Still can’t get enough of the nation’s 250th birthday? Maybe you don’t have quite the stamina to make it through the first volume—800 pages long—of Rick Atkinson’s award-winning Revolution Trilogy? Here’s an alternative: The book is now available in a graphic edition. Adapted by Nora Neus and illustrated by Federico Pietrobon, The British Are Coming (Ten Speed Press, June 2) is one of several new standout titles in a crowded field of graphic literature. As our review puts it, the book offers “an approachable treatment of a complex subject.…Although the text is necessarily simplified—many frames contain no text at all—it is by no means dumbed down.”
Many other historical narratives have also been revived in lively graphic formats. One of them is David Lester and Marcus Rediker’s The Black Schooner: Rebellion on the Amistad (Beacon Press, June 9), adapted from Rediker’s history The Amistad Rebellion (2012). Illustrated by Lester, this “evocative, incisive, and powerful piece of graphic history,” in the words of our critic, recounts the famous 1839 slave revolt on the Amistad—as seen through African eyes.
A historical figure who surely deserves more attention is Marshall “Major” Taylor, an Indiana native who set cycling records as a Black man—and became a wealthy citizen of Massachusetts—in the largely white sport at the turn of the 20th century. Frederick Noland, an Oakland, California, artist who’s an avid biker, brings the onetime international star to life in Major Taylor: The World’s Fastest Man (Drawn & Quarterly, Sept. 8). (Read my Q&A with Noland.)
Far less known is the story of two women who lived together—and were accepted by their early-19th-century community of Weybridge, Vermont. Based on archival research, Tillie Walden’s Charity and Sylvia (Drawn & Quarterly, June 16) is “a timeless story of marriage, well-grounded in queer history,” says our starred review. “That they remained partnered in a world where homosexuality was essentially unimaginable is played with such subtlety as to sometimes blur into insignificance.”
The French comics artist Joann Sfar delves into the Israel-Gaza conflict in To Life: A Cartoonist’s Journal in the Aftermath of October 7th (23rd St., Sept. 8). Translated from the French by Montana Kane, the book’s “intensely personal account of that day and the next 80 days is anguished (‘It’s gone from difficult to unbearable’) but hopeful,” says our starred review. “Framed by moving, thoughtful text, Sfar’s beautifully detailed ‘little drawings’ convey heartbreak.”
There are, of course, graphic memoirs that aren’t as grim, and my favorite forthcoming title is The Two Saddest Kitchens: A Comics Conversation (Bloomsbury, Oct. 6) by New Yorker cartoonists Jason Adam Katzenstein and Roz Chast, the latter known for her alternately touching and very funny Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (2014). In it, the pair gather to “kvetch about kitchens”—everything from janky fridges and mismatched Tupperware to sinks piled with “Precambrian dishes.” Would that those were the only messes in modern life.
John McMurtrie is the nonfiction editor.
