The American Revolution In Comic-book Form

March 12, 1995|By Reviewed By Harvey Pekar, an author whose most recent book, co-written with Joyce Brabner, is "Our Cancer Year".

Stan Mack's Real Life American Revolution

By Stan Mack

Avon, 166 pages, $10 paper

The comic book medium is as good and as versatile as any other. Comics, like film and television, employ words and pictures, although the words are written, not spoken, and the pictures are still, not moving. Comics can be any length. Comic book writers can use all of the words in the dictionary and put them together in any combination. Comic book illustrators can employ a variety of styles, including those rooted in "fine art." In fact, Hogarth's "The Rake's Progress" can be considered comics, as can the wordless woodcut novels of Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward.

The general public, however, views comics as a children's medium-if only because the vast majority of comic books published since the 1930s have been escapist fantasies of one sort or another, aimed at juveniles or those with juvenile intellects. Thus readers assume that it is impossible to produce a comic that does not contain costumed superheroes or talking animals. If comics are to gain broader acceptance, though, their quality must improve and they must deal with a wider variety of topics, including non-fiction subjects.

Enter Stan Mack. Since the mid-1970s Mack has done his Real Life Funnies for the Village Voice, dealing with a wide range of social and political issues. Because of his unpretentiousness, subtlety and functional but unspectacular drawing style, Mack hasn't received the acclaim accorded to the Voice's Jules Feiffer. But while Feiffer has been in love with his own cuteness for many years, Mack's work has freshness and conviction.

In 1988 Mack covered the Tompkins Square riots in the East Village, which occurred when squatters were rousted from abandoned buildings by the police. He sympathized with the squatters and was struck by the way they were abandoned by politicians and better-off citizens. This got him thinking about the responsibility of society toward all its citizens and the legitimacy of rebellion.

Now he has dealt with those and other issues in his comic book history of the American Revolution, which covers the period from 1760 to 1789, when the Constitution was finally adopted. The book can be recommended on several grounds. Though informally and humorously written and illustrated, it provides a solid historical summary of the times.

Mack the populist does not write dispassionately. Dispensing with hero worship, he shows John Hancock promoting his economic interests while backing the Revolution and portrays George Washington as a stiff who commits strategic blunders. He points out the failure of revolutionary leaders to back Tom Paine's call for democracy. He shows John Adams expressing reservations about popular rule after the war.

Often Mack takes the position that the wealthier, more politically influential participants in the independence movement had little concern for the welfare of the lower classes. He notes, as others have before, that many of the founding fathers were pro-slavery; he also notes the significant military participation by blacks on the revolutionary side. Writes Mack: "When necessary, the military can be colorblind. In the civilian world, it's a different story. . . ."

The rebel's attitude toward Native Americans was also not exemplary: "During the war, bloody fighting raged up and down the frontier. Indians, allied with the Tories, fought the patriots. There were atrocities on both sides. But colonial propagandists used Indian culture and martial differences to portray the Indians as mindless savages. Meanwhile, the US Army strips the flesh off dead Indians to make boots."

Despite being "brushed aside by men," women contribute to the war effort, "by raising money and running the farms and businesses" and by risking "their lives as nurses, spies and secret couriers." Some "go to war disguised as men."

Poor whites continued to be oppressed after the war. In Massachusetts that led to Shay's Rebellion, which was suppressed but left politicians startled and shaken. Despite these injustices, Mack concludes:

"But all these disenfranchised people now understand the ideas of equality and dissent. And they will pass on these thoughts to their sons and daughters. And what of ideals like living in harmony, working for the common good, civic fairness and honest labor, which the people also fought for? They will be taught to children, they will live on as slogans, they will fuel movements toward a genuine democracy, and they will be proclaimed in political campaigns."

Below this text, Mack portrays "Stanislaw," who arrived in America as a penniless immigrant but has cleverly and opportunistically climbed the social and economic ladders. "I promise, if elected," he proclaims, "to represent all the people!"