IF I COULD BUT SEE IT: A Graphic Biography of William Morris, by socialist and artist Nick Thorkelson

IF I COULD BUT SEE IT: A Graphic Biography of William Morris
NICK THORKELSON
Pluto Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$24.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.8* of five

The Publisher Says: A vivid, full-colour graphic biography of the celebrated 19th-century designer and socialist William Morris (1834–1896), the celebrated designer, driven polymath and radical socialist.

Acclaimed cartoonist Nick Thorkelson moves through the events of Morris’s life weaving a rich tapestry of the major artistic, social and political questions which animated him.

He explores Morris’s politics and art, and how his hatred of class tyranny and love of humanity shaped his poetry, design and relationships.

The book brings to life the tension of Morris’s efforts to democratise art while creating pieces for the wealthy, his critique of Britain’s Empire, and his central place in socialist culture and propaganda.

Thorkelson’s striking and idiosyncratic drawings chime with the Arts and Crafts movement’s emphasis on the humanising power of the handmade.

The book also features fourteen pages of immersive and dazzling illustrations by Sharon Rudahl, pioneer of women’s comics, honouring the literary work for which William Morris was best known during his lifetime.

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My Review: If there has ever been an illustrated biography of socialist artist, poet, and capitalism-fleecer William Morris, I did not hear about it. Now that I have it's hard for me to see why this is the first one (if it is). Morris's role in reviving and revamping Gothic architecture in the newly rich Victorian era, using the English hunger to memorialize their ill-got gains to redistribute huge sums of money from the kleptocrats to honest craftworkers.

Like Josiah Wedgwood a century earlier, Morris used the design and manufacture of gorgeous luxury goods to redress the income imbalance he saw plaguing and ruining his society as it turned from the United Kingdom into the British Empire.

a graphic synopsis

chapter opening art in the Master's style

In a clear and concise telling of the events and the beliefs that animated the events of his life, Author Thorkelson does something I both enjoy and admire: he uses the technique of Morris's métier to give we-the-reader extra, surprising insight into the forces Morris was so contemptuous of and adept at harnessing to the economic betterment of the craftworkers he employed, and the aesthetic improvement of the people who paid for it all.

Morris thinking and scheming and designing

It's only 128pp so you know how very much heavy lifting the illustrations are doing. Much time is saved, in a sense, by leaving us to look in the corners and backgrounds for the rest of the story. In a time where sequential-art storytelling is so very prevalent, finding it deployed well on a major culture-shaping visual artist and designer of built living environments is deeply refreshing.

Morris out in his world

And lo, behold! Morris made over a world that was not heading anywhere beautiful into a world that included public and private spaces with gravitas and grandeur...handcrafted by well-paid workers in an increasingly mass-produced, uninspired, enslaved by machines ethos. He made it possible for aesthetics to last into our own age.

It might not be to your personal taste but it for sure and certain could not have been created by a LLM.

ALL-NEGRO COMICS: America's First Black Comic Book, wonderful anthology that's a 2025 WINNER OF THE EISNER AWARD

ALL-NEGRO COMICS: America's First Black Comic Book
CHRIS ROBINSON (created by Orrin C. Evans)
Image Comics (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: WINNER OF THE EISNER AWARD • The first comic ever created by African Americans, for African Americans.

Three quarters of a century ago, Orrin C. Evans lead a team of cartoonists to create the first comic book anthology of original Black characters created by Black talent, with the expressed purpose of entertaining while rejecting harmful stereotypes and pushing boundaries in the industry. This was only 8 years after Action Comics #1, 6 years after Captain America #1 and a whole 19 years before Black Panther hit the pages of Fantastic Four.

All-Negro Comics #1 should be among those revered moments in comic book history, but the original print run was quickly removed from newsstands and faded into obscurity, remaining largely unknown for 75 years. . . until now.

All-Negro Comics 75th Anniversary Edition (an Eisner Award-winning collection) preserves that history for generations to come, containing All-Negro Comics #1, in full and digitally remastered for clarity, several essays for historical context and contemporary reflection, as well as new stories by Black writers and artists of today, featuring the original characters.

This award-winning volume includes:

• The complete single issue from 1947, digitally remastered! Consistent colors, crisp text, and no damage! • Contemporary comics and prose stories, featuring the All-Negro Comics characters, written by notable Black creators of today • Essays that provide historical and cultural context to deepen your reading experience • A discussion guide and resource list

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I had no inkling (!) this series of comics ever existed. Which is the point of banning and suppressing books: If you don't see yourself in popular culture, you have no reason to think you belong in it. I myownself, standing on an already enormous mountain of white male privilege, was also given the gift of growing up after Stonewall...I know exactly how important it is to see your Self, your identity and looks, your behavior and thoughts, in the culture around you.

I can't even imagine how much more important it is today, and certainly was in the past, to Black children...adults, too, but comics reach both groups.

The Eisner Award has never been given more thoughtfully and necessarily than to honor these groundbreaking creators, ignored far, far too long:

I liked seeing the cover art, just as art, without the usual impedimenta to get in the way of its kinetic design. It's easier to enjoy as art:

In my defense of personal ignorance about this comic book's existence, I offer the fact I never read a comic book in my life until I was almost ten. I got books whenever I wanted, bought for me or from the library, so I never developed the interest or formed the habit. Of course, no one pitched them to me like Orrin C. Evans pitched these comics:

Silver-tongued devil, no?

So your comics maven will enjoy the Eisener winner part, your Black history maven will enjoy the recovered history and the prescience of Orrin C. Evans in doing it at all, and it looks lovely on the tablet if you've got an ereader! Now, enjoy some of Ace Harlem's adventures:

#ReadingIsResistance

MUSEUM OF DEGENERATES: Portraits of the American Grotesque, a body of work more like a corpse, a lych-gate for your mind

MUSEUM OF DEGENERATES: Portraits of the American Grotesque
ELI VALLEY
O/R Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$44.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Museum of Degenerates invites you to a delirious display of art by one of contemporary America’s most original and incendiary political cartoonists. Eli Valley’s extraordinary work is a scathing indictment of the entire American polity, with a particular focus on the issues of Israel and Judaism at a time when these have moved to the center of public debate and action.

In these pages, Valley tips a homburg to German expressionists such as George Grosz and Otto Dix who featured in “The Exhibition of Degenerate Art,” a 1937 Munich show that sought to ridicule the work of artists critical of Hitler’s fascist regime. In an aesthetic that is strikingly original, Valley also draws on early twentieth-century American Yiddish cartoons and the work of artists who created the helter-skelter exuberance of MAD comics in the 1950s.

Valley’s own art, accompanied here by extensive descriptions of its genesis and context, is a howl of protest against the political, cultural and media elites driving America into an authoritarian abyss. Here is anger, pure and hot, expressed in exquisite detail and, often, disturbingly funny.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: "Disturbingly funny" from the synopsis above is spot-on. This editorial artwork is disturbing. It can be funny. It disturbed me to find some of it funny. It was a funny kind of disturbing. I'm sure I can recombine those ideas in more apt ways, but I trust my point is made: Épater la bourgeoisie is the modus operandi of this artist. It feels...unsettling, "funny" or weird and certainly unnatural to laugh at the present moment rendered into highly stylized art.

Funny. Sick-making. A moldy shar-pei corpse with a hatespeech ikon in and on it. Somehow it's still funny. Sorta.

Like a zombie movie. Into the fire with you! These zombies don't want braaaiiinnns but roasted flesh.

On every axis I am appalled and offended...less by the artwork than the accuracy of the commentary. Bibi showed his luuuv to the bankster-in-chief by accepting some Gaza deal that kept the dollars flowing. Never mind how ridiculously ineffective it was at justice, or even fairness.

If the revolution needs a poster, let this be it.

I suspect most of y'all are thoroughly turned off by now, so I'll stop. The thing that Eli Valley does is the thing all editorial cartoonists strive to do: exaggerate the ghastly into absurdity. Shock the viewer into recognizing how demented and distorted the discourse he's skewering is. The text of the artist's thought processes and inspirations will make a reasonable person as mad...in all senses...as he is himself.

I'm positive offense is intended by Eli Valley; I'm positive offenseiveness is deployed with purpose, can't say "care" but intent and purpose make up for it. In times of horror, use the horror of the times to motivate the audience to make it stop.

This is not a test. The signal is repeating; the instructions are....

AND MANKIND CREATED THE GODS, graphic storytelling in a very very important cause

AND MANKIND CREATED THE GODS: A Graphic Novel Adaptation of Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained
JOSEPH BÉHÉ (tr. Edward Gauvin)
Graphic Mundi
$39.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: These are some of the most fundamental and enduring questions we have about the mysteries of religion, and they may well hold the key to humankind’s future on this earth.

In this adaptation of Pascal Boyer’s classic work exploring these concepts, Religion Explained, artist Joseph Béhé harnesses the power of comics to provide clear answers to the basic questions about why religion exists and why people believe.

A distinguished scholar, Boyer drew from research in cognitive science, anthropology, psychology, and evolutionary biology to explore why religion exists and why the strength of human beliefs can drive us to be selfless sometimes and, at other times, to be fanatical and intolerant. His erudite book is rich with insight into the endless jumble of ideas that inform religious beliefs and practices across cultures. With detailed, illustrative drawings and carefully adapted prose, Béhé’s graphic novel brings a new perspective to Boyer’s work.

An eminently accessible approach to the notoriously thorny topics of belief, cognition, humanity, and religion, And Mankind Created the Gods is a thoughtful, inspiring graphic novel that will further and broaden the conversation with which Boyer’s book engages.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I feel very sad about this book. It needs explaining all the way from the subtitle, on to the purpose of the project. Plus this is a disaster of time to present something that is not a rah-rah Rasputin-style cheerleadin' on the subject of religion. Even if you've never heard of Religion Explained, you who are not first-timers to my reviews know that there is no way at all (no way in Hell!) I'd review something pro-religion even to dunk on it. Then we come to its length...over 350 pages...and its price...forty dollars. I do not foresee this wonderful, trenchant, tendentious read burning up the sales charts.

Damned shame, that. Look at this stareable art:

I'll happily do my bit here, trying for some interested sympathetic eyeblinks from among my smarter-than-average readers. Y'all give me hope, the numbers who come here to read about worthy, important books about subjects most polite people bury in order not to risk offending some ignorant little twidgee with a keyboard and a grudge against smart people.

So, Religion Explained: its subtitle is "The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought", and that is what it explores. Unlike the idea you'd get from my fondness for the book, it is not a screed against religion. It is a scholarly examination of Belief, as a phenomenon, not as a disorder. (I'm sure someone religious has used its facts to argue that it proves y'all's gawd designed Belief into humanity.) Like all things touching the cultural third rail that is Belief, this book has attracted both support and anger, as its surprisingly unpolemical Wikipedia page shows. It has existed this entire century. It is still in print via Basic Books. I myownself recommend you read it.

Why you should read *this* book, this sequential-art story about its concepts, comes down to the reasons anyone should read a story when seeking knowledge: A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down, to quote the Sherman Brothers. I'm so old that I remember hearing Julie Andrews sing it to me in a dark, enormous theater.

So please take this in. Despite swimming against the prevailing social current, despite having one of the most unpleasantly good-for-you subtitles in all of history, despite being in a medium I am not fond of, this story about a book I read almost a quarter-century ago told me something new about Belief. It did it without taking my side. It is a very clear-eyed evocation in story form of the source material's information.

And I still gave it five stars.

MILK WITHOUT HONEY, elegant graphic non-fiction about bees gracefully translated from German

MILK WITHOUT HONEY
HANNA HARMS (tr. Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp)
Street Noise Books
$21.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: What would the future of the world look like without bees?
MILK WITHOUT HONEY chosen for NPR’s BOOKS WE LOVE!

Bees are vital to securing our food supply. We could live in a paradise where insects, especially bees pollinate fragrant seas of flowers whose fruits we harvest. Instead, vast lawns are now replacing flower gardens, and agriculture is characterized by monocultures. Pesticides and climate change are also causing insect mortality, with dramatic consequences for the global ecosystem. As we destroy the insect populations, honey is just one of many foods that will no longer be available to us, unless we learn to honor our innate connection with nature before it's too late.

In gorgeous, limited palette artwork, using contemplative images as well as informative charts, Hanna Harms brings us into the world of bees: their hives, their colonies, and their interactions with the global ecosystem. This is the perfect gift book for anyone concerned about climate change and the environment.

About the Author
Hanna Harms is an illustrator and comic author. She graduated from the Münster School of Design in Germany. She is currently studying for an MA in illustration at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. Hanna is co-editor and author of the comic zine Sander. The German edition of this debut graphic novel Milch ohne Honig, won the Ginco Award in 2020 in the Best Nonfiction Comic category.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A book receiving wide notice, a lot of praise, and all of it well-deserved. The author is German, and translator Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp did a seamless job of rendering the text into equally elegant English. Look at these spare, graceful pages:


Remember when I praised BIOGRAPHY OF A FLY by Jaap Robben? The style here is very similar, so of course I'm inclined to enjoy it.

The choice of yellow and black for the presentation is logical...what color is a bee, after all...but I wish they'd gone just a bit more bee-and-honey with the shade. As it is, the book is more pee-and-yellowjacket. It got a touch wearing. That's why the book only got 4.5 stars instead of five, which it otherwise fully merits.

That did not stop me from devouring the book, pardon my wordplay, eager to possess the images that Author Harms has created to explicate the nature of the problem that bees face. The depths of our species' dependence on the bee for its labors to feed itself, which thereby feeds us, makes this a very urgently needed book.

I hope you'll add it to your young ecowarrior's pile of gifts this Yule.