Nat Turner
1. Nat Turner by Kyle Baker (New York: Abrams, 2008)
On August 21, 1831, Nat Turner led more than seventy rebels in what would become the largest slave uprising in U.S. history. He was subsequently captured, tried and hanged, but his conversations with his lawyer became the basis for a document titled "The Confessions of Nat Turner," which artist and author Kyle Baker has used as the background script for a graphic novel about Turner's life and rebellion.
Nat Turner is nearly wordless, but Baker's art ably carries both the scope and the subtleties of Turner's story. He's capable of both beauty and the grotesque, with some very interesting artistic choices implemented as the rebellion progresses, and his skill at portraying action kept me hurtling through what is ultimately a deeply unpleasant, ugly and upsetting story.
This was a harrowing read; no punches are pulled. There are no heroes in this story, only very desperate people living in an intrinsically violent and dehumanizing situation. I read this along with Chester Brown's Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography (ineligible for this challenge), and it's an example of the versatility of the graphic novel format to see how two author/artists could adapt similar stories about religiously charismatic men who led armed rebellions against their oppressors into wildly different end products.
While the story of Louis Riel is nearer to my heart, I think Nat Turner is by far the superior work, and I fully recommend it.
(tags: au.nationality:united.states, au.race:black, genre:non.fiction, slavery, )
On August 21, 1831, Nat Turner led more than seventy rebels in what would become the largest slave uprising in U.S. history. He was subsequently captured, tried and hanged, but his conversations with his lawyer became the basis for a document titled "The Confessions of Nat Turner," which artist and author Kyle Baker has used as the background script for a graphic novel about Turner's life and rebellion.
Nat Turner is nearly wordless, but Baker's art ably carries both the scope and the subtleties of Turner's story. He's capable of both beauty and the grotesque, with some very interesting artistic choices implemented as the rebellion progresses, and his skill at portraying action kept me hurtling through what is ultimately a deeply unpleasant, ugly and upsetting story.
This was a harrowing read; no punches are pulled. There are no heroes in this story, only very desperate people living in an intrinsically violent and dehumanizing situation. I read this along with Chester Brown's Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography (ineligible for this challenge), and it's an example of the versatility of the graphic novel format to see how two author/artists could adapt similar stories about religiously charismatic men who led armed rebellions against their oppressors into wildly different end products.
While the story of Louis Riel is nearer to my heart, I think Nat Turner is by far the superior work, and I fully recommend it.
(tags: au.nationality:united.states, au.race:black, genre:non.fiction, slavery, )