It's a screenplay that could never, ever, ever get made into a movie - yeah, Hollywood's not going to leap right on a movie about East St. Louis seceding from the U.S. - so they made a comic out of it. Not the most feminist comic in the world, but hilarious and awesome anyway.

When the mostly-black residents of East St. Louis are prevented from voting due to a "glitch" that lists them all as felons, they demand a recount. When all they get is an apology, they do the unthinkable: secede from the United States.

This was recommended to me when I posted about Truth: Red, White & Black, also illustrated by Kyle Baker. To be honest, the summary didn't grab me all that much, but I figured what the hell, why not? and put it on my wishlist. Not like graphic novels take long to read anyway.

I ended up enjoying it a lot more than I anticipated. The writing's great and I was laughing at something on practically every page. And Baker's art works a lot better here than it did in Truth, where his cartoony artwork felt a little out of place.

One thing I didn't really like was the format. It's not a comic book, or even a series of comic strips. Neither is it a text story with illustrations. It's kind of a weird hybrid, with panels laid out like a comic, but with the narration and dialogue (mostly dialogue) underneath each panel, and I found it kind of hard to follow sometimes. ( )

A political satire about the African American population of East St. Louis Missouri. The 2000 elections finds a system error that hinders the majority of the population from voting, thus causing a change in the projected election winner. Controversial and derogatory, yet enlightening insight. ( )

McGruder (Boondocks) and Hudlin (House Party) teamed up for a movie script that turned out to be unproduceable, and so turned it into a graphic novel.

We begin with the voter disenfranchisement of the 2004 U.S. presidential election (except all veiled-like and names-changed, except not THAT veiled, because the illustrator didn't attempt to disguise Bush, Powell, Rice, Cheney, et al). Illinois is the pivotal state in this version of the election, which makes the voter disenfranchisement in East St. Louis the determining factor in the election's outcome. (That reveal-sequence was visceral and powerful---goosebumps, I had.) The Mayor of East St. Louis takes the matter to the Supreme Court and gets a can't-stop-losing-for-winning ruling (yes, disenfranchisement happened; no, it's not worth doing anything about). East St. Louis responds by seceding from the United States.

What follows is a breakneck roller-coaster ride of intrigue, power, money, politics, double-crossing, back-stabbing, chickening-out, and stepping up. Plus a lot of affectionate satire about the people of East St. Louis. Teh awesome.

I quibble with the final page---I think that Blackland would become another Taiwan---but hey, I think that the final ten minutes of most movies should be skipped. Some reviewers also charge that there's a sexism problem here, which, yeah, there is: the book has a bad case of the suspense/thriller genre's double-crossing sex-diva. But Kabilah, our spunky college activist---who, in trio with our spunky guerrilla-activist Nala and the power-brokering sex-diva herself, manages to save the day several times over---makes me all kinds of happy. Which is all to say that while I had my doubts about the portrayal of women during the first third of the book, McGruder and Co. had made me happy again by the final third.