So does Bohemians, co-authored by Occupy Wall Street activist David Berger. They appeal simply to the geek, essentially asking, "Aren't markets neat?" But other graphic novels lionize redistributionists and revolutionaries. Palestine, by artist Joe Sacco and historian Edward Said, is yet worse: Its main character complains about the sympathetic treatment generally accorded Leon Klinghoffer, the American tourist murdered and thrown overboard in 1985 when terrorists boarded his cruise ship.Īnd what about the books in the genre that try to explain economics? Some are likable and harmless cousins to the popular behavioralist books on the bestseller list. history dragged sadly from Wounded Knee to the Iran–Contra scandal without anything but similar humiliations in between. Children who read Howard Zinn's A People's History of American Empire come away thinking U.S.
What was and is troubling, therefore, is that the many of the more serious graphic novels are like Marx's Capital – reinforcement weapons for progressive, or even outright Marxist, messages. Publishers Weekly rates the graphic-novel genre "the hottest section in the library." Teachers have found that kids who start with manga, the Japanese fantasy style, switch easily to cartoons about history or economics. One-third of all teachers of English as a Second Language report that they use comics. And demand for that drug, from both teachers and students, is exploding. In short, graphic novels are "a gateway drug to content," as an artist once put it to me. As Bill Bennett, one who gets the medium, noted recently: "After reading the comic of The Iliad, then I read the children's edition of The Iliad, and then I read The Iliad." What's more, these long cartoon books have much the same capacity as films to entice the reader to delve deeper. Maus, another graphic novel, takes on a yet touchier subject, the Holocaust, and somehow manages to convey what happened without exploiting or reducing the record. Artist Marjane Satrapi depicts the habits of the Shah's SAVAK officers and their terrifying successors, Khomeini's PERFUMED police, better than any print history of Iran and certainly better than, say, the film Argo. Take Persepolis, a mauve-and-grey depiction of a girl's life in the Iranian Revolution. Lately, however, such cartoon books have been proliferating wildly, becoming so numerous that they now can claim to their own category, the oddly named genre of the "graphic novel."Ĭounterintuitive as it may sound, these graphic novels not only feature nonfiction but also lend themselves enviably to difficult nonfiction topics. For years now teachers have relied on a cartoon version of A People's History of American Empire, the 1980 book by the progressive historian Howard Zinn. Serious cartoon books like Marx's Capital Illustrated have been around for a while. Haymarket Books confirms as much when it describes this volume as "economics for the 99 percent." In other words, Piketty can rest easy: Marx's Capital Illustrated will continue his class war even if he himself flags.
This one is Haymarket Books' new illustrated edition of Das Kapital, by Karl Marx. Still, around the time many pundits expect Capital to wipe out – i.e., within a couple of weeks – a second Capital will be entering the intellectual marketplace. As much projectile as book, Capital was hurtling forward, seemingly unstoppably, until journalists and scholars began to discover flaws in its data.
The first Capital is, of course, the anti-wealth bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by the French professor Thomas Piketty. Cartoons are a powerful teaching tool – which conservatives ignore at our peril.Ĭapital may be stalling.