“Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio”

50 years ago, four students were shot dead on an Ohio college campus by the National Guard. This is the story of that weekend.

Cover by Derf Backderf

Written, Illustrated and Lettered by Derf Backderf

From bestselling author Derf Backderf comes the untold story of the Kent State shootings—timed for the 50th anniversary. On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard gunned down unarmed college students protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State University. In a deadly barrage of 67 shots, 4 students were killed and 9 shot and wounded. It was the day America turned guns on its own children—a shocking event burned into our national memory. A few days prior, 10-year-old Derf Backderf saw those same Guardsmen patrolling his nearby hometown, sent in by the governor to crush a trucker strike. Using the journalism skills he employed on My Friend Dahmer and Trashed, Backderf has conducted extensive interviews and research to explore the lives of these four young people and the events of those four days in May, when the country seemed on the brink of tearing apart. Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio, which will be published in time for the 50th anniversary of the tragedy, is a moving and troubling story about the bitter price of dissent—as relevant today as it was in 1970.

Originally set to be published on the 50th anniversary of the Kent State shooting, “Kent State” was delayed until September due to the pandemic. This delay has done nothing to diminish the book’s impact as a piece of historical chronicle as well as a reflection of today and, in some ways, has made it an even more relevant piece, as the current president deploys the national guard against citizens who protest the administration under the guise of “law and order” and quelling “terrorist organizations.” But I digress, and “Kent State” is purposefully singular in its focus so as to allow us to draw our own parallels rather than inextricably link it to the current era while trying to tell the story of another.

Derf chooses to frame the story, as he often does, with his own personal connection to the subject material, though in this case it’s more tangential than in “My Friend Dahmer.” 10 years old and living about 20 miles away, Derf uses this aside to establish the general temperature of Ohio at the time, of the simmering tensions between the “military of Ohio” and the people on the ground. Of discontent with Nixon and the powder keg that were the college campuses. From there, Derf is out of the narrative. This is not his personal story but he makes sure to remind us that it was a personal story regardless.

“Kent State” makes sure to never let us forget that the book is a piece of historical journalism and not just a dramatization. Frequent asides into the history of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Yippies, the Weathermen, the mindset and actions of Richard Nixon and Hoover’s FBI, and ROTC punctuate the narrative to provide context on why they were important, how they were represented, or misrepresented, versus the reality, and how the conflict of those two images acted to exacerbate tensions at every level. These are comprised of small insertions like a caption reminding us that the voting age in 1970 was 21 not 18 or larger asides like how the draft worked.

Further emphasizing this point are the 25-30 pages of notes in the back, which help add context to an already full book by giving insight into how Derf constructed the narrative, why he made certain choices in what to include, such the testimony of the Unnamed Guardsman, as well as laying out the reasons why certain sources were flawed. Genuinely worth reading at the end for the curious, far more engaging than most there is also a one page epilogue after the notes.

From a purely educational perspective, “Kent State” offers many tidbits outside of the narrative of the weekend that one may have never known about, like how ROTC used to be compulsory on many campuses. The one that sticks out the most to me is actually central to the narrative, and that’s how The Weathermen became the boogeymen of the Nixon administration and how this image was a constructed fear goblin. Derf is clear and uncompromising in his portrayal of the Weathermen’s takeover of the SDS but he’s also just as incisive and unambiguous in skewering the oversized, laughably monstrous, and long-lived version Nixon and others turn them into in the national consciousness. It’s this clarity yet willingness to talk about the ambiguous and unknown aspects of this weekend that truly makes “Kent State” stand out.

Instead of crafting a clean and easy to digest narrative, Derf chooses instead to allow the book to have unanswered questions and to discuss when there isn’t enough of a consensus on a fact or event to draw clear conclusions. For example, it may have been more dramatic to use the highest estimation of how many undercover agents there were or, in a different narrative, more politically expedient to use the fewest (or none,) but instead he sticks to what can be confirmed and corroborated and candidly lays out the rest. He refuses to speculate on details but will point out bullshit claims, like the CIA saying it didn’t operate within the US to spy on the student left.

This applies less so to the personal narratives of the four students but that is because their actions, words, attitudes and whereabouts are based on accounts from friends, from previous reporters and act to humanize what, for most of the country, were names and photos on a screen or on a page. Kent State, Ohio becomes a real place full of real people through this work in a way other, dryer books do not. Derf successfully humanizes these characters, even the villains of the piece, and allows them to speak with their own words rather than the words of others. It makes for a contradictory narrative in terms of “message” but also one with an arc for each character, showing how events change us, even over the course of a few days. It is reality, reconstructed.

The success of “Kent State” lies in Derf’s skills as a cartoonist and as a storyteller. His style is distinct, full of heavy inks and ugly faces, bridging that gap between the realistic and the exaggerated. Moments such as that final chapter image of the burning ROTC building are powerful thanks to Derf’s use of contrast, the fire burning bright, illuminating the canisters of tear gas, a torn peace shirt, and a long shadow of the bell used as a rallying point. The tension builds and builds and builds and then. . .is released. In a harrowing final act that, even knowing what was coming, brought me to tears because of the work Derf had done in the preceding pages, “Kent State” reminds us why this story is still being told 50 years later and why it remains powerful and tragic.

By synthesizing the personal and the historical, he makes a narrative that informs on an emotional level as well as in a more traditional educational capacity. “Kent State” is a marvel of a book that captures the environment and the people of the time with an unflinching eye and an engrossing narrative. It is timely and poignant too, reminding us that while the specifics may change, it was not the first, nor will it be the last, event of its kind.