THE BRITISH ARE COMING

Graphic adaptation of the first volume of Atkinson’s acclaimed history of the American Revolution.

As adaptor Neus writes, the Revolution began with bad odds: “No colonial rebellion had ever succeeded in casting off imperial shackles.” As the narrative proceeds, she also takes up several themes that have recently defined the historiography of the era, particularly the trope that the Revolution was at heart a civil war, one that became “brutal and continental.” As to brutality, one key episode is the rebels’ torching of the loyalist town of Norfolk, Virginia, while driving a British garrison out; on the continental front, Neus, following Atkinson, spends a great deal of time treating the American invasion of Canada, which, some patriots worried at the time, might convert that civil war into a war of aggression against our northern neighbor “and lose the moral high ground of a country fighting for its own freedom.” In all events, that invasion turned into a shambles. Yet another theme is the thought that George Washington, while undoubtedly brave and stoical (“His appearance alone gave confidence to the timid and imposed respect on the bold”), wasn’t much of a strategic master, although he succeeded in doing the one thing he had to do, namely keep his army alive. Although the text is necessarily simplified—many frames contain no text at all—it is by no means dumbed down. Pietrobon’s artwork moves fluently, with plenty of attention to the mayhem of battle (which, Neus notes, Washington called “the rumpus”) and a few disturbing frames, such as one depicting the unfortunate meeting of a cannonball with a colonial’s head. Altogether, the narrative, which ends with the liberation of Boston on March 17, 1776—before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, that is—is an approachable treatment of a complex subject.

For those who like their history in an artistic frame.