Erstwhile editor Graeme Pente reviews Bohemians: A Graphic History (Verso, 2014). In Bohemians: A Graphic History (2014), Paul Buhle, David Berger, and Luisa Cetti help a dozen artists bring to life an impressive cast of historical characters who lived on the margins of mainstream society while pushing the creative boundaries of diverse forms of art.[1] Covering the…
Graeme Pente reviews Reinhard Kleist’s graphic novel surveying the life of former Cuban leader Fidel Castro in Erstwhile‘s Graphic Histories series. “No one fears that we should transform ourselves into dictators. Only he who does not have the support of the people becomes a dictator.” — Fidel Castro, January 1959 Few figures of the twentieth century…
Erstwhile editor Beau Driver returns to the Graphic Histories series with his review of Wobblies: A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World (2005), edited by Paul Buhle and Nicole Schulman. Author’s note: In the wake of the recent shooting of an IWW member and apparent anti-fascist demonstrator at the University of Washington…
Erstwhile contributing editor Graeme Pente explores the implications of a new Canadian multimedia project that encourages the country to confront its colonial history with the region’s First Peoples. You don’t make a dent / In indifference / Ya gotta haunt them, haunt them, haunt them — Gord Downie, Secret Path (2016) The graphic novel is the…
Erstwhile’s Graeme Pente continues the new review series of historical graphic novels with Kate Evans’s Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg. Read the first in the series here. “Shamed, dishonoured, wading in blood and dripping with filth, thus capitalist society stands. Not as we usually see it, playing the roles of righteousness, of order,…
Erstwhile‘s Beau Driver kicks off a news series on historical graphic novels by reviewing Jonathan Fetter-Vorm’s Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb in the inaugural edition of Erstwhile‘s “Graphic Histories.” Last year, I had the pleasure of interviewing Ari Kelman about his and Jonathan Fetter-Vorm’s wonderful graphic history of the Civil War, Battle…
Winner of numerous awards including the Avery O. Craven Award and the Bancroft Prize, Ari Kelman is the McCabe Greer Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University and the author of three books: A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (2003); A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand…
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