“David Kunzle Page” on Töpfferiana Website for Early Comics

 Michel Kempeneers 

Fig. 1. Screenshot of the “David Kunzle Page” on the Töpfferiana website. 

 

Introduction 

In order to pay tribute to comics history pioneer, David Kunzle (1936-2024), the “Töpfferiana” website takes a unique initiative and shares most of Kunzle’s writings on early comics on a dedicated “Kunzle Page,” thus making them available to scholars and researchers.

Though, in 2025, comics are widely spread and the subject of significant academic interest, “early comics” remain a field apart, and a highly specialized one.

Since Kunzle started his academic career in the 1960s, he has always remained an important voice in this field, maybe even the only one reaching a broader, not necessarily, academic audience. More importantly, Kunzle probably was the only high-profile author trying to get books on the subject published.

This has never been easy, though, not even for a researcher of Kunzle’s reputation. In his early years, because Kunzle demanded his “Early Comics” volumes be published in a huge format, (to do justice to the reproductions of broadsides), even though most of them still required a reduced format to fit them on the “early comics” pages. But even in the new millennium, Kunzle complained, among insiders, of a lack of interest by his publisher, who kept postponing the publication of, for example:  his Cham book, without ever providing a satisfactory explanation for yet another delay. Surprisingly, Kunzle was always worried that his publisher would no longer be interested in his next book, which also shows how keen he was on sharing his findings with an interested audience, even long after he had officially retired as an academic.  

David Kunzle (Tribute) Page 

The organizers of the yearly, “Platinum Meeting,” which is organized in the margin of the Angoulême “Festival de la BD,” end of January, found it appropriate to start their gathering of Platinum Age[i] scholars with a tribute to Kunzle. Participants shared testimonies and anecdotes, and one researcher wondered if anyone in the audience was aware of the status of Kunzle’s two landmark books on early comics. “Kunzle 1” (1973) and “Kunzle 2” (1990), as these are commonly tagged, had been out-of-print for ages, and nothing seemed to indicate that the University of California Press was ever going to reprint them. The answer was negative, and the meeting’s organizers promised to reach out to Mrs. Marjorie Kunzle and inquire.

They quickly found out that Mrs. Kunzle holds the rights to all of David’s articles, and, it later turned out, that the same goes for both “early comics” volumes. Mrs. Kunzle was completely in agreement with the suggestion that both volumes be spread as pdf files among the early comics community, though she would not actively participate in any concrete project to make that happen.

During these exchanges, the idea grew to grab the occasion and to really pay tribute to Kunzle’s legacy of half a century of research on early comics. And, why limit the effort to Kunzle’s first two major works, when it seemed possible to stretch it to all of Kunzle’s writings on the subject and share these on one platform? This way, scholars would have a single point of access, and, thus, be able to more easily advance with their own research projects.

As we were convinced that Kunzle himself would have loved that idea, and with Mrs. Kunzle backing it, the “David Kunzle(tribute) Page” (DKP) was born. “Töpfferiana.fr” seemed the logical place to host it, for the site shares a focus on early comics, and since, for a couple of years, it also organizes the Angoulême “Platinum Meeting.”

So, we set out to compile Kunzle’s comics bibliography. It seemed easiest to kick off with articles and book chapters, as we were already sure that there would not be any rights issues with these. Moreover, we discovered that, in February 2024, independent scholar, Hillel Schwartz, published a draft of Kunzle’s complete bibliography, all subjects included,[ii] i.e., not only comics, but also posters, arts, and even corsets(!). Schwartz imposed only one important limitation on this cv; it would not include the many reviews written by Kunzle.[iii]

From Schwartz’s overview, we retrieved all comics-related articles and book chapters, and ordered chronologically in an Excel table. Such an underlying table will allow researchers to also easily search the set for specific data, or extend their own copy with extras for personal use. That may sound trivial for a corpus consisting solely of early comics articles, as it will probably consist of little more than some 40 entries. But, if ever the list is extended to other areas in which Kunzle’s expertise led to publications, that may quickly change, so it seemed better to foresee such potential extensions in the specifics of the current table. Besides, it is not impossible that, at some point in the future, the current project scope is extended to include reviews, both by and of Kunzle.

All in all, it took less than a week to gather about 15 articles, which presumably already contained most of the essential ones. At the DKP Go Live on March 2, the counter stood at 26 articles/chapters out of 38 pieces identified, and early June (deadline for this article), these figures are 37 out of 45, i.e., almost 82 percent, with a couple more files to come. But, the real gems are the pdf versions of “Kunzle 1” and “Kunzle 2,”[iv] which were added on April 6 and, as such, can be regarded as a first highlight of the DKP.  

Structure 

All shared articles are in pdf format. We harmonized their presentation, as well as the way the corresponding files are named. Moreover, we made it a point to only share searchable files, for this characteristic is one of the prime reasons for researchers to be keen on e-versions of reference materials. We also made sure to document all such specifics in the detailed Excel table. That file is only aimed at visitors needing more details; the overview on the DKP of all articles and book chapters identified (and their download links) will be more than sufficient for most people.

On top of that, we explicitly marked every article which we have not been able to locate; this way, scholars and researchers who consult the DKP, or its Excel table, and discover that they have a pdf copy available of one of the Kunzle writings still missing in our offer, can reach out and share, so that we can add it to the DKP at the next update. In fact, this already happened almost immediately after we publicized the initiative on the Platinum discussion list. 

Fig. 2. Excerpt of the article bibliography on Töpfferiana’s “David Kunzle Page.” 

It is also worth pointing out that the overview makes no distinction between languages (English, French, Spanish, ...), and does not try either to establish a logic between articles with the same subject. Indeed, as is the case for most academics, no subjects were ever really “completed” for Kunzle. He kept reworking them, leaving out parts, updating others, and adding new finds and insights, possibly reacting to fellow researchers. Kunzle made no distinction between languages while doing so:  any journal wanting to publish his--then current--insights, was entitled to a state-of-the-art article, regardless of language. (Kunzle was fluent in four or five languages.) 

Future

 An inherent danger of any tribute initiative is that it outgrows its purpose; tribute has been paid, check. People have no obvious reason to return; they have visited the site, secured all the extras they wanted, or found the information they were looking for. Full stop.

Töpfferiana is very much aware of this pitfall and wants to avoid it by approaching the DKP as work-in-progress. In practice, the DKP team will try to add novelties on a regular basis, and will notify its core community of any such updates. In a sense, this boils down to giving the DKP some of the characteristics of a periodical. The aim is to share something bound to interest the early comics community every three months or so.

So far, the DKP has not only shared Kunzle articles; it celebrated its first update by also adding some Kunzle tributes spontaneously offered to the DKP by researchers who had known Kunzle for a long time. More tributes will be added in due time.

Furthermore, Philippe Kaenel of Lausanne University (Switzerland), a long-time friend and colleague of Kunzle, recently suggested to Töpfferiana to open up the DKP to other historic research on Töpffer, other reference articles on Töpffer which have become very difficult to find unless one has easy access to a good research library.

Rodolphe Töpffer (1799-1846) was already on the radar of Kunzle’s mentor, Ernst Gombrich (1909-2001), the influential art and culture historian, and he is probably the artist whom Kunzle studied for the longest time. And, logically, Töpfferiana itself would find it difficult to hide or deny its sympathy for this Swiss comics pioneer. Kaenel shared several of his own articles on Töpffer with the DKP team, who probably have added them already. On the other hand, chances are that the DKP will be able to share the articles of the Töpffer coffee table book, published in 1996 by (then) Swiss publisher, Skira. That book accompanied the celebrations for the 150^th anniversary of Töpffer’s death, and has been out-of-print for decades.[v]

Obviously, it would be beneficial if the missing Kunzle articles were to be added. As they are not readily available on the academic e-platforms, that may turn out to be complicated, but we are confident that researchers will contribute, because Kunzle has left a strong impression with generations of them, especially the ones who were lucky to meet him. We also hope that we will be able to add Kunzle publications in less obvious languages, e.g., German, as we have also identified some of these. That would be helpful, especially because Kunzle always had a keen interest in seeing his writings spread as widely as possible. For him, that wasn’t a matter of ego, but he was very much aware how little has been written about early comics, and how important it is to make Töpffer & Co. available to audiences who don’t know French.

The DKP team decided to also add an atypical, unusual contribution of the “early” Kunzle, which we believe tells a lot about his drive then, and, which is definitely worth pointing out.

In 1972, before “Kunzle 1,” Kunzle translated an article by the French author, Francis Lacassin (1931-2008), for the Fall issue of Film Quarterly.[vi] In this article, Lacassin argued that the “language” of the comic strip shows many similarities, and even some historical priorities, over the language of film. Curiously, it turns out that there is no genuine source article by Lacassin:  in fact, Kunzle combined a recent article and a huge chapter from a new book, both by Lacassin, directly into an English summary. In the process,  he added a couple of small footnotes, and, more importantly, extended his Lacassin summary with four more pages of comments, even adding illustrations, as he wanted to update some of Lacassin’s findings by his own, not yet published, ones. Obviously, he did so with the consent of the journal, which even publicized this unusual translation in the article’s introduction.

If similar unexpected finds pop up, we will make sure to add them to the DKP, as they definitely have historical importance. 

Opportunity 

It may not be obvious at first, but the DKP also offers a test case for “collaborative improvement” or “enrichment” of these source materials. Indeed, it seems that this specific format for a tribute page, with shared materials, has never been deployed before. The DKP offers opportunities to probe how such a project might evolve, when it appeals to its reader community, not only for them to fill holes in the current offer, but also to investigate which added value a community can offer to factually improve key works, such as “Kunzle 1” or “Kunzle 2,” and how their findings can best be shared with the early comics community. A first attempt to do so is on the DKP already, for interested researchers to discover.[vii] Similarly, it can help to offer added value to users by providing bookmarks, e.g., of the publication’s structure, or to add pagination when missing, so that these users do not have to re-invent the wheel. The point here is to see if the community feels like participating to the effort, and if it does so spontaneously, or, on the contrary, it must be stimulated and encouraged to do so.

 The DKP can be consulted here:

http://www.topfferiana.fr/2025/03/david-kunzles-bibliography.

The “Platinum Age Comics” discussion group is hosted by Google Groups:

https://groups.google.com/g/platinum-age-comics.

---

[i] Roughly anything pre-World War II, but, especially, because European comics focus is mostly on 19^th Century production.

[ii] See, https://www.academia.edu/114691723/David_Kunzle_A_Bibliography (accessed Jan. 15, 2025).

[iii] One notable exception is Kunzle’s review of Thierry Groensteen’s “M. Töpffer invente la bande dessinée” (Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2014) for European Comic Art, 7-2 (Autumn 2014). This review also contains a personal biographical account of the origins of his own interest in Töpffer. Hence, it seemed worth adding to the list.

Similarly, Kunzle’s “Review Essays” for the International Journal of Comic Art (IJOCA) have been withheld. For, indeed, as the name indicates, this particular IJOCA format is more than merely a review, and is like a lengthy article triggered by a new publication, as reviews get considerably less space in the IJOCA.

[iv] Contrary to popular belief, Kunzle’s final book, Rebirth of the English Comic Strip:  A Kaleidoscope, 1847-1870 (University Press of Mississippi, 2021), is not the last volume of his History of the Comic Strip series, which had been announced as a trilogy. Rebirth... does not contain any such reference, and the description of the would-be content of this volume in Ian Gordon’s Kunzle tribute on the IJOCA blog makes clear that this third volume, unfortunately, never materialized (see, https://ijoca.blogspot.com/2024/01/ian-gordon-remembers-david-kunzle.html, accessed on March 16, 2025).

[v] Even though, in 1996, Kunzle had already been an established international Töpffer authority for several years, he did not contribute to the Skira book. For administrative reasons, it was not possible to include an article by him.

[vi] “The Comic Strip and Film Language,” Film Quarterly. 26 (1, Fall 1972): 11-23. As hinted by Michael Connerty on the Platinum discussion list March 5, 2025.

[vii] For example, in his “Kunzle 2” (Note 19, p.109), Kunzle (notoriously) states that he did not find a copy of Gustave Doré’s Holy Russia at the French National Library (BnF), which, he found surprising. In the Internet era, it is easy to establish that Kunzle was wrong, but not really so, as it turns out that the BnF does have a copy, be it not in book format, but as loose sheets (prints). Hence, the BnF’s Holy Russia set is kept in the Prints Department.

 ________________________

Michel Kempeneers is an independent Belgian comics scholar. After several decades of comics journalism in the national press, he has turned his focus to proto-comics and 19^th-Century illustrated press, the latter especially through e-versions shared online by major reference libraries. A version of this article will appear in IJOCA 27-1.

Graphic Novel Review: Socrates by Francesco Barilli and Alessandro Ranghiasci

Reviewed by Cord Scott, UMGC Okinawa

Socrates by Francesco Barilli (w) and Alessandro Ranghiasci (a).  Miami, FL: Mad Cave Productions, 2025. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Socrates/Francesco-Barilli/Becco-Giallo/9781545821671

Any historically-based graphic novel must walk a fine line between known facts, re-creations for storytelling or effect, and the need to balance a compelling story with engaging art.  When one then includes a significant historical figure and a discipline that is often considered “deep” - such as philosophy – the likelihood of problems is compounded.  However, the story of Socrates is one that works to meld these issues into a story which sheds light on the famous philosopher that also has resonance in today’s world.

A translation of the original Italian version Socrate, which was released in 2019, also contains a historical forward by Stefano Cardini, explains the events in which we enter the story.  Socrates was brought up on charges of not recognizing the old god, as well as corrupting the youth of Athens. This was in the aftermath of the Thirty Tyrants uprising (abetted by Sparta).  The actual reasons for Socrates’ arrest and trial were probably due to jealousy and divisions within Athenian society.

One of the biggest issues with a biography of Socrates is that he did not write anything down. Much of what is known about his philosophy comes from his most famous student, Plato. Why he never wrote anything down is not discussed or speculated about in this book.  Plato’s version of his oratory skills are clearly demonstrated in the script, and the creators of this graphic novel worked to make a flowing story arc with narration and conversations borrowed from later written works. 

The story starts directly with the trial.  As the trial is taking place, chapter sections go back to past memories or aspects of Greek gods; instances in the past are presented in black and white, while the sections about Greek gods or lore are illustrated to look like a Grecian vase artwork.

Much of Socrates view on the issues of the world are applicable not only to his Athens, but still today.  One of Aristotle’s biggest complaints was that no matter what their status, everyone he talked to considered themselves an expert on a variety of subjects. He personally thought that “the wisest is he who knows he knows nothing.” (p. 29). He also noted that while many people may feel that laws benefit everyone, the prevailing truth was that the strong always dominate the weak, be it in nature or in a society of laws.  Reportedly, Socrates even predicted his own arrest and trial due to people around him.  To that end, Socrates noted that rather than being driven by power or money, he wanted to live his life pursuing the truth.  “Not to have riches or honor but to seek wisdom and truth” (p. 55) was an aspect of Socrates’ creed for a just life.

Socrates’ trial was one in which the true motives of those who opposed him or his ideals (or were simply jealous) were brought to light.  The nature of the charges was disputed through logic and reason, yet made no difference in the end.  His sentence was one of three options: exile from Athens, a monetary fine (which many of his disciples were willing to pay) or death by poison, in this case hemlock. Socrates argued that he was too old to live in exile, especially with his wife and children still in Athens, nor was he rich enough to pay any sort of fine imposed upon him.  He accepted death, and this story is relayed in a simple, yet almost dreamlike manner. 

The entire book is under 150 pages, while the last part is a section that deals with the historical basis of both the story itself, as well as discussing the art. Rough sketches are included to give insight into the process.  One passage stood out in this section, and it seems especially apt in today’s climate; Barilli writes, “a free and rigorous intellectual always makes those who hold power, in whatever way it is exercised, uncomfortable.” (p. 139).  As so many institutions of higher learning, let alone politicians, are questioned for their rigor, or lack thereof, this story from 2,500 years ago still serves as a guide for good moral governance and living.

“The pictures I’m choosing to draw in these boxes is revolution”: Interview with Ben Passmore

 

self-portrait from Penguin website

“The pictures I’m choosing to draw in these boxes is revolution”: Interview with Ben Passmore

By Katherine Kelp-Stebbins

Conducted 10/1/2025

Katherine Kelp-Stebbins: Does it feel like your life has changed significantly in the past month or so with the release of Black Armsto Hold You Up?

Ben Passmore: In terms of how busy I am? Making comics is infinitely harder than doing events, so in that way, it doesn't feel incredibly busy. In most cases, I'm showing up, and the topic is me, so there's not usually a whole bunch of preparation. It's busy. My partner would certainly agree with you. She's been reminding me that things are very, very busy as I add additional things to my plate. But it feels good. I used to self-publish for years, and I was used to contacting reviewers and trying to get interviewed on podcasts, organizing tours, and doing the shows. So, in that way, this feels much easier, because Ciara, [my publicist] over at Pantheon, ultimately organizes a lot of things. And even if I set something up, she's getting the specifics down. So, things seem not that bad to me, but maybe that's because I am a workaholic. It's a crazy that's less crazy than I'm used to.

KKS: In 2020, the auction for Black Arms to Hold You Up was big news. What was the pitch that you brought to that auction? Were there things that changed along the way, and were there ways that being with Pantheon shaped the book?

BP: I appreciate you saying it's big news. I didn't have a real sense of how much anyone cared. It was big news for me, in my life. About 14 publishers bid on the book, and I ultimately went with Pantheon for all the reasons that I think anyone that reads comics knows.

When I pitched the book, there was a pitch deck, but it was essentially a title and a relatively broad concept. The original idea was a straight history graphic novel, something that would almost look like a Ben Passmore version of a Gord Hill graphic novel. Originally, I wanted to have a lot of interviews, something between Gord Hill and Joe Sacco.

Pantheon had certain requests that made sense based off of what seemed popular that I had done, which at that time was Your Black Friend and all the things that I'd done for The Nib, in which I was a presenter of the material; I'm lecturing in temporal spaces, chaos is happening. So that style of narration was a request, and I felt like I needed to honor that after they paid me more money than people usually pay cartoonists.

But the issue was that a nine-page comic on The Nib is different than a 200-page graphic novel. And there's obvious narrative requirements. The most obvious thing was I am not an armed black revolutionary, at least not in the way that Assata Shakur is, now was (she's obviously transitioned recently). The struggle was to justify my presence.

The easy thing to do would have been to just do what I had done before for The Nib and be a smartass for 200 pages. But honestly, I was tired of doing that. It felt like it was feeding this parasocial relationship with me outside of the books that I had become really uncomfortable with in my career as a political cartoonist. You never want to be in a situation where people are associating you with founding these ideas that you are taking from somewhere else.

Upon reflection, thinking about how the culture of liberation movements in general or the political culture of the country had changed after Ferguson and Baltimore, we were seeing the rising up again of Black liberation, culture, energy--we were in the streets. Something that I think really cut the legs out of a lot of the mobility of liberation was people who were comfortable taking credit for revolutionary ideas in exchange for a lot of money and a lot of power, and that was easy to do. People are very trusting, particularly in these periods when people who maybe didn't think of themselves as political subjects or political agents are now thrust into protest movements, and they're looking for answers. A lot of these people are really young, and they turn to someone who is very charismatic and seems to know everything, but probably only knows like an Assata speech and has read maybe one book by Imari Obadele, or more likely has just watched some Kwame Ture speeches. And they're like, okay, we'll go with that.

I wanted to move away from anything that would sort of fake that. So the solution I came up with was to locate myself within the gathering of this knowledge, which was this history. And the community itself has raised me, has helped me locate my identity in the world and given me a lot of tools over and over again, starting as a 16-year-old who was institutionalized; the community really took the place of my father.

I still need a narrator; I'm covering 100+ years of history. That means I'm going to have to jump around, because 200 pages is a lot of pages, but it's absolutely not enough space for how much material I wanted to cover, and I didn't want to give readers something they could essentially find on Wikipedia. That felt insufficient. I'm not an academic, but I wanted to add to the conversation in some kind of way. So my solution was to introduce my father, or a facsimile of my father, into the book and have us go through a history. Hopefully by the end of the book it becomes very clear that this is not definitive at all. But it gives you a sense of what it’s like to have an elder like this give you a very essential history, but one that's filled with contradiction, and truth gets very, very fuzzy very, very quickly. And the job is to take it in with respect, but be critical and, as best you can, find out what is true, and to see this history amongst others like queer history, and to recognize how it's very important for power to invisibilize the history of people fighting oppressors.

For much of the stuff I was researching, you are relying on people writing about their own life or people who are not academics. Very famously, the book Who Shot Malcolm X is written by someone who's not an academic at all. And that's an essential piece of work, and there's a lot of things like that. And there are academics: Akinyele Umoja is one of the most important writers in this space. 

So that's how the book changed. It went from a straight history to something that was a bit different. Where the book wears its untrustworthiness on its sleeve, and I hope that you still understand that some of this is pearls, and I'm trying to challenge the reader to start here and locate more details in other places, which is why I have the reading list in the back to help people get started.

KKS: In terms of drafting and scripting, was Ronnie [your facsimile father] the framework from the beginning? Did you know you were going to end with Micah [Xavier Johnson], or did that come out as you were writing it? How much did you know in advance?

BP: I knew who I was going to focus on. And I had an idea of what sort of figures or moments around them I wanted to help frame them. The only big difference is that originally, instead of Sanyika Shakur, the Crip-turned-revolutionary, I was going to write about the time Tupac Shakur shot two undercover cops as they were assaulting a black man in a parking lot in Atlanta. I think that would have been cool, but in some ways I chose not to because I was worried about it being a Tupac book. In the way that when I originally conceived of my book Sports Is Hell, the football player who was haunting the book was going to be Colin Kaepernick. But it was just going to be the Colin Kaepernick book then. And I really wanted to interview Sanyika, but he died of an overdose in a tent, unfortunately.

So, I knew what I was going to write about, but in terms of framing it, like the connective tissue, that changed quite a bit. Originally, I was going to be like an MC: you would join me in like a bookstore, I'd open up a book, and we'd go off to learn. And I think that would have been fine, but I think some part of me wanted to make a book that worked outside of it being a political book. I wanted there to be real emotional stakes, in part because I wasn't so confident that I could make those moments inside the chapters themselves. There's a lot of information that I really wanted to get down, and I thought some sections are going to seem a little dry, or like we can't sit on certain moments in a way that I want to. So let's have this overarching relationship between me and my dad, so that even if a Brazilian publisher bought this book--and there’s an edition down there, where’s there's the largest diaspora population, a lot of black people there, but I don't know them like that. And I don't know what they'll get out of the book--they'll understand, hopefully, this dynamic with my father, and maybe that will help them understand the stakes of why all this information is important for me.

KKS: Do you script before drawing? And were there ever times where you reworked certain sections, especially the game show moment at the end?

BP: Do I script before drawing? The answer is yes. For a book this size, I have to do a lot of writing, way, way before I draw. Most of the writing that I did early on was just going from all sorts of notes from various readings and some of the interviews that I did to a condensing down, trying to pick out moments I want to write about and fleshing those out. (In some ways I’m proudest of the Robert Charles story, because I really wanted to make the couple hours of that gunfight feel like a narrative that built up.)

A big part of the craft of comics is your deadlines, which is not something they talk about at school, but it becomes part of the medium. It's how you're managing time. And you end up making a lot of decisions based off of the lack of it. So there are certainly moments where I will script something, realize I don't have enough time to do that, and then find a resolution that does the same thing. Or I might script things, and start to thumbnail, and realize I don't have time to draw this crowd scene.

There's a transition period that's unstated in the book; it's sort of like the long hot summer. It's the transition from the Robert F. Williams chapter, which ends with folks rioting in some of the northern cities, and that brings us into the Republic of New Afrika [RNA] chapter. That section originally included huge crowd scenes of people running around, and I realized that I have to cut a lot of this because I don't have enough time to draw these crowds of people.

There's a lot of things like that. This being the most ambitious book I've ever done, it made me figure out, similar to what I've learned in martial arts, that as a 40-plus year-old man there's moments where you have to use a whole burst of energy, and you only have so much energy, so you got to make it worth it. Those are the moments in which I would go back to scripting after doing thumbnails and reconsider how I was going to draw it.

KKS: Are you working digital from the start, or are you doing parts of it first on Bristol board with pencil and then scanning? What is that workflow in terms of the actual drawing?

BP: The only physical drawing I did was thumbnails and all of the character design. That was all on paper. After that, everything is digital. I immediately take a picture with my iPad of the thumbnails, and then it all ends up being digital, which is terrible for any selling of originals. I hate working like that, but it's the fastest. And the book took about five years to do. If I did it on Bristol board like I'd like to, it would have taken ten.

KKS: It's such a complex book, and one of the things that makes it especially involved is that you don't have neat transitions. There's times where, as a reader, you’re pressed to question, “Am I to understand that this is a story that I'm reading directly in relation to the one that came before?” Especially how “The Republic of New Afrika” section goes into “This Is Assata” in a way where those are intimately intertwined. The chapters do more weaving than stop and start. I'd love to hear how you conceptualized those sorts of like shifts from section to section.

BP: I came to understand that all of this stuff was really intricately connected, and I picked subjects that I both thought were very important and underrepresented, and also ones that weave together. Some things I didn't know, like, I didn't know that Assata got her first New Afrikan name at an RNA event. I had no idea until I read her book. I wanted people to understand that these different movements are integrally connected, and that people flowed into other things like the Panthers, and I don't talk about the Panthers really at all. They're sort of there in the Assata section, but I purposely don't really focus on them. But there are many significant Panthers that became RNA members despite Huey [Newton] not being into their vision of nationalism. I wanted to show that a lot of things are happening at the same time. 

I also wanted people to have a feeling of presence. There's this way that people think about this kind of black liberation history: it's over there; it's in the past. And similarly, that there were singular mythical figures who were wholly unique, and they're the only people that could do what they do. I wanted people to understand that there's a whole ecosystem that people come out of, and it's interconnected. And its interconnectedness is part of why people are able to do what they're able to do.

If you talk to Panthers, they talk about how they were in the moment. This was the culture; this is what was around them. And they just hopped on it, and they had a persona drive. In some cases, like Robert F. Williams, his writings and writings about him point to his grandfather, his grandmother, and them being sort of uniquely rebellious against white supremacy. His grandmother handed him his first gun, that was his grandfather's that he used to defend his family from white racists. That felt really important to me. And the Micah stuff is in there. And we're not necessarily thinking of this thing as all the way back there.

KKS: I was surprised at seeing RNA popping up throughout in places where I wasn't necessarily expecting it, and all these other callbacks to signal that we're not actually leaving that. Like that's still part of all these other movements and all these other ideologies.

BP: I'm biased because when you meet a Panther, you're starstruck. You know what I mean? And there are many; they're living. They're not living in mansions, right? They live in cities. You're going to run into them. They look like any one of my neighbors, and then you find out, “Oh! it's Ashanti Alston!” But in my mind, there is a greatest generation, and it's that generation. We got so much from them, and they stayed busy for so long; they gave so much energy and knowledge. I really appreciated Sanyika Shakur as someone who came from that gangland generation, but who was so deeply changed by that prior generation. It's not depicted in the book at all, but when he was in prison, he connected with Sundiata Acoli. And the BLA had transitioned from a guerrilla movement to largely a prison support movement, and they had a press. Sanyika connected with certain members like Safiya Bukhari and Jalil Muntaqim, the BLA soldiers who founded the Jericho movement (which is still around and dedicated to political prisoners across the board, not just black ones). He connects with those people, and he gets a bunch of writings and that becomes part of him understanding, “F--- gangbanging. This is what people like me should be doing.” Even in his writings you can hear some of that deference. As an anarchist, I find deference to be a complicated concept, but you do really appreciate that to a person there is something really, really special, and they did do so much.

KKS: Is the section with Ronnie interviewing Sanyika an actual interview?

BP: No, there's no actual interviews in the book. But in that section of the book, I'm caught in a fire, and it's like, “Where is Ben?” Because I’m sort of the reader’s safe place. And in the prior chapter with MOVE, we lose Ronnie, right? I was hoping that people would think of it how I think about MOVE in that period where the Panthers are crushed, where we've lost the prior generation to guide us, and it left people open to a lot of manipulation. (MOVE is, in my opinion, an example of that.) But then in Sanyika's section, we're still kind of lost. So with the interviews, I wanted people to not be sure exactly who is talking to him at first. I also thought it would be nice to have those little interviews because Sanyika Shakur is a terrifying person--he murdered a bunch of people. There's a lot of conflicting opinions about how accurate his book Monster is in terms of like how many people he killed. But he has stories about cutting an enemy's arms off and bringing one to a house party. You have to square that with--if you watch any interviews of him, or if you read his book, Struggle Forward--he's very funny. He's a very likable person. And he did a lot of organizing in his community. He needed both his street reputation and his charisma to organize in his community. I wanted people to feel that: Up close he's just a normal person, despite the fact he is a murderer, you know what I mean? He started killing really young.

KKS: In terms of style, especially with Assata, you have at least four distinct styles for that section. Are there specific things that you were trying to emulate or trying to evoke with each of those styles?

BP: The longest section when she's a little girl and she's tricking the john, I based that style off of Ho Che Anderson, whose book King was really important to me for this book. He's an amazing artist, but I had many dark, dark days where I didn't know what I was doing. And I would look at King and it was helpful for me to consider some ideas and representation. There are a couple of artists I looked at.

The main idea was—and this goes for the whole book, but for Assata specifically--so much of how we think of her is informed by narratives around her. She will say herself that the FBI created this image of her as the bank-robbing gorilla, the heart of the Panther Party. But also BLA members will say, she's like the heart of the BLA. And there's decades that we don't know. She didn't write another book. There's a couple of interviews and a couple of documentaries, but even those are not like her book. They're a lot more focused on her relationship with her mother and her elders. I thought that in trying to communicate what it's like to learn about Assata, it's through several layers of interpretation. I thought it would be good to have sections of her chapter be presented by these different people, like Imari Obadele. I was a little unfair with my representation of him in the book. But he wrote “War in America.” His section is like hyper rah rah, the Assata that particularly the BLA generation would think of her as. The first Assata, who Mae Mallory is presenting when she's like a little girl, is how she thinks of herself. Because Assata talked about her youth over and over again after she went to Cuba. So, I wanted to give people a range.

KKS: If you could pick someone who is in the book but doesn't really have their own section or a movement that you learned about that doesn't get a lot of play, what would you want to keep writing about or keep drawing if you had more time?

BP: I wish that I had written really anything about Muhammad Ahmad and RAM [the Revolutionary Action Movement]. Muhammad Ahmad and RAM did the Kwame Ture arc where they went to the South to be a part of the freedom struggle, realized that actually a lot of Southern resistance culture is based in armed self-defense, and really had a come-to-Jesus moment about the limitations of non-violence.

RAM itself was sort of a mix of underground and above-ground and was really informed by these youth uprisings, these riots, which other organizations were shaming. Muhammad Ahmad recognized that this was important energy and an important phenomenon. They did a lot of things that, in my opinion, informed the Panthers a couple of years later. They did karate workshops. They did political education. They had chapters in different cities. And they had a close relationship with Malcolm [X]. Malcolm was their unofficial foreign diplomat. Muhammed Ahmad went to Cuba and was part of talking to Robert F. Williams about being the president of the Republican of Afrika. He's a Forrest Gump figure for that time, but wholly clandestine for the most part. He has a really good book called We Will Return in the Whirlwind, but I don't hear about him from anybody. He's a Philly native. He lives here, but he's not trying to talk about his past at all to most people. I wish I wrote about him.

I also learned a lot about reconstruction-era resistance when reading things for this book. And I would love to do a book about resistance during reconstruction. Akinyele Umoja writes about it quite a bit, and some other people do. But I didn't appreciate how much insurrectionary history could be found during reconstruction, which, in retrospect, makes sense.

KKS: That's really where you start; that's where you place the fulcrum for what you're exploring throughout in the question of armed resistance. I’d like to ask about how you end the book by picking up and throwing a book rather than taking up the gun. Do you see those as being two diverging paths, or do you see those as being unified in some important way?

BP: There’s obvious, non-profound choices that go into making a conclusion. In the beginning, I'm arguing with my dad and say, you may as well just throw these books; they're so useless. Of course, I have to end the book with me throwing them at cops. Also, I can't draw myself shooting cops. I want to work in this country. Although these days, just making a book will probably get me as bad a sentence. We'll see. 

I don't think of them as divergent at all. Guns have a place of prominence in this book. Shooters specifically do. But I think that the main focus is about revolution. These are revolutionaries in the sense that they're engaged in struggle, actual struggle, not the things that professional activists call struggle. They're engaged in the war of liberation. And to me, of course, guns are part of that because that's the war. You know, if it was bows and arrows, this book would feature a lot of bows and arrows, But in all cases, like knowledge that they don't want us to have, these conversations that happen in text and person to person from generation to generation, these are, in my view, incredibly important to maintaining this war of liberation. In that way, I think I'm just playing my part. Researching for this book and just being in the world, being in the streets when uprisings happen, you appreciate what you can do and what you can't do, where your strengths are. I went into the book thinking that what I did was pretty unimportant as a cartoonist, and I came out the other side being like, “Well, a lot of people told me that it was.” And I can see in my past books were really, really important for me becoming who I am, and also engaging in struggle, you know, in an actual struggle.

KKS: Do you feel like while researching and writing this book there were revelations you had that you wouldn't have had otherwise about who you are and what you do?

BP: Yeah. It is difficult because it's me, but it's not me. The book starts off in 2020 and I'm disaffected and uninterested and uninformed, which is not what I was like in 2020 in reality. And my father in the book is not my father, not in many different ways. Mostly what I hoped a reader would get other than just being invested in this character, I was hoping that they could see themselves in me, you know what I mean? And maybe hopefully relate to the experience of the relationship with my father in the book, my relationship with material concepts that are talked about.

In terms of how I was changed outside of the book or in the course of making it, in many ways, I'm a wholly different person. I was deeply changed, not even just by the research. I prioritized being in community with people I was either researching or their families, or other people that are really, really invested in this movement. The RNA was broken apart, but there's many organizations that formed out of it. And I have close relationships with people in those groups. And a lot of these people are doing things that I wouldn’t have respected or understood prior to getting into this book. My day-to-day, my whole life is fundamentally different than it was when I started the book five years ago.

KKS: Do you imagine that you will do more work in this continuum? Or do you feel like this was kind of the culmination of that work and of that process?

BP: I would need to have something new to say about it. There's exceptions to that: I've talked with Russell Maroon Shoatz's kids about doing a book based off of the book he wrote, I Am Maroon. So if a family was interested in me adapting something like that, or if there was someone who hasn't written anything at all, like Joe-Joe Bowen (who would never want to do that, but, you know, as an example), I certainly would do that.

Being a cartoonist, I think that there are just other genres I would like to work in. You know, there's other kinds of stories I'd like to tell. This book was incredibly exhausting and almost ruining to do. It almost destroyed me. So, the idea of doing something at the scale is terrifying to think about. It also made me appreciate the kind of skill and stamina an academic has to have to do this. Definitely in the middle of the book, I was like, I'm not an academic. I'm doing my best...but like, I'm not. And I don't want people to walk away thinking that I work at that level. And the scale of all the different people I was trying to write about, the timeframe was too much. It was definitely a first book mistake to commit to doing this. And I realized that way too late.

Anything I did in the future would be much more manageable and much more focused and hopefully wouldn't age me so much. We'll see. I started out doing weird sci-fi comics and then at a certain point, people decided I was really good at this kind of stuff.  I will always do work around this, but whether or not people think that it can make them money for me to do it is, unfortunately, not really up to me. 2020 was such a particular time. The enthusiasm for what was ultimately an idea by so many publishers is a wholly singular scenario. I would certainly like to do more things like this, but that might look like me self-publishing something that's 15 pages and maybe not a major publisher publishing something that's 200 pages.

KKS: It's clear how much research went into this book. The book is also outspoken about the need to “free our stories from white supremacy. Given the way that white supremacy forecloses so much Black history, how did you approach the idea of accuracy and wanting to be true to the people and the movements you're talking about, while at the same time acknowledging that there's often no way to do that or to do it with justice?

BP: It's interesting, thinking about people's different expectations of a book like this. We, for understandable reasons, want a book about history to be accurate and to be, to some degree, provable. But I am finding that people who are inside of the world that the book is writing about, they're mostly focused on respect. Their stories have been exploited and diminished forever.

When it's Assata or Sanyika, someone like that writing about their own lives, people just assume that they're telling the truth, right? There's no question. There's no, "Did you get a source for this?” And some of that has to do with the differences between how our communities think of elders. The fact that they can live to be elders already like this is much more of a hurdle than the majority population.

I found myself trying to consider: who am I writing for? Since I did the comic Your Black Friend, which I wrote without necessarily thinking about who I was writing for--the title itself was a bit of a joke that was just taken totally sincerely—I've thought about this a lot. Over the years, when I was working for The Nib, I made a decision to stop writing for non-Black audiences. I know that they're in the room. I know that they're reading. The higher percentage of readers, maybe less so now, but certainly when I started, was going to be non-Black people reading. But I felt like I was limiting myself. I would get caught explaining things that in my world are very obvious. And that would keep me from having deeper conversations.

So, when I wrote this book, I wrote it for Black people, Black people who are more or less invested in this movement, for lack of a better word. Some of them might even be MAGA voters, but, because of the contradictions of being Black in America, you can be a MAGA voter, you can be anti-immigrant, and still quote Malcolm X. I think that those people will find this book disrespectful, even if they think that it's well researched, because the book does take the Black leadership class to task in various ways. That is an inside conversation. This is not an outside conversation. The book is filled with a lot of inside conversations that are going to happen outside. And I think people are going to dislike that. I did a presentation to a reparations salon, and that was the overwhelming feedback that I got. They liked the material, but they felt like it was disrespectful.

There's a moment in the book when there are different people pointing out the limitations of the narrative that you've read so far. There's all these things that are being left out and why. And you're finding out that my dad, has limitations: these misogynies, this queerphobia, these unaddressed queerphobias made his view smaller. For me, I was late to a lot of gender content. It was something that I needed to learn about that I learned through friends, through comrades, and then reading. In that way, despite the fact that I researched quite a lot for this book, because I did want things to be as true as possible, but also knowing it's a comic book not a history book, there's only so much I can put in there. And there's a lot of blanks I have to fill in, right? Because there's so much we can't really know for sure about so many things that I write about. I wanted to be able to stand up in a room and defend choices that I made and point to books that I read or people that I talked to, but also I don't actually want people to assume that everything is true in the book or to assume that they can necessarily know that things are true. That's just the reality of being a colonized population who's trying to remember.

It's interesting seeing the third-positionist fascism that's taken over the country because it has superficially taken on so many of the critiques that the left wing has had. And one of those is the critique of academia, the sciences. And it's true that these institutions have created a noose to make sure that a lot of things that my community talk about get scrutinized, like, "Are you sure that that's what happened? Where's the proof?”, making sure that only certain voices are validated.

It's one of those things that I was really battling in my head when tackling the book, both because I have a critique of this idea of the truth when everything is so subjective. In the case of Sanyika Shakur, most of what he writes about being a Crip, no one is around for it. Everyone else that was there is dead.

KKS: How do you introduce the idea that there are things that will necessarily be left out, but that doesn't mean that they didn't happen or that they're not true?

BP: Or that they can't change you...for the better. I think that's the big thing. If you talk to a former BLA person, someone who's still alive, or Joe-Joe Bowen, who was not in the BLA. He spent most of his adult life in prison being a part of these really fantastic prison rebellions. If you talk to them, they don't want to talk about any of the details of their struggles. Because in their minds, they're still at war. What you have around a lot of these people is just rumor. It's street knowledge stuff. And what you do know is that this person was a soldier in a war of liberation that you feel like you're the beneficiary of. So what do you do? Because you don't know anything for sure. You can choose to be inspired by just the presence of this person and decide how you want to live your life because we all have to. And if you're sitting there waiting to know absolutely what's true, you're going to be waiting forever. I don't think that's preferable. But I think that's the reality right now. Hopefully the conclusion that the character of me is demonstrating at the end: the books he's tossing these are weapons because they inspire action. We know that the white supremacists are afraid of that, it's terrifying for them. And that's all we can know.

Maybe somewhere down the road, the Republic of New Afrika Department of Education can narrow all of these things down when the nation is made. But right now, all we have is rumor. All we have is street knowledge. We have some accounts of elders. And we're being attacked. So we’ve got to do something.

Sometimes I feel like it’s irresponsible for me to publish a book with that mindset. But also, it's a comic book. And we have real academics like yourself to write the more concrete material. I just thought about when CLR James was writing in The Black Jacobins: “I didn't try to cover everything. I just want you to know it's there.” At this point in our country, the best thing I can do is put things out there and say look, this is here, look at it. You have to go to the source if you want deeper knowledge about it, but I draw pictures in boxes, and the pictures I'm choosing to draw in these boxes is revolution. Let this be a starting point.

 

Kate Kelp-Stebbins is an Associate Professor and Director of Comics Studies, Department of English, University of Oregon.

 

 A version of this interview will appear in print in IJOCA 27-2