October 28, 2023

Graphic Novels and Protests: Recent Reads 10.28.2023

 The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott

 

I came to this based off of Thorogood’s newer text. It’s a more straightforward narrative than that one. It’s good though. It’s about friendship and mort importantly, the urgent need to create art. She’s certainly an artist to watch as her career grows. 

 

Monica

This was an interesting book because in structure, it’s a lot like the kind of graphic memoir that you can come across easily. But there is also this supernatural thread that Clowes weaves throughout the narrative. It’s beautifully weird, and then there’s this incredible payoff on the last page. Totally worth your time and attention.

 

If We Burn

“Bevins has a new book coming out,” I said to myself, “I’m pre-ordering that no matter what it’s about.” That’s how good the Jakarta Method was.

 

With “If We Burn,” Bevins moves into more recent history as he explores the protests that swept the world in the 2010s, some of which he was a part of, and interviewing other people who were firsthand witnesses. What struck me most was how he described so many of them taking their cues from recent past and contemporary movements. Protests in the social media age developed a whole vocabulary of action and reaction from both the protesters and authorities.

 

Also, of note is how he covers the emergence of leaderless protests. They can express real dissatisfaction, but they can also have no real (or shifting) demands or possible end states. They can also be co-opted as Bevins shows how some of the protests in Brazil and Egypt evolved.

 

Overall, as someone who wants to see the world develop towards a society of greater equity and citizen rights, the mood is somber. The protests covered here were ineffective for the most part in creating any change that was durable. Perhaps we need a new vocabulary or need to revisit old paradigms.

 

 

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