Thursday, October 07, 2004
Birth of a Nation: A Comic Novel
No, it's not the hugely influential—and hugely racist—cinema classic; this Birth of a Nation is a fairly amusing graphic novel in an alternate history/utopian SF vein: What if the largely ghetto-ized city of East St. Louis (not to be confused with the shiny main city of St. Louis with the Gateway Arch across the river) had responded to the year 2000 presidential election difficulties by seceding from the United States? It's quite amusing, though the reliance on cheap and easy sources of unlimited energy hurts the plausibility—if you're judging it as SF, anyway. There are also some crudities early on, as the writers put some “stage directions” into the captions, rather than letting Kyle Baker show and not tell. But overall, it's a very entertaining work with a strong African-American slant (both of the writers and the artist are black, as all the people listed in the acknowledgments seem to be), and a moving introduction by Reginald Hudlin, in which he explains that yes, his hometown of East St. Louis really was like this, and dedicates the book to his deceased father.
