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In the Hipster Book Club’s 2009 April Fool's edition, we presented a book called Bedtime Stories for Very Small Neo-cons by Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, invented/reviewed by Julia Watson. The joke was, of course, the idea of the "turdblossom" Republican strategist and the closest thing America has to Darth Vader creating a tiny tome to instill right-wing values into children as early as possible. Trotsky: A Graphic Biography seems to be a counterpart to the HBC's creation. While Rick Geary's work seems to try to be as neutral as possible, the idea of a comic book about communism feels akin to Julia's fiction. To Geary's credit, the intention of Trotsky was, most likely, simply to educate. The overall tone of the book is one of simple fact-based storytelling, packed into a slim, easily digestible package.
Geary's Trotsky is a quick, easily read summary on the life of a major historical figure, and Geary pulls through on the bite-sized fact-based front. In a brief 100 pages, he summarizes Leon Trotsky's life from his peasant birth in the Ukraine to death by ice ax in Mexico. Trotsky covers, in generally easy-to-understand language, the man's trajectory from student to political dissident to figure in the Leninist revolution to exile in Mexico.
As easy-to-read and even-handed as the narrative is, the 100 pages of Trotsky could quite easily be replaced by a Wikipedia entry, but because this is a graphic biography Geary attempts to make the narrative more eye-catching than a simple encyclopedia write-up.
The art, however, is mostly passable. Geary's simple black-and-white illustrations seem like the heavy hand of a first-time director. The frames are well-laid with occasionally good ideas that convey both the tumult of Trotsky's life and the world-shaping events that entered into it. However, for covering a subject who escaped exile twice, took part in a civil war, traveled the world, and was eventually killed by a fairly esoteric murder instrument, Geary's art falls largely flat and doesn't convey the excitement one may expect from such events. Even a group of protestors led by a priest, who were all mowed down by Tsarist government soldiers for their dissent, gets nothing more than one static frame of a few bloodless bodies amid some detritus, missing any opportunity for a great noble clash of powerless people against an oppressor.
Add to this no-frills storytelling a near-complete lack of emotion, and Trotsky becomes a much less entertaining read. Geary seems to express little interest in raising emotion from the suspected murder of Trotsky's son, the suicide of his daughter, or the life-long fight for the causes he believed in. Without creating any tension from the Russian leader’s struggles, Geary makes Trosky simply “appear” in his life’s events, without being driven by previous occurrences or growing from experience. He’s simply there. There’s no buildup, no climax, and nothing the reader can latch onto in any way. The visual medium of the graphic biography, when stripped of emotion and excitement, brings it dangerously close to something akin to "Illustrated Bible Stories for Children": simply a way to catch a young eye and tell them the story of someone the parent values.
Strangely for a supposedly neutral biography, Geary utilizes several exclamation points that seem to express an excitement for Trotsky's ideas. For example, "It only took a few soldiers of the Red Guard to secure the palace and place the ministers under arrest...and the revolution was victorious!" or "The solution would be to spread the revolution westward across Europe in a never-ending tide...until it covered the globe!" Both of those statements are divided across two panels to further hype the big, exciting reveal. Plus, artistically, it’s hard to call the book neutral when it features a portrait of Trotsky, left leg bent at the knee on some unseen rock, looking stoically into the distance, hands on hips in military uniform after a panel detailing his "ruthless means of imposing discipline" involving executing "every tenth man...from units that refused to fight."
The reader is left with a book that either is aiming for neutrality and failing or is an informative (possibly indoctrinating) document for children. As a product for adults, it lacks the emotion and art direction to create excitement or compelling storytelling. As a simply factual document, it's largely successful, though telling the story from Trotsky's point of view makes the presentation of certain opposing viewpoints seem vague and untrustworthy. Trotsky: A Graphic Biography may work as a quick throwaway primer on the life of a historical figure, but unless it’s a primer for a child being raised as a socialist (and there's nothing wrong with that) it will be a largely disappointing read.
(February, 2010)
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