Celebrity historian and professional liberal Howard Zinn has fathered a somewhat unlikely franchise with his seminal work, A People’s History of the United States. The latest in the long line of spin-offs, which have included a sequel of sorts, live readings and filmed adaptations, is the perhaps inevitable graphic novel version.
Titled A People’s History of American Empire, this self-professed “graphic adaptation” is an odd and awkward marriage of slick, impressive packaging to a surprisingly amateurish work.
Ironing out who did what isn’t easy, but according to the introduction by editor Paul Buhle (who edited the recent and more effective Students For a Democratic Society: A Graphic Adaptation), the uncredited Dave Wagner is mostly responsible for the script, consisting of words that are attributed to the cartoon avatar of Howard Zinn, who narrates the book. Mike Konopacki is the artist who draws the entire endeavor, and it seems he and Wagner deserve most of the blame for what went wrong.
The book is structured as a Zinn lecture—probably not the most exciting framing device to begin with, but Konopacki makes it even less interesting by repeating the same three angles of Zinn at a podium, often times rerunning the exact same panels, giving the comic a cheap, Fred Flintstone-running-past-that-same-granite-easychair-over-and-over kind of feel.
Konopacki’s certainly not a terrible artist, and he draws a neat-looking Zinn, but the unwieldy subject matter (everything America’s ever done that’s bad) and the complex artistic techniques employed conspire to overwhelm him.
Konopacki’s black-and-white drawings sometimes populate panels that he’s drawn completely, and sometimes they’re laid over photographic backgrounds. Appropriated photos and illustrations are used liberally throughout, but the integration is clumsy. Recent non-fiction graphic novels like Alice in Sunderland and The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam used the same collage techniques brilliantly, making this look like the “How Not To” example of using them.
The execution hurts the history portion as well, as the jumps between Zinn’s narration and that of the narrators within the various narratives telling their stories are often unclear. The stories are organized around the United States as an imperial nation, starting at the Wounded Knee massacre and stretching to the current Iraq War; and it also explores some of the dustier but relevant corners of U.S. foreign policy in between.
It may all be perfectly true (and likely is), but the book makes it look dubious, something a work of history—graphic novel or otherwise—should avoid. Konopacki draws all his “villains” with slanted, angry eyebrows and gritted teeth, making his caricatures look too simplistic.
And there are some eye-rollingly strained parallels between past national sins and the current state of the union making everything else suspicious. For example, as bad a piece of legislation as the Patriot Act is, to compare it to the WWI-era Espionage Act, while at the same time showing how that piece of bad legislation lead to three million cases of reported disloyalty (and the arrest of people who spoke out against the war), just seems lazy and disingenuous. Whatever potential for awfulness is in the Patriot Act, seven years after it’s passage we’ve still got an all-volunteer army and no packs of roving loyalty enforcers reporting their neighbors.
The tragedy of this “graphic adaptation” isn’t just that it’s one more bad graphic novel on the over-crowded graphic novel shelves: There’s also a lot of potential squandered here.
Given the overlap between the subjects covered in the book and the existence of American political cartoons, it’s a damn shame this version couldn’t more closely resemble Zinn’s original People’s History template: using original political cartoons the way Zinn used primary original prose documents.
That way, the title would have made more sense. But then, I guess A Couple Guys’ Not Particularly Good History of a Howard Zinn Lecture wouldn’t have moved quite as many books as the title they ultimately went with.
Titled A People’s History of American Empire, this self-professed “graphic adaptation” is an odd and awkward marriage of slick, impressive packaging to a surprisingly amateurish work.
Ironing out who did what isn’t easy, but according to the introduction by editor Paul Buhle (who edited the recent and more effective Students For a Democratic Society: A Graphic Adaptation), the uncredited Dave Wagner is mostly responsible for the script, consisting of words that are attributed to the cartoon avatar of Howard Zinn, who narrates the book. Mike Konopacki is the artist who draws the entire endeavor, and it seems he and Wagner deserve most of the blame for what went wrong.
The book is structured as a Zinn lecture—probably not the most exciting framing device to begin with, but Konopacki makes it even less interesting by repeating the same three angles of Zinn at a podium, often times rerunning the exact same panels, giving the comic a cheap, Fred Flintstone-running-past-that-same-granite-easychair-over-and-over kind of feel.
Konopacki’s certainly not a terrible artist, and he draws a neat-looking Zinn, but the unwieldy subject matter (everything America’s ever done that’s bad) and the complex artistic techniques employed conspire to overwhelm him.
Konopacki’s black-and-white drawings sometimes populate panels that he’s drawn completely, and sometimes they’re laid over photographic backgrounds. Appropriated photos and illustrations are used liberally throughout, but the integration is clumsy. Recent non-fiction graphic novels like Alice in Sunderland and The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam used the same collage techniques brilliantly, making this look like the “How Not To” example of using them.
The execution hurts the history portion as well, as the jumps between Zinn’s narration and that of the narrators within the various narratives telling their stories are often unclear. The stories are organized around the United States as an imperial nation, starting at the Wounded Knee massacre and stretching to the current Iraq War; and it also explores some of the dustier but relevant corners of U.S. foreign policy in between.
It may all be perfectly true (and likely is), but the book makes it look dubious, something a work of history—graphic novel or otherwise—should avoid. Konopacki draws all his “villains” with slanted, angry eyebrows and gritted teeth, making his caricatures look too simplistic.
And there are some eye-rollingly strained parallels between past national sins and the current state of the union making everything else suspicious. For example, as bad a piece of legislation as the Patriot Act is, to compare it to the WWI-era Espionage Act, while at the same time showing how that piece of bad legislation lead to three million cases of reported disloyalty (and the arrest of people who spoke out against the war), just seems lazy and disingenuous. Whatever potential for awfulness is in the Patriot Act, seven years after it’s passage we’ve still got an all-volunteer army and no packs of roving loyalty enforcers reporting their neighbors.
The tragedy of this “graphic adaptation” isn’t just that it’s one more bad graphic novel on the over-crowded graphic novel shelves: There’s also a lot of potential squandered here.
Given the overlap between the subjects covered in the book and the existence of American political cartoons, it’s a damn shame this version couldn’t more closely resemble Zinn’s original People’s History template: using original political cartoons the way Zinn used primary original prose documents.
That way, the title would have made more sense. But then, I guess A Couple Guys’ Not Particularly Good History of a Howard Zinn Lecture wouldn’t have moved quite as many books as the title they ultimately went with.
