Ernie Colón (1931–2019)

Essential Reading

(Full disclosure: I received a free ARC for review from the publisher, Hill & Wang.)

- 4.5 stars -

This is actually the second graphic novel by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón that I've read in as many weeks - though it didn't quite register until I was several chapters in. I won a copy of their previous book, The Torture Report: A Graphic Adaptation, in a Goodreads giveaway; and, while I ultimately recommended it, this was due more to the book's Very Important subject matter show more than its successful execution. Heavy on text and with a flow that proved hard to follow, The Torture Report was a bit of a slog.

While Three-Fifths a Man: A Graphic History of the African American Experience is similar in style and form to The Torture Report, the narration is infinitely more succinct, engaging, and intuitive. I can count on one hand the number of times I got lost between panels; and, though this still isn't ideal, it's a huge improvement over The Torture Report, which led me astray on nearly every page. The chronology also makes more sense, with fewer time jumps; when Jacobson and Colón do flit back and forth in time, it's in a way that feels natural and doesn't confuse the reader or disrupt the narrative.

Don't get me wrong: Three-Fifths a Man is still pretty heavy on text, but given the breadth of the topic, it never feels tedious or repetitive. This sits in stark contrast to The Torture Report, where everything after the first third of the book felt like a bad case of déjà vu.

The title perfectly encapsulates the content of Three-Fifths a Man: from the beginning of African slavery in the so-called "New World" to the birth of the Movement for Black Lives, this is a graphic history of the African American experience. Jacobson and Colón cover a pretty stunning range of events in a mere 179 pages, including but not limited to the trans-Atlantic slave trade; the Civil War; Reconstruction; the rise of the KKK and other white nationalist hate groups; Jim Crow; WWI and the great migration; the Depression and FDR's The New Deal; WWII, and the (gradual) opening of the US military to black soldiers; the rise of the Dixiecrats; the New Reconstruction and the Civil Rights era; Reagan's War on Drugs and the advent of the New Jim Crow; the beating of Rodney King and the focus on police brutality and racism; and ending with the election of our first black president, Barack Hussein Obama (and I absolutely do not include his middle name as an insult here).

I really love the idea of using non-traditional media to engage kids with difficult or "boring" topics. Three-Fifths a Man is more honest and thought-provoking than any high school text book I can remember reading. This should be in American history classrooms and public school libraries across the country. If I'd been introduced to texts like this as a child or young adult, I think I would have developed an interest in history and politics at a much younger age.

Also, Hollywood should take note: Three-Fifths a Man includes a number of historical figures and events that are all but screaming for their own scripts, television shows, and film adaptations. From the West African kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai (History Channel, can you hear it? That's the sound of your next Vikings calling to you!), to black soldiers who fought on both sides of the Revolutionary War, as well as in World Wars I and II and the Civil War, and people like W.E.B. Du Bois, Denmark Vesey, Colonel Tye, Zora Neale Hurston, and Josephine Baker (So much Josephine Baker!), there's a world of potential here.

As much as I loved Three-Fifths a Man, I found it somewhat skewed toward the men. I feel like the authors expended a little less effort undoing the erasure of women (specifically, black women) from history than they did on whitewashing. For example, while the Fifteenth Amendment is rightly described as "male suffrage" - women, including black women, would not be granted the right to vote for another fifty years - the Nineteenth Amendment doesn't merit a single panel.

In particular, the final page on the Black Lives Matter movement felt like it was tacked on at the last minute, like an afterthought. Nowhere is it mentioned that the BLM founders are women of color (some of them queer), let alone single them out by name. This seems inexcusable, given the importance of BLM (quite possibly the new civil rights movement). That said, I received an early copy, and it's possible that the final pages will be redrafted prior to publication. This seems even more likely given the 2016 election and the resurgence of white nationalism Trump's "victory" ushered in. Likewise, I wonder whether the finished copy will end on the same cautiously optimistic note.

Yet if Three-Fifths a Man makes one thing clear, it's that we must never take our rights, or social progress, for granted: from the ascendancy of Andrew Johnson after the assassination of President Lincoln, to Reagan's undoing of FDR's New Deal, history is unfortunately brimming with incarnations of modern events. As Junot Díaz writes in Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times, "This is the joyous destiny of our people—to bury the arc of the moral universe so deep in justice that it will never be undone."

http://www.easyvegan.info/2018/01/16/three-fifths-a-man-by-sid-jacobson-and-erni... show less

I have always been interested in the life and death of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, so when I spotted this in our GN collected I took it home and expected a good story. And I wasn't disappointed -- not with the story, anyway. Although Jacobson keeps stopping the action and backing up to fill in historical facts, Che's life was just so convoluted that recreating it had to take many twists and false starts. One has to have an understanding of why he felt the way he did, and of the histories of the show more many countries in which he tried to foment revolution, or else one is hopelessly lost. Che was a true idealist, and though he doesn't come off as an unsullied hero, he is also far from villainous.

My beef, though, was with the illustrations. Ernie Colon left me so very confused from frame to frame; his style is too changeable for my taste. His depictions of Che were inconsistent -- so much so that at times I confused Che with both Raul and Fidel Castro!

However, I feel overall that I know much more about the man and his passions than I did before, and that was the point. show less

WHOOOM! and BLAMM!

In The 9/11 Report—a Graphic Adaptation, that’s the sound, the onomatopoeia, of terrorism as United Airlines Flight 175 strikes the South Tower of the World Trade Center and American Flight 77 crashes into the Pentagon.

Authors Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon have condensed the nearly 600-page Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States into a 130-page comic book.

I use the term “comic book” loosely, for there is nothing funny show more nor super-heroic in these pages. This is a sober, respectful examination through color, line and shading of the unimaginable acts of terror which reached our shores five years ago. It’s even far less appropriate to call it a “graphic novel.” It’s a literal illustration of the Commission’s prescription to prevent similar attacks in the future. The publisher, Hill and Wang, plans to follow The 9/11 Report with illustrated biographies of Malcolm X and Ronald Reagan.

Readers move through this book on a journey of pain, frustration, incredulity and anger as the Commission details the permeability of our airline security in 2001, the chaotic and ill-equipped response to the attacks, and how Osama bin Laden announced his intent, through a well-publicized fatwa, in February 1998 which called for the murder of Americans as “the individual duty for every Muslim.”

The report, simplified into pictures and palatable text, charts the rise of al Qaeda and bin Laden, traces the roots of modern terrorism back to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the late 1970s and illustrates how the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center should have been a blinking red light (along with the bombings of the USS Cole and the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam).

The dots were all there, but remained unconnected.

The report concludes: “The commission believes the 9/11 attacks revealed four kinds of failure: in imagination, in policy, in capabilities and in management.”

Jacobson, the creator of Richie Rich at Harvey Comics, and Colon, who has worked for Marvel and DC Comics, give the 9/11 tragedy to us in a more digestible form than the Commission’s doorstop volume (which, I suppose, is this generation’s Warren Commission Report on the Kennedy assassination—something we know we should read, but never do). The result is gripping, informative and heartbreaking.

One significant advantage Jacobson and Colon’s book has over the dry bulk of the Final Report is its ability to show a timeline for the morning of September 11. For a dozen pages, four separate narrative strips run horizontally across the page so we can see where each plane was in relation to the other. Is it painful to see—even in pastel color-wash—flight attendants and pilots being stabbed and passenger planes turned into “large guided missiles, loaded with up to 11,400 gallons of jet fuel”? Yes, excruciatingly painful; but in the inky hands of the illustrators, it’s also a work of instructive art. It’s art that hurts, but perhaps one day will help us heal.

But first, the Commission warns, we must steel ourselves: “The lesson of 9/11 for civilians and first responders can be stated simply: in the new age of terrorism, they are the primary targets. The losses of that day demonstrated the gravity of the threat and the need to prepare ourselves. We must plan for the next attack. This is perhaps the best way to honor the memories of those we lost that day.” show less

This book first begins with the lives of Anne Frank’s parents that led into the years after World War II. I think the original Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl offers more emotion for readers young or old, whereas this graphic novel lacks the great emotion that comes with Anne's first-person account/narrative. The information is presented in more of a straight-forward impersonal style. I found the maps and diagrams enclosed in this book interesting, and I appreciated the detailed show more diagrams and images of the annex where Anne and her family hid for 2 years. The “snapshots” shown throughout the book were interesting and provided an abundance of background information, such as: life in Germany during World War I, info on the German economic crisis and the rise of the Nazi party, the Wannsee Conference, and the concentration camps. I think the artwork could have been better, however. The art is a realistic approach which is appropriate and disturbing at times, but something about the art could have been more refined or offered more movement. This book also includes a Chronology near the back and suggestions for further reading. I feel that this version of teaching young readers about Anne's sad story and the atrocities that occurred is best for children or people who prefer learning more visually. I think my favorite part of this book was the information given about Anne's father Otto, with real quotes from him. The book gives life to him by describing the type of man he was and the level of respect he drew from those around him. The book reveals how he personally responded to a great many of the letters he received from readers after the first publication of Anne's diary. It was so nice to read about his hopes that Anne's book will have an effect on peoples lives and promote unity and peace, because it has had a profound effect on millions and fortunately doesn't seem to be fading away anytime soon. show less