Showing posts with label Black History. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Black History. Show all posts

Thursday, February 23, 2023

#IReadsYou Review: DARK BLOOD #6

DARK BLOOD #6 (OF 6)
BOOM! STUDIOS

STORY: LaToya Morgan
ART:  Moisés Hidalgo
COLORS: A.H.G. with Allison Hu (pp. 18-21)
LETTERS:  Andworld Design
EDITOR: Dafna Pleban
COVER: Valentine De Landro
VARIANT COVER ARTISTS: Juni Ba; Valentine De Landro; Tiffany Turrill
24pp, Colors, 3.99 U.S. (January 2022)

Dark Blood created by LaToya Morgan

Dark Blood is a six-issue comic book miniseries created and written by screenwriter LaToya Morgan (AMC’s “The Walking Dead,” “Into The Badlands”).  Published by BOOM! Studios, the series is drawn by Moisés Hidalgo and Walt Barna; colored by A.H.G.; and lettered by Andworld Design.  The series focuses on a Black World War II veteran who discovers that he has strange powers.

Alabama, 1955.  After leaving his job at the diner, “Hardy's Eats,” Avery Aldridge, also known as “Double A,” has a fateful encounter with a racist.  Double A is a highly decorated World War II soldier, a former fighter pilot, a member of the soon-to-be-legendary “Red Tails.”  He is expected to act like a boy … when he is actually a very powerful man.  But this is “The Night of the Variance,” and everything is going to start to change – even the things some don't want changed.

Dark Blood #6 opens in 1955 – late into the Night of the Variance.  Avery confronts Dr. Carlisle and Dr. Marshall, and he learns that he is the “Variant,” the one who responded “positively” to their formula (apparently dubbed "Formula 687") and treatment.  Now, his powers are raging, and powerful as he is, it comes with a devastating cost.

Meanwhile, Sheriff Wright has finally caught up with Avery.  If Avery wants to see his wife, Emma, and daughter, Grace, again, the racist lawman insists that he must play by his rules.  But does he?  Can Avery make sure that no one ever goes through what he has?  Can he protect his wife and child?  Will it cost him everything to do this?

THE LOWDOWN:  I recently learned, via “CBS Evening News,” that the United States Air Force museum had been keeping a secret.  In 1949, a team from the famed all-Black “Tuskegee Airmen” won the first “Top Gun” contest.  This contest was a gunnery competition among pilots from across the Air Force.  However, the Air Force's record book listed the winner as “unknown.”

The winners' trophy was hidden in the bowels of the Air Force museum until a historian discovered it in 2005.  Now, the trophy is on display at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.  The Tuskegee Airmen have finally been recognized with Top Gun honor – 73 years after winning the first contest.

The “Red Tails” (the 332nd Fighter Group) were part of the Tuskegee Airmen, and in “Dark Blood,” Avery Aldridge” was a Red Tail.  I didn't take this revelation as mere coincidence that I learned of it less that a week before the release of the final issue of the Dark Blood comic book miniseries.

In Dark Blood, television writer-producer LaToya Morgan (AMC's “TURN: Washington's Spies”) offers a comic book that is steeped in the history of African-American participation in World War II.  Dark Blood is allegorical in the way that it references the “Tuskegee Experiment” (a study which observed the effects of untreated syphilis in Black men).  The series also opens at the dawn of the “American Civil Rights Movement” (1954-68).  Dark Blood has been historical.

Yet it was not until Dark Blood #5 that I realized how much this comic book is also a rip-roaring science fiction yarn.  The series' narrative blood is certainly Black history and culture, but Dark Blood's DNA is pulp science fiction literature.  Its pedigree is the world of weird science fiction and fantasy comic books that emerged after World War II.  While reading issue #5, the sci-fi reality of Dark Blood came at me like a space rocket.

Morgan, artists Moisés Hidalgo and Walt Barna, and colorist A.H.G. have presented readers with a comic book series that looks and feels like it came out of the 1950s.  In an alternate reality, I can see it as something that William Gaines would have published through EC Comics.  Yes, Dark Blood would have been one more nail in EC's coffin, but Morgan's mixture of reality and sci-fi would have been a perfect fit for EC's mixture of morality and blood and guts genre.

Dark Blood #6 offers both – history and drama and also the astounding yearnings of golden age science fiction.  The drama has a powerful resolution, and the super-powers are the fireworks of comic book magic.  Superheroes and mutants – Dark Blood #6 promises readers an interesting future as the series comes to an end.  Whatever may come, what we have now in Dark Blood, dear readers, it is a blast to read.  And if you haven't read it yet, Dark Blood flows at comiXology.

I READS YOU RECOMMENDS:  Fans of golden age science fiction and of super science fiction comic books will want to read Dark Blood.

A+
10 out of 10

Reviewed by Leroy Douresseaux a.k.a. "I Reads You"


Dark Blood trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzzXIYr_FrA&feature=youtu.be
Dark Blood first loook: https://www.boom-studios.com/wordpress/archives/dark-blood-1-first-look/
https://twitter.com/MorganicInk
https://twitter.com/WaltBarna
https://twitter.com/AHGColor
https://twitter.com/andworlddesign

https://twitter.com/boomstudios
https://www.boom-studios.com/wordpress/
https://www.facebook.com/BOOMStudiosComics
https://www.instagram.com/boom_studios/


The text is copyright © 2022 Leroy Douresseaux. All Rights Reserved. Contact this blog or site for reprint and syndication rights and fees.

-------------

Amazon wants me to inform you that the link below is a PAID AD, but I technically only get paid (eventually) if you click on the ad below AND buy something(s).


Wednesday, December 21, 2022

#IReadsYou Review: DARK BLOOD #5

DARK BLOOD #5 (OF 6)
BOOM! STUDIOS

STORY: LaToya Morgan
ART:  Moisés Hidalgo
COLORS: A.H.G. with Allison Hu
LETTERS:  Andworld Design
EDITOR: Dafna Pleban
COVER: Valentine De Landro
VARIANT COVER ARTISTS: Juni Ba; Valentine De Landro; Ernanda Souza
24pp, Colors, 3.99 U.S. (December 2021)

Dark Blood created by LaToya Morgan

Dark Blood is a new six-issue comic book miniseries created and written by screenwriter LaToya Morgan (AMC’s “The Walking Dead,” “Into The Badlands”).  Published by BOOM! Studios, the series is drawn by Moisés Hidalgo and Walt Barna; colored by A.H.G.; and lettered by Andworld Design.  The series focuses on a Black World War II veteran who discovers that he has strange powers.

Alabama, 1955.  After leaving his job at the diner, “Hardy's Eats,” Avery Aldridge, also known as “Double A,” has a fateful encounter with a racist.  Double A is a highly decorated World War II soldier, a former fighter pilot, a member of the soon-to-be-legendary “Red Tails.”  He is expected to act like a boy … when he is actually a very powerful man.  But this is “The Night of the Variance,” and everything is going to start to change – even the things some don't want changed.

Dark Blood #5 opens in 1955 – the Night of the Variance.  But this night feels the weight of a time a decade earlier when World War II servicemen, Avery and Henderson, two pilots of the Red Tails, face injustice masquerading as justice in Austria.  Oh, how it resembles the same process of injustice in the United States.  What happened that night may have laid the groundwork for Avery's situation now.

What Avery discovered about himself six weeks before the Night of Variance seemed like a good thing, but this night, there is horror and there must be a reckoning.  As Avery's condition continues to manifest and become more intense, is his search for answers merely going to lead him to something far worse?

THE LOWDOWN:  In Dark Blood, television writer-producer LaToya Morgan (AMC's “TURN: Washington's Spies”) offers a comic book that flows through multiple genres, including science fiction and fantasy, horror, and history.  It has layers and subtexts.  There is metaphor and symbolism and history made reality.  Morgan presents her readers with a beautiful and complex work.

On the other hand, I see the art of Moisés Hidalgo, who has been the regular artist on this series since the third issue.  I read his signs and graphics and symbolism, and I realize that Dark Blood #5 is just so much fun to read.  I feel like a kid again discovering something every time I read a new comic book or new issue of a favorite series.  Even if I were too ignorant to figure out the layers behind this story, Hidalgo turns this tale into a wild adventure of mad scientists, Nazis, and rotten cops.  It is pure escapism, and ain't nothing wrong with that.  Hell, Dark Blood #5 is the magic and the mystery of the Golden Age of Comics before busybodies ruined this outsider art form with the “Comics Code Authority (CCA) in 1954.

A.H.G.'s beautiful colors on Hidalgo's art makes this vintage mode (so to speak) feel so real.  I hope the upcoming final issue of Dark Blood also has a touch of escapist entertainment in it.  I also hope that it isn't the end...

I READS YOU RECOMMENDS:  Fans of modern science fiction and dark fantasy comic books will want to drink Dark Blood.

A+

Reviewed by Leroy Douresseaux a.k.a. "I Reads You"


Dark Blood trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzzXIYr_FrA&feature=youtu.be
Dark Blood first loook: https://www.boom-studios.com/wordpress/archives/dark-blood-1-first-look/
https://twitter.com/MorganicInk
https://twitter.com/WaltBarna
https://twitter.com/AHGColor
https://twitter.com/andworlddesign

https://twitter.com/boomstudios
https://www.boom-studios.com/wordpress/
https://www.facebook.com/BOOMStudiosComics
https://www.instagram.com/boom_studios/


The text is copyright © 2021 Leroy Douresseaux. All Rights Reserved. Contact this blog or site for reprint and syndication rights and fees.

------------

Amazon wants me to inform you that the affiliate link below is a PAID AD, but I technically only get paid (eventually) if you click on the affiliate link below AND buy something(s).


Wednesday, October 5, 2022

#IReadsYou Review: DARK BLOOD #3

DARK BLOOD #3 (OF 6)
BOOM! STUDIOS

STORY: LaToya Morgan
ART:  Moisés Hidalgo
COLORS: A.H.G.
LETTERS:  Andworld Design
EDITOR: Dafna Pleban
COVER: Valentine De Landro
VARIANT COVER ARTISTS: Juni Ba; Valentine De Landro; Christian Ward
24pp, Colors, 3.99 U.S. (September 2021)

Dark Blood created by LaToya Morgan

Dark Blood is a new six-issue comic book miniseries created and written by screenwriter LaToya Morgan (AMC’s “The Walking Dead,” “Into The Badlands”).  Published by BOOM! Studios, the series is drawn by Walt Barna and Moisés Hidalgo; colored by A.H.G.; and lettered by Andworld Design.  The series focuses on a Black World War II veteran who discovers that he has strange new abilities.

Alabama, 1955.  After leaving his job at the diner, “Hardy's Eats,” Avery Aldridge, also known as “Double A,” has a fateful encounter with a racist.  Double A is a highly decorated World War II soldier, a former fighter pilot, a member of the soon-to-be-legendary “Red Tails.”  He is expected to act like a boy … when he is actually a very powerful man.  But this is “The Night of the Variance,” and everything is going to start to change – even the things some don't want changed.

Dark Blood #3 opens in 1945, ten years before the Variance.  In Alabama, Emma Aldridge, Avery's wife, feels the penetrating eyes of a member of the local wolf pack, also known as a police officer, specifically Officer Wright.  Meanwhile, near the Austrian border, Avery and a fellow pilot race for safety with another kind of wolf pack, in the form of a Nazi commandant and his soldiers, nipping at their heels.

Ten years later, back in the present, it is the “Night of the Variance.”  Once again, Emma evades a wolf, while Avery runs away from one.  As he did a decade before, Avery will once again have to decide when he should stop running and turn around and start fighting.

THE LOWDOWN:  The indignities that Avery Aldridge suffers in Dark Blood #2 are familiar to me because I have experienced some of them and others were told to me via first hand or second hand accounts.  A theme that runs throughout Dark Blood, thus far, is the notion that Black people are often being hunted.  Sometimes, even being watched is a form of being hunted; the difference is that the hunter hunts with his stare or gaze.

Television writer-producer LaToya Morgan (AMC's “TURN: Washington's Spies”) offers in Dark Blood a comic book that flows through multiple genres, including science fiction and fantasy, horror, history, and reality-based drama, to name a few.  As a television writer, she knows how to deliver action, suspense, and thrills along with the character drama.  And Dark Blood #3 offers the thrill of the hunt.

This third issue finds husband and wife, Avery and Emma Aldridge, living and surviving on the razor's edge more than once, over two time periods.  It would not be inappropriate to compare this issue's hunters, Alabama law enforcement and Nazi military personnel to one another.  After all, one was the teacher of codified racism, and the other was the student.  [I'll let you, dear readers, figure out which was which.]

Morgan delivers Dark Blood's most taut thrills and fraught drama, thus far, and this time she has a different artist as her creative partner.  Moisés Hidalgo, who drew a few pages of Dark Blood #2, returns to draw Dark Blood #3's dark nights of pursuit to life.  Hidalgo's compositions seem inspired by the surreal madness of Steve Ditko's comics and also the impressionism and and wild-eyed emotions of Japanese manga.  Here, Hidalgo makes the reader feel, as if he refuses to allow the reader to experience Morgan's story only in a rational way.  His art wants us to be fearful, desperate, and even irrational.  While reading this issue, I believed that I had to feel this story if I was really going to have a chance of understanding the characters' plights.

Once again, I must praise A.H.G.'s coloring for Dark Blood.  I read comiXology's digital editions of Dark Blood when I am reviewing the series, and A.H.G.'s colors look gorgeous in this format.  The coloring makes Dark Blood's interiors look like pages from a vintage comic book, so Dark Blood seems to be not a comic book about the past, but a comic book from the past.  It is like a memento from a time capsule, a story that has been waiting for us.

Strangely, Dark Blood #3 confirms what I have been thinking since I started reading this series.  Dark Blood is the comic book that some comic book readers need and have needed for a long time, though some may only discover this later via a Dark Blood trade paperback.  So, once gain, I highly recommend Dark Blood.

I READS YOU RECOMMENDS:  Fans of modern science fiction and dark fantasy comic books will want to drink Dark Blood.

A+

Reviewed by Leroy Douresseaux a.k.a. "I Reads You"


Dark Blood trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzzXIYr_FrA&feature=youtu.be
Dark Blood first loook: https://www.boom-studios.com/wordpress/archives/dark-blood-1-first-look/
https://twitter.com/MorganicInk
https://twitter.com/WaltBarna
https://twitter.com/AHGColor
https://twitter.com/andworlddesign

https://twitter.com/boomstudios
https://www.boom-studios.com/wordpress/
https://www.facebook.com/BOOMStudiosComics
https://www.instagram.com/boom_studios/


The text is copyright © 2021 Leroy Douresseaux. All Rights Reserved. Contact this blog or site for reprint and syndication rights and fees.

----------------------

Amazon wants me to inform you that the affiliate link below is a PAID AD, but I technically only get paid (eventually) if you click on the affiliate link below AND buy something(s).


Tuesday, August 9, 2022

#IReadsYou: Review: DARK BLOOD #2

DARK BLOOD #2 (OF 6)
BOOM! STUDIOS

STORY: LaToya Morgan
ART: Walt Barna with Moisés Hidalgo (pp. 10-12, 19)
COLORS: A.H.G.
LETTERS: Andworld Design
EDITOR: Dafna Pleban
COVER: Valentine De Landro
VARIANT COVER ARTISTS: Juni Ba; Valentine De Landro; Taurin Clarke
24pp, Colors, 3.99 U.S.(August 2021)

Dark Blood created by LaToya Morgan

Dark Blood is a new six-issue comic book miniseries created and written by screenwriter LaToya Morgan (AMC’s “The Walking Dead,” “Into The Badlands”).  Published by BOOM! Studios, the series is drawn by Walt Barna; colored by A.H.G.; and lettered by Andworld Design.  The series focuses on a Black World War II veteran who discovers that he has strange new abilities.

Alabama, 1955.  After leaving his job at the diner, “Hardy's Eats,” Avery Aldridge, also known as “Double A,” has a fateful encounter with a racist.  Double A is a highly decorated World War II soldier, a former fighter pilot, a member of the soon-to-be-legendary “Red Tails.”  He is expected to act like a boy … when he is actually a very powerful man.  But this is “The Night of the Variance,” and everything is going to start to change – even the things some don't want changed.

Dark Blood #2 opens six months before the Variance and reflects that which occupies Avery's oft-troubled mind.  He thinks of his wife, Emma, and their daughter, Grace Emmadell.  We see his life in “Vale Junction,” a small Black community where everyone knows him and loves Emma's “Vale Junction Book Mobile.”  Even his wartime experiences, especially from a particular time in Austria, circa 1945, flits in and out of Avery's memories.

However, reality intrudes after an altercation leaves Avery hurt.  Dr. Carlisle, a white university doctor, is the unlikely bystander who steps in to help, offering Avery immediate first aid.  As luck … would have it, Dr. Carlisle also operates a clinic “right outside of town on the old Rickman Farm” where he offers free medical care.  But nothing is really free...

THE LOWDOWN:  The indignities that Avery Aldridge suffers in Dark Blood #2 are familiar to me because I have experienced some of them and others were told to me via first hand or second hand accounts.  I admire a writer who can take such things and transform them into drama.  When a writer takes reality and inflicts it on make-believe people in a way that hits the audience in the soft spots (the heart, the soul, the mind), that is some mighty powerful storytelling.

Television writer-producer LaToya Morgan (AMC's “TURN: Washington's Spies”) offers in Dark Blood a comic book that is both science fiction-fantasy/horror and historical or reality-based drama.  She makes the Jim Crow world in her corner of Alabama truly an awful place, but at the same time, she presents in Vale Junction a Black community permeated with love and possibilities.  And that was the world that Black Americans lived not that long ago.

There are times when Avery suffers the insults of White people, and I can feel the hoary ghost of Nat Turner scratching at every window of my soul.  A documentary film or a work of journalism in our world would take Avery's experiences and attempt to engage our intellect.  Great drama takes those same experiences and engages our soul and ensnares our imagination.  It is through such mighty and imaginative drama that Morgan makes Dark Blood work as serialized fiction, a kind of fantastic fiction born in our reality based histories.

By page design and panel composition, artist Walt Barna brings the compelling drama of Dark Blood #2 to life.  With each panel, he is like a photographer working the right angles and capturing the perfect moments as he builds this chapter/issue.  There are also some beautifully drawn pages by guest artist Moisés Hidalgo.  Of course, A.H.G.'s gorgeous colors shift with the winds of Avery's memories, as well as with the linear jooks of Morgan's narratives.  So I credit the colors with forcing me to pay attention to the graphics throughout Dark Blood, especially this second issue.

After reading the first issue, I thought that LaToya Morgan, Walt Barna, A.H.G., and Andworld Design were off to a most excellent start, offering something that had great promise.  Dark Blood #2 aggressively delivers on that great promise.

I READS YOU RECOMMENDS:  Fans of modern science fiction and dark fantasy comic books will want to drink Dark Blood.

A+

Reviewed by Leroy Douresseaux a.k.a. "I Reads You"


Dark Blood trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzzXIYr_FrA&feature=youtu.be
Dark Blood first loook: https://www.boom-studios.com/wordpress/archives/dark-blood-1-first-look/
https://twitter.com/MorganicInk
https://twitter.com/WaltBarna
https://twitter.com/AHGColor
https://twitter.com/andworlddesign

https://twitter.com/boomstudios
https://www.boom-studios.com/wordpress/
https://www.facebook.com/BOOMStudiosComics
https://www.instagram.com/boom_studios/


The text is copyright © 2021 Leroy Douresseaux. All Rights Reserved. Contact this blog or site for reprint and syndication rights and fees.

-----------------

Amazon wants me to inform you that the affiliate link below is a PAID AD, but I technically only get paid (eventually) if you click on the affiliate link below AND buy something(s).


Thursday, June 16, 2022

#IReadsYou Review: DARK BLOOD #1

DARK BLOOD #1 (OF 6)
BOOM! STUDIOS

STORY: LaToya Morgan
ART:  Walt Barna
COLORS: A.H.G.
LETTERS:  Andworld Design
EDITOR: Dafna Pleban
COVER: Valentine De Landro
VARIANT COVER ARTISTS: Juni Ba; Dan Mora; Valentine De Landro; Marcus Williams; Javan Jordan; Mico Suayan; Felix Icarus Morales with Robert Nugent; David Sanchez with Omi Remalante; Karen S. Darboe; Ingrid Gala; Marco Rudy
24pp, Colors, 3.99 U.S.(July 2021)

Dark Blood created by LaToya Morgan

Dark Blood is a new six-issue comic book miniseries created and written by screenwriter LaToya Morgan (AMC’s "The Walking Dead," "Into The Badlands").  Published by BOOM! Studios, the series is drawn by Walt Barna; colored by A.H.G.; and lettered by Andworld Design.  The series focuses on an Black World War II veteran who discovers that he has strange new abilities.

Dark Blood #1 opens in Alabama, 1955.  It's night.  Avery Aldridge, also known as “Double A,” is leaving his job at the diner, “Hardy's Eats.”  In the alley, he has a fateful encounter with a racist.  Double A is a highly decorated World War II soldier, a former fighter pilot, a member of the soon-to-be-legendary “Red Tails.”  He is expected to act like a boy … when he is actually a very powerful, grown-ass man.  But this is “The Night of the Variance,” and everything is going to start to change – even the things some don't want changed.

THE LOWDOWN:  As I much as I love the original Star Wars movies and a number of classic Walt Disney animated features (Peter Pan), my all-time favorite movie moment occurs in 1967's In the Heat of the Night.  Involuntarily assigned to a homicide case in Sparta Mississippi, Philadelphia police detective Virgil Tibbs (played by Sidney Poitier) is interviewing a suspect, a local and powerful rich white man named Endicott (Larry Gates), when Endicott slaps him in the face.  Tibbs slaps him right back.  The first time I saw Tibbs slap Endicott, it took my breath away … and it still does.

Television writer-producer LaToya Morgan (AMC's "TURN: Washington's Spies") offers a sci-fi/horror spin on Tibbs' slap as the spine of the first issue of her new comic book, Dark Blood.  This time, the confrontation is longer, and Avery Aldridge's response is made a bit more complicated, partly because he seems unstuck in time.  Morgan does everything to tell her readers a lot by whetting their appetites for more, because they don't know the half of it, and she makes that “it” intriguing.

For all that I am intrigued by Dark Blood #1's story and concept, this first issue is also a showcase for the art team of illustrator Walt Barna and colorist A.H.G.  Barna's compositions are some of the most convincing period art that I have seen in a modern comic book in years.  Barna's Alabama, 1955 looks so “old-timey” that I could believe that it is something Barna drew at least half-a-century ago.  Barna's aerial sequences depicting Aldridge's time as a Red Tail reminds me of the comic book art one might find in EC Comics' legendary war comic book, Aces High (1955).

A.H.G.'s colors are gorgeous and also from a time machine.  If I didn't know better, I would say he hand-colored this comic book and manually separated those colors in a back office at a NYC-based comic book publisher – in days gone by.  Seriously, his colors shimmer, but are also earthy, and they make the storytelling's time periods look and feel authentic.

And I always enjoy Andworld Design's lettering, which is always stylish in a way that brings immediacy and power to the drama.  So LaToya Morgan, Walt Barna, A.H.G., and Andworld Design are off to a most excellent start, and Dark Blood #1 sparkles with promise.

I READS YOU RECOMMENDS:  Fans of modern science fiction and dark fantasy comic books will want to drink Dark Blood.

A
★★★★+ out of 4 stars

Reviewed by Leroy Douresseaux a.k.a. "I Reads You"


Dark Blood trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzzXIYr_FrA&feature=youtu.be
Dark Blood first loook: https://www.boom-studios.com/wordpress/archives/dark-blood-1-first-look/
https://twitter.com/MorganicInk
https://twitter.com/WaltBarna
https://twitter.com/AHGColor
https://twitter.com/andworlddesign

https://twitter.com/boomstudios
https://www.boom-studios.com/wordpress/
https://www.facebook.com/BOOMStudiosComics
https://www.instagram.com/boom_studios/


The text is copyright © 2021 Leroy Douresseaux. All Rights Reserved. Contact this blog or site for reprint and syndication rights and fees.

--------------------

Amazon wants me to inform you that the affiliate link below is a PAID AD, but I technically only get paid (eventually) if you click on the affiliate link below AND buy something(s).


Thursday, September 2, 2021

#IReadsYou Review: DREAMING EAGLES #2

DREAMING EAGLES #2 (OF 6)
AFTERSHOCK COMICS – @AfterShockComix

[This review was originally posted on Patreon.]

WRITER: Garth Ennis
ARTIST: Simon Coleby
COLORS: John Kalisz
LETTERS: Rob Steen
COVER: Francesco Francavilla
VARIANT COVER: Declan Shalvey
32pp, Color, $3.99 U.S. (January 2016)

For mature readers

Dreaming Eagles created by Garth Ennis

Chapter 2: “Sunward I've Climbed”


Dreaming Eagles is a comic book created and written by Garth Ennis and drawn by Simon Coleby.  A six-issue miniseries, Dreaming Eagles tells the story of the first African-American fighter pilots to join the United States Army Air Force in World War II.  The narrative connects the pilots' stories with the 1960s Civil Rights movement through two character, WWII veteran, Lt. Reggie Atkinson, and his son Lee, a Civil Rights activist.

As Dreaming Eagles #2 (“Sunward I've Climbed”) opens, Reggie tries to explain to Lee the experience and feelings of flying an airplane.  He then recounts the early struggle of Black pilots to gain acceptance and the difficulties facing other Black men who wanted to become pilots.  Connected to the U.S. Army Air Corps Thirty-Third fighter group, the Black servicemen travel overseas to find that some things are the same as at home in the United States, as they prepare for their first combat.

As much as the first issue of Dreaming Eagles intrigued me, I was equally curious about where this series would go.  I am surprised that the second issue focuses so much on the bureaucratic obstacles that the Black pilots confront as much as it depicts the resistance these men face from their superior officers.  This is all driven by racism, bigotry, ignorance, and everything bad that is rooted in the Jim Crow America which emerged late in the 19th century.

Garth Ennis offers a story that reads like an oral history, covering both the larger details of the wider national and military history, but also depicting the more intimate details of a personal story.  Yet Ennis also depicts the thrill of flight, both in training and in combat.  This sense of drama is as exciting as the best moments of a good action movie.

Artist Simon Coleby brings Ennis' script to life and captures every nuance and all the high-drama.  I can't find the words to describe how wonderful is the manner in which Coleby depicts airplanes in flight and in fight.  Yet Coleby also brings the same power and intensity, but quietly, when depicting the indignities the Black servicemen face.  Even when these men take it with a “stiff upper lift,” Coleby shows the anger that simmers beneath these proud men.

Dreaming Eagles #2 makes me even more curious.  What's next with issue #3?

A

[This comic book includes a six-page preview of the comic book , “Second Sight,” by David Hine and Alberto Ponticelli.]

Reviewed by Leroy Douresseaux a.k.a. "I Reads You"


The text is copyright © 2016 Leroy Douresseaux. All Rights Reserved. Contact this blog for reprint and syndication rights and fees.

----------------------

Amazon wants me to inform you that the link below is a PAID AD, but I technically only get paid (eventually) if you click on the ad below AND buy something(s).


Sunday, February 28, 2021

#28DaysofBlack Review: Ho Che Anderson's KING

KING
FANTAGRAPHICS BOOKS

WRITER-ARTIST: Ho Che Anderson
EDITOR: Gary Groth
ISBN: 978-1-56097-622-5; paperback with French flaps (February 16, 2005)
240pp, Color, $22.95 U.S.

Introduction by Stanley Crouch

King was a three-volume graphic novel series written and illustrated by Ho Che Anderson and published by Fantagraphics Books.  Anderson is a British-born, Toronto, Canada-based comic book creator and illustrator.  Over his three-decade career, Anderson is known for such works as I Want to Be You Dog (1997), Scream Queen (2005), and Godhead (2018).

King was a comic book biography of slain Civil Rights leader and icon, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968).  The first volume was published in 1993, the second in 2002, and the third in 2003.  In 2005, Fantagraphics collected the series in a single over-sized paperback volume, entitled King, and subtitled “A Comics Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.”  Stanley Crouch provided a weighty three-page introduction to the book.  The 2005 edition eventually went out-of-print, and Fantagraphics released a new hardcover edition in 2010 (which is currently still in stock via Amazon).  This review references the 2005 edition.

Any reader who is a fan of comic book biographies or historical comics will find that the King collection, even sixteen years after its collection, remains an essential edition to any comic book library.  This paperback collection, with its French cover flaps, has the book design and printing quality of pricey art books and illustrated historical retrospectives.

THE LOWDOWN:  King, Vol. 1 debuted in the second half of 1993, and, of the three volumes, it is the closest to actually being a biography that focuses on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a human.  Certainly, the narrative here reveals him as a man grasping at greatness, but the Dr. King in Vol. 1 is like clay still being molded into a great man.

In this volume, Anderson uses collage and traditional drawing in various styles to illustrate the narrative.  Some of the art may remind readers of Kyle Baker and Dave McKean and, from the fine art world, Pablo Picasso.  It is simply a virtuoso performance in the illustration of a comic book, but it is also an example of someone taking advantage of the comic book medium's storytelling potential.

The script and dialogue are also important in Vol. 1.  The easy thing to do is to describe this as a biography of King.  It is that, but much more.  King, Vol. 1 covers the early movements of the entire Civil Rights movement.  It does so with such force and flavor that this sometimes comes across like a documentary film, except we're getting the most powerful and informative still moments from that film.  The reader really gets a sense of struggle and conflict through the characters.  Anderson manages to give each character a unique voice, which in turns broadens the scope of the narrative about the movement.

Early in Vol. 1, Anderson creates a series of talking head panels.  Each character, a sort of background player, has a say, which allows him or her to have an immeasurable impact on the narrative's ability to communicate multiple points of view.  It also allows for multiple points of view of the main character.  This is similar to a Greek chorus, or even closer, this is like Frank Miller's use of the television talking heads in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.

If, back in the early 1990's, Joe Sacco showed us how comics can be journalism (Palestine), Anderson, then, showed us how comic books can tell history.  Thus far, comic's biggest achievement in the field of history is Maus; other than that, it's mostly been war stories.  King might come across as that dreaded important book one must read, but it is a great work of comics in the tradition of Maus.

While Volume 1 of King covered the early years of the life of Dr. King and the early years of the American Civil Rights Movement, post World War 2, King, Vol. 2 leaps fully into detailing the life of the movement:  inner workings and conflicts, public tactics and the face the movement presented to the public.  Anderson reveals the players both major and minor, the movement's adversaries and sympathizers and people who straddle the fence.

Anderson uses the same illustrative techniques as in the first book: collage, drawing, painting, and some mixed media.  His script remains the darling of this project.  Here, Dr. King isn't so much a main character as he is a player (albeit the primary one) in a major social event.  We do get snippets of Dr. King's character, but here he is most interesting as the most prominent figure in a movement that swells and ebbs with tidal consistency.  I have a number of favorite moments in this volume.  There are the private meetings between Dr. King and President John Kennedy (Anderson's account is speculative, as the subject of the conversations were known only to King and Kennedy).  Two other exceptional moments are when Dr. King's daughter asked to be taken to a theme park and she couldn't understand why black children would be unwanted there; and the " I Have a Dream" speech.

This work could have had the same problem that movies have when they attempt to cover a large historical movement or a public figure with a rich past.  Sometimes, movies hop from one big moment to another and end up looking like an over produced highlight reel, as in the case of Michael Mann's film, Ali.  Anderson makes full use of the space on every page, using concise unadorned dialogue and brief bits of conversation that advance his story.  Imagine the excitement that Neal Adams brought to comics four decades ago in page layout.  Combine that with traditional layout, Film-Noir, fine art, collage, and you have Anderson's King.

When King, Vol. 2 was first published it was another example of the continuing evolution of comic books as a serious medium of storytelling, and revealed that comics could engage in the kind of myth making and communication that prose and film, both fiction and non-fiction, have been doing for a long time.

King, Vol. 3 is the last book in Ho Che Anderson's three-piece suite, an interpretative biography of Dr. King.  In his afterword to the third volume, Anderson wrote he understood that some readers might find this last book's appearance “visually eclectic.”  Anderson wrote that he felt he had earned the right to indulge himself.

The book's narrative eclecticism is, however, equally worthy of notice.  It's as if the author devoured the history of the Civil Rights movement and regurgitated a book that couldn't possibly contain the movement's far-reaching story, but the author would certainly give it his best shot.  Of course, Dr. King was the epicenter of the Civil Rights movement and is focus of Anderson's graphic novel, but even as a fictional character, King seemed lost in a movement larger than his life, but not his legend.  For all that King the comic has, it seems to be missing not just something, but a whole lot of things.  Vol. 3 perhaps revealed the shortcomings of this entire concept without crippling the larger novel.

If we accept Anderson's conceit of his book's personal bent, many notions of historical accuracy get tossed.  This isn't to say that the book is inaccurate, but as with any broad movement in history, each pair of eyes might see the same thing as any other pair, but look at it differently.  The Civil Rights movement is exactly that, a movement; it's not a single incident in time.  The Civil Rights movement is a whole bunch of events and moments artificially lumped together in hopes that it'll be easier to make sense of what happened.

It is best to examine King the comic as a graphic narrative and to investigate how well it works as a comic book, rather than to argue its historical merit alone.  Pretensions aside, this is still a comic book, and (dammit) there's nothing wrong with that.  We should always remember that comic book creators produce work like The Spirit or Love & Rockets just as they easily create digestible products for reading, which we can also enjoy

What Anderson does in King is take the graphic narrative another step forward the way comic books like The Spirit and Love and Rockets did.  Both were revolutionary in their form at the time of their initial release and even further ahead of the high concept/low brow narratives that make up the bulk comic book storytelling today (DC Comics' “Black Label” line).  It's as if Anderson took all the raw materials that he could use to make comix and used them to produce his final volume of King, making it far more adventurous than even the previous two volumes.

Anderson uses talking heads, collage, splash pages, photographs, line drawings, paintings, color effects, special effects, surrealism, expressionism, and guess what?  It all works; it actually looks like a comic book.  So often comic books try to look like something else, for instance, comic book art that looks like anime or painted comics that look like Norman Rockwell paintings.  King is a comic book, an expensive comic book printed on enamel paper with card stock covers, but by gosh, still a frickin' comic book.

Visually, King 3 has such a sense of organic unity, in which all the disparate parts come together to give this book its own life.  Each reading seems to tell a story different from the previous reading.  The book seems almost self-aware, as if the words and pictures deliberately communicate something beyond the static images on the surface of the page.

There is one thing about the story of movement Anderson gets right.  Civil Rights are an ever growing ideas that absorb people, places, and times, and the best an observer can do is understand just that.  Who can ever nail this thing down, and, in way, it seems that Anderson's fictional Dr. King can't ever really put his finger on it the entire pulse of the movement.  King has an idea of his place inside the movement, but he has trouble getting a fix on where the movement itself is going.

Anderson also seems to have a little difficult putting his finger on the pulse of the story because he moves from one plot to another or in and out of subplots like a journalist running madly from one news hot spot to another.  Best example is when Dr. King discusses with Ralph Abernathy the possibility of Abernathy taking King's place as spokesman for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference if something were to happen to MLK.  The wonderful exchange between the two is a fascinating peek at Dr. King's place in the SCLC, but it only tantalizes with the mention of other "leaders."  Ho Che leaves the idea of SCLC rivalries dangling because Dr. King's rivals for power over the larger movement are perhaps more important to this story.  Throughout the series, Ho Che gives the reader a small taste, here and there, of King the man, even if the narrative demands a deeper look than what the author gives.

Still it's good that Anderson didn't make the King he was “supposed to make.”  He didn't make the one for which other people (like me) would have wished.  In spite of what faults it may have, King is example of what a cartoonist can create within the medium of the so-called "graphic narrative" when he uses all the artistic elements available to him.  Anderson took an adventurous leap forward with this comic book – a brave, personal, artistic statement and an adventurous leap forward with the comic book – warts and all.  King shows that comics can deal with subject matter weightier than, say, Wolverine's origins or just how screwed up Batman/Bruce Wayne is.  Maybe Ho Che Anderson is one of the few cartoonists capable of treating comics as a medium of art and communication the way the great novelists, short story writers, musicians, and filmmakers treat their respective mediums.

I READS YOU RECOMMENDS:  Fans of great comic books will want to read Ho Che Anderson's King.

A+
10 out of 10

Reviewed by Leroy Douresseaux a.k.a. "I Reads You"



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The text is copyright © 2021 Leroy Douresseaux. All Rights Reserved. Contact this blog or site for reprint or syndication rights and fees.

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Sunday, October 25, 2020

Book Review: WANDERING IN STRANGE LANDS

WANDERING IN STRANGE LANDS: A DAUGHTER OF THE GREAT MIGRATION RECLAIMS HER ROOTS
HARPERCOLLINS – @HarperCollins

[This review was originally posted on Patreon.]

AUTHOR: Morgan Jerkins
ISBN: 978-0-06-287304-0; hardcover (August 4, 2020)
304pp, B&W, $27.99 U.S.

Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots is the new nonfiction book from Morgan Jerkins, magazine editor and writer, cultural critic, and bestselling author of the book, This Will Be My Undoing.  In Wandering in Strange Lands, Jerkins journeys across the United States in order to understand her roots, the Great Migration, and the displacement of black people across America.

At the center of Wandering in Strange Lands is the fact that between 1916 and 1970, six million black Americans left their rural homes in the South for jobs in cities in the North, West, and Midwest.  This movement is known as The Great Migration, and it was an event that transformed the complexion of America.  The Great Migration brought black people to new economic opportunities, but Morgan Jerkins argues that this massive movement also left African-Americans disconnected from their roots, their land, and their sense of identity.  Both sides of Jerkins family made the Great Migration, but to what extent?  Who were the family members left behind?  Who are the founders of her family lines?

Jerkins decided to fill in the gaps in her own personal story and in the gaps in the history of both her mother and her father's families.  She decided to do this by recreating her ancestors’ journeys across America, following the migratory routes they took from Georgia and South Carolina to Louisiana, to Oklahoma, and to California.

Jerkins follows in her people's footsteps, backwards and forwards, as she seeks to understand not only her own past, but also the lineage of her family and of the entire group of black people who have been displaced, disenfranchised, and disrespected throughout our history as a nation.  Jerkins conducts interviews with family, with friends, and with new friends who might be family.  She takes photos and collects hundreds of pages of transcription – all of this to gather those loose threads of her family’s oral histories that she might make something whole and hopefully complete.  Along the way, she is disabused of some of her notions, and she starts to wonder – who controls our stories?

THE LOWDOWN:  My paternal grandmother supposedly had American Indian heritage.  Her and her siblings were of so many different skin tones that when I met some of them, I did not realize that they were her siblings.  Three of my grandmother's brothers were part of the Great Migration, heading to Detroit for jobs in the automobile industry a long, long time ago.  I met them at my grandmother's funeral decades ago.

My maternal grandmother turned out to be the child of former slave, which means my mother was the grandchild of a former slave.  Also “the old white man” who came to play with me whenever I visited my maternal grandmother was actually her wayward husband and my mother's father.  My mother, who died a few years ago, was the keeper of detailed histories of both her and her husband's families.  Mama always had a story.  I never recorded them, and now, that she is passed, I feel helpless as I try to rediscover the stories from which I will regrow the family tree.

Wandering in Strange Lands is the story of someone, in this case, a young woman named Morgan Jerkins, who wants to braid the loose threads of the oral histories of both sides of her family.  She backtracks across the Great Migration to learn about the Gullah Geechee.  She plumbs the mystery of water, of root work, and of root doctors in the Lowcountry of Georgia and South Carolina.

Jerkins heads to Louisiana and visits Natchitoches and Cane River to meet the “Creole” people she once dismissed.  She travels south to the Louisiana cities of Lafayette and St. Martinville and discovers her connections to Voodoo.  Then, it's on to Oklahoma where threads of her family lead back to North Carolina and Florida and to the stories of the “Freedmen,” “by-blood Indians,” and the “Dawes Roll.”  Finally, Jerkins returns to California and to Los Angeles where the Great Migration took black people to a place where things were supposed to be much better than in rest of the racist United States... or so they believed.  But it wasn't.

I have been steadily writing reviews for almost twenty years, yet I don't have the words to describe the epic scope of Morgan Jerkins deeply personal story.  I can't describe the power this book has; sometimes, I thought it put some hoodoo on me.  Jerkins' journey to connect the disparate parts of her family history and their origins is her own story.  Somehow, she connects me with and into her story, and I think that she will do that to everyone who reads her book.

Morgan Jerkins makes Wandering in Strange Lands a nonfiction work of black history and of American history.  It is a book of religion and of culture, and it is an indictment of America's systemic white racism and pernicious white privilege.  The lens through which Jerkins tells this story is a microscope for her family's history and a telescope gathering in the star fields of black history.

In the awful year that is 2020, Wandering in Strange Lands might seem to be the book that was meant to be here.  It is not a prophetic work, but the prophets wanted it to be here now.  So...yeah... I'm saying it's a must-read.

I READS YOU RECOMMENDS:  Readers interested in the stories and oral histories of African-American families will find an essential book in Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots.

10 out of 10

Reviewed by Leroy Douresseaux a.k.a. "I Reads You"

https://twitter.com/MorganJerkins


The text is copyright © 2020 Leroy Douresseaux. All Rights Reserved. Contact this blog or site for syndication rights and fees.

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Friday, June 5, 2020

#IReadsYou Review: DREAMING EAGLES #1

DREAMING EAGLES No. 1 (OF 6)
AFTERSHOCK COMICS – @AfterShockComix

[This review was originally posted on Patreon.]

WRITER: Garth Ennis
ARTIST: Simon Coleby
COLORS: John Kalisz
LETTERS: Rob Steen
COVER: Francesco Francavilla
VARIANT COVERS: Brian Stelfreeze; Phil Hester
32pp, Color, $3.99 U.S. (December 2015)

For mature readers

Dreaming Eagles created by Garth Ennis

“We Cannot Consecrate”


Okay.  So back on September 11, 2015, Comic Book Resources posted an interview that assistant editor, Brett White, conducted with comic book luminary, Garth Ennis, concerning his then-upcoming miniseries, Dreaming Eagles.  Drawn by Simon Coleby, Dreaming Eagles tells the story of the first African-American fighter pilots to join the United States Army Air Force in World War II.  The series also deals with the 1960s Civil Right movement.

The first question that White asked Ennis was related to Mark Waid and J.G. Jones' current miniseries, Strange Fruit.  That comic book blends superhero comics to tell a story of racism during the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.  Prior to the release of the first issue, there was some criticism by African-Americans leveled at Wade and Jones for telling their story in this manner, especially as privileged White American comic book creators.

So White asked Ennis, “Do you have any concern that you'll face similar scrutiny in writing about the Tuskegee airmen and their experiences?”

Ennis' response is so typically American White male privilege that it is hard to believe that he is originally from Northern Ireland:  “My attitude to that is that it's going to be what it's going to be; it's so far beyond my control that there's no point worrying about it. I'll write the best and most honest story I can, with appropriate attention to detail in terms of historical research. If you think I have no right to tell the story because I'm white, don't read it. If you don't think that and you're interested, give it a try.”

It is not that Black people do not want White people telling stories about Black people and African-American subject matter or featuring Black characters.  The complaint or grievance is that the same opportunity to produce such comic is, in large measure, not afforded to Black comic book creators.  Unless the story would be tailored to one of their characters, neither Marvel nor DC Comics would publish something like Dreaming Eagles produced by an African-American creative team.  In fact, it is unlikely that any of the major independents that publish creator-owned comic books would publish something like Dreaming Eagles by a team of Black creators.

How do I know that?  Well, they haven't...  A few times a year, Image Comics makes a big deal out of announcing its slate of upcoming creator-owned titles, and none are by African-American creative teams.  I think once, out of embarrassment, Image tossed in a token Negro title, which I have yet to see.  So AfterShock Comics is doing the same as the other publishers, and Garth Ennis is officially an American White male, willfully blind to his unearned White privilege.

So, onto the review...

Dreaming Eagles #1 (“We Cannot Consecrate”) opens in 1966, at night, outside “The Silver Pony” (a restaurant in New York City?).  The place is owned by a Black man, WWII veteran, Reggie Atkinson.  Tonight, he is thinking about his son, Lee, who is a budding activist in the 1960s Civil Rights movement.  Father and son don't agree on the movement, but tonight, Atkinson will finally tell Lee about his time as Lt. Reggie Atkinson, one of the first African-American fighter pilots in the United States Army Air Force in WWII.  And those first Black men had to prove a lot of White men wrong about a lot of things.

My diatribe to open this review aside, I like this first issue of Dreaming Eagles, which will be a six-issue miniseries.  The conflict between father and son is nothing new.  The old Black man versus the young brotha' conflict has popped up in much of the fiction and storytelling about the Black struggle for equality and dignity in the United States (most recently in the film, Lee Daniels' The Butler).  What I like is that Garth Ennis is depicting the father-son struggle as not being toxic, but instead, as a matter of perspective and worldview brought on by different life experiences.

Ennis is also blunt and to-the-point in stating the obstacles facing Black men in the U.S. military before and during WWII.  Ennis' storytelling has always been blunt and to-the-point which gives the drama and action in his stories the force of a series of jabs that keeps the readers always on his feet and engaged with the story.

If this comic book were published by DC Comics' Vertigo imprint, which published practically all of Ennis' work for about a decade, Simon Coleby would be the artist and this story would not look different.  He is not a fall-back choice for a name writer looking for as an artist.  Coleby gives each panel just the right amount of drama that is needed, from subdued to momentous.  He does not force a mood to pander to reader expectations, simply because he understands the build up to moments – immediately and for later chapters.

I think that this first issue is rather languid compared to what I expect to come in later issues, but I could be wrong.  My sense of expectation suggests that readers of Garth Ennis' war comics will want to read beyond the first issue.  However, I don't know that people who have enjoyed Ennis' work on comic books like Preacher and The Punisher will care for this.

A-

[This comic book includes a five-page preview of the comic book , Replica #2, by Paul Jenkins and Andy Clarke.]

Reviewed by Leroy Douresseaux a.k.a. "I Reads You"


The text is copyright © 2016 Leroy Douresseaux. All Rights Reserved. Contact this blog for reprint and syndication rights and fees.


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Sunday, July 14, 2019

Book Review: THE CONFESSIONS OF FRANNIE LANGTON

THE CONFESSIONS OF FANNIE LANGTON
HARPER (HarperCollins Publishers) – @HarperCollins @HarperBooks

[This review was originally posted on Patreon.]

AUTHOR: Sara Collins
ISBN: 978-0-06-285189-5; hardcover (May 21, 2019)
384pp, B&W, $26.99 U.S.

The Confessions of Frannie Langton is the debut novel of author Sara Collins.  This 2019 historical novel and murder mystery, which is set largely in the 1820s and in Georgian London, focuses on a servant and former slave accused of murdering her employer and his wife.

The Confessions of Frannie Langton opens on April 5, 1826 in London, at “The Old Bailey” (the common name for the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales).  Frances “Frannie” Langton, a mulatto Black woman, is accused of double murder.  London is abuzz with this scandalous case in which renowned scientist, George Benham, and his eccentric French wife, Marguerite “Meg” Benham (the former Marguerite Delacroix), were murdered in their home, Levenhall.  Huge crowds pack the courtroom to hear the tawdry details of two White people brutally, repeated, and savagely stabbed by this mysterious Negress to whom the late couple gave a home and a job after she was turned out by her previous master.

But there is always more... more... more to such stories.  For that, we travel back in time to the period of 1812 to 1825.  Frannie Langton was once a slave on a plantation in Jamaica, called “Paradise.”  Her owner, John Langton, had scientific ambitions, and he was determined to prove his theories about race, particularly about Black people and about Black Africans.

Frannie may claim that she cannot recall what happened that fateful evening of the Benhams' deaths – even if remembering could save her life.  However, she does have a tale to tell, and it begins with her childhood on that Jamaican sugar plantation.  It continues to her apprenticeship under John Langton, cruel master turned debauched scientist, stretching all bounds of ethics.  Then, the story moves into the Benhams’ London home, where Frannie finds a wannabe scientist who may be as bad as Langton and where she also finds a passionate and forbidden relationship.  The newspapers say Frannie is a seductress, a witch, a master manipulator, and a whore, when she may simply be a Black woman trying to make her own way in a racist world.

When HarperCollins offered a galley review copy of The Confessions of Frannie Langton, I jumped at asking for a copy, especially after reading the cover copy.  However, The Confessions of Frannie Langton turned out to be one of the most difficult reads that I have encountered in well over a decade.

The depiction of slavery and of forced servitude in The Confessions of Frannie Langton is so vivid and horrifying.  It's like combining the screenplays for 12 Years of Slave and Birth of a Nation (2016 version, of course) squeezed into one heartbreaking novel.  What Sara Collins offers in The Confessions of Frannie Langton is certainly a brilliant, searing depiction of race, class, and oppression.  This novel, however, offers even more; it is a historical thriller and literary indictment with ambitions to be as entertaining as any other literary thriller.

Collins offers wisdom and insight into the way both the oppressors and the oppressed are forced to live their lives.  Such perceptiveness is revealed in lines like “... 'cause you got white hopes. I got Negro expectations.” (as said to Frannie by Sal, her friend and fellow sex worker) or “The very woman who'd spit in your porridge in the morning could be fornicating with your husband at night.”  As if she were a venerable, elderly Black woman storyteller, Collins has uncanny insights into the perilous and fraught lives of Black woman who are property or who are technically not property, but are really property for all intents and purposes.

Perhaps, we love people because we view them through a lens of being people who make us feel a certain way.  Frannie becomes attached to or falls in love with people who view her as being property that makes them feel a certain way.  In order to convey that stark and sometimes subtle difference, a writer needs to be a superior storyteller and also needs to have a command of prose.  With her first novel, Sara Collins' mighty storytelling and command of prose take her to the summit of literary heights.  I would be surprised if The Confessions of Frannie Langton did not become a staple of college literature courses within five years.

The Confessions of Frannie Langton is an incredible novel with a kind of terrible power.  This is the power needed to convey the horrors experienced by Africans enslaved in the Western Hemisphere and also by those forced to inherit the status of their enslaved parents, grandparents and ancestors.

10 out of 10

Reviewed by Leroy Douresseaux a.k.a. "I Reads You"


The text is copyright © 2019 Leroy Douresseaux. All Rights Reserved. Contact this blog or site for syndication rights and fees.

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Thursday, July 12, 2018

Review: MARCH Book Three

MARCH: BOOK THREE
TOP SHELF PRODUCTIONS – @topshelfcomix

[This review was originally posted on Patreon.]

WRITERS: John Lewis and Andrew Aydin
ARTIST: Nate Powell
EDITOR: Leigh Walton
ISBN: 978-1-60309-402-3; paperback with French flaps – 6.7" x 9.7" (August 2, 2016)
256pp, B&W, $19.99 U.S.

Congressman John Lewis is a member of the United States House of Representatives as Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District Representative (GA-5, Democrat).  During the 1960s, Lewis was also one of the “Big Six” leaders of the American Civil Rights movement (with the others being Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., James Farmer, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, and Whitney Young).  Before such fame and accomplishments, he was born John Robert Lewis in February 1940 to sharecropper parents, Willie Mae (Carter) and Eddie Lewis.

In 2013, Top Shelf Productions began publishing a series of three graphic novels, entitled March, that would chronicle Congressman Lewis' time as a Civil Rights activist.  March begins with his childhood and moves onto his time as a college student who is a participant in and organizer of dangerous protests.  The story ultimately shits into Lewis' years as a leader in the Civil Rights movement and as someone who shapes and influences change, politically and socially.  March is written by Congressman Lewis and Andrew Aydin, one of Lewis' top advisers, and is drawn and lettered by Nate Powell, an award-winning book illustrator and comic book creator.

March: Book Three (August 2016), like March Book One and March Book Two, uses the inauguration of President Barack Obama (January 20, 2009) as a kind of framing sequence from which a 68-year-old Lewis looks back on the events of the past.  Book Three opens on September 15, 1963 and depicts the terrorist bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

By the fall of 1963, the Civil Rights movement has found its way into the consciousness of the American people.  As the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), John Lewis is one of the people that have made this happen.  SNCC continues to force the nation to confront its own blatant injustice, but as the movement grows more successful, its enemies grow bolder and more dangerous.  The supporters of segregation and of Jim Crow use everything from courtroom tactics via friendly judges to intimidation via violence.  Even more worrying, racists like the Ku Klux Klan and segregationist become more violent and seem to deal out death with impunity.

However, the Civil Rights movement, with Dr. Martin Luther King as its leader and most famous face, decides that in order for black Americans to be truly free and equal, they must be able to vote as freely as any white American.  It is time to end the voter suppression that silences so many Americans.  The cry becomes “One Man, One Vote!”  Lewis and an army of young activists launch their nonviolent revolution with innovative campaigns such the “Freedom Vote” and “Mississippi Freedom Summer,” and with an all-out battle for the soul of the Democratic Party waged live on national television.

There are new struggles, new allies, new opponents, and an unpredictable new president (Lyndon B. Johnson – the 36th) who might be both an ally and an opponent at the same time.  Even SNCC begins to fracture.  For 25-year-old John Lewis, however, there is no turning back as he and his fellow activists risk everything on a historic march that will begin in the town of Selma, Alabama.

I never doubted that March Book Two could be as powerful as March Book One, but then, I found that Book Two surpasses the first book in terms of intensity.  So, would March Book Three be the typical trilogy fail – the week final entry in a storytelling triplet?  Never fear, dear readers; there is no failure here.  Book One depicts the awakening or the full rising of Civil Rights tide.  Book Two took the readers into the trenches and to the front lines of a non-violent war in which one side uses peace and the other employs senseless, ceaseless, and wanton acts of violence.

March Book Three depicts many infamous acts of violence against Civil Rights activists.  The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing; the kidnapping and murder of three Civil Rights workers (Mickey Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney), and “Bloody Sunday” are some of the most infamous acts of violence, murder, and mayhem that occur against the movement from the Fall 1963 to Spring 1965.

However, Book Three gets into the details and process of forcing change through politics and political action.  The emphasis is the movement's focus on the federal government, particularly on the Presidency of the United States and the U.S. Department of Justice.  The narrative of this book focuses more on political wrangling, with violence often as backdrop, and there is a sense that something is coming to an end.  Gaining the right to vote for Black people nationwide feels like the end of one story, the close of an iteration of the Civil Rights movement.

Whatever comes next for the movement will be different, but for now, there can be some joy in what is gained by the end of March Book Three.  That is the best thing about March Book Three; Lewis, Aydin, and Powell convey the sense of hope, and no matter what happens next, the victory of the 1965 Selma to Montgomery, Alabama voting rights marches offers hope no matter how good or bad things get from that point going forward.

On the last page of March: Book Three, Congress John Lewis and Andrew Aydin give us a depiction of the two of them talking about that “comic book idea.”  Lewis says “We'll have to find a great artist – someone who can make the words sing.”  Lewis and Aydin's words have the depth and detail of prose and convey the lyrical flow of poetry.

Well, they did find the great artist who could make their words sing in the person of Nate Powell.  Comic books are a storytelling medium that uses graphics to convey, communicate, and tell a story, and Powell makes the words sing “Hallelujah!”  That boy can sang!  In the end, Powell, with pencil, pen, and brush, creates a comic book that lifts him, as well as the readers, to the heights.  None of the greats – not Crumb, not Kirby, not Moebius, not Eisner, not Los Bros., not Wood, not Kurtzman; none of them are above him.  Now, he is their equal.

Nate Powell has marched on up to the mountaintop, and he sits on high with the masters, old and new.  John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, Dr. Martin Luther King, and the named and unnamed of the American Civil Rights movement deserve nothing less in the comic book artist who would tell their story.

10 out of 10

For more information about the March trilogy, visit here or at http://www.topshelfcomix.com/march

Reviewed by Leroy Douresseaux a.k.a. "I Reads You"


The text is copyright © 2018 Leroy Douresseaux. All Rights Reserved. Contact this blog or site for syndication rights and fees.

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Friday, June 1, 2018

Review: MARCH: Book Two

MARCH: BOOK TWO
TOP SHELF PRODUCTIONS – @topshelfcomix

[This review was originally posted on Patreon.]

WRITERS: John Lewis and Andrew Aydin
ARTIST: Nate Powell
EDITOR: Leigh Walton
ISBN: 978-1-60309-400-9; paperback with French flaps – 6.5" x 9.5" (January 20, 2015)
192pp, B&W, $19.95 U.S., $25.95 CAN

Congressman John Lewis is Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District Representative (GA-5, Democrat).  Lewis was also one of the “Big Six” leaders of the American Civil Rights Movement (with the others being Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., James Farmer, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, and Whitney Young).  Before such fame and accomplishments, he was born John Robert Lewis in February 1940 to sharecropper parents, Willie Mae (Carter) and Eddie Lewis.

In 2013, Top Shelf Productions began publishing a series of three graphic novels, entitled March, that would chronicle the life of Congressman Lewis, from his childhood to his college-age youth as a participant in and organizer of dangerous protests.  The story ultimately moves into Lewis' years as a leader in the Civil Rights movement and as someone who shaped and influenced change, politically and socially.  March is written by Congressman Lewis and Andrew Aydin, one of Lewis' top advisers, and is drawn and lettered by Nate Powell, an award-winning illustrator and comic book creator.

March Book Two (January 2015), like March Book One, uses the inauguration of President Barack Obama (January 20, 2009) as a framing sequence.  The story then moves back to November 1960.  After the success of the Nashville sit-in campaign to desegregate lunch counters, the Nashville Student Movement is ready to make its next moves.  The students want to desegregate fast food restaurants and cafeterias and movie theaters so that that black people can receive the same service that white people do.  John Lewis is more committed than ever to changing the world through nonviolence — but he is about to become involved in his most perilous venture yet.

In 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) plans to test a recent favorable Supreme Court ruling, Boynton v. Virginia, which outlawed racial segregation on buses and in bus terminals.  CORE called this program Freedom Ride 1961, and the young activists involved are dubbed “Freedom Riders.”  However, these “Freedom Riders” plan to go into the heart of the deep south in order to segregate bus terminals in cities like Birmingham, Alabama and New Orleans, Louisiana, and they will be tested as never before.  They must face beatings from vicious white devils... (I mean) civilians, police brutality, imprisonment, arson, and even murder.  With their lives on the line, these young activists also face internal conflicts that threatens to tear them apart.

I never doubted that March Book Two could be as powerful as March Book One, but now, I think that Book Two passes the first book in terms of intensity.  Book Two also chronicles how John Lewis and his fellow activists attracted the notice people like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who would become powerful allies.  We also witness Lewis get elected chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), thrusting the 23-year-old into the national spotlight.  We see Lewis become one of the “Big Six” leaders of the civil rights movement and a central figure in the landmark 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.  March Book Two also depicts the speech that Lewis gave at that historic march, and, at the back of this graphic novel, the original version of Lewis' speech is reprinted.  The section of the story that deals with the “negotiations” involved in getting Lewis to make changes to his speech is riveting.

However, the spine of March Book Two is the harrowing depiction and recounting of “Freedom Ride 1961.”  Lewis and Andrew Aydin's script, narration, and dialogue are some of the most powerful that I have ever read in a comic book.  As I read those glorious pages, I felt as if my blood was freezing, at the same time that my heart was a'pounding.  If Lewis and Aydin's text about the Freedom Riders was reprinted without the art, it would still be compelling and effective.

I could say the same thing about the art.  If Nate Powell's illustrations and graphics for March Book Two were reprinted without the text and word balloons in an art book, they would still be all-powerful and potent storytelling.  Even as pantomime comics, Powell's work here would force us to understand every bit of Lewis' story as told by the Congressman and Mr. Aydin.  Powell is easily one of the very best comic book illustrators of the still young twenty-first century.  He is in my Top 10.

Fortunately for us, Lewis, Aydin, and Powell work as one almighty comic book creative team.  On that ride back through time, they transport us onto the buses for the most perilous bus rides in American history.  Because of the felicity with which they tell this story, Lewis, Aydin, and Powell honor not only Lewis' story, but they also honor the men and women, black and white, who put everything on the line for freedom and equality.  March Book Two was and still is 2015's best original graphic novel and best work of comics.

10 out of 10

For more information about the March trilogy, visit here or at http://www.topshelfcomix.com/march

Reviewed by Leroy Douresseaux a.k.a. "I Reads You"


The text is copyright © 2018 Leroy Douresseaux. All Rights Reserved. Contact this blog or site for syndication rights and fees.


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Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Book Review: BARRACOON

BARRACOON: THE STORY OF THE LAST “BLACK CARGO”
HARPER/Amistad – @HarperCollins @AmistadBooks

[This review was originally posted on Patreon.]

AUTHOR: Zora Neale Hurston
EDITOR: Deborah G. Plant
ISBN: 978-0-06-285508-4; hardcover – 5 1/2” x 8 1/4” (May 8, 2018)
208pp, B&W, $24.99 U.S.

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist and playwright, who may be best known for her 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, one of her four novels.  Hurston was and still is noted for her contributions to African-American literature, for her portrayal of racial struggles in the American South, and for her research on Haitian voodoo.

Hurston was also an anthropologist and folklorist and authored two books of folklore, Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938), and her autobiography, Dust Tracks on the Road (1942).  There was one work by Hurston that mixes anthropology, folklore, and biography.  It is the story of one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade, a story Hurston told in the vernacular in which that survivor spoke.

It was unpublished... until this week (May 8th, 2018).  Now, in a hardcover from Amistad Books (a HarperCollins imprint), comes the book entitled Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo.”  This is the story of a man who was help captive aboard the last slave ship, the Clotilda, to come from Africa and deliver African captives into slavery in America.

In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, an African-eccentric community just outside Mobile, Alabama, to interview an 86-year-old African man named Cudjo Lewis.  Lewis' birth name was Oluala Kossola, and he was one of millions of men, women, and children who were transported from Africa to America as slaves.  By 1927, however, Cudjo (born sometime around 1841) was the only person still alive who could tell the complete story of being captured, transported across the Atlantic (the “Middle Passage”), and forced into slavery.

Hurston recorded Cudjo’s firsthand account of the raid on his African hometown (Bantè) by the Fon of Dahomey, who were among the African people who resisted the British-led effort to end the trans-Atlantic slave trade.  [Up to the beginning of the Civil War, some Americans still sailed to Africa to get slaves that they smuggled into the United States.]  In this raid, Cudjo was captured and transported to Ouidah, a town along the West African coast, where he was held prisoner in the “barracoons.”  A “barracoon” was a hut or structure where captors detained Africans who were to be sold and exported to America or Europe as slaves.  In 1859, Cudjo would leave Africa for America, where he would spend five-and-half years in bondage as a slave in Alabama until he was freed in 1865.

In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, which had been founded by Cudjo and the other former slaves that had been transported to America in the Clotilda.  Hurston spent more than three months with Cudjo, talking in depth about the details of his life.

During this time, Hurston, the young writer, and Cudjo, the elderly former enslaved man, talked about Cudjo’s past.  He recounted the memories of his childhood and young adulthood in Africa and then,  the horrors of the raid in which he was captured.  He narrates the story of his time being held in a barracoon and his eventual selection by American slavers.  Cudjo recalls the harrowing experience of the “Middle Passage,” packed with more than 100 other souls aboard the Clotilda.   He finally reveals the years he spent in slavery and his troubled life after helping to found an Alabama town for Africans like himself.

Based on those interviews, Hurston tells the story mainly from Cudjo's point of view, transcribing Cudjo’s unique vernacular diction.  Although she wrote the text from her perspective as she heard it, Hurston spelled the words as she heard Cudjo say them, using the former slave's rhythm, expressions, and phrases.  Rejected by publishers in the 1930s, Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” sees the light of day thanks to the bold vision of Amistad Books and HarperCollins.

Amistad Books is proving to be a year-round “Black History Month” celebration, thanks to publications such as the recent, brilliant non-fiction tome, Black Fortunes: The Story of the First Six African Americans Who Escaped Slavery and Became Millionaires, by Shomari Wills.  It is best not to underestimate the importance of Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo.”  In the literary world, there are people (like Alice Walker) who worked to restore Zora Neale Hurston, who died in obscurity (more or less), to a place of honor in American literature.  Deborah G. Plant is among those people, and Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” is important to the ongoing restoration of Hurston.  It is also a fantastic book and a riveting read.

Hurston's text, which includes the body of Cudjo Lewis' story, an introduction, and appendix, makes up 112 pages of this book.  By the time I finished reading, I was not sure what part of the story impressed me most, but by recording Cudjo's recollections of his life and trials in Africa, Hurston informs today's readers of her place as an anthropologist.  The tale of the raid on Cudjo's village and the forced march from his captors' village to the barracoons is harrowing.  I think that this part of the narrative will be imprinted on my memory for a long time, but I found every part of this book fascinating.

Hurston's decision to keep the story in Cudjo's vernacular was the right choice, and potential publishers to whom she hoped to sell this book apparently did not agree with this.  Cudjo's story is so powerful and unforgettable precisely because of the manner and language in which Hurston committed it to text.  I think Hurston's decisions regarding this text assure her place as a hugely important twentieth-century contributor to American history and culture.

Hurston's appendix contains some folktales Cudjo related to her, the recording of which testifies to Hurston's place as a folklorist.  Deborah Plant's introduction is a must-read for readers before they enter Hurston's text.  The glossary and notes will help readers grasp many of the terms, phrases, names, and words included in Hurston's text.  At 200+ pages, Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” is a slim text, but it packs a wallop of a punch both as history and as a document of a particular facet of American slavery.

Readers looking for great tales of “Black History” and for books that reveal an untold corner of American history must have Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo.”  And no Zora Neale Hurston library or collection can be without it.

[This book includes an introduction by editor, Deborah G. Plant, and a foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Alice Walker.]

9 out of 10

Reviewed by Leroy Douresseaux a.k.a. "I Reads You"


The text is copyright © 2018 Leroy Douresseaux. All Rights Reserved. Contact this blog or site for reprint and syndication rights and fees.

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