As you probably know, we’ve got an election coming up here in the US, and it’s a contentious one. The stakes are high … again. This will be the first presidential election that two of my kids will get to vote in, and we’ve had a lot of conversations about the state of the world, and what to do with your vote. Obviously, there’s a lot of information (and misinformation) out there, and a lot of the time it feels like there are too many important issues to become an expert on all of them, but I’m doing what I can to be informed, and to model what it means to be a good citizen for my kids.
Last month I had a stack of World Citizen Comics that I think do a good job of providing information about things like how democracy works, what is and isn’t free speech, and the topic of immigration and citizenship. This week I’ve got a couple more titles about voting, tyranny, and the American dream.
Drawing the Vote written by Tommy Jenkins, illustrated by Kati Lacker
This graphic novel is (as the subtitle describes it) intended for future voters, but I think it’s one that even current voters could benefit from reading. It’s largely a history book about the United States, with a focus on voting: how it started, how things have changed, what tactics have been used to affect it. A lot of it isn’t necessarily new information—some things you probably learned in American History back in middle school or high school—but this book is an easy way to get caught up all at once. The comics format makes for a quick read, and allows for illustrations that stray a bit from the strictly literal. (For instance, there’s a “generic politician” who appears throughout the book to add commentary.) The book was originally published in 2020 leading up to the election, and has been expanded to include some of the things that shaped that election, as well as things like COVID-19, the protests over George Floyd’s murder, and the January 6 insurrections.
Tommy Jenkins is an English professor, and he explains at the beginning of the book that he saw a marked contrast in his students’ attitudes toward voting from 2008 leading up to Obama’s election to 2016 leading up to Trump’s election. In 2016, many of his students were discouraged and disillusioned, some complaining that their votes didn’t matter, and others feeling that there weren’t good options to vote for anyway. His motivation for writing this book was to show the importance of voting and the struggles that so many have gone through to get the right to vote. Jenkins is on the side of giving more people the right and ability to vote, and the book talks about the many ways that people in power have tried to withhold the vote, mostly from women and Black people. A lot of those obstacles have been overcome over time, but there are also new roadblocks that have been put in place to suppress votes. Drawing the Vote does not provide easy solutions, but it gives encouragement to continue to work for voting rights for everyone.
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century written by Timothy Snyder, illustrated by Nora Krug
Here’s another book that is a new edition: the prose edition was originally published in 2017, and this graphic edition was published in 2021. The founders of the United States were concerned about tyranny: having declared independence from the King of England, they didn’t want to subject themselves to an American king. Our system of government, cobbled together from debates and compromises, was supposed to be designed to prevent any single person or group from having all the power. But the history of democracies across the world does not always end in “happily every after.” Snyder pulls lessons that we should learn from the ways that other democracies have failed, and cautions that we should not just assume that it couldn’t happen here.
The lessons include some that feel like something from a Miss Manners column: “Make eye contact and small talk,” for instance, or “Learn from peers in other countries.” There are also those that are more specific to political situations: “Beware the one-party state,” “Be wary of paramilitaries,” “Defend institutions.” The book looks a bit like a picture book at first: a large hardcover with colorful illustrations inside, a mix of drawings and photos and collages. But you’ll soon notice that there is a good deal more text than your typical picture book, and at the same time it’s been boiled down to its essence. Each of the twenty sections is fairly brief as far as chapters usually go, but they feel rich with meaning.
Snyder pulls from other sources and quotes other writers often, and also points you toward further reading on different subjects. The lessons are fleshed out with examples from history. The illustrations work really well, with one small one paired with the lesson title that has the feel of a fable or parable, and then a variety of other types of illustrations with the text flowing around and through them, almost like posters (but, again, usually with more text). Although Snyder tends to avoid referring to Donald Trump by name, he does refer to “an American president” from time to time and it’s clear from the words and actions described who he’s talking about; there are examples of how Trump has used language or behavior that reflects slogans and tactics used by those who have seized power for themselves in the past. But even though the book does use those examples, the book is not specifically about Trump, either—the lessons here are important no matter who may be trying to control the narrative.
Uncle Sam: Special Election Edition written by Steve Darnall, illustrated by Alex Ross
Uncle Sam was first published over two decades ago—the hardcover collection was from 1997, and has been out of print. I don’t remember exactly when I read it, but it was probably before 2000, and I was very curious about revisiting it because it had been long enough that I’d forgotten much of it. This new edition adds an introduction by Greil Marcus and afterwords by Darnall and Ross, but otherwise has the same content as the original.
We first encounter our protagonist, Sam, in a busy emergency room: a wild-eyed man who looks a lot like the “I Want You” Uncle Sam: balding on top, long white goatee, and wearing red-and-white striped pants. He’s missing his hat, but he’s still instantly recognizable, particularly in Alex Ross’s photorealistic painting style. Sam is shouting a bunch of nonsense while orderlies try to figure out if he needs help, but then he comes to himself at least enough to leave and walk down the street, where he’s in a modern-day big city. (Modern-day for 1997, anyway.)
But as he wanders around, he constantly finds himself in a different time, in different places: at the Black Hawk War in 1832, in a Union soldier prison during the Civil War, facing off against farmers during Shay’s Rebellion. He also runs into some other symbolic figures: an aged Brittania shows up with her lion, Columbia speaks to him from the White City at the 1893 World’s Fair. Sam is—or at least thinks he is—the spirit of America himself, and his head is full of memories of the nation’s history, his mouth full of quotes from notable figures.
In the modern day, you get snippets of a story about an election—the incumbent senator has just won, thanks in part to some nasty attack ads against his idealistic challenger. Sam encounters a younger, shinier version of Uncle Sam—who is he? Has Sam been replaced by this grinning, greedy spirit?
The bits of history that Sam experiences in his visions aren’t so great: these are the ugly parts of America’s past, and Sam finds them troubling. The ultimate message seems to be that it’s important to acknowledge them as mistakes instead of pretending they didn’t happen, and then to try to do better. Despite the fact that this was written about our world about 25 years ago, it felt surprisingly relevant, which is also perhaps a little disappointing. Have we learned anything in the past quarter-century? Which version of Uncle Sam represents the U.S. these days?
Ross’s artwork is astonishingly good—this book was made after his Marvels and Kingdom Come, and because most of the settings are in our world (even as Sam jumps around in time), they have a solidity to them: you look at the images and these look like real people in a real place.
The back of the book includes an essay by Darnall about the image of Uncle Sam—how it evolved and some speculation about where the nickname “Uncle Sam” came from in the first place. That’s an interesting story in itself. In the new essays, Darnall writes about how this book came to be, and Ross explains a bit about his inspiration and some of the “unfulfilled ambitions” for it. This isn’t a book that is specifically about this year’s election, but it is about the “spirit of America”—what it is, and what it could be, so I think it’s particularly worth a re-read now.
My Current Reads
I’m still working my way through A House Like an Accordion but paused a little to read these other titles this week. I still have the big stack of movie-related books that I mentioned a few weeks ago, but between the election-related books and Halloween-related books I haven’t even started on that pile yet!
Disclosure: I received review copies of these titles. Affiliate links to Bookshop.org help support my writing and independent booksellers!
