This week, we are offering reflections on the six nominees for the 2015 Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work, while contemplating larger questions of the variety of ways comics can uniquely crystallize reality for readers.
Written and Illustrated by Nathan Hale
Amulet Books, Hardcover, Two-color Illustrations, 128 pages
World War I set the tone for the 20th century and introduced a new type of warfare: global, mechanical, and brutal. Nathan Hale has gathered some of the most fascinating true-life tales from the war and given them his inimitable Hazardous Tales twist. Easy to understand, funny, informative, and lively, this series is the best way to be introduced to some of the most well-known battles (and little-known secrets) of the infamous war.
In contrast to our previous nominee’s serious project of complicating the First World War, this book is dedicated to the author’s “first World War I teacher, Snoopy!”
For the uninitiated, Nathan Hale is the Revolutionary War soldier whose actual famous last words were, “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country.” Proving that literature can grant second lives, Nathan Hale is also the contemporary cartoonist whose series of history comics resurrecting his namesake (the Revolutionary War soldier) as a protagonist and narrator is now in its fifth volume, “The Underground Abductor,” a Harriet Tubman book out this year. Last year’s Treaties, Trenches, Mud, and Blood follows Hale’s previous whimsically titled installments, “One Dead Spy,” “Big Bad Ironclad!,” and “Donner Dinner Party,” in the engaging march through mostly American history, targeted towards elementary school readers, full of quick witticisms and fun factoids, but also containing a fourth-grader-palatable bit of reflection on war’s cost and consequence.
The Venn Diagram of the Nathan Hale take on World War I and its co-nominee “To End All Wars” overlaps at the intent to address different dimensions of the war, to stew only briefly enough in particular settings to get a taste of the political alignments and failures, the trench ennui and devastation, the sheer scope and mania of a world engulfed. Also in the overlap is a mature sense, after multiculturalism and the Information Age, after Howard Zinn and books like Lies My Teacher Told Me, after Lemony Snicket and Adventure Time, that teaching children history shouldn’t require packaging up a rough-edged story into a neat narrative of patriotic triumph, historical hero hagiography, or the uniform march of progress. Insofar as literature doesn’t merely describe but adds to reality, an oft-quoted CS Lewis-ism, the historical realities both books re-create serve to stimulate an imagination of complex causes and consequences, unaccountable costs, and divergent human experiences.
The point of departure for this rendition of Hazardous history is, of course, that it’s targeted to kids, which thoroughly shapes its telling. The British are conveniently bulldogs and the Germans are eagles for ease of reading, the prose and action can jump-cut from freeze-frame warfare to lengthy exposition, and narrators Hale and “The Hangman” can rescale themselves Pym-like from map-sized to minutiae-tiny. Carefully meted out doses of quippy humor don’t trample over moments of dramatized seriousness. Hale (the narrator/historical figure) insists to his co-narrators that, “We’ll keep the animals! But remember, this really happened–it’s not some animal fairy-tale!” And words like “bombardment” and “mobilization” are eased in next to panels like the Hangman’s quizzical speech balloon: “‘Mobozillation?’ What does that mean?” In other words, the final arbiter of how much “reality” to impress on this comic is the pedagogical goal of keeping kids on the line, making the history lesson worthy of a Saturday afternoon on the couch. Hazardous Tales reminds us that “reality,” not just in comics but in all kinds of teaching, bend towards the ears of the listeners, and we must be both soberly mindful and lightheartedly liberated by the endeavor of shaping the imaginations of children.
Later today, we examine MariNaomi’s “Dragon’s Breath and Other True Stories.” You can keep up with the entire week’s look at the 2015 Eisner nominations for Best Reality Based Work here.
