (2001). For a page illustrating “the pursuit of Happiness,” a lecherous wolf (in a cravat) is leaning into an open window, his eyes on a Betsy Ross–like figure in a bonnet; the original source is Stephanie Gladden and Jim Massara’s Droopy, Wolf & Red (1995). Some cartoons are more famous than others (a comics index proves useful). There are Brian Stelfreeze’s Black Panther (2016), Bil Keane’s The Family Circus (circa 1975), and W.W. Denslow’s Scarecrow and the Tin-Man (1905), as well as newer creations such as Jen Bartel’s She-Hulk (2023). In all, the book is both wholesome and irreverent—and thus very American.

An inspired reframing of a bedrock document—for younger readers, yes, but also older citizens who need waking up.